andrewcriddle

I responded in one of those threads something like this

IF Ananus executed or attempted to execute the brother of another senior priest then this would certainly imply very bitter hostilities between factions of the senior priests.

However as the narrative stands the opponents of the Sadducee priest Ananus, who manage to have him sacked, seem pretty clearly to be Pharisees, not other Sadducee priests.

This would agree with the general narrative development of Antiquities here, with the gradual intensification of conflict among Jewish groups. In the previous chapter we have had the beginning of bitter conflict between the senior priests and other prominent Jews (of which on the traditional understanding the James incident would be a continuation), it is only after the James incident that Josephus refers to the beginning of bitter conflicts among the senior priests with conflict between Jesus son of Damneus Jesus son of Gamaliel and the elder Ananias.

Whoever the James sentenced by Ananus was, it is unlikely he was a member of the senior priestly families.

Andrew Criddle

Celsus

What better way to spend Sunday afternoon than talking about Jesus (peripherally)? If I've repeated myself too much here, my apologies, but the same assumptions kept cropping up, and sometimes a new angle appeared from the way they surfaced, so I addressed the points again.
Sure. The more the merrier. Of course the time I have to commit to three different voices may mean longer waits for responses, since I don't believe in doing half-hearted replies.
I am interested in the details, because the details tell us whether this is or is not the right direction to be looking. It's quite clear that Judaism has Semitic/Mesopotamian roots shared with Phoenicia, Ugarit, Akkad, Sumer, Babylon, etc. Later Jewish thought of course drew upon some Hellenistic ideas (Philo, as we repeat each time), but the Jewishness of say, the Talmud and Mishna remain incontrovertable. That is to say, when we have established borrowing, that leaves the rest unchecked. That's why Vermes's concession that John is Hellenistic is a good example (I will question this later). What isn't so clear is, for example, Mark--Vork's great stuff on Mark, if correct, is emphasising the Jewishness of Mark (even if written in Greek), because chiastic structures like that are not a form practiced in Latin and Hellenistic work. So the question is at what level do we assign degrees of influence? I'm by no means well-read on NT scholarship, but I believe that certain features of the Gospels are inescapably Jewish. As for Paul's doctrine, yes, it is clear that there is Hellenistic influence, but that does not extend to the level of direct borrowing from the Hellenistic myths that a clear parallel would demonstrate. Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults takes great pains to illustrate how different the mystery cult organisation and mindset were from that of the early Christian sects. I think this is overlooked in Doherty's project--we have to focus on both the influences and its uniqueness in order to understand it on its own terms. What are we to make of eli eli lema sabachthani, for example?

At the same time, it is clear that Hellenistic Jews had already taken on Greek ideas (I personally question the necessity of positing Persian influence on Jewish thought), and this confuses the idea further: To what extent are signs of Hellenism actually just Jewish Hellenism of an earlier period? This might not sound like an important question, but if we do return to the Jewish origin, then the mythical Christ becomes a less likely possibility.
Plutarch's interpretation of Isis and Osiris is our first attestation of such a reading of the Isis and Osiris myth. Its Hellenistic reading is also obvious, paralleling the much older Demeter structure of a journey to the netherworld. According to Penglase, it directly borrows from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter in order to emplot the story. This is important, because if you are merely speaking of loose influences, then there is nothing radical about it: It is already well-known that Christianity took on Platonic ideas right from the beginning (if we consider John at the beginning).

But when one looks at Paul's writing, how do we know that he was not simply emplotting the Jewish story along Hellenistic motifs? The other possibility I raised is that the writers simply grabbed Greek words for sacred concepts, thus blurring the issue further: Manetho simply allows his Egyptian gods to be named according to the Greek ones, even as he is rebutting Herodotus (as per several scholarly suggestions that that was the purpose of writing Aigyptiaka). Transcribing the names would have settled his problem much more effectively. What about John's logos and the way the language mimics Genesis 1:1? Can we be so sure that John originally intended this as a reinterpretation, or did he believe he was performing a so-called literal translation the same way as Manetho's? The same applies to analysis of Pauline jargon. This undermines Doherty's mythic Christ, the same way the poststructuralist readings undermined Lévi-Strauss' mythemes.

