A reader wrote in with a question about the ubiquity of stories similar to the Christian one in other myths. For instance, the dying and reborn god Balder, or the miraculous birth of Horus. This is a fairly common strain of questioning. My response is to usually talk about the conversations between CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and Hugo Dyson that dealt with this very subject. Here are a couple of YouTube videos that deal with those conversations.
The first is a really good portrayal of Lewis' vantage point:
This one illustrates Tolkien's view. This particular conversation never happened, but all of the words portrayed as delivered by Tolkien are drawn from his writings. Lewis is portrayed a little simplistically as the young man being lectured by the professorial Tolkien, but that's not suprising considering this is an EWTN production about Tolkien's Roman Catholicism.
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