Where did the Jesus myth come from?

[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.

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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.