At the risk of sounding even more pomo, we have not yet reached Pearcean structuralism, which, unlike the Saussurean form, is triadic: not only is there the sign and object, but there is sign, object, and 'interpretant'. The interpretant (writer, reader, actor, etc.) can choose three levels of meaning: iconic (formal relation, "pot" = real existing pot), indexical (lots of pots = evidence of the room being an apothecary or storehouse), and symbolic (a picture of a pot being the sign of a tavern or inn). At this level, interpreting logos to mean any one thing alone fails absolutely--while Doherty can marshall all the evidence to show Greek writers using logos as "word" or "speech" or "knowledge", he can't demonstrate this use by the key interpretants; (for example) that John's logos was the equivalent of the hieros logos of the mysteries. Secondly, he wants to interpret the key terms using the logic one employs at an iconic level, when in fact the level of interpretation we must reach for is at the symbolic level, and these are deeply theory-laden. This is a fundamental problem for structuralism, and a key reason for its failure in anthropology and archaeology.

Those who dislike postmodern readings will eventually run into these same problems over and over again: it is unavoidable in the practice of literary criticism (which is what this argument rests on--note: Pearce is not a poststructuralist like Derrida or Lyotard). I believe that syncretism cuts many ways, and I also believe there is a very high degree of underdetermination when trying to address the origins of the Christian religion. For a structuralist theory to be convincing, it must be able to slot more and more things into its "superstructure" (to use Lévi-Strauss' term). Doherty's deep structure points to a mythic Christ, and this is plausible, but the question is the connection between signifier and signified that creates his deep structure.

In this case, I think Doherty has made a heroic attempt, but he is not systematic enough, and nor do I feel is Jacob's appeal above to understand the borrowing more loosely--this lack of rigour on our part does us no favours--it is the kind of structuralism that leads to "unverifiable flights of fancy" as Ian Hodder puts it. We must be very rigorous in how we define transmission, what boundary conditions are necessary, and how much influence is sufficient to accept it as a case. The same care must be applied to how words "mean": Lévi-Strauss' attempt to understand meaning in terms of binary oppositions is nowhere to be found in Doherty's readings, so I suspect he is unaware of the Saussurean problems that Lévi-Strauss was attempting to address; and leads us back to the basic signifier-signified problem.

Secondly, when the ancients conflated religious motifs, they were still conscious that there was an "otherness" about the religions they were describing. Plutarch did not think his thoroughly Hellenised Isis was Hellenistic at all, but still the Egyptian version. Likewise, it is difficult to see to what extent Paul viewed his Hellenistic Christianity as distinct from the Jewish one, if that is indeed what he was propagating. I suppose that still means I'm begging the question that Paul's original was Jewish, but it seems very clear to me that his clash with James demonstrate this as such. That means focusing on Paul, whose letters give us a prima facie indication that the original Christianity did not originate with him, does not inform us sufficiently about Jesus. This leads us then to the Gospels.
If I may defend Carrier here, I believe the point is that the principle of non-contradiction is not sufficient grounds for the hypothesis holding its own. Eisenman's work (excluding the 14C problems) are also "plausible" or "the correct interpretation" or "fits very well" with many things, but it is still utter bilge. I'm not saying that's the case with Doherty, but as I've said many times, suggesting a fit and necessitating a fit are two very different things.
You need to read Umberto Eco.
So after what I said above, the fact that Doherty takes on structuralist assumptions, yet does not even employ structuralist answers to Saussurean problems (that of binary opposition), nor even consider Pearcean structuralism or poststructuralist critiques, how am I to take this assertion seriously? It is not intractable, but the problems are much bigger than Doherty has dealt with yet. He can retreat, or he can engage, but first he needs to learn more about Lévi-Strauss before quoting him to me.
The problems start with his first two words: "Ideal types". "Ideal types" are scholarly constructs, not actually existing mythical figures. We have already seen how sloppy the likes of Freke and Gandy are with their "ideal type" (i.e., conflation of several gods). The problem is that approaching the problem from essentialist notions is a methodological misstep. With a little parsimony here, we can draw similarities and differences just as easily without this notion of "ideal type" to get in the way. No one speaks of an "ideal type" Flood story, yet we can compare them quite easily. Price's assumptions here echo Doherty's and Lévi-Strauss' ideas of some universal underlying feature or superstructure. I am not against comparative religion as a project--it has its uses, for example in comparing ethical systems and their effectiveness, etc. But in trying to determine the origins of the religion, one must first attempt to understand those religions according to what it might have meant to its adherents. "Ideal types" just serve to obstruct that study. The same problem holds for contrastivist studies--the emphasis on difference means one is not understanding those principles on their own terms.

