Featured Quote:
“The parallels are uncanny. But no scholar believes that because of these similarities there is any legitimate connection…” — Mark Clark, The Problem of God
The God Question Response:
In Chapter 4 of The Problem of God, Mark Clark attempts to discredit mythic parallels between Jesus and earlier gods by appealing to a popular list of coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. It’s an entertaining section—but deeply misleading.
Yes, there are bizarre similarities between Lincoln and Kennedy: both concerned with civil rights, elected 100 years apart, assassinated on a Friday, and so on. But these parallels are purely trivial and incidental—no one claims JFK was a myth modeled after Lincoln. Both men are verifiably historical. The comparison serves no meaningful purpose other than to entertain or surprise.
When it comes to the Jesus story, however, skeptics aren’t pointing out fun coincidences. They’re noting that long before Christianity emerged, there were religious myths with divine sons, miraculous births, sacrificial deaths, and triumphant resurrections. These motifs weren’t trivia—they were sacred narratives embedded in the cultures that predated Christianity.
Clark’s comparison is what logicians call a false analogy. The Lincoln-JFK parallel doesn’t even belong in the same conversation as Horus or Dionysus. You can’t equate popular historical trivia with deeply rooted religious storytelling.
Here’s the real problem: if a new religion today began telling a story that mirrored the life of Jesus—but with only updated details (say, a carpenter from Idaho born of a virgin who dies and rises three days later)—we’d immediately suspect copycat mythology. That’s precisely what critics argue happened in the other direction with Jesus.
To dismiss this with a wink and a trivia list is to avoid the real question altogether.
So we ask again: Is Christianity an original revelation—or a brilliant remix?
God or Delusion? 