Is Christianity based on older myths?

[Fidel_Castronaut]

We need to iterate to Steve that, again, taking simply contemporary accounts of 'Jesus' as the benchmark for his existence, the amount of evidence for him being real is 0.

The gospels were written anonymously. Nobody knows who authored them, only that that they appear several decades after Jesus supposedly rezzed. Just as likely they were written by a group of people working in collusion than they were by one. 100x more likely they were written by people who had absolutely no contact with any of the events they describe, or any of the people that lived through them.

Paul is equally an unknown. We know next nothing about him either.

Steve, we will never be convinced by a story with so many holes in it. The reality of what and why is most likely unknowable, but presuming the message behind this story is 100% factual is naive, bordering on delusional. Nobody can say for certain that this guy existed or didn't exist, but there's no reason to presume he existed, and certainly no reason (or evidence) to presume he was divine or had magical powers. I, as someone who rejects your unevidenced claims, needs evidence to make me doubt my position and be open to yours. And that's it.

[Mister Agenda]

You mean someone lied, lied, lied and lied. No one seems to want to tell me why the assumption is all these writers lied.

Because we have no obligation to defend the words you put in our mouths.

Or is it more proper to assume a writer of an ancient document is not being intentionally deceitful until it can be proven or at least a plausible explanation why the contents are false.

It's more proper not to assume either way. Revising history has been a popular human activity for as long as history has been recorded. Without independent corroboration, we can't evaluate whether a given author is more likely to be honest or dishonest. And even the dishonest ones are likely to include some actual facts and even the honest ones are going to get some things wrong. And that's without going into the issue of unconscious bias.

There are at least 8 authors of these 27 docs.

Yep, at least.

[Mudhammam]

Some assumptions have to be made for discussion purposes.

No, they don't. But okay, let's make them anyway.

If you want to argue that these things are not so, that's fine but I am going with the people who make this their life's work.

So, you should have in view about a dozen completely different conceptions of Jesus. Those are just the ones taken seriously.

A. Scholars believe Jesus existed.
B. Scholars believe the Pauline epistles to be written in the 50s and the 4 gospels between 60-100.
C. There are at least 8 different authors of 27 separate documents. Don't make the mistake of combining them all into one book. They are not.

Okay. So, this is relevant to what exactly?

Okay, to sum up whether Christianity is based on myths, I am hearing the following reasoning:

1. The gospels are not accurate or are complete fiction
2. Paul, Peter, John, and James had motives other than truth to write their letters
3. Therefore the narrative is fiction and the source must be recycled myths.

No, see, "Therefore" implies that 3) is derived from 1) and 2), which makes little sense since 3) is just a recapitulation of 1), and 2) assumes we have writings from anyone named John, Peter, and James. Also, you forgot to add the following premises:
P1. Many religions/cults predate Christianity and contain the exact same language and themes.
P2. The claims made in the Gospels lack corroboration from other contemporary sources, more startling than might be typically expected given the nature of the supposed events.

First, why would we not assume the 8 separate writers believed what they wrote until we have evidence or a plausible motive for a significant conspiracy?

We can assume all the writers, whomever they were, believed what they were writing and were not involved in a conspiracy. Moot point.

Do we assign this type of scrutiny to other historical documents?

Yes. Of course, unless you're so gullible to believe every mythical story ever written.

Can you give me an example of even a group of 5 historical documents that are attesting to something that are all thought to be intentionally false?

Red herring.

Or is it that you think that a plausible motive for this level of falsehood and conspiracy was to start a new belief system based on self-sacrifice, love, and humility in a political climate that was hostile to it?

Like the other 4,000+ other religions currently in existence, those may be some of the possible reasons. Christianity created a community or brotherhood amongst the poor and disenfranchised and empowered those who were politically weak by turning things on their head (as in, it is the poor, the sick, the dumb, etc., that God blesses and stores treasures in heaven for, not the rich or those who keep the law like the Pharisaic righteous, etc.)

Lastly, the conclusion 3 does not follow from the premises 1 and 2. To get to this conclusion, you would have to insert and prove probability of the premise that the early church conspirators had access to extinct and eastern religious characters, stories, and philosophies. I would argue that if premise 1 and 2 are true, it is far more probable that any similarity to myths is coincidence.

Red herring.

I'm starting to think, based on your other posts, that to continue this discussion would be a waste of time because you are either 1) not bright enough to consider the evidence or 2) intellectually dishonest. I really hope your future comments prove me wrong.

[robvalue]

You know it's funny, I could swear people told me there was just one author of the bible.

But I already established who that is.

[Mister Agenda]

It still remains that if Christianity is based on recycling old myths (including the Teacher of Righteousness):

1. The eyewitnesses of John, Peter, and James lied (with or without Paul's help).

Are you actually ignoring my posts, or just pretending to ignore them? We can't even assume there were eyewittnesses to do the lying. We can't assume they were lying rather than merely inaccurate. We can't assume that Chinese Whispers can't account for drastic inaccuracy between the original accounts and the ones written down with zero intentional deception being involved.

There has yet to be a plausible reason for such involved and far reaching deceit.

There would have to be if our position was that being the only possible explanation and also that there was something in human psychology that made it unlikely for us to lie without a plausible reason, but it's a demonstrable fact that many people don't need a good reason to lie, or perhaps more kindly, think 'it makes a better story' is a good enough reason to lie.