The second problem, and this is true of structuralism, poststructuralism, and Price's method above is that the focus on such phenomena restricts room for human agency and interpretation. We see it best in what you've added below:
Why restrict evolution according to artificially constructed structure? It is clear that, for example, Mormonism developed without significant genre transgressions: it just had a slightly different story attached but creates a religion organisationally similar to mainstream Christianity. On the other hand, Scientology develops, well, from a science fiction novel. There are many, many ways that religions can arise, and while it is likely that an individual proponent of the religion cannot escape the cultural milieu s/he is born into, there is no requirement that s/he hold all its cultural assumptions, nor that s/he borrowed from any specific religions already extant. The point is that it goes back to being rigorous in the demonstration of influence, as I've been calling for all along.

Now for the Doherty:
What if the features are totally different, as I have demonstrated? I'm willing to allow some reductionism in the motif in order to demonstrate a parallel (though of course the best parallels do not require any such reductionism), but one must be very careful not to obscure or distort the original myth in an effort to demonstrate the similarities. This was exactly what was done initially with Inanna. I think I've demonstrated that one cannot account for a (being generous) 700 year-gap between the myths (more accurately, the gap is at least 1600 years--I think there is some Old Babylonian attestation). Why would one reading of a myth 700 years earlier have any bearing on a reading of a myth 700 years later? As I have said, this is grossly ahistorical. I don't need to repeat that the cultural worldview that developed in this period is vastly different (cf. Jaspers' Axial Age, for instance).
While I don't disagree entirely with this, see what I said above about the problems of denying human agency. Secondly, if you paint your tree with broad enough strokes, then yes, most mythic concepts will find themselves fit within this univeral tree. The problem is that the more general you make a statement, the less it can tell us (this is not to invoke Popper).
See anything I said about Lévi-Strauss. If he wants to demonstrate an interrelation between Egyptian, Sumerian, and Greek myth, he is more than welcome to attempt such a feat. I believe he forgets that the Hellenistic milieu created by Alexander's conquest (and later under Pax Romana) created a sort of "globalisation" that did not exist prior to it. Even during this period, we do see mixing up of beliefs, stereotyping, misunderstanding, and all sorts of other problems. Before the 8th century, Egypt and Greece may as well have been on opposite sides of the world (Mycenaean "Sea Peoples" are another matter, but they were raiders, and those who stayed went native, hardly a good source of transmission). If Homer is anything to go by, the Greek myths were well-developed independently (i.e., before substantial contact) of Egyptian myths, while the larger Mesopotamian milieu is fairly complicated. One can't blithely assume that conditions of the Mediterranean in the 1st or 2nd centuries were similar to those periods before, as is required for an "easy" transmission of Sumerian myth. Despite direct linkages and frequent incursions into the Levant, there is little evidence that Egyptian religion ever made an impact on Semitic beliefs, or vice versa. The same can be said about the Hittites. So yes, we can treat Hittite and Egyptian myth as "independent" of each other, and influence on/by Semitic religions as minimal (with the Hittites showing some relation at a very general level).
Um, I hope that one recognised the most Hellenistic Jews were not to be found in Galilee, but in Alexandria and other parts of the Mediterranean. As I said above, Hellenistic Jewish thought may have some bearing on the first Christians, but how one separates this is a difficult question. I'm not saying that it existed in isolation, this reductio Doherty attributes to me (and I believe Vermes as well) is a straw man. I'm saying that, like all cultures, the differentiation through "otherness" is not examined, and distinctive, almost xenophobic, Jewish thought of that period features this very strongly. That lessens the probability of openness to foreign ideas.
No, I don't agree that it is rooted in an astronomical or agricultural cycle. The astronomical stuff by Ulansey (which Carrier bizarrely commends) is not taken seriously by mainstream Mithras scholars, and I know of no one who seriously ascribes an astronomical context to the Inanna myth. Incidentally, a Pearcean analysis of Ulansey will quickly demonstrate why he's a load of crock. I believe that the link between ritual and myth has to be demonstrated, not assumed. And yes, 3,000 years is a really long time.
The point is not to invoke examples one isn't familiar with. Carrier has now conceded the point, so I wonder what Doherty has to say now. Despite his defense of ahistoric interpretation that he wishes to employ, absent an understanding of the historic context of the ANE in general, I hope that explaining the structuralist readings of religion expose the ontological assumptions inherent within (of course Doherty has declared some of them up front). I picked on the Inanna case because it was clear-cut, and I believed I wouldn't need to spend too much time on this thread. But thoroughness and attention to detail is a virtue, and I hope I have demonstrated at least that in this response.

