Bill Maher helped to popularize the claim that the Resurrection
and other Christian "myths" were plagiarized from early "mystery
religions". By the turn of the century, this theory was for the most part
abandoned by scholars,[1] although some skeptics
will continue to peddle this theory on the Internet and in popular culture. The
moral of this story is that it isn't just conservatives or the nominally
religious who, from time to time, deny the scholarly consensus (e.g., on
climate change).
[1]
See Archetypes and Motifs in
Folklore and Literature (Garry and el-Shammy), and the Riddle of Resurrection:
Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East (Mettinger) (the author, by the
way, accepts the dying-and-rising-gods category, although he acknowledges the
scholarly consensus against it).
