(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.
It's certainly plausible that cognitive dissonance accounts for the majority of the bible's tall tales, but on the other hand, if a person is willing to look, a lot of the stories and bible passages carry idiom and philosophical figure-of-speech that westerners (majority of) don't understand.
Personally I don't even accept that Jesus actually died on the cross. It's meant to take anywhere from three days onward, yet he 'died' in less than six hours. Consider medical knowledge back then, if he appeared to be dead, they'd have thought him dead. And if he was resuscitated, they'd have thought him resurrected. It's well accepted in Muslim faith that he only appeared to have died to the romans. The word for 'resurrected' in the greek doesn't even have to mean resurrected, it can mean 'resuscitated'. Not only that, in Hindu circles it's widely accepted that he went to Kashmir and lived out his life there, and that in his teens and twenties (that coincidental huge gap in the canonized, sanctioned bible's narrative of his life) he studied the Theravadas and Buddhist philosophy in Kashmir.
That would explain why so many of his sayings are parallels to Buddha.
Then you get crazy popes, holy-wars and King James and post-crusades England making a complete muck-up of most of the bible. We're left with hellheim-God of eternal love that, contradictory to that, tortures people for all time unless a person hears the one-stop fast-track pop-culture checklist to tick that let's whoever pretends to accept it get in past the non-existent pearly gates, as long as they use phrases like 'grace-through-faith' and go to church on Sundays.
Jesus was a Jew with a buddhist way of looking at it, and he wasn't the son of God anymore than the other 'sons of God' were biologically related to their creator.
Saying that, the man was a philosophical Rembrandt, and if it weren't for fundamentalist christians he might get shown for the wisdom he had.