And yes, 3,000 years is still a really long time.

Joel

Vorkosigan

I think this underdetermination is built into the issue because of two fundamental problems. The first is the lack of evidence. By the time we see Christianity in Paul's letters it is already a full blown movement. It's entire cultic history is lost.

The second problem is that underdetermination is inevitable because the connection between the signifier and signified took place in a single mind, and nowhere has that mind preserved its insight for us to comprehend. The early Christians were probably a lot like the Taiping Tianguo, a revolutionary religious movement as a result of living in uncertain conditions on a colonialized margin. One of the hoi polloi had a vision probably in much the same way that Hong Xiu-quan would have one, a vision that took the new/old religion, Judaism, which he had picked up as a God-Fearer or a Jew, and combined it with Hellenistic ideas and cultic concepts. The movement grew as a movement of ecstatics meeting in house churches, and it grew orally and organically, with widely varying relations between Hellenism and Judaism from congregation to congregation. By the time we see it in Paul, where the tentmaker from Tarsus is evolving his plan to hijack it and a centralized organization is starting to spring up, it is too late to recover those roots.

Markan invention, definitely, rich in irony. As Brown points out, the mistake Mark has the locals make would have been impossible for them to make. No Aramaic speaker would ever have confused Eli for Elijah.

I had a spat with Doherty on the JM list last year. Doherty's basic problem is that he wants to pull Jesus out of the framework, replace him with a mythical one, and retain everything else -- Q, etc. It's not going to work.

Vorkosigan

Ted Hoffman

Celsus,
Thanks for your detailed post - I will read it again later and see if I can muster an adequate response. I have alerted Price and hopefully, we will get his input on the issues involved too.

I would appreciate your explanation as to why ritual and myth, things which I understand as going hand in hand, should be treated as not connected.

When you write "chiastic structures like that are not a form practiced in Latin and Hellenistic work", which scholarly works are you referring to? When was it established that chiastic usage emphasizes the Jewishness of a writer?

I see you as shifting your tools of discourse mid-stream. Your earlier approach was from a standpoint of someone very well versed with Sumerian, Egyptian and other ANE myths, someone who saw direct and clear pathways between various myths and their precedents within that same arena, someone whose contact with such sister myths made him somewhat xenophobic to other myths and theological motifs claiming some heritage from that same arena.

Someone who was outraged that such distant cousins could claim ancestry or association without any clear genetic pathways from that arena. So what you did is, you demanded the same, or similar degree of featuristic density for these distant cousins as the sisters in your arena. You leaned heavily on the details and emphasized the importance of that. I think this is where thinking out of the box is required. But my time is limited. :banghead:

Now, your transvaluation is more postmodernist and employs lessons learnt by the casualties of the wars between structuralists, deconstructionists etc, and warns us that we should be careful lest we repeat the same mistakes. Your standards of judgement are now somewhat different and the parameters and criteria have shifted. I am glad you cite Girad, though I think Mark Goodacre (Fatigue in the Synoptics) would be more glad to cite him and relate him to what we are discussing.

You cite Frazer and Ulansey as people who have been abandoned by "mainstream" scholarship.

Celsus, wrt Ulansey, Frazer etc would you agree that approaches, foundational issues etc have a way of fluctuating depending on the interests of current scholarship? I remember we discussed at Ebla on these gods and seasonal cycles etc...

Lets see what Price has to say...

Vork
Hey, have some faith .

gurugeorge

Wow, what a highbrow discussion! If I may add my tuppence ha'pennyworth here, I think Celsus is right (so far as my meager understanding can follow) about the immense difficulty of finding commonalities just by looking at extant texts and interpreting them. But I think looking at texts and archaeology isn't actually enough; you really have to approach this whole area with an eye to anthropology, even cognitive science, even neurology, viz:-

Any investigation of these matters will take for granted some background of knowledge. I take it most people here would accept, as a common denominator, the findings of ordinary Western science. If we do so, I think we can take seriously the idea that commonalities, or common threads, analogies, etc., arise not only out of peoples' past intellectual interpretations of the world around them, and the passing down of those interpretations, but also out of deeper-level responses that the mind and brain have (across time) to the world under certain regimens of practice.

IOW, all over the world, there are people who do certain practices (austerities, rituals, meditations, etc.), and these practices (identifiable by physical means, and not very open to symbolic interpration - e.g., lots of these sorts of people from different cultures all over the world can be found being still for very long periods of time) actually alter the practitioners at the level of the brain (as is being found more and more by researchers who use brain scanning devices to see what's going on in meditators' brains, for example).

