Jesus' sacrifice is Jewish, not pagan, in origin...

I'm going to ease into this one as I haven't read all posts so am not certain what has been covered. However, this is primarily in response to the debate about dating Mithraism and whether its predating Christianity would equate to Christianity borrowing from it.

Geza Vermes, a Christian who reverted back to Judaism, discusses, in a stellar article, the conncetion between the Akedah and Jesus' crucifixion and its redemptive power. The article itself is over 30 pages long and is thick with exegesis, drawing from the Midrash, the Targums and Second Temple literature to draw out the connection. It can be found in Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: Haggadic Studies.

While not his primary focus, this article does reveal that the crufixion of Jesus is drawn from within Judaism and accusations of "pagan" borrowings are quite simplistic (making the early Christians look like a bunch of comparative religious scholars which, ironically enough, looks a lot like the scholars who make such accusations). In fact, these accusations are not necessary at all. In fact, by drawing the "pagan" connection, it actually casts misunderstanding on the significance of the crufixion from the understanding of the early Christian movement as many of these scholars may point out the similarities but they often fail to spend any time on the differences.

Anyhow, part one brings forth the following conclusions:

1) The two main targumic themes of the Akedah story, namely, Isaac's willingness to be offered in sacrifice and the atoning virtue of his action, were already traditional in the first century AD.

2) Genesis 22 was interpreted in association with Isaiah 53. That is to say, the link between these two texts was established by Jews independently from, and almost certainly prior to, the New Testament.

3) The theological problem which apparently led to the creation of this exegetical tradition was that of martyrdom.

4) The tradition must consequently have established itself some time between the middle of the second century BC and the beginning of the Christian era.

I'll try and draw this out more but questions are welcomed to help focus my responses.

The other work that is significant in this regard is Shalom Spiegel's The Last Trial. He shows, in much greater detail (Vermes references this work), the tradition where Isaac was actually killed and resurrected by God.

Though not a common belief, it is not unknown in Jewish circles. This idea is mentioned briefly in the movie The Believer.

Again, this stuff is dense but it convincingly shows that there is no need to go outside of Judaism to explain the core of Christian beliefs. If there is any "pagan" influence it either came to Christianity through Judaism (what Spiegel calls the residual "dust" of paganism) or by those who interpreted Christianity once it left the environs of Jerusalem.