Iskander

When I quote Rav kook I am assuming that there is a real man behind the origin of the breakaway Jewish sect that eventually became known by the name of Christianity.


When I quote Schiffman or Clark I am assuming that the events discussed by them describe the behaviour of real people in a real ancient world.


When I read the Gospels I treat them as real documents affecting the lives of real people and as relevant to me as documents describing the political constitution of one country or another.

aa5874

The myth fables of Adam and Even affected the lives of real people.

Romulus and Remus, the myth founders of Rome, greatly affected the people of Rome.

The Angel Moroni affected Joseph Smith's Mormons.

Mythology has affected mankind.

Robert Tulip

This thread is about the probable origins of Christianity. Much is not known, and much is in dispute. It is valuable to discuss areas of uncertainty regarding Christian origins, especially since much that is allegedly ‘known’ about the Gospels is so dubious. The possible philosophical views of the founders is an important key topic.

The specific question I was discussing here is the possible original cosmic identity of Christ as imaginary mythical figurehead. To answer the central question of Christ, ’Who do you say that I am?’, we need to define the function of Christ within religion and culture. Against this objective, we see that core religious functions include the explanation of the nature of reality, and how the world of temporal appearance fits within a single encompassing eternal truth. This problem may be summarised as the relation between heaven and earth.

A core theme in ancient wisdom literature, addressing this problem of explaining reality, is the monist philosophical claim that all is one. Monism is not just mystical magic, but provides the basic axiom at the foundation of science, the simple logical assumption of physics that we have one universe that obeys coherent and consistent laws. Monism also gave rise to the Vedic idea ‘thou art that’, suggesting that each drop of water has a unity with the ocean, and that each human person has an identity with the natural universe, as a part is always similar to the whole.

The Lord’s Prayer says ‘thy will be done on earth as in heaven’. This core teaching can be investigated as part of the original philosophical construction of the idea of Christ. The Lord’s Prayer calls for cosmic reconciliation, for the unification of the apparent way of seeming of the world with the true way of the one, healing the dichotomy between earthly appearance and heavenly reality. This dichotomy between earth and heaven is a big central problem in philosophy as well as religion, for example with the Greek philosopher Parmenides saying that the way of seeming is unreliable while unitary logic provides true understanding. Plato sets the distinction between belief (appearance) and knowledge (logic) at the core of his epistemology.

Science has done much to bridge appearance and reality, for example with Newton’s discovery of the laws of energy and motion and gravity. Newton was a devout Christian, but his discovery that the same law of gravity governs the motion of the stars and of objects on the earth had a mystical content that goes beyond the traditional supernatural understanding. Newton translated the Emerald Tablets of Thoth, because this ancient hermetic poem, expressing the mystical intuition ‘as above so below’, summarised the principle of the law of gravity.

So, the evidence for the link between the Lord’s Prayer and the Emerald Tablet of Thoth rests in the deep logical nature of religious understanding. Religion seeks to explain reality by seeing everything as connected. For Christianity, Jesus Christ is the cornerstone of this connected unity of reality, symbolising how human life unites the temporal and the eternal.

This sense of cosmic unity in Christ is central to the concept of Logos – word or reason – which the Bible defines as the identity of the incarnation. One modern philosopher, Martin Heidegger, defines logos as ‘the original connecting connectedness of being’. This sense of connection in reality rests on the axiom that all is one, illustrating how the wisdom behind Christianity has conceptual roots in older religious traditions.

dog-on

Indeed, perhaps even something like a new, or perhaps a more culturally relevant take on an old story.

Iskander

Well spotted aa5874. It is indeed the fate of man that what we do in ignorance affects our lives here and according to some also ‘there’.

outhouse

It can be, just not with credibility.

In context, we are talking about people who thought the end of the world was coming and they were preparing for the afterlife.

Earth-living
Heaven-dead

Personal opinion.

Etablet is completely out of context with the formation of Christianity, your "link" is unsubstantiated.

Opinion, and also, unsubstantiated


Laughable

He was a theist, and his theism stopped much of his work because when he got stuck on a problem, he attributed god.

It doesnt summerize gravity, its only what the man may, or may not have, tried to tie gravity in, with imagination.


You read way to far into text, that is no "cornerstone"

The only unity we have is that people looked up to a divinity they created from a dead man, whom they looked at living in heaven like all other deities from this era.

People had many different beliefs for divinity, and the above, is not a "catch all" phrase even though as you place it, it was generalized.

This philosophy alos had wide and varied beliefs

outhouse

Yes, but what I see is people trying to pervert this philosophy.


As written, there is only a man who died as and was deified as the "son of god" a obvious parallel to the living Emperor. This work, these words were so important to these people, They wouldnt beat around the bush to explain their beleifs. If they worshipped a cosmic savior they would have told you so.

Instead what they told us, was that they believed in a martyred man at passover that died for their sins, so that they could live better in death, then their pathetic miserable lives they were living under severe oppression.

This man set a example, they viewed as a personal sacrifice so sacred and unusual that he was martyred in his death, like no other before him.

They lived under a impending catastrophy, people didnt need to be smart to know that rebelous Jews would soon start a war that would lead to their demise, as Jews had always done.


I dont think you understand the misery these peasants lived under, and their need for a place of beauty they could not have in life, and looked at death as offering them a better place to be.

aa5874

Your claims are KNOWN fallacies.

They told us that Jesus was born AFTER his mother was made pregnant by a Ghost, that he was God the Creator, a quickening Spirit, who resurrected after he was a Transfiguring Sea water walker. See the Canon

Apologetics TOLD us it was a LIE that Jesus had a human father--Jesus was born of a Ghost anf the Son of a God--See Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, AND OTHERS.

Robert Tulip

There are good reasons why the cosmic origin of Christianity is concealed in ancient sources. The Jewish religion puts an anathema on worship of the sun at Deut 4:19. Orthodox Christianity largely accepts the Jewish concept of God as purely transcendental, with the addition of the incarnation. All our early source documents have been lost, so we cannot know the extent to which a natural cosmic wisdom informed the mythmaking.

If in fact the myth of Christ emerged within secret mystery religions who venerated the sun, it is readily explicable that knowledge of this origin was lost as the historized story of Jesus touched the popular nerve. There is abundant concealed reference to the cosmos in the Bible. The fact that it is so artfully concealed - for example the river of life is the Milky Way and the four evangelists as signs of the zodiac - illustrates the heavy political repression that was used to attack the worship of a cosmic saviour.

Restoring knowledge of the cosmic ontology of faith is the key to a scientific reformation of Christianity.

outhouse

It is not concealed, that is your opinion not followed by the vast majority of scholarships, and for a good reasons.