Where did the Jesus myth come from?

[Epimethean]

I don't recall Campbell stating that he did not understand why heroes and demi-gods had enormous strength and performed great deeds. In fact, his thoughts on that form the crux of the Hero's Journey. Can you give me a reference to read where he admits this failing?

[michaelsherlock]

But religious "salesmen" are not selling reality anyway. They do not need a real "jesus" any more than any other ancient religion needed a real Marduk, Horus or Molech.

As the xtian members of this board demonstrate they can be persuaded to buy just about any pile of shit that someone dreams up.

Actually religion does need a "real" Jesus, Horus, or Marduk, even if it was made up. The cosmic myth origin of religion is based on astrology. If astrology i.e. the constellations predicts a great hero born of a virgin, then it must happen. This is why the heroes of ancient times had enormous power and strength, something Joseph Campbell never understood.

I don't know if Campbell failed to understand it, or was just not interested in that aspect of myth. Campbell was more interested in the function, the 'why' of myth, rather than the 'how'. If you look at the symbolism in many ancient mythologies, you will see that they are multi-layered, in other words they reflect, not only their creator (man) but also the environment that their creator was subject to.

---

Remember we have evidence of a cult which believed in "resurrrection" after 3 days at the close of the first century BC.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0...85,00.html

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus' followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day — and it might even hint that they they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified.

Now, one of the significant differences between the Pharisees and the Saduccees was the belief in an afterlife so this could have been an Phariseeic offshoot which our sole chronicler of these events, Josephus, might have declined to talk about as he was a Pharisee himself and might have been embarrassed by this bunch. But what the stone tells us is that some group in late first century BC Judaea had a concept of a dead man resurrecting. So not only is "jesus" philosophy copied from the Greeks but his whole bullshit story seems to have been spreading around the region before he was even "born."

Also, if you look at some of the ancient versions of the myth of Helios, he also goes into the underworld for 3 days and then rises again.

[LEDO]

I don't recall Campbell stating that he did not understand why heroes and demi-gods had enormous strength and performed great deeds. In fact, his thoughts on that form the crux of the Hero's Journey. Can you give me a reference to read where he admits this failing?

A slight misstatement. Perhaps I should have said great morals over strength.

I quote Campbell in my book in this paragraph.

The extreme importance our ancestors placed on the zodiac and constellations would have made astrology the prime influence on religion and culture, contrary to what the best scholars in this field have to say. One can read a whole chapter by Joseph Campbell discussing the relationship of the woman and the serpent and come away empty. Campbell shows the famous Adam and Eve Seal, remarking on the snake’s relationship to the tree. He quotes references to Leviathan from Job mentioning the “dark sea” or the “abyss”; shows us Dionysus being nurtured in a cave; describes the goddess Demeter; dissects the virgin concept; relates the legend of Medusa and Pegasus; and demystifies the battle of Zeus and Typhon, yet not once does he mention a constellation. Instead, he claims that all these stories rise from things known by him and his colleagues as “order of the Mother right,” “the warrior principle of the great deed,” or “the principle of indeterminacy.” After he makes his conjectures, he then admits there is something amiss with the whole idea: “And yet one cannot help feeling that there is something forced and finally unconvincing about all the manly moral attitudes of the shining righteous deedsmen, whether of the Biblical or Greco-Roman schools…A residue of mystery remains with them…as to say ‘But do you not hear the deeper song?’” Campbell misses the whole point of the cosmic myth and the major influence it has had on man.

Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology (Viking Penguin Books, 1991), 25.

Minimalist- I don't believe in astrology either, but I don't deny that is the origin of religion.

[Epimethean]

I have read that passage. I don't think he is suggesting that he didn't understand it. It is phrased rhetorically, and the pivotal term is "manly," which hits back at the point he made just before with the reference to a key point, which is the shift from Mother Right to manly might.

