Absorbing old religion

[Spooky]

Pretty much.

All those whiny little bastards bitching about the "Christ" in Christmas. Morons. Zealots would be funny if it wasn't so pitiful.

[watchamadoodle]

That's why the bible reads like a patchwork quilt, I presume

It makes sense. It's a win for everyone. Except people living in reality.

The patchwork reminded me of something I saw in a youtube presentation by Richard Carrier. I'm not convinced by the Jesus myth theory, but Carrier mentioned that the Nag Hammadi library included the teachings of a Hellenistic philospher that were apparently in the process of being inserted as the teaching of Jesus in a Gnostic gospel called the "Sophia of Jesus Christ". I don't know what motivated this forgery. Was it commonly understood by all Christains at that time that Jesus, his teachings, and his biography were myth? Maybe the Gnostics were the original Christians, and they created myths of Jesus to convey secret truths. Meanwhile some Christians came to believe that these myths were historical, and those orthodox Christians eliminated the Gnostics as heretics when they were actually the inventors of Christianity?

The Epistle of Eugnostos is one of many Gnostic tractates from the Nag Hammadi library, discovered in Egypt in 1945. The Nag Hammadi codices contain two full copies of this tractate. The epistle was a familiar literary convention of Antiquity; it is not to be supposed that this essay is an actual letter written by a man named Eugnostos ("right thinking", sometimes Eugnostus).

The text is devoid of any specifically Christian themes or associations, and simply describes the esoteric cosmology of the gnostics. The similarity with the cosmology in Sophia of Jesus Christ, led Douglas M. Parrott to conclude that that work was an adaption of this Epistle for a Christian audience. Parrott places the two side by side for comparison in his translation for The Nag Hammadi Library in English, edited by Robinson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_of_Eugnostos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sophia_of_Jesus_Christ

[robvalue]

For me, the inclusion in the bible of just one obviously copied story from a previous mythology would be enough to make me seriously doubt the integrity of the whole book. If I was the kind of person who might mostly take things at face value, but not entirely gullible.

[watchamadoodle]

For me, the inclusion in the bible of just one obviously copied story from a previous mythology would be enough to make me seriously doubt the integrity of the whole book. If I was the kind of person who might mostly take things at face value, but not entirely gullible.

A Christian would just see this as evidence that those dastardly gnostic heretics were composing fraudulent gospels.

What I find interesting is that scholars think these works were hidden by a nearby Christian Pachomian monastery - that's St. Pachomius a contemporary of St. Anthony. In other words, these works are associated with the Desert Fathers who most Christians admire.

So why were these monks putting ideas from a non-Christian work into the mouth of Jesus? It makes me wonder if early Christians felt that Jesus was a mythical person just like the original Greek writer "Eugnostos" was a mythical person. The fact that there were so many weird gospels so early in Christian history makes me suspicious.

[Chas]

Call me old fashioned, I think they just need to kill everyone that ain't praying the right way to the right god.