Misconceptions Archives - Page 17 of 22 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Is Donald Trump the Second Coming of Cyrus the Great?

As strange as it may sound, Donald J. Trump, the current president of the United States of America, has been repeatedly likened to Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – c. 530 BC), the founder of the Persian Achaemenid Empire. The comparison between Trump and Cyrus the Great is especially popular among evangelical Christian Trump-supporters in the United States, but it also has some prominence among Israeli Jews. Let’s take a look at who Cyrus the Great was, why Donald Trump is being compared to him, and why these comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny.

Just How Pagan Is Christmas Really?

The Christmas season is upon us and, if there’s one thing I know I’m going to get for Christmas, it’s spurious claims about modern Christmas traditions supposedly having ancient “pagan” origins. Most of my readers are probably already familiar with the sorts of claims I am referring to; it is popularly believed that Christmas is really an ancient “pagan” holiday that was hijacked by early Christians and that modern, twenty-first-century, secular American Christmas traditions are actually of ancient “pagan” origin.

Well, I’m here to tell you that, although there was a time when Christmas did indeed incorporate some pre-Christian traditions, virtually none of the traditions associated with Christmas in the United States today are actually of ancient pre-Christian origin. In fact, virtually all of the Christmas traditions that you usually hear people going around claiming are “pagan” are actually traditions that only arose within the past two hundred years or so, within a Christian cultural context.

The Long, Strange, Fascinating History of Santa Claus

Have you ever wondered where the story of Santa Claus comes from, why he is said to bring presents to children at Christmas, why he is said to live at the North Pole, or why he is said to have a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer? Well, as it turns out, the history of Santa Claus is an incredibly long, twisted, and strange one.

It involves a building project by a Byzantine emperor, a story about a father preparing to sell his own daughters into prostitution, a hoard of stolen human bones reputed to have magical properties, armies of Crusading knights, Protestant zealots, the author of “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow,” a poem you probably read as a child but didn’t realize how influential it was, a “Nast”-y nineteenth-century political cartoonist, and Coca-Cola.

This may seem like a bizarre assortment incredibly disparate things, but I promise you, everything I just mentioned is actually vital to the development of Santa Claus as we know him today. Let’s go all the way back to the beginning of it all in late antiquity and embark on this odyssey together to discover the origins of Santa Claus!

Was Jesus Copied Off the Greek God Dionysos?

As everyone reading this is doubtlessly already aware, there are hundreds of memes and articles out there on the internet claiming that Jesus was “copied off” various pagan deities. The usual culprits include Horus, Dionysos, Mithras, Attis, Tammuz, Adonis, Sol Invictus, et cetera. I have already written a detailed article debunking claims about Jesus being copied off of Horus. Now I am going to debunk the claims about Jesus being copied off of Dionysos.

This article will be a lot more nuanced than my article about the alleged parallels between Horus and Jesus, however, since there really are some significant parallels between Jesus and Dionysos; they just aren’t nearly as numerous or as significant as Mythicists on the internet often claim. There is some evidence that some Christians may have intentionally shaped certain stories about Jesus in response to stories about Dionysos, but there is no good evidence to suggest that Christians just “copied” Jesus wholesale off of Dionysos.

The Truth about the Archimedes Palimpsest

If you have an interest in ancient science or mathematics, chances are you have probably heard at some point about the Archimedes Palimpsest. According to the narrative that New Atheist writers and media outlets keep pushing, the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC) wrote groundbreaking mathematical treatises that were millennia ahead of their time.

Then, according to the standard narrative being pushed, in the thirteenth century AD, ignorant, obscurantist Christians who did not care about science or mathematics erased the text of the manuscript containing the last known copies of several of Archimedes’s treatises and reused the parchment to make a prayer book. Now—or so the story goes—Archimedes’s previously lost groundbreaking works are being recovered through the brilliancy of modern secular technology.

