Christ is said to have worked miracles. But all the gods and saints of all the older religions were said to have worked miracles.
Christ is said to have brought to men, direct from Heaven, a new message of salvation. But the message He brought was in nowise new.
Christ is said to have preached a new ethic of mercy and peace and good-will to all men. But this ethic had been preached centuries before His supposed advent.
The Christians changed the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday. Sun-day is the day of the Sun God.
Christ's birthday was fixed on the 25th of December. But the 25th of December is the day of the Winter solstice—the birthday, of Apollo, the Sun God—and had been from time immemorial the birthday of the sun gods in all religions. The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians, and Teutonic races all kept the 25th of December as the birthday of the Sun God.
The Christians departed from the monotheism of the Jews, and made their God a Trinity. The Buddhists and the Egyptians had Holy Trinities long before. But whereas the Christian Trinity is unreasonable, the older idea of the Trinity was based upon a perfectly lucid and natural conception.
Christ is supposed by many to have first laid down the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you." But the Golden Rule was laid down centuries before the Christian era.
Two of the most important of the utterances attributed to Christ are the Lord's Prayer and the Sermon on the Mount. But there is very strong evidence that the Lord's Prayer was used before Christ's time, and still stronger evidence that the Sermon on the Mount was a compilation, and was never uttered by Christ or any other preacher in the form in which it is given by St. Matthew.
Christ is said to have been tempted of the Devil. But apart from the utter absurdity of the Devil's tempting God by offering Him the sovereignty of the earth—when God had already the sovereignty of twenty millions of suns—it is related of Buddha that he also was tempted of the Devil centuries before Christ was born.
The idea that one man should die as a sacrifice to the gods on behalf of many, the idea that the god should be slain for the good of men, the idea that the blood of the human or animal "scapegoat" had power to purify or to save, the idea that a king or a king's son should expiate the sins of a tribe by his death, and the idea that a god should offer himself as a sacrifice to himself in atonement for the sins of his people—all these were old ideas, and ideas well known to the founders of Christianity.