Plenty of people have indicated that they don't think deliberate deceit is the only or best possibility. I think you've just seized on it because you see it as a weaker position, and can work in an appeal to emotion with it (you guys are saying all these guys are liars!).

Seeing the problem with that, some of you say, "Well, not so much as a lie...as...". Sorry, the deceit had to be intentional.

So you misrepresent our position and then claim we're dishonestly changing it to address your insightful points. Don't be such a douchebag. And support your claim that the deceit has to be intentional.

2. John, Peter, and James (with or without Paul's help) had access to all the myths mentioned (from Egyptian, Sumerian, Roman, Greek, eastern religions, etc.) and cleverly used them to be compatible with not only monotheism, but the monotheism of the OT.

Who said that? Oh, it was you. No cleverness or special education is required to incorporate elements of another story you've heard into the one you're telling. You don't have to know the story you're borrowing from's provenance. And what Christianity came up with is not compatible with the monotheism of the OT. You've got three gods with the NT, and some hand-waving about them really counting as one god. It shows chutzpah, not cleverness.

I have yet to hear any scenario that is more probably than the disciples ALL believed what they were saying was true; and since some of them were eyewitnesses, they believed they saw these events (most important being the resurrection of Jesus).

The disciples could have completely believed what they were saying was true, but we don't actually know what most of them were saying, we only know what people told other people they said. It would be nice to have a first-hand account of the events of the life of Jesus, but we don't have that. It would be nice to have interviews with first-hand witnesses, but we don't have that either. We have oft-told tales.

It is important to note that it does not matter what you believe about the events of Jesus' life or if you think their belief rational.

Why was it important to note that?

If the disciples all believed what they saw, wrote and spoke of, then the hypothesis of this thread, that Christianity is based on recycled myths, fails.

If the disciples all believed 'what they saw', 'wrote', and 'spoke' of, then the hypothesis that Christianity is based on recylcled myths is affected not a whit, because we only have hearsay of what the supposed discioles supposedly saw, wrote, and spoke of.

[watchamadoodle]

@SteveII, maybe we could focus on a specific myth or old religion that seems to have been absorbed by Christianity? There are a few people that believe the gospels are completely mythical, but there are a lot more people who believe the gospels are partially mythical.

Also I think fictional would be a better word than mythical.

Here is a suspicious case I read about recently. Jesus catches 153 fish. Why 153? Well it turns out that 153 was a significant number in Hellenism.

The number 153 has several interesting mathematical properties. 153 is the sum of the first 17 integers (see mathematical properties of the number 153) and is also the sum of the first five positive factorials, 1! + 2! + 3! + 4! + 5!. The number 153 is associated with the geometric shape known as the Vesica Piscis or Mandorla. Archimedes, in his Measurement of a Circle, referred to this ratio (153/265), as constituting the "measure of the fish", this ratio being an imperfect representation of √3.
...
In Iamblichus' Life of Pythagoras, a tale is mentioned in which Pythagoras, while journeying from Sybaris to Crotona, is said to have met some fishermen, who were drawing their net heavily laden to the shore, and he told them the exact number of fish they caught. In this reference, the exact number is not mentioned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miraculous_catch_of_fish

There is an entire wikipedia article listing the interesting properties of 153. It seems very unlikely that this number was chosen because it was historically factual.

As a triangular number, 153 is the sum of the first 17 integers, and is also the sum of the first five positive factorials:1!+2!+3!+4!+5!.

The number 153 is also a hexagonal number, and a truncated triangle number, meaning that 1, 15, and 153 are all triangle numbers.

The distinct prime factors of 153 add up to 20, and so do the ones of 154, hence the two form a Ruth-Aaron pair.

Since 153 = 1^3 + 5^3 + 3^3, it is a 3-narcissistic number, and it is also the smallest three-digit number which can be expressed as the sum of cubes of its digits. Only five other numbers can be expressed as the sum of the cubes of their digits: 0, 1, 370, 371 and 407. It is also a Friedman number, since 153 = 3 × 51, and a Harshad number in base 10, being divisible by the sum of its own digits.

The Biggs–Smith graph is a symmetric graph with 153 edges, all equivalent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/153_(number)

[robvalue]

Maths is like porn to me!

[Minimalist]

Yeah...maybe 'jesus' caught 154 fish and threw one back because it was too small?

[robvalue]

I dunno, what are your sources for that? It's sounding a bit far fetched :p

[Thumpalumpacus]

I don't care if you believe the events of Jesus' life actually happened or not. But the consequences of rejecting the gospels is that a significant number of people intentionally lied. Then the question is to what end? This all goes toward the probability assessment of whether the first Christians believed in the actual key events in Jesus' life.

Not at all. You're completely ignoring the fact that the Bible has been massaged for 1700 years, often with an agenda in mind, as anyone who has read Ehrman's work would know. Assuming that what you read today is what was written centuries ago is fatuous and unwarranted.

Just as an aside, let's turn your question on its head: why would the authors of the myriad other religious texts lie? By your logic, shouldn't you invest their claims with the same amount of credulity? I'm told that churchin' is a pretty lucrative business. Even in those times, all money is good money.

And -- if Christ really was Yahweh personified, why would he pick a group of off-the-shelf traits so as to make himself indistinguishable from the myriad other godlings running around in those days? And how can you be sure that those godlings weren't real?