Mythology 101

[Drich]

Who says atheists have to be irrational?

[Mudhammam]

Does anyone know if an editor has compiled all of the relevant texts pre-Christ that establish the preeminence of certain ideas in the culture and that together can be easily shown to form the prototype for a mystery cult such as the Christian faith? Often times I read about the similarities but no direct passages or translations are given, and then I read them myself to find the comparisons a bit of a stretch.

[GrandizerII]

Does anyone know if an editor has compiled all of the relevant texts pre-Christ that establish the preeminence of certain ideas in the culture and that together can be easily shown to form the prototype for a mystery cult such as the Christian faith? Often times I read about the similarities but no direct passages or translations are given, and then I read them myself to find the comparisons a bit of a stretch.

Good point.

I would say sometimes too much of a stretch.

[watchamadoodle]

It coinsides with Passover.

Passover was is a remembers the worst of the ten plagues, in that if a house hold did not have the fresh blood of a lamb on the door post the oldest son would die.

Likewise if you do not have the blood of Christ/the lamb of God to cover you, you too shall die.

Thanks, I'm wondering about the year too. If I was inventing the story, I might make the year of crucifixion significant too.

For example, if I was trying to explain the destruction of the second temple, I might invent a particularly significant Passover that happened 40 years before this event. That would be analogous to the 40 years wandering in the desert before reaching the promised land.

[watchamadoodle]

Assuming the passion narrative was invented after 70 CE, what references to the crucifixion can be dated before 70 CE? Josephus suggests that the unjust stoning of James, the brother of Jesus, may explain the destruction of the temple. If Josephus had been aware of the passion narrative, and the prophesies of Jesus exactly 40 years prior, then he would have mentioned them along with the stoning of James IMO.

So do Paul's letters show knowledge of the passion narrative? Also, what dates Paul's letters before 70 CE?

[pocaracas]

I once saw someone suggesting that the story of Jesus is somewhat representative of the night sky and its constellations.
So I set out to see what the sky looked like in the year 1... here: http://neave.com/planetarium/
And what do you know?....



The big yellow thing is the sun rising in the Libra constellation
Right at the left of the sun, there's a lone bluish thing: that's Neptune (the guys at this time didn't know there was a Neptune out there...).
Then you have an upward trail of planets aiming at Virgo's... errr... skirt:
- Mercury
- Venus
- Mars (the red one)
- Jupiter


33 years later (not counting 7 leap days):

It repeats... well, minus Jupiter... Joseph?

Is it significant?
Probably.
Many mythologies may have come about by making up stories about the figures seen in the stars... that's why heaven is said to be up there.

[Jenny A]

This question is bugging me, and maybe somebody here can answer: Is there any significance to the date of the crucifixion? If I was a gnostic Jew inventing a biography of Jesus, I might set the date of the crucifixion as a fulfillment to some numerical master plan. Maybe the crucifixion is a magic number of years before the destruction of the 2nd temple? Maybe something else?

There are a couple reasons why it happened at Passover. One is historical, the other mythological.

The first is that unlike today, Passover involved a sacrifice which could only be made in the temple at Jerusalem, and so Jews converged on Jerusalem over Passover. The holiday celebrated the Hebrew escape from Egypt (whether true or fictional) and the Hebrews were currently ruled by the Romans, a symbolic point lost on neither the Romans nor the Jews. Given the crowds plus the symbolism, the day was a flashpoint for civil unrest. Consequently there were many Roman soldiers in the Jerusalem every Passover and the Roman governor was likely to be close by. There was an incident not many years before Jesus' crucifixion where a Roman soldier mooned the crowd and started a riot.

So while he'd been preaching in the hinterland, Jesus had both a political and a religious reason to be in Jerusalem over the Passover weekend. And the Romans had good reason to be touchy about people who could raise crowds, caused unrest in the temple, etc.

