ichabod crane

This I don't accept. There were numerous groups separate from the Catholic church that saw themselves just as much as followers of Christ, and which have a legitimate claim to that title. Marcion and the Gnostics are a good case in point. Why should we accept the Catholic Church's claim that Marcion wasn't a Christian but they were? The Catholic Church only developed very gradually from the 2nd century on as a certain body of Christians organised themselves into one institution and began to exclude other bodies of believers.

As for the issue of the Jesus Myth, I'm not as sceptical as you about the subject, although I certainly am open to be persuaded and I don't accept the straightforward historicity of the gospels (I think there is a historical core, but also lots of errors).

Biff the unclean

I'm well aware of these alternate Christianities. What makes them different from Roman Catholicism is that they "borrowed" the myths from other Pagan religions than the ones which appealed to Constantine. Constantine the Great...who was a Mithrain and the general of Mithrain troops. Whose capitial city was the hub of Dionysus worship.
Had these other types of Christianity won out I'd be talking about Egyptian/Greek Gnostic Pagan gods making up Jesus and not the Gods who won the contest.
The Marcions and the Gnostics with their alternate Jesus's are evidence that the story is a construct.

CX

This is irredeemably incorrect and likely the result of reading Freke & Gandy or some other pseudo-scholar. Xianity bears none of the marks of a mystery religion. Mystery religions were called mystery religions because their rites, rituals, hierarchy etc. were kept secret and divulged to a relatively select few. it is certainly arugable the Xian Gnosticism was a mystery religion, but certainly the proto-orthodox was not. There is none of the concept of spiritual "levels" in Xianity. Most mystery religions do not (and did not) have liturgical texts (for example there are no known texts related to the Roman Cult of Mithras). Adherents of Xianity do not and did not attain levels of spiritual awareness in the same sense as the mystery religions. Ultimately Xianity is an Hellenistic adaptation of Jewish religious ideas. Obviously the Hellenism creates a pagan influence and we should expect to see similar themes, but the notion that Xianity was a mystery religion or that it was created in toto from a patchwork of pagan sources is simply not supported by the evidence we have. Xianity coopted judaism and mixed it with Hellenistic themes. It was not directly influenced by any particular pagan belief. It certainly had nothing whatever to do with Mithraism as is often, and might I add tiresomely, claimed. Is Xianity unique as it's adherents claim? Mostly no. There are unique elements and it is a creative synthesis of disparate ideas, but as with all human religion it addresses the same issues and concerns and is informed by the culture in which it arose. On the other hand is Xianity a cut & paste copy of any other religion or religions? No. There is no evidence to support that and every source I've seen on the matter (Kersey Graves, various internet sites, books linking Mysteries and Xianity etc.) are wrong or misinformed or completely invented and sometimes all three.

Evoken

Of course they didn't because there was no messiah before Jesus after the exile.

Magi was also used to refer to a magician or occultist often astrologer and in a more general sense not just to the Magi of Zoroatrianism. So whatever the case, the Magi who visited Jesus were astrologers be it from Zoroatrianism or some other sects.

You know what I meant.

I have and I only linked to the site for further reading.

Yes I know about Justin Martyr's reply but it has been taken out of context in order to try and justify the charge of Christianity borrowing from the mysteries.

Sorry but they are not the same stories.

This is a topic that is rather broad and aims at another direction. But the most simple answer is that they held the councils because heresy abounded so when they were starting to organize the church they had to settle everything.

Negative, the Jews start as the good guys but later turn into the bad guys because they are disillusioned with Jesus since he didn't fulfill their idea of the messiah.

What stories are you talking about? What plot did Christian borrow from the mysteries?

dado

there were numerous messiahs both before and after the dates in question. there were so many messiahs jokes about them became part of canonical jewish humor.

that's a very interesting way to put it. messiahship was, at least in that region, a Jewish concept: if jesus didn't fulfill the jewish definition he didn't fulfill *any* definition.

