Messiahs: Christian and Pagan.

MESSIAHS: CHRISTIAN AND PAGAN, by Wilson D. Wallis. This is another book on the subject that there have been many, so called, saviors before Jesus. This fact is generally known to ministers, those that went to theological schools, and it seems to me if those who collect the money know the myth is probably not true, the folks who pay the money should know it too. So we are glad to offer this study of savors before the current one. Here is something from the Preface: Even those who have approached the matter historically, as, for example, Greenstone in his study of The Messiah Idea, have left large gaps in the evidence and seem unaware of the connecting threads and the similar underlying conditions that open up a large field for original
investigation. Mooney and Chamberlain, among ethnologists, have approached the study of American messianic movements from a more profitable angle, but they too have left the evidence incomplete. Although it seems safe to say that no one has attempted this most important study in comparative religion and sociology, the need for such an investigation has more than
once been pointed out by scholars who were familiar with at least some important phases of the major topic. Foremost among these are three American scholars, two of them theologians, and the other a psychologist, who was earlier a student of theology, and who has remained deeply interested in anthropological theory and Weltanschauung - G. STANLEY HALL. In 1893 Dr. Ellinwood in lectures given in Union Theological Seminary, ‘New York City, called attention to the universality of a vague expectation of coming messiahs, than which, he declared, “nothing found in the study of the religious history of mankind is more striking.” He pointed out that “in modern as well as in ancient times nations and races have looked for deliverers or for some brighter hope. The very last instance of an anxious looking for a deliverer is that which quite recently has so sadly misled our Sioux Indians.” (Oriental Religions and Christianity, 282-5, New York, 1896. Second Edition.) Several years later another American Biblical scholar insisted that “Jewish and Christian scholars ought to be able by this time to break the spell of a name and to accord a fair judgment to those political leaders, social reformers, mystics, and prophets who from Simon bar Kozeba to Sabatai Zewi have assumed or received from others the title of the Messiah. . . . These Messianic movements should also be more closely examined in the light of similar phenomena in the East which is so prodigal with the Saoshyants, Mahdis, prophets and revealers.” (NATHANIEL SCHMIDT, The Prophet of Nazmeth, 93, 1905.) G. Stanley Hall has more recently emphasized this need. (In the first volume of The Americam Journal of Religious Psychology and in Jesus and Christ in the Light of Recent Psychology, 1917.)" As you can see thses studies are from a hundred years ago, and much more research has been done since then, all proving more solidly that Christianity is a born again pagan religion.
Emmett F. Fields