The second reason is mythological, or as Dritch says, because of the sacrifice of the lamb and the symbolism associated with that. However, there was no current Jewish tradition of a messiah or king who sacrificed himself. To the extent the Jews expected a messiah, they expected a warrior king (again one of the reasons for unrest in Jerusalem). Paul says that the crucifixion itself was the major stumbling block for the Jews in accepting Jesus as the messiah. But surrounding peoples did have myths about sacrificed gods. So any significance having to do with self sacrifice is a latter add-on probably by gentiles.

It's interesting that in the earliest of the gospels Jesus is crucified after the passover meal (Mark: 14-15) but in John, the latest gospel and most gentile oriented (and anti-Jewish) of the gospels, Jesus is crucified after noon on the day before the passover meal, just as if he was the sacrificial lamb (John: 18-19). I don't think that that change is coincidental. It has everything to do with symbolism.

[watchamadoodle]

I have only read the reviews on this book. The author is a scholar, but his views don't seem to be accepted yet. He claims that pre-Rabbinical Judaism was actually very diverse and there was a proto-Christian branch awaiting a figure like Jesus. So Christianity didn't evolve after Jesus; it evolved before Jesus. The author's claim makes a lot of sense to me, but apparently it isn't widely accepted yet.

In short, every idea in early Christianity is to be found in the variety of Judiasms of the first century. There were Jewish groups who built their Judaism on Daniel, on Isaiah, and the ideas of Qumran. The Pseudepigrapha was not just a funky alternative to our midrashic narratives, rather they were people’s lived version of Torah
...
There was widespread bi-theism or binitarianism within Judaism where Jews perceived God as an unknown God and a lower logos of God. The ideas of a complex godhead (a God with two or three persons) have their origins in the Judaism of Jesus’ time and before him. Many, perhaps most, Jews were expecting a Redeemer who was an anthropomorphic divine being, known as the Son of Man.

https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/03/0...sh-gospel/

[Jenny A]

I have only read the reviews on this book. The author is a scholar, but his views don't seem to be accepted yet. He claims that pre-Rabbinical Judaism was actually very diverse and there was a proto-Christian branch awaiting a figure like Jesus. So Christianity didn't evolve after Jesus; it evolved before Jesus. The author's claim makes a lot of sense to me, but apparently it isn't widely accepted yet.

In short, every idea in early Christianity is to be found in the variety of Judiasms of the first century. There were Jewish groups who built their Judaism on Daniel, on Isaiah, and the ideas of Qumran. The Pseudepigrapha was not just a funky alternative to our midrashic narratives, rather they were people’s lived version of Torah
...
There was widespread bi-theism or binitarianism within Judaism where Jews perceived God as an unknown God and a lower logos of God. The ideas of a complex godhead (a God with two or three persons) have their origins in the Judaism of Jesus’ time and before him. Many, perhaps most, Jews were expecting a Redeemer who was an anthropomorphic divine being, known as the Son of Man.

https://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/03/0...sh-gospel/

Interesting. A suffering redeemer is certainly is closer to what Christians imagined after the fact of crucifixion than I had understood the Jewish view to be.

Despite strong objections from conservative Christian apologists, the prevailing rabbinic interpretation of Isaiah 53 ascribes the “servant” to the nation of Israel who silently endured unimaginable suffering at the hands of its gentile oppressors. The speakers, in this most-debated chapter, are the stunned kings of nations who will bear witness to the messianic age and the final vindication of the Jewish people following their long and bitter exile. “Who would have believed our report?,” the astonished and contrite world leaders wonder aloud in dazed bewilderment (53:1).

* * *

Simply put, there are 15 verses in the Targum’s annotation on Isaiah 53 (52:13-15 and 53:1-12), yet with surgical precision, missionary conversionist tracts selectively and deliberately ignore almost all of them with the exception of the first verse on Isaiah 52:13. This is a well-worn technique of wielding rabbinic literature as an evangelical sledgehammer, in order to drive home the well-crafted message to unlettered Jews that ancient rabbis concealed the truth that Isaiah 53 is speaking of Jesus, and not the nation of Israel. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth.

https://outreachjudaism.org/gods-sufferi...isaiah-53/

There is consensus though that the Jews were not a unified faith by the time of Jesus, and probably never were a unified faith--sects, sects, many many sects.