Unfortunately, this narrative that I have just outlined is deeply, deeply misrepresentative and based on an extremely selective presentation of the evidence. If the media would tell the full story of the Archimedes Palimpsest, we would be getting a very different narrative—a narrative not about how religion is inherently dangerous and destructive, but rather a far more complex narrative in which religious individuals are neither inherently evil nor inherently good but simply human beings capable of both good and evil.

Why Is Tutankhamun So Famous?

Pharaoh Tutankhamun is undoubtedly the most famous of all ancient Egyptian pharaohs. He is one of the very few Egyptian pharaohs that most ordinary people are able to name. Most people have never heard of Hatshepsut and even fewer have heard of her nephew and successor Thutmose III, but everyone has heard of Tutankhamun. He even has a Batman villain named after him!

Things were not always the way they are today, though; up until the discovery of his tomb in 1922, Tutankhamun was utterly obscure. If you asked someone on the street in 1921 who Tutankhamun was, no one would have been able to tell you. Even if you asked an Egyptologist about him, many of them probably would not have known who he was. Ironically, it is precisely because of his former obscurity that Tutankhamun is so famous today.

When Was Jesus Really Born?

Most people assume that Jesus of Nazareth was born on 25 December 1 AD. Superficially speaking, this assumption makes a great deal of sense. After all, Christians today celebrate Jesus’s birth every year on December 25th and our modern Anno Domini dating system, which is ostensibly based on the year when Jesus was born, begins with the year 1 AD.

Unfortunately, things are never quite so simple. The truth is, we genuinely have very little idea when Jesus was born. There is no mention of the exact date of Jesus’s birth anywhere in any of the earliest surviving Christian writings and it was not until around the fourth century AD that December 25th was settled on as the day on which Christians would celebrate Jesus’s birth. Even the year of Jesus’s birth is uncertain; all we can say is that he was probably born sometime between c. 10 BC and c. 4 AD.

Was Jesus Copied Off the Egyptian God Horus?

Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity. One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD. Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.

The truth is, all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity are wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus. The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition. While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.

Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd. I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them. I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus.

Famous Classical Authors Who Were Probably Not What We Would Consider “White”

Classical studies has long been perceived as the study of “dead white men.” This is a reputation that has certainly greatly injured classical studies as a discipline in recent years. I remember reading a rather disturbing answer on Quora a while ago written by a history professor in which he argued that, since we are now living in a modern, racially diverse world and classical studies is nothing more than the study of dead white people, universities should stop teaching the classics and, instead of hiring classics professors, only hire professors to teach subjects dealing with non-white history, like East Asian history or Latin American history.

One thing that many people do not realize, however, is that the ancient Mediterranean world was actually much more racially diverse than it is often portrayed. In fact, a very large number of the most revered classical authors were probably not what we would call “white.” Many of them came from lands all across the Middle East and North Africa, including the lands that are now the countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Algeria.

Spencer Ruins “Adam Ruins Everything”

Adam Ruins Everything is a comedy television series on TruTV starring comedian Adam Conover. It has been on air since September 2015 and has had, to date, three seasons, amounting to a total of sixty-five episodes. The basic premise of the show is that Adam Conover is an obnoxious know-it-all who cannot help ruining everyone around him’s favorite things by revealing to them the dark truths and common misconceptions surrounding them.

This premise provides a sort of framing narrative for a series of information-based comedy segments, which make up the bulk of each episode. Each episode usually consists of three segments debunking common misconceptions related to a particular topic, followed by a final “positive takeaway” segment in which Adam tries to make the audience feel better by putting a positive spin on everything he has said throughout the episode. Along the way, Adam cites various sources (some more reliable than others) and calls in people identified as experts to testify.

In general, most of the show’s main points are usually broadly correct. The show clearly really does strive for factual correctness, as demonstrated by their repeated warnings that the show is fallible and their multiple “corrections segments.” Sadly, they do not always live up to their aspirations. Often the errors on the show are errors of omission resulting from the fact that it is only a thirty-minute show and they try to cram no less than three different debunking sessions into each episode, which results in a series of extremely rushed information segments that end up leaving out a lot of really important information.