(December 28, 2013 at 7:47 pm)Minimalist Wrote:

Quote:At that time Jesus was not "divine", that came later.

That's not the story as "they" tell it. Granted the whole brew had to ferment for a couple of centuries but the winners were the ones who claimed both fully human and fully divine....
Again, the concept of a dying/resurrected god was commonplace in the region. Of course there were differences in all the stories but it would not have been considered something revolutionary.

Mini, the thread is, as I understood it, how the myth began. I provide an internally and contextually consistent story of how that could have happened. How it evolved into the divinity stuff is quite different from how it began. It is a distinction that is valid and I think it is of fundamental importance: Jews did not and could not have done the divinity thing, but Jews definitely invented the resurrection story. Therefore it began somewhere, somewhen, and somehow, and that is what I focused on. How it evolved to Trinity took lots of time and the elimination of lots of "heretics" and their "heresies".

(November 10, 2013 at 1:29 pm)xpastor Wrote: Many would answer that it was borrowed from the Osiris myth.

Perhaps. However, I start from the premise that Yeshua was a historical figure, an itinerant rabbi with considerable rhetorical prowess, who got himself crucified by the Romans and remained dead.

So my answer is cognitive dissonance.

When people believe something intensely, and it fails to happen, they can't live with that. They have to invent a story to prove that it really did happen in an unexpected way.

We have seen this in the recent history of apocalyptic prophecy. William Miller predicted that Jesus would return on October 22, 1844, and it obviously did not happen. The result was the birth of Seventh-Day Adventism, which "arrived at the conviction that Daniel 8:14 foretold Christ's entrance into the Most Holy Place of the heavenly sanctuary rather than his second coming." (Wikipedia) I have no idea what that is supposed to mean, but it satisfied them. Likewise, the first Jehovah's witnesses predicted that Jesus would return in 1914. When no one spotted him, they said he had returned "invisibly."

Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet expecting the Son of Man to come and usher in the Kingdom of God within his own lifetime.

Of course he died without seeing any such event. I suppose his followers said things like, "I just can't believe he's gone." Denial is the start of the grief process. Given Jesus' very real abilities as a preacher and the credulous nature of the era, they never moved on to the later stages of grief. Someone came up with the idea that he must have risen from the dead, and then others started to fill in the details, that so-and-so had seen him post-crucifixion, that there were angels there, that he showed his wounds, that he had dinner with his associates, that he ascended into heaven.

Christians will protest that no one would make up the story of the resurrection, but they do in fact come up with all sorts of fictional details to promote their faith. To take a few trivial cases, I have received an email which presents the young Albert Einstein as a defender of the Christian faith against his atheistic professor although Einstein was a non-observant Jew who explicitly disavowed any belief in a personal God. Or there is Lady Hope's well-known story of Charles Darwin's deathbed reversion to Christianity, although Darwin's children say she was nowhere near the great scientist in his last years.

A god's resurrection from the dead is an ancient archetype found all over the world, so it wasn't borrowed from anyone, more likely it was just another expression of the human's innate fear of death. For the record, Osiris' "resemblances" to Jesus are really stretched.

(December 31, 2013 at 4:38 pm)The_Thinking_Theist Wrote: A god's resurrection from the dead is an ancient archetype found all over the world, so it wasn't borrowed from anyone, more likely it was just another expression of the human's innate fear of death. For the record, Osiris' "resemblances" to Jesus are really stretched.

The response to you is as to Mini: That Jesus was a god/God was not an early Jewish contribution to, and had nothing to do with the origin of, the resurrection myth. The origin of the myth was the original question posed by this thread. For the original Jewish followers, equating a mortal man with God was inconceivable and entirely unnecessary. Rather, the myth originated as the resurrection of a dead mortal man, for reasons Xpastor provided, and his view is entirely consistent with the "actual facts" as I set out in a miracle-free scenario that is consistent with Jewish law, the calendar, the clock, and the "technology". Hey, Jews had precedent: Elisha did it, so it could happen again. Only later did the conflation occur with the god-resurrection myths of the neighbors, and its absorption into Christology

I hate to agree with TTA even a little bit but you are missing the point. Dying/resurrected gods were a dime a dozen in the ancient world. Like assholes, everybody had one. The concept far predates Judaism.