Evoken

Actually I have never read Freke & Gandy's books or any of the pseudo-scholar books, well I have read Acharya S and think her book is heavily misinformed and I have read Elaine Pagels, many articles and debates from both sides. What I mean when I say that Christianity is a mystery religion or more clearly a Jewish adaptation of the Greek mysteries is not that it is a mystery religion per se but that it follows the same format of the mystery religions:

-Virgin Birth by the sexual intercourse of a God and a mortal woman.
-Initiation thru baptism, Jesus didn't do any miracles before he has baptized by John.
-Jesus spoke in parables and revealed them only to his disciples (outer and inner mysteries)
-Jesus didn't write a body of scripture and neither did his disciples, everything was passed down via oral tradition. But as the eye witnesses were dying they sought to preserve the teachings and wrote them down.
-Death and resurrection of Jesus.
-Heaven is attained during this life and not the after life.

I know I am leaving some other aspects out but this in my mind makes Christianity a mystery religion in the sense I pointed out above. There are other aspects of it that are more Jewish like the prohibition of idols, no reverence to other pagan gods, a body of scripture which was on what Christianity is based on and later continued to keep in order to preserve its teachings and a real messiah unlike the other mysteries, etc. Also unlike the mysteries and Judaism, Christianity was definitive in the sense of redeeming converts.

Also I am more interested in the period before Christianity was made the official religion. What came after that was no longer Christianity but a slimed down version mainly due to the suppression of "heresies" and the selection of an official canon.

In any case, I am still searching for answers and looking at the different possibilities so what I am saying here is not 100% accurate, I don't claim to have a definite answer, it is just what I have learned so far.

I agree, I think that Christianity as it was before it became the official religion was composed of Gnostic Christianity (i.e. the inner mysteries reveled only to a selected few) and Christianity which was a more literal representation of the mysteries. There are many concepts in Christianity that can't be explained clearly by just using Christianity. Concepts like the trinity, the virgin birth, original sin, the resurrection of the dead, etc. gain a new and more reasonable perspective when seen on the light of Gnostic Christianity. This is not to say that Christianity is wrong, it is just that it is incomplete without its Gnostic aspect.

Well, take Jesus for example and Paul. In the case of Jesus he started doing miracles after his baptism and with Paul he was taken to "the third heaven" and was "revealed things". The same could be say of Lazarus. So there was a way to gain this spiritual awareness.

Also if you notice, the people who were initiated into the mysteries often changed their names like it happened with Peter, Paul, etc.

True, what happened was a cultural development, Christianity carries the mark of the culture on which it arose.

Biff the unclean

Why is this simple fact not obvious to Xians?

GakuseiDon

I haven't heard that one before, and I've read the Bacchae. Where are they found?

Evoken

All the events that lead to Jesus arrest and crucifixion were conrary to procedure, it was a scheme planned by a small group of the Jews.

Sorry but I do not find evidence that affirms that the Magi (or Magians as they are actually refered to in the Gatas) remained the same since the begining of Zoroatrianism. At first they were Magians and were exclusively reserved for Zoroatrianism but as time passed the term gained another use and was often applied to Magicans or translated from the greek word magio(magus/mago/magican or magi) the word was used when refering to occultists, astrologers, etc.

True.

Christians were facing a lot of persecution back then and those parallels that Justin made do not denote borrowing but merely pointing out the injustice that it was to persecute Christians when they held a belief based in the same format as their persecutors (i.e. mystery religion).

I do not agree with the "lies of satan" bit, I think it is meaningless and irresponsible. Also I do not claim or have said anything of Christians borrowing from pagan religions, that is your case not mine.

There were Christian beliefs as a whole, the problem came with the split between heretic and orthodox.

Of course, the anti-semitism in the Gospels is probably the result of the persecutions the Christians were enduring during the time they were written. It is possible that this affected the writters in some manner.

Your claims are unsupported due to lack of evidence. If you are so sure that Christianity borowed these things (and in fact the very things it opposed) then please present evidence or a source of information.

As for Saul's conversion I had never heard of Euripides Bacchael, but I found an online version of the play here:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/~johnstoi/euripides/euripides.htm

It is really long and I will most likely read it, but since you are confident that it was taken from there I would like if you please point me out where it is or just copy/paste it here.

No, it is not.

Toto

Mithras discussion has been split out here