In their book, The Jesus Mysteries, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy discuss the remarkable
similarities between the supposed
biography of Jesus Christ, and the Pagan myths associated with the mythical being that has been known from as early as the third century B.C. by the combined name, Osiris-Dionysus, and was used to denote his universal and composite nature.
In that regard the authors state that although the perplexing
similarities between the Pagan myths and the
biography of Jesus Christ are generally unknown today, in the few centuries A.D. the early Christians were painfully aware of the disconcerting similarities between the biography of Jesus Christ and that of mythical Pagan figures that predates Jesus by several hundred years.
The crisp question was: How could pagan myths which predated Christianity by hundreds of years have so much in common with the biography of the one and only saviour, Jesus Christ? In a desperate attempt to come up with an explanation for their predicament, the church fathers resorted to one of the most ridiculous theories ever advanced, being that the Devil had plagiarised Christianity, by anticipation, in order to lead people astray. One of the church fathers, Justin Martyr, actually claimed that the story of Dionysus was invented by demons to correspond with a certain prophesy in Genesis and bring the true Christ into doubt. It was said that, knowing that the Son of God was to come and literally walk the earth, the Devil had copied the story of his life in advance of it happening, and created the myths of Osiris-Dionysus (which includes the myths of Attis in Asia Minor, Adonis in Syria, Bacchus in Italy, and Mithras in Persia).
So, the position of the church fathers were that the Devil knew about certain prophesies allegedly pertaining to Jesus, and therefore created a tradition of several godmen several hundreds of years before Jesus,