The Gabriel Revelation Stone indicates that the concept of a 3-day resurrection was already known to some group(s) by the end of the first millenium BC.

The so-called epistles of "Paul" know nothing of Mary, Joseph, Pilate, Calvary, miracles, etc. This shit was yet another tradition which was incorporated into the system which emerged.

Marcion used the "Jews" as the bad guys in his story and yhwh as a sort of primeval scumbag. But because xtians burned all his writings we don't know his motivations...only what his enemies have told us.

If you are going to be skeptical about this stuff you have to be skeptical of all of it.

Xtianity seems to be a mid-2d century creation...or at least that is the time that someone pulled together various disparate themes and started what Ehrman calls "proto-orthodoxy." By the mid 2d century there had been 3 serious Jewish revolts and they had been crushed and scattered by the Romans. They were the perfect bad guys for this little story.

But we have no archaeological or historical evidence for xtians in Palestine in the first century. The earliest actual reference is Pliny the Younger, in the early 2d century, in friggin' Bithynia-Pontus which was on the Black Sea coast of Turkey and his report of them does not bear much resemblance to the later variants of xtianity.

The only tale we have which supports the story is the one which the proto-orthodox championed and that, frankly, is not worth the parchment it is written on.

(January 2, 2014 at 12:18 pm)Minimalist Wrote: I hate to agree with TTA even a little bit but you are missing the point. Dying/resurrected gods were a dime a dozen in the ancient world. Like assholes, everybody had one. The concept far predates Judaism.

I may be missing your point, but you are therefore missing mine. Mine is that the origins of the myth had zero to do with a god resurrection. Resurrections were not only of gods, since the Elisha resurrection was not of a god. Must have been a shekel a dozen. Jesus would not have been considered a god, and certainly not God, by his Jewish followers. They originated the resurrection myth. God/god attribution/apotheosis came later. What am I missing? Sorry if I'm being dense, please explain it.

First of all, sorry for losing track of this thread. Thanks for coming to look for me.

The word for today will be "syncretism." Defined as:

1 : the combination of different forms of belief or practice

2: the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms

We can't really know what first century Jews believed. Until 70 it seems that the majority believed that all they had to do was pay for their sacrifices at the temple and the priests would do the rest. We hear lots of b.s. about how the "Jews" did not represent the human form nor would they tolerate other gods. Yet,



this portion of a mosaic floor from kibbutz Beth Alpha was unearthed in 1928 as the floor of an ancient synagogue. Helios was the Greek sun god yet here we see him depicted in the middle of a representation of a zodiac. How can this be if what we are told of ancient Judaism is true?

For that matter, these days we are told that muslims will not draw the image of muhammad and will gleefully chop off the heads of those who do...yet....



Mohammed receiving his first revelation from the angel Gabriel. Miniature illustration on vellum from the book Jami' al-Tawarikh (literally "Compendium of Chronicles" but often referred to as The Universal History or History of the World), by Rashid al-Din, published in Tabriz, Persia, 1307 A.D. Now in the collection of the Edinburgh University Library, Scotland.

in spite of what they now say this did not always seem to be the case. My point here is that one cannot believe religious bullshit based on what they say now.

In the Helios example we see evidence of syncretism with Hellenistic ideas which was what Philo of Alexandria was trying to do in the early first century. So I am not in a position to say what jews may or may not have thought of any "jesus." You are right about resurrection not being restricted to gods - the Gabriel Revelation Stone is indicative of that but I am also less than convinced that these stories originated in Judaea or Galilee. They were set there by their author ( "mark" or whoever) but that is just literature.