Here is Campbell elaborating on that issue:

Toward the end of close of the Age of Bronze and, more strongly, with the dawn of the Age of Iron (c. 1250 B.C. in the Levant), the old cosmology and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and in large measure even suppressed, by those suddenly intrusive patriarchal warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to us chiefly in the Old and New Testaments and in the myths of Greece. Two extensive geographical matrices were the source lands of these insurgent warrior waves: For the Semites, the Syro-Arabian deserts, where, as ranging nomads, the herded sheep and goats and later mastered the camel; and for the Hellenic-Aryan stems, the broad plains of Europe and south Russia, where they had grazed their herds of cattle and early mastered the horse. 1

and,

For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the character only of darkness--to which, also, a negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic orders of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her representatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, the order of Mother Right. And opposed to such without quarter, is the order of the Patriarchy, with an ardor of righteous eloquence and a fury of fire and sword. 2

The Masks of God-Occidental Mythology

1. pg 7
2. pg 21

Further, Campbell does reference the Mother as representing "Space, Time and Matter," which is fairly concrete reference to the cosmic myth. The shift as male dominance enters the picture is fully discussed, and I do not see Campbell allowing as to a failing to understand here, but rather, that the change is not completely natural.

[Minimalist]

Toward the end of close of the Age of Bronze and, more strongly, with the dawn of the Age of Iron (c. 1250 B.C. in the Levant), the old cosmology and mythologies of the goddess mother were radically transformed, reinterpreted, and in large measure even suppressed, by those suddenly intrusive patriarchal warrior tribesmen whose traditions have come down to us chiefly in the Old and New Testaments and in the myths of Greece. Two extensive geographical matrices were the source lands of these insurgent warrior waves: For the Semites, the Syro-Arabian deserts, where, as ranging nomads, the herded sheep and goats and later mastered the camel; and for the Hellenic-Aryan stems, the broad plains of Europe and south Russia, where they had grazed their herds of cattle and early mastered the horse

Um, somebody needs to tell this guy about the Sea Peoples who overthrew the Late Bronze Age kingdoms of the Hittites, Cyprus, Mainland Greece, Crete, and Asia Minor and damn near took out Egypt. Not so coincidentally the city which Schliemann identified as "Troy" fell to unknown attackers right around 1190 BC which is right at the onset of the Sea People invasion. These invaders did not come by horse or camel. They came by boats.

[Epimethean]

LOL. He's a bit too dead to tell him now, but we can send a message via his sheut.

[cratehorus]

Remember we have evidence of a cult which believed in "resurrrection" after 3 days at the close of the first century BC.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0...85,00.html

A 3-ft.-high tablet romantically dubbed "Gabriel's Revelation" could challenge the uniqueness of the idea of the Christian Resurrection. The tablet appears to date authentically to the years just before the birth of Jesus and yet — at least according to one Israeli scholar — it announces the raising of a messiah after three days in the grave. If true, this could mean that Jesus' followers had access to a well-established paradigm when they decreed that Christ himself rose on the third day — and it might even hint that they they could have applied it in their grief after their master was crucified.

Now, one of the significant differences between the Pharisees and the Saduccees was the belief in an afterlife so this could have been an Phariseeic offshoot which our sole chronicler of these events, Josephus, might have declined to talk about as he was a Pharisee himself and might have been embarrassed by this bunch. But what the stone tells us is that some group in late first century BC Judaea had a concept of a dead man resurrecting. So not only is "jesus" philosophy copied from the Greeks but his whole bullshit story seems to have been spreading around the region before he was even "born."

SO the Pharisees invented the myth

[Minimalist]

You are looking for an "Ah ha" moment and I don't think you are going to find one.

[DeistPaladin]

SO the Pharisees invented the myth

What Min said, nobody invented the myth. Nobody "just made up Jesus one day". That's not typically how these things work anyway.

[Minimalist]

The name "jesus" is a Greek translation ( iesou) (later Latinized into Jesus when the Romans invented the letter "J" in the middle ages. The original Hebrew name was Yehoshuah (meaning Yahweh is Salvation) but the actual pronunciation seems to have been more like Yeshua or Hosea. Again, the word "joshua" has to wait until the invention of the "J."

Yahweh seems to have been a minor figure in the overall Canaanite pantheon but his cult was centered in the desert areas around what later came to be Jerusalem during the Iron Age. This actually gives quite a lot of time for various bullshit stories to grow up about him.