I suggest that this is where a good deal of the commonalities lie. Specifically, there seem to be 3 categories of practices: 1) practices which lead to a "pure consciousness experience" (PCE), an experience of consciousness without content, 2) practices which lead to "astral" visions - rather like a kind of lucid dreaming while awake, in which the practitioner really seems to him or herself, for all the world, to be interacting with discarnate intelligences, and 3) practices which lead to non-dual states, in which the distinction between the practitioner and the world breaks down.

This, I suggest, would be a more fruitful place to find commonalities. With this approach, it's easy to see that, for example, Freke and Gandy take 3) to be what Christianity was originally all about, but they're not so keen on 1) or 2), but in reality 2) is just as likely. We can see that there's some degree of 1) in, for example pseudo-Dionysus (the "Dazzling Dark") and also 2) (angelic heirarchies) but not so much 3). We can see that the Gospel of Thomas talks a lot about 3) and maybe 1), but not much about 2), whereas a lot of other Gnostic stuff lays heavy emphasis on 2). It becomes plausible that the Mysteries were something to do with 3) (perhaps a bit like contemporary "enlightenment training seminars" like est, or like some of the old stories of Chinese Zen masters, where they give a discourse to a large crowd and we hear that "the whole assembly was enlightened"). We can make sense of the fact that the only thing we know of the pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides' teacher was that "he taught him stillness". We can see a common thread running from Pythagoras, the pre-Socratics, even Socrates (who reportedly stood still for long periods communing with his "daemon") and Plato (who leaned heavily on Pythagorean and Orphic myths), right through to neo-Platonism and Christianity. We can see the plausibility of a connection between Merkabah mysticism and early Christianity and Gnosticism. We can see a connection between Christianity, Gnosticism and Egyptian thought via the thread running from Pythagoras through to the neo-Platonists.

Like that.

But I'd go even further - to some extent, if we really want to understand what was going on, we have to participate to some degree in similar practices, rather like some anthropologists do when they investigate cultures. We have to try out some of these practices, to try to get a feel for what these people were talking about "from the inside". Then, for instance, we can understand more easily how someone can be perfectly rational in discourse, yet describe experiences of meeting angels or gods with a straight face. Were they just making it up, based on vague philosophical notions and hidden intellectual agendas, or political maneouverings? Perhaps, but perhaps as a result of things they did, they just happened to have peculiar experiences of contact with other entities that felt very, very real to them.

To put this yet another way, just as we have to really try and get clear on the symbolism of early religions just as they were in themselves, we have to get clear on the practice component: only then will we know how the two factors, practice and theory, interacted. Only then will we really be able to draw accurate distinctions.

I'm aware that this kind of approach isn't going to be to the liking of many of the good folks here, who are genuinely much more interested in the philology, semiotics, philosophy, etc., of these matters. But unfortunately, in lieu of more texts (hey, roll on those recent Egyptian finds, eh?), I believe it's really only by taking this approach combined with the sort of acute textual and archaeological analysis demonstrated so splendidly on this board, that we're going to get anywhere close to getting the foggiest idea of what all that woo-woo stuff was all about

(And, with this approach, 3,000 years isn't a very long time - in fact, we are right there with those early Christians, with Bronze Age cultures, etc., right back to the Neolithic and beyond. They are as close to us as we are close to each other.)

Celsus

Well very simply, the rituals (i.e., the sacred rites) of any religion develop without a necessary connection with the myth. For instance, Jesus' ordeal down the Via Dolorossa might be ripe for a ritual reenactment, but in fact this is only practiced among Catholics, and usually in the developing world (Philippines, Latin America). Protestants, mainline Catholicism, the Orthodox, etc. all do not practice this associated ritual. Or another example: Osiris' descent to the netherworld may seem ripe for a fertility ritual, but in fact the ritual is associated with Pharaonic succession. Thus the Frazerian "seasonal" rituals may seem like they are the right time and place, etc. but the association with e.g., Inanna, Baal, Attis, Osiris, etc. must be demonstrated, not assumed.

