The Argument: Christianity is just based of a number of other ancient religions, therefore it’s not true.
Like the ‘the Bible cannot be accurate‘ argument, this is one I’ve had a few people tell me as well and appears to be based on a lot of misinformation.
As with many of the other arguments/questions, a simple Google search can provide the information needed to refute this claim.
A common belief is that the religion of Mithra is what Christianity borrowed from. This page provides some information on that. Essentially the punchline there is that the religion of Mithra, considering that Christianity is based off the Old Testament Jewish religion which predated Mithraism, would have been the one to ‘borrow’ from the Christian religion, not vice-versa.
There are a number of other claims about pagan religions influencing and forming Christianity, this page details a number of them and the historical evidence that refutes the arguments.
If the Old Testament prophecies and writings are compared with the New Testament recordings of the events that transpired there is really no question that the ‘Christianity’ in the New Testament was indeed based off of the Old Testament Jewish religion and God.
This is a fairly simple argument to respond too, however you have to be willing to do a little research into the topic if you actually want to make an informed decision about what you believe is true and what isn’t; although that can be said about nearly everything…