To add to the confusion, what the Jews meant by "Son of Man" and "Son of God" are quite different than the modern Christian interpretation. "Son of God" is used in the OT to refer to favored representatives of god such as David, Saul, Solomon, etc. There is no implication that they are biological sons of god, only god favored men. So when Jesus said he was the "Son of God" those listening to him understood that differently than Christians reading gospels today.

The "Son of Man" on the other hand, meant the messiah to the Jews.

You can see how interpretations could change rapidly in the hands of Gentiles who were unfamiliar with the Jew scriptures.

[goodwithoutgod]

Does anyone know if an editor has compiled all of the relevant texts pre-Christ that establish the preeminence of certain ideas in the culture and that together can be easily shown to form the prototype for a mystery cult such as the Christian faith? Often times I read about the similarities but no direct passages or translations are given, and then I read them myself to find the comparisons a bit of a stretch.

As I mentioned briefly, there is a pattern, a flow of direct, similar pieces that are used when hero gods are constructed, and there are reasons for this based on the cultural expectations at the time of what makes a hero god..From Horus to Jesus, you can line them up and check the boxes for similarity. A popular posit, and one I used to make until I came across the story of Romulus, was Mithra.....and there are some similarities, but there are a lot of pieces of misinformation out there about Mithraism and its similarities to the jesus story. Mithra was a prevalent religion at the time, and there has been conjecture that if Xtianity hadnt been embraced and enforced by Emperor Constantine as the only authorized religion, that Mithra may have become the dominant religion.

The similarities with Romulus stops the clock for me....800 years pre-jesus....it seems too much of a coincidence, unless of course jesus was a construct for political purposes and they used the execution of a man named jesus who was one of many self proclaimed prophets/son of gods who was convenient to use as a basis for the myth...remember the "odd period of silence" in which there is nothing about jesus, then suddenly, years later, a scramble is done to put together urban myth stories about this magical demi god who upon his death, the earth shook, the sky went dark, and corpses burst out of the ground and went walking around town...odd no one at the time thought any of that was noteworthy...

Matthew 27:45 Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour.

Mark 15:33 And when the sixth hour was come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour.

Luke 23:44-48 And it was about the sixth hour, and there was a darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour.

Unfortunately, there is not one shred of evidence that this happened...zero, all of the royal scribes, historians, philosophers, and literate people who wrote down and recorded EVERYTHING of any significance, failed to note the whole earth going dark mid-day for three hours...an eclipse lasts about 7.5 min max, so it wasn’t that...nothing, .....zero....not one word written down at the time....not even anywhere in the world for this "global event"... Never happened.

Matthew 27:51-53
King James Version (KJV)
51 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent;

52 And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,

53 And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

Again, as I said previously, one would posit a zombie invasion would gather some attention....nope, nothing to see here, time to go milk the goats..

Why there are no records of Jesus Christ

It is not possible to find in any legitimate religious or historical writings compiled between the beginning of the first century and well into the fourth century any reference to Jesus Christ and the spectacular events that the Church says accompanied his life.

This confirmation comes from Frederic Farrar (1831-1903) of Trinity College, Cambridge:
"It is amazing that history has not embalmed for us even one certain or definite saying or circumstance in the life of the Saviour of mankind ... there is no statement in all history that says anyone saw Jesus or talked with him. Nothing in history is more astonishing than the silence of contemporary writers about events relayed in the four Gospels."
(The Life of Christ, Frederic W. Farrar, Cassell, London, 1874)

This situation arises from a conflict between history and New Testament narratives. Dr Tischendorf made this comment:
"We must frankly admit that we have no source of information with respect to the life of Jesus Christ other than ecclesiastic writings assembled during the fourth century."
(Codex Sinaiticus, Dr Constantin von Tischendorf, British Library, London)

There is an explanation for those hundreds of years of silence:
the construct of Christianity did not begin until after the first quarter of the fourth century, and that is why Pope Leo X (d. 1521) called Christ a "fable"