I could go off on a tangent about functionalism in myth, but suffice to say many similarities here also break down if we examine the ritual aspects a myth may have had.
I'm not a classicist, but as far as I know, Latin and Hellenistic work did not practice this overarching superstructure nearly as rigidly as the Jewish writers did (ok, it's attested well at Ugarit too, but that's a precursor to Hebrew anyway). The Latin writers use it more like juxtaposition, and while frequent enough to be attested, it isn't in the same form as (for example) vast chiastic structures of the Pentateuch. What I mean is that it is more readily identifiable as a feature in Semitic writing, and that means Hellenistic Jews for the authors of the NT.
Yes I did switch the flow of discourse, but that's because Doherty weighed in with his invocation of Lévi-Strauss (he brought it up, not me), and universalist assumptions about myth. I can't show why structuralist ideas relating to myth ("all come from the same pot") is wrong without explaining the problems inherent in structuralism. That naturally makes my language poststructuralist, though I have tried to broach a middle-ground by introducing Pearcean structuralism instead (i.e., Lévi-Strauss' structuralist readings (or Doherty's) are wrong, even within a structuralist paradigm). Before this, as I've already said, I was content to focus on the isolated Inanna myth and demonstrate why reading any sort of parallel is either wrong or tells us nothing. I thought it was an open and shut case, but then Doherty accused me of turning the thread into "a showcase for (knowledge of) Sumerian mythology for its own sake." I think I've already demonstrated why he is wrong in the details, so having given away his game, I am demonstrating why his structuralist tendencies do not deal with the problems of interpretation adequately. This is a wider critique of his general theory.
I never used the term "genetic". Christianity was a consciously developed "new" religion in the ANE, appearing as it did at a specific point in time. It was not a religion that was constantly being reformulated, adapted, and reinterpreted the way the Hellenistic or Egyptian religions were. The role of agency in such a new creation consequently cannot be ignored (imagine trying to find antecedents to Scientology a few thousand years from now: it would be an utter failure, because a great deal of it is down to the creativity of L. Ron Hubbard). When we are privileged enough to witness a clear starting point for a religion, we better make sure we explore the role of agency, creativity, and so on, before attributing structuralist readings to the texts. In doing so, as I've said already, the problem between the signifier and signified becomes immediately apparent (like what Vork just added--unfortunately, we have no clue what sort of agency was involved, hence underdetermination and agnosticism about a historical Jesus).
I can only cite what I know about. I haven't read Goodacre, and I doubt my fatigue in the Synoptics will be alleviated by reading Fatigue in the Synoptics.
Ulansey was never accepted by mainstream scholarship to begin with, so it's difficult to see how he was "abandoned". Yes, I do see things fluctuating, but methodologies improve if only because we add new items in our "How Not to Do Bad Scholarship" list. Frazer is 19th century. Let's leave him there.

Joel

andrewcriddle

This is partly repeating what I said in a thread I tried to start about Middle Platonism, but I have serious problems with the idea that Plutarch regards Osiris as incarnating and dying in the aer.

a/ 'Isis and Osiris' begins with an introduction up to 355 D. From 355 D to 358 E we have an account of the Hellenistic version of the myth of Osiris. From 358 E to 360 D we have an attempted 'Euhemerist' explanation.

b/ From 360 D to 363 D Osiris Isis and Typhon/Set are regarded as daimons beings intermediate between Gods and men and are (probably) confined to the region under the moon. It is not clear in this section what the interpretation of the dismemberment of Osiris is but since (361 D) the violent acts of Typhon take place in the terrestrial region, the dismemberment of Osiris may refer to destructive terrestrial events.

c/ From 363 D to 368 F we have a Stoic explanation in terms of natural forces here the breaking up of Osiris clearly refers to terrestrial events.

d/ From 369 A to 371 A we have an explicit introduction of Plutarch's dualistic version of Middle Platonism with references to Zoroastrianism and (neo)-Pythagoreanism.

e/ From 371 A to 372 E the myth is interpreted as the struggle between order and chaos throughout the cosmos. Here Osiris and Typhon appear to be regraded as natural forces.

f/ From 372 E to 377 A we have (at last) Plutarch's preferred allegorical interpretation. Here Osiris is the divine Creator Isis is matter Typhon is the evil spiritual principle of Chaos, the body of Osiris is the works of the creator in the sensible world and the dismemberment of the body of Osiris by Typhon is the destruction of the Creator's works by the spiritual principle of evil. This destruction of the body of Osiris appears to occur primarily on the terrestrial earth (375 B). Osiris himself is everlasting and imperishable (373 A).

g/ From 377 B to 383 A we have a discussion of the relation of the enlightened philosopher to popular religion. This repeats (382 F) that the true Osiris is pure from liability to destruction and death. From 383 A to the end there is a digression about Egyptian religious ritual.

