(May 14, 2017 at 2:25 pm)vorlon13 Wrote: still, making the christers confront the blatant hijacking of Jesus' religion apostle Paul foisted on them . . .
As you know, I have my doubts about this whole 'paul' shit. As Carrier notes:
Quote:Element 31: Incarnate sons (or daughters) of a god who died and then rose from their deaths to become living gods granting salvation to their worshiperswere a common and peculiar feature of pagan religion when Christianity arose, so much so that i nfluence from paganism is the only plausible explanation for how a Jewish sect such as Christianity came to adopt the idea (again, Element 1 1). For example, you won't find this trend in ancient China. No such gods are found there. If Christianity had begun in China, its claims would indeed have been unique and astonishing. Yet in its actual Greco-Roman context it was neither unique nor astonishing. Thus it cannot be a coincidence that Christianity arose with an idea matching a ubiquitous pagan type unique to the very time and place it was born. Any theory of historicity, to be plausible, must take this into account.31
In the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr wrote the following:
When we say that the Logos, who is the firstborn of God, Jesus Christ
our teacher, was produced w ithout sexual union, and was crucified and
died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new
or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call Sons of
God. [In fact] . . . if anybody objects that [our god] was crucified, this is
i n common with the sons of Zeus (as you call them) who suffered, as prev
iously listed. Since their fatal sufferings are all narrated as not similar
but different, so his unique passion should not seem to be any worse-
indeed I will show, as I have undertaken, and as the argument proceeds,
that he was better; for Jesus is thus shown to be better by his actions.n
1 69
Thus even Christians acknowledged the ubiquity of the dying-and-rising son-of-god theme in their surrounding pagan culture, and recognized it as a common theme even when every story differed in details from every other (on that being how syncretism works, see again Element 1
Pgs 168-69 On the Historicity of Jesus
Nothing new or original in jesusism. Merely syncretism of the exisitng concepts which had been floating around for centuries.
