capnkirk

This thread is intended to explore how Xtianity arose.

If God doesn't exist, then he couldn't have had a son. So, what really DID happen? How could a historical person have been morphed into a resurrected, sacrificial deity? Or was there no historical person at all?

The fundamental premise here is that however it happened, it was the creation of man, so I would ask any theists who happen to get this far to refrain from challenging the fundamental premise. It is not germane to our discussion, so please don't be rude and intrude.

Marduk

Constantine, lots of guys with sharp swords & spears.

Toto

This is not exactly the first time someone has asked this question.

A sociological explanation

Jesus Mythicism

Christianity was an offshoot of Judaism that invented a founder

among others.

The assumption for most of the last century was that Jesus was a human who was elevated to god status by his followers. I think that Robert Price's latest book here and here shows that there is no Biblical support for that.

So I don't know where you want to start. Have you actually examined the mythicist case?

graymouser

Everything I've read in history lately seems to be tending toward the view that Christianity arose as something of a Jewish response to the pagan mystery cults, and later was co-opted by literalists who began the slow move toward New Testament theology. (It's immaterial as to whether or not its alleged founder really existed.) Christianity moved away from mystics with esoteric ideas and toward wealthy landowners, who became the episcopacy even before the legitimization, and who began to codify the myths used by the mystics to teach esoteric points into a legalistic religion.

Christianity became something of a revolutionary force in the Roman Empire, denying the state religion and the Imperial cults in a way that was tantamount to treason. This is why, right up to Diocletian, there were periods of persecution. The final phase was particularly hard, as many of the landowning bishops were either losing their land or apostatizing.

From the time of Constantine, the church went through heresy after heresy - most significantly Arianism, Nestorianism, and Monophysitism - as people tried to figure out what the heck all of this meant. The Bible was compiled from the collection of would-be scriptures to best support the church's positions at the end of the 4th century.

Christianity continued to develop as the justification for the Roman Empire; the Byzantines would claim it to their last day. The schism between the eastern church and the western church was essentially because both Emperor and Pope wanted supremacy. The western arm flourished, and grew rich and powerful, as the eastern atrophied.

Protestantism arose as a social movement in large part to diminish the power and influence of the Pope. People went to one side or the other based on what their political leaders did, or faced persecution and exile. (I am descended from ancestors exiled on both sides, French Huguenots and English Catholics.)

Christianity was fading as a social force by the end of the 18th century, with logic finally overcoming it after centuries of war. However, in America particularly, proto-fundamentalism began to sprout in the form of cultish groups like the Mormons, the 7th Day Adventists, and the Jehovah's Witnesses. They suffered a great loss just before the 19th century ended, but would resurge in the 1920s and 1930s, and then mutate into primarily Southern movements by the 1950s. This spreading version of fundamentalism increasingly spread as the mainline Protestant churches have shrunk; the Catholic Church has proven true to its long tradition of authoritarianism and corruption to stay the course.

My assessment of the current situation is: the average person in America today is a weak theist, who lets the fundamentalists get away with their hijinks because they want the basic theistic claims to be true. This leaves them vulnerable to Bible-thumping fundies who tell them they're going to Hell if they don't embrace Jesus as their "Personal Lord and Savior" and perpetuates the cycle.

Christianity thrives on two things: war and money. War keeps the people in a state where they're more likely to buy the bill of goods the Christian is selling; money is the object.

-Wayne

ManIsGod

Simple:

It is easier to believe an increasingly bigger lie than admit you have been duped.

spin

I think the more relevant question is, if God doesn't exist how did he arise, don't you think? For once you can answer that you are part the way to answering any such question.

No invention exists without a need for it. How did thinking humans survive in a world without science? How were natural phenomena understood? How did they tame an incoherent hostile world?

Where did the world come from? How did it get here? Where do we come from? Why do people die? Why do lights cross the sky during the day and at night? As we have "life", doesn't everything else? Why do things happen? Why are there seasons? Where does evil come from?

I could ask many many questions, but I think you get the drift of the questions: a fertile mind will find answers and those answers come in the form of things "greater" than us, for we don't have control of any of these things. The wind is life, as is the sun. Gods. Rivers lead to the sea and life goes somewhere, somewhere greater. A god must cause growth. It must cause crops to grow, things to die. Everywhere one looked there was divinity at work. The divine was amongst us.