The simple fact is that it only matters what first century jews thought if you accept the proto-orthodox version of history which has him living in first century Judaea. I don't. Once you move beyond the borders of Judaea there is no question about the prevalence of dying/resurrected vegetation gods. They were a drachma a dozen.

(January 7, 2014 at 10:59 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The word for today will be "syncretism." Defined as:

1 : the combination of different forms of belief or practice

2: the fusion of two or more originally different inflectional forms

We can't really know what first century Jews believed. ... We hear lots of b.s. about how the "Jews" did not represent the human form nor would they tolerate other gods. Yet,



this portion of a mosaic floor .. was unearthed in 1928 as the floor of an ancient synagogue. Helios was the Greek sun god yet here we see him depicted in the middle of a representation of a zodiac. How can this be if what we are told of ancient Judaism is true?
...

in spite of what they now say this did not always seem to be the case. ...
Helios example ... syncretism with Hellenistic ideas which was what Philo of Alexandria was trying to do in the early first century. ... You are right about resurrection not being restricted to gods - ... it only matters what first century jews thought if you accept the proto-orthodox version ... which has him living in first century Judaea.

Very fine, Mini. Great food for thought. The Beth Alpha mosaic was not the only one with Helios in a zodiac, and I hadn't thought about it at all. Here's a link to an article that attempts to explain, in a way neither of us will have much patience for, the use of the zodiac in the seven synagogues so far discovered having them: http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily...n-symbols/. I didn't see the times and locations for these synagogues, nor did I yet spend time looking, but I'll see what turns up.

You narrow the discussion very helpfully with this: "... if you accept the proto-orthodox version of history which has him living in first century Judaea. ..." First, according to the story, Jesus never lived in Judea, although he died and was surely buried there. He lived mostly in Galilee, and found his followers there. It should be what the Galilean Jewish followers thought that would have counted most in their earliest portrayal of Jesus and his "resurrection". I think his brother James is considered the leader of the Jerusalem church. I guess he must have relocated the HQ to the big city, but he was really Galilean if he was really the brother.

None of the authors I have read attribute anything but Jewish piety to these followers, and it seems hard to believe that an apocalyptic worldview would have fit much with cosmopolitan, Hellenized Jews. Also, James was of the party that did not want to go beyond the Jews, that was the Paul people. But there was all sorts of stuff going on in the region at the time, and it may be hard to attach those mosaics to this or that set of Jews -- all we can know is that to make a nice mosaic costs money.

Quote:None of the authors I have read attribute anything but Jewish piety to these followers, and it seems hard to believe that an apocalyptic worldview would have fit much with cosmopolitan, Hellenized Jews.

Hmm.... I have to go walk my dogs but let me leave you with a thought on this. Some years ago I read a critique of the Original Star Trek. In it, the author made the point that the crew represented the attitudes of 20th century Americans set in the 23d century. There was little attempt made to pretend that they represented 23d century humanity. It is the writer who determines the attitudes/opinions of fictional creations.

The "jews" were chosen to play the role of the bad guys. In the century from the mid first to the mid second century there were 3 serious revolts and by the end of that time they were at the top of everyone's shit list. Jesus is the good guy in the story and the jews are his opponents. In Hollywood versions they would be wearing black hats!

I know Min has read this book, The Bible Unearthed by Finkelstein and Silberman. It too pokes holes in the picture of the ancient Jews as devout monotheists.

To summarize their findings, we are given the impression of an original adherence to a strictly monotheistic cult of YHWH from which the people (especially the northerners) lapsed into the polytheism of the neighboring nations. However, polytheism was there from the beginning. The archaeologists have unearthed hundreds of figurines of naked fertility goddesses, and a few inscriptions are found in both Israel and Judah referring to the goddess Asherah as the consort of YHWH, Of Judah too the authors say, "the idolatry of the people of Judah was not a departure from their earlier monotheism. It was, instead, the way they had worshiped for hundreds of years."

Jesus slammed his dick against the boulder until it disappeared. Then jesus swung his penis around in a fashion of 360 degrees until enough lift was produced from his penis that he could fly away into heaven.