Malachi151

I hear a lot about how the Jesus Myth sounds so much like other myths of the time, but I haven't been able to find any of these other texts.

What are some other religious / mythical / historical texts that were written between 100 BCE and 200 CE?

Iasion

Greetings,

Here is a general list of writings from that period :

Cicero, Catullus, Sallust, Horace, Vitruvius, Caesar, Nepos, Virgil, Ovid, Lucretius, Livy, M. Rufus, PlinyE, Dio Chrysostom, Martial, Lucan, Petronius, Philo, Josephus, Seneca, Arrian, Josephus, Apollodorus, PlinyY, Plutarch, Tacitus, Ptolemy, Sextus Empiricus, Apuleis, Suetonius, Appian, Pausanius, Albinus, The Chaldean Oracles, The Sepher Yetzirah, Pistis Sophia, the Gnostic works, The Pirke Aboth, The Hermetica, Nag Hammadi, Dead Sea Scrolls, Epictetus, M. Aurelius.


Some of these works discuss earlier myths which bear some (variously arguable) resemblance to Jesus :

Osiris, Mithras, Attis, Dionysus, Hercules etc.


None of these figures were considered to have lived at that time, but they were known myths contemporary with the rise of Christianity and were compared to the Christian legends by sceptics (e.g. Celsus, Justin.)


Iasion

Malachi151

Thank you

Have any links to specific texts?

Iasion

Here is a useful page with links to many authors online:
http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/authors.html

Fordham has many works available:
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/asbookfull.html


Philo can be found here:
http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/philo.html

Apollodorus and others are on Perseus:
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/apollod.summ.html

The Nag Hammadi books are here :
http://www.webcom.com/gnosis/naghamm/nhl.html

A collection of (mostly recent) esoteric works :
http://www.hermetics.org/library.html


Iasion

Malachi151

Holly shit ball batman!

I particularly like this text, and all of the other texts "by" Hermes:

http://www.hermetic.com/texts/hermetica/hermes13.html

Man, every new thing I learn about this subject verifies the idea of a mythical Jesus more and more:

Gamera

Since the Corpus Hermeticum is post-Christian, taking shape in the second century CE, it's less likely Jesus owed his existence to these mss and more likely that they owed their existence to him.

The early dating of the Corpus has been abandoned by most scholars as pure nostalgia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetica#Dating

Malachi151

That is certianly true, but it does show the variety of ways in which the story was interpreted and used at the time.

Yes, I'd like to find some writings from about 100 BCE. Metamorphasis by Ovid is pretty interesting. Many of the ancient people believed in a gobal flood because of the fact that they found so many sea fossils inland and on the mountian tops.

andrewcriddle

As a nit-picking comment on a good list, the date of the Sepher Yetzirah is uncertain but may be later than the rest of the list.

Say 500 CE or maybe even later.

Andrew Criddle

darstec

The fallacy in Gamera's statement is that the fable of Joshua could well have been fabricated contemporaneously with Corpus Hermeticum.

There is no evidence of a first century Joshua nor a first century Paul. I believe it to be a case of one storyteller feeding off another. The petre dish of the second century had a nourishing broth.

An interesting tidbit which I would like to keep track of is an announcement this past summer that a technique has been developed to separate and read the charred remains of the documents found at Herculaneum and Pompeii. Most interesting is that as of 79 AD when Vesuvius preserved everything, there is nothing restored yet that mentions Jesus or Paul. Exactly how popular could they have been if the resort areas with the wealthiest and most literate of Roman citizendry failed to mention them? Certainly 30 to 40 years was enough time to have heard of Paul, and 50 years to have heard of Jesus? Pliny the elder was a voriferous writer. Another deafening silence. [But still possibly able to be overturned as other documents are restored.]

At least any mention of them or the ideas of Christianity would have been untainted by what is now considered Orthodox Christianity.

steph s.

darstec, about this interesting tidbit: the villa of the papyri at herculaneum you mention is exciting, but we can't really conclude anything from it yet. from what i've read the majority of the scrolls that have been found are greek works by epicurean philosophers, mainly philodemus, leading us to believe it's just a sub-section of a bigger library. there are further areas that archaeologists haven't been able to excavate yet. you'd expect to find a lot more latin in a library owned by julius caesar's father-in-law. presumably the rest of the library would be more likely to contain references to christianity, if there are any. if we had the entire library excavated and all its texts pieced together, translated and publicly available, our knowledge of early christianity, and the whole ancient world, might be very different.

the imaging technology is also being used for the oxhyrynchus papyri, which was dug up in the late 19th century and after 60+ published volumes there's still a hoard of the stuff sitting in boxes at oxford university that hasn't been translated. the oxford site for both projects is here: http://www.papyrology.ox.ac.uk.

on a similar-ish note, there are still countless manuscripts of works by church fathers and other authors that haven't been translated into english, which might be interesting if anyone ever gets round to it. take the online catalogue of the vatican secret archives, for example.. http://asv.vatican.va/en/stud/download/V_1_4.htm interestingly, the BYU team that worked at herculaneum and oxhyrynchus have also visited the vatican. the only problem is the few online news reports about these things are out of date.. http://farms.byu.edu/display.php?table=insights&id=61

we've still got a lot to learn about early christianity.