RE: Pagan influences on the biblical stories of Jesus' life
April 7, 2016 at 5:42 am
(This post was last modified: April 7, 2016 at 5:46 am by Fake Messiah.)
(April 6, 2016 at 7:25 pm)Minimalist Wrote: Far more likely to be from Sumerian sources rather than Egyptian.
Well think some more, would ya? Genesis 1–11 presents an insight into how the Bible evolved from a collection of polytheistic myths and from various cultures into almost a coherent monotheistic account.
And while Noah story is mostly taken from "Gilgamesh" you must also remember that Egyptians also believed there was a world-wide flood named as the Nun or Nu.
The Hebrew philosophers looked at the Egyptian deities and identified what aspect of nature a particular god or goddess represented. Then, taking the order in which these deities appeared, the early Hebrew scribes separated the deity from the phenomena represented by the deity, and described the same sequence of natural events solely in terms of natural phenomena. Where the Egyptians, for example, had Atum appear as a flaming serpent on a mountain emerging out of the Nun, the Hebrews simply talked about light appearing while a firmament arose out of a primeval flood.
Then Israel moved into Canaan, Hebrew writers were exposed to new traditions from Babylon. The Hebrews further rewrote their earlier ideas, which by this time had become divorced from the original Egyptian roots. The Hebrews encountered a new worldwide flood myth that occurred in the tenth generation of humanity rather than at the beginning of time like Egyptian.
Bible Creation story begins with the odd introduction that the story is about the children of heaven and earth, clearly a reference to pagan deities. In that myth, heaven and earth are the Egyptian deities Geb and Nut, and the biblical authors replaced them with Adam and Eve.There are numerous parallels between the myths about Geb and Nut and their biblical counterparts.
Initially, events in the Garden of Eden were about the children of Geb and Nut and the conflicts among them. The Garden of Eden lay along the Nile. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life were derived from symbols associated with the Egyptian deities Shu and Tefnut.
The sons of Adam and Eve—Cain, Abel, and Seth—corresponded to the sons of Geb and Nut—Osiris, Set, and Horus. The feuds between the family of Adam and the serpent, and the feud between Cain and Abel were based on the feuds between the family of Osiris and the serpentine Set.
In the story of Cain and Abel, for instance, Cain, a planter, killed his younger brother Abel, a shepherd. In the original Egyptian story, the younger brother killed the older brother, who was also a planter. The roles somehow became reversed. In Babylonian myths, however, we find stories about feuds between planters and shepherds and the tragic death of a shepherd.
Even geography changed. Where Eden once lay along the coasts of the Nile, biblical redactors clumsily removed it to Mesopotamia, confusing it with the Sumerian paradise of Dilmun.
Take Gen. 1:1–2, for instance:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
The opening verses describe four things:
1. an earth and heaven that took up space but had had no form or content;
2. darkness;
3. a watery deep,within which the unformed space existed; and
4. a wind (i.e.,"Spirit of God") hovering upon the face of the waters.
They correspond precisely with what Egyptian deities and the elements they represented:
1. Huh and Hauhet—unformed space, i.e., the shapeless bubble within the deep, as described in Genesis as tohu and bohu;
2. Kuk and Kauket—the darkness on the face of the waters;
3. Nun and Naunet—the primeval flood, "the Deep," the same as the biblical deep;
4. Amen and Amenet—the invisible wind, the biblical "wind" that hovered over the deep.
Genesis author of this Creation story accepted the Theban (Egyptian) tradition that the primary Creator was identified with the wind. They simply changed the Egyptian god’s name of Amen to the Hebrew name of Elohim, and described him as the wind.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
