I wrote the following comments on the Serapis-Christian links and overlay a few years ago at
http://www.booktalk.org/post94654.html#p94654 When I wrote it I was not aware that the Hadrian quote is possibly fraudulent, and I still consider it highly plausible.
The deliberate invention of
Serapis by the Greco-Egyptian Pharaoh Ptolemy i in the third century BC is a model for the invention of Jesus Christ in Alexandria in the second century AD. I mentioned Serapis in the
thread on the twelve followers, and would like to explore this further here.
This intentional founding of the worship of Serapis as a new imaginary religion followed the Greek conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great, and aimed to provide a belief system that would be acceptable to both Egyptians and Greeks. The mixing of different cultures in the ancient Mediterranean world led to the need to mix their religions. When Greeks spread throughout the Hellenistic world after Alexander's wars, they found it necessary to compromise with the beliefs of the local inhabitants rather than keeping their Greek traditions intact. Greeks did not like worshiping gods with animal heads, so they invented Serapis, a combination of the Egyptian god Osiris with the Greek god Zeus, among others.
Why was Serapis not adequate in the common era? The
destruction of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD changed the situation. The Egyptian city of Alexandria was already half Jewish. It experienced a new influx of Jewish refugees from Palestine. In this melting pot, the previous spiritual cosmic Christ/Serapis was transformed into a historical savior.
Serapis, being purely invented and acknowledged as such, lacked the subversive political force of an incarnate messiah who claimed to be real and not imaginary. Serapis could not compete with the new doctrine. Belief in Christ grafted the law of Moses and Isaiah on to the Greco-Egyptian myth of Serapis, providing a new ethical purpose in a vision of millennial transformation of the world, 'the last shall be first'.
The Jewish War had proved that the Jews could not simply be ignored as part of the melting pot, but it seems that Christianity, after Rome had robbed the Jews of their land, sought to rob them of their heritage as well. Murdock says the Therapeuts were "Hellenizing Egyptian Jews" (p433). It is not surprising that they would graft Israeli traditions onto the Greco-Egyptian myth of Serapis if their agenda was a new universal ethical faith. One thing that is perhaps surprising or ironic here is that if Christianity was actually founded by the Therapeuts, who were a partly deracinated Jewish brotherhood, they gave rise to a dogma which would prove universally popular across the Roman Empire except among the Jews, who became the object of racial hatred on the basis of this new ideology which incorporated their heritage.
A key theme regarding the comparison of Serapis with Christ is the ability to invent religious ideas that enjoy mass appeal. No one says Serapis was a real man, but Roman Emperor Hadrian said that Christians in the early second century were worshippers of Serapis. The motive to write the Gospels appears to be the recognition that myth just didn't cut it as an ethical power. If Christians wanted to transform the world, they needed to believe in a material cause of redeeming change, something directly supplied by the doctrine of the incarnation of God in Christ. Admitting that Christ was fiction like Serapis just would not do.
Earlier Jews had already put religion in the service of politics by inventing the empire of David and Solomon and the supposed antiquity of the book of Deuteronomy in the seventh century BC, hundreds of years after the supposed facts. The invention of Serapis was an even more recent instructive model as a way to give a popular facelift to tired old myths that only worked in a mono-racial society. The most plausible basis for the production of the New Testament is that it was deliberately invented by the Jewish Therapeut Brotherhood of Alexandria, intentionally targeting the new multiracial societies of the common era with a story that would provide a lowest common denominator for all to believe, incorporating a plausible cosmic critique of the lax ethics of the time. Christianity relied on deception to achieve its popularity, a deception so successful that Christians today are still hoodwinked by the fiction that Jesus is more historical than Serapis, Osiris or Zeus.