excerpt taken from Declaring the End from the Beginning

I want to take this opportunity to address a common objection you may hear as to whether Christ is the Savior and Son of God. I’ll call it the Mithras Objection. As we saw above, Mithras is the Roman name for Tammuz, the son of Semiramis of Babel. You may hear people try to point to the fact that the god-son story of Mithras pre-dates Christ. They will say that Christ only borrowed from this earlier religion in order to build a following and become popular. Therefore, Christ is not really the Son of God and Savior of the world.

There is no doubt that a person who was eventually known as Mithras pre-dates the First Advent of Jesus Christ. A good question to ask is, why was it necessary for the story of Mithras to be created before Christ walked the earth? Or, for what reason would someone make up a story like that which mimics the prophecy of Christ unless there was a realization of a coming Christ as the One, true Savior? In other words, we are asking, logically, which do you think came first, the prophecy of Christ in Genesis 3:15 or the story of Mithras? There’s no rational reason to speak out against something that doesn’t really exist, or, is at least no real threat. This is the equivalent of drawing the attention of the entire world to the very thing you so desperately don’t want it to know. This was Satan’s way of attempting to pre-empt any belief in the true Savior, Jesus Christ, by introducing a false savior in order to confuse mankind. Furthermore, consider that Jesus went to His death when, if He was merely out to deceive people for His own glory, could have easily fled the area many times. I also want to point out that when a story is written has no bearing on which story actually came first. Many dissenters will say that since some of the pagan stories of the creation of the world and the Flood, etc., were written before Moses wrote the Pentateuch, this somehow proves the Bible arose from these pagan religions and therefore cannot be true. Keep in mind, in contemporary terms, one of the very definitions of plagiarism is copying and publishing someone else’s original work and claiming it to be one’s own before that someone does.

Interestingly, this same line of reasoning above can be applied to the existence of God as well. The belief that there is no God had to rise from a single someone. In other words, someone had to first have the thought before others did. Who was the first person to claim there is no God and why would he claim such a thing? Why would someone ever think to say there is no God unless someone had first declared there was, or he first had a knowledge of His being? In fact, I submit to you he would have never had the thought of denying God if there really were no God. He would never know there wasn’t. Scripture confirms this by telling us that man innately knows God exists and deliberately suppresses this truth [Rom 1:18-20]. Therefore, claiming God doesn’t exist only serves to prove that He does.