It is only in interpretation f/ that Osiris can be said to 'incarnate' and here only metaphorically, in other interpretations Osiris is either an impersonal force or a daimon who (with Isis) has now become elevated to full divine status (361 E and 362 E). But in interpretation f/ Osiris only 'dies' in the most metaphorical sense and this 'death' occurs primarily in the terrestrial regions (375 B) the place most vulnerable to the forces of chaos.

In interpretation b/ since Isis and Osiris have undergone apotheosis to full deity, we can assume from Plutarch's other works that this occurred in the aer (or at the moon). But this apotheosis is not apparently explicitly linked to the myth of Osiris's violent death and applies equally to Isis who has no mythical murder.

The claim that for Plutarch Osiris is incarnated and dies in the aer may involve a confusion of some of the interpretations offered in 'Isis and Osiris' maybe particularly b/ and f/ (what I have previously called the psychic and allegorical modes)

Andrew Criddle

Celsus

Thanks for that, Andrew. What do you make of the suggestion that Plutarch's version of the Egyptian myth (356A-357B) is a derivation from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter?

Joel

andrewcriddle

The Section in 357 A-C about Isis at Byblus and her working as a nurse and trying unsucessfully to give immortality to the child she's looking after seems an obvious copy of 'Hymn to Demeter' about Demeter at Eleusis. (lines 90-300).

I can't see any thing as clear in 356 and IMHO we have stronger corroboration from Ancient Egyptian texts of the information in 'Isis and Osiris' 356 than we do for 357 A-C The whole connection of the Isis and Osiris myth with Byblus is IMHO Hellenistic and seems to involve syncretism between Osiris and Adonis.

So IMHO the influence of 'Hymn to Demeter' is certainly there but may be largely confined to the episode at Byblus.

Andrew Criddle

Ted Hoffman

I managed to get some time and reviewed the thread. I realize I made Joel repeat so many points and I am sorry for that. Btw, who is Umberto Eco? ( I know I should have googled, but I am already asking so...).
And you are right: Doherty introduced Levi Strauss.

In a demonstration of pathways through which Babylonian Utnapishtim or Sumerian Atra Hasis could be transmitted to Hebrew Noah, Joel relied on four features:

A Framework for Checking Transmission of Elements from one Myth to Another

1. Key structural similarities
2. Linguistic similarities (he mentioned goper and koper - these words appear in the 'same places' - I do not have the texts, care to clarify?).
3. The idea that [the]myth was widespread in ANE from at least 22 cent BCE (Atra hasis) to classical times (Ovid).
4. Occasion of Greek contact with the myth via Greek mercenaries and trade through Phoenicia.
5. Thematic parallels.

When I tried to paint a general picture of how the myths could have been passed down from the Egyptians, down to Paul in a cultural milieu that enjoyed a rich background of preceeding myths and religions, similar to the one our Plutarch emerged from, Joel accused me of gross generalizations (look at point 3 above) and then he split hairs about the difference between Ptolemaic, Saite and Achaemenid Egypt. That was it. He shut the door on that. But I had one foot lodged in the doorway

We will see if we can push that door open.

Joel states that "details do matter". There are several key differences in detail between the flood stories just like we find differences between the dying and rising god stories. My question to Joel is, how do you deal with the differences between Noah's flood and those of Atra hasis? What is their role in the comparative effort and to what extent are they significant?

For example, the ankiography of The Epic of Gilgamesh for example, is very different from the one in Genesis - ankiography being the landscape of the ancient universe - of heaven and earth (AN and KI), also, Gilgamesh has no counterpart in Noah's story (or even the boatman Urashabi). The main character in The Epic is Gilgamesh, whose quest is immortality and it is that quest that leads him to Utnapishtim who recounts to Gilgamesh the flood story. Gilgamesh is so tired from his journey that he fails to stay awake for seven days, and thereby fails the test for immortality and is sent back to earth (Uruk) with Urnashabi the boatman. Utnapishtim and his wife were granted immortality by Enlil. Don't these differences matter? If so, to what extent?

