(July 10, 2015 at 11:44 pm)Chas Wrote:(July 8, 2015 at 9:51 pm)Randy Carson Wrote: The idea that Jesus is no different than the 2,000+ gods of ancient history who have been largely forgotten may make it easier for you to discount Christianity (without actually thinking), but it's not a legitimate argument. The alleged parallels between Jesus and other so-called gods lack any real substance.
The alleged events in the life of Jesus lack any real substance.
Chas,
On page 173 of Carrier's On the Historicity of Jesus he has this footnote. I've got to find this article so I can read it in full.
Quote:The component of vanishing corpses as a mytho-type for translation to heaven
is demonstrated to have been a commonplace in pagan literature of the time in Richard
C. Miller, 'Mark's Empty Tomb and Other Translation Fables in Classical Antiquity',
Journal of Biblical Literature 129 (201 0), pp. 759-76. He shows this theme was so
distinctive of pagan tradition (as opposed to Jewish literature) that it is unlikely to have
come from anywhere else. That translation to heaven was almost a/ways understood
by pagans to be bodily (typically by the assumption of a new, indestructible, divine
body) see Carrier, 'Spiritual Body', in Empty Tomb (ed. Price and Lowder), pp. 1 10-13,
137-39, 212 nn. 169-70, particularly in regard to Philo, who often uses words such as
' incorporeal' to refer to what he actually means are physical bodies of astral material.
Really an extraordinary book in many respects. Jesusism, it appears, was just warmed over shit...easily recognizable to people living at the time.