Running Inanna and Pauline Jesus through Joel's Methodology:

1. Key structural similarities.

a) A god leaves heaven (per the Phillipians passage or the "upperworld" per Inanna) and comes down and is killed.

b) The god is killed by a leader/leaders of the underworld. Paul says the archons (princes of this world) killed Jesus. Inanna is killed by the Annunaki-judges "who fastened their eyes upon her, the eyes of death" and hung her on a stake J.B. Pritchard, ed., ANET(Ancient Near East Texts Relating to the Old Testament), 1969 as cited by Alford A., in When The Gods Came Down,2000. (Inanna enraged Ereshkigal, who, with Nergal, ruled the underworld)

c) The god is suspended (hung/crucified) on an instrument of torture (stake/cross).

d) Both stories have the concept of ransom [soteriology]. Dumuzi must suffer instead of Inanna for the latter to be released. Christ must suffer [and die] for believers to get salvation.

d) Christ leaves heaven and comes down to save mankind (messiah) but is killed (though his death is ransomized). Inanna leaves the upperworld to conquer the underworld but gets killed too. Though they are killed, they survive their deaths.

e) The god resurrects after three days.

I will skip 2. I lack the linguistic background, plus issues of myths evolving via transgression as noted by Price and the idea of underdetermination, loose amalgamation or conflation (as we see between Christianity and Judaism, Roman Mithraism and Persian Mithraism, Plutarch's Osiris and Egyptian Osiris etc), translation as opposed to transliteration (Greco-Roman culture had adequate word equivalents) etc come in and based on my question above, I am not sure your examples are not incidental.

I think that 3 and 4 can be argued in a fashion similar to the one Joel has used to argue for Utnapishtim | Noah above since I don't see much historical and cultural dissimilarities behind Inanna|Jesus compared to Utnapishtim|Noah other than the departure from Judaism under Hellenism. 5 is obvious - the theme is the death and resurrection of god.

Note that it is not crucial whether the manner of the death and resurrection of Paul's Jesus was influenced by the manner of that of Inanna. The significant thing is that they are both examples of a dying and resurrecting god. "Ideal types" if you like. Influence is not necessary though I am exploring it for fun, just to be sure that that avenue is sealed.

What do you think Joel? I hope this is better than "gross generalization" at least?

Specific point in time? When was that? The Gospels were written close to 40 years after Jesus' alleged death. We have Funk's reverse Christology (as opposed to big bang Christology), the riotous diversity of cults that were later forced under one empire-wide religion by Constantine, Ebionites, Nazarenes (Epiphanius), Essenes, Naasenes (Hippolytus), Marcionite docetism, "son of god" cults as we see in Shepherd of Hermas, and Odes of Solomon, Christ as we see in Didache and Barnabas, then we see a HJ coming out of the melting pot outside the gospels in mid second century. We have heresies competing against heresies, people being exiled or killed for not recanting, Aryanism, the dethroning of the zadokites in the Hasmonean period and movements as led by the teacher of righteousness in the DSS, the roles of James - who was the bulwark that held God's wrath against Jerusalem at bay, and whose death brought about, according to some, in the destruction of Jerusalem etc etc. I mean, we have Christianity being propounded and promulgated without a central human figure as we see in Epistle to Diognetus and Apology to the Greeks and this only changes from mid to late second century.

Specific point in time?

A note on the issue of fertility Gods and so on: besides crops, the death and resurrection motif (dying and rising gods) has been argued to have been associated, by the ancients, with the sun's rising and setting, the moon's appearance and disappearances and ditto some stars (eg. the Egyptians Orion, Sirius etc). The stars died in the western horizon for example, and were reborn in the east and so on. So, the comparative religion project does not, IMHO, simply fail because we don't have winters and autumn seasons in this and that region: there are still other 'cycles' that the ancients linked with birth and rebirth, and ultimately to fertility.

Your "Frazer is 19th century. Let's leave him there" could easily lead to an avalanche of "Darwin is 19th century. Let's leave him there", or "Einstein is early 20th century. Let's leave him there".

About the 3000 years is a very long time thing, Georges Roux, an Assyriologist, tells us in Ancient Iraq, Penguin Books, 1992, that "for more than 3000 years, religious ideas promoted by the Sumerians played an extraordinary part in the private life of the Mesopotamians, modelling their institutions, coloring their works of art and literature, pervading every form of activity...In no other antique society did religion occupy such a prominent position"

We have their clay tablets which have survived this "veery long time". In addition if what Roux says is correct, their religious ideas found expression in all avenues and therefore in trade in Phoenicia and other places, their ideas and myths were promulgated via pottery and material culture and other works of art and literature.

This gives us a glimpse of how the myths could have sailed through 3000 years gap of raging sea of wars, conquests, civilization and death without getting shipwrecked.