The world came into existence because of divine interventiion and is maintained by divine intervention.

As societies become more complex, so must explanations. As societies become more complex, they also become more structured and specialised. There are people dedicated to supplying answers and knowledges about the gods. In some cases these people become the highest stratum of society and have control over vast populations and eventually priest kings emerge. In other cases they take on less lofty, but still politically important, roles. Who control the answers and means of propitiating gods control much of the wealth of the society. And with the structuring of society comes the structuring of divine society: there were top dogs, or gods, and there were lower, less important ones, ones that gave orders and ones that took them, who would eventually leave the circle of gods and become messengers and members of starry hosts, good and evil spirits. The many become ruled by the one, the one which gave existence to the world. And as there are forces working in favour of the good government of the cosmos, there were also those which worked against it.

With the specialisation within the community, those who have control of the god must have a means of feeding themselves. Why should the god(s) need all the sacrifice? Sacrifice is only a means of communication with the divine, so as long as the sacrifice is offered the god is happy, so why not let the priesthood eat the sacrifice?

What happens in the theological sphere in a society which lives in a communities of societies in which another society is stronger and can dominate the others and lord their superiority and that of their gods over the other societies? Blame must be laid somewhere and obviously that can't be at the foot of the gods or the one god who has emerged from the flock, otherwise that would spell the end of both the god(s) and the priesthood.

It must be the people who get it wrong. They are simply not faithful enough. This is really a no-boner. No-one does everything right: everyone is self-seeking, except the god, who must do something to lift the wrongdoers out of their errors. And they are still explaining their world.

But the righteous will survive, if the society is to copntinue at all. There will be a remnant of good people, or at least a group of people willing to seek goodness, because no person is perfect.

Yet, by having done wrong, otherwise why should bad things have happened?, we become distanced from our god, for he is perfect and has no truck with imperfection and chooses to deal with licentious humans through emissaries, be they the priests or mediators of a higher plane, the sons of god. Propitiation must go on for we have done wrong and need to redeem ourselves, cleanse ourselves of our impurities. We cannot save ourselves because we cannot stop doing wrong. Salvation can only come from without.

The god intervenes to save us from ourselves, from our wrongdoing, from our lack of worthiness, from our lack of faith in his perfection. He listens to the priest and the world is preserved, as long as miserable humans keep doing what they can to show that they want to be saved. This god is a stern father and we are wayward children.

In his perfection, he now communicates with us through his emissaries, which are his tools for achieving his goals in this imperfect world, a world which created perfect has gone wrong because of the choices made of the people who live there. The angelic emissaries must also maintain purity or risk falling from his grace, for they cannot continue to serve the god if they are not worthy to do so.

Can nothing happen to exempt us from this permanent castigation? Can nothing come along and take the impurity away from us? Are we destined to stay out of favour of this god who has turned his back on us and our wrongdoing? If we were to escape our wrongdoing, what would prevent us from falling back into the mire we were just in? If only the god would wipe our slate clean and provide us with a way of staying clean, as we are not able to do it ourselves. What is needed is a scapegoat, something that would take away our sins and continue doing so.

We have seen in other societies gods that die to give fertility to the earth and somehow miraculously they seem to die every year as the year dies and with the new year the god is resurrected. Year in and year out without any respite. Is this really any different from our plight? We have no respite from our need to propitiate our god. If only someone could die just once and renew the world, renew us and save us from our endless recurrent plight. That of course would have to be a hell of a someone for they would be dying for us, to set us free. Who could, who would do such a thing?

As the scapegoat must be spotless to take away sin each year, so must the one who could end the cycle and allow us to escape from our plight. Only a willing sacrifice of a worthy victim will do, someone who can take our sins from us once and for all.

The god himself is spotless of wrongdoing, but how can he die when the world exists because of him and without him nothing could exist? No, this is unthinkable. It must be an entity which is pure, like one of his angels, but it cannot be such a servile entity, for he must be able to choose to sacrifice himself. He must be better than an angel.


spin

Amaleq13

I would just add to this: "including an increasing awareness that a Messiah, as traditionally expected, did not appear capable of defeating the Roman oppressors" (I would also ask what happened to your buddy Fafhrd?)




To spin: :notworthy

Amos

Good analogy Wayne but I think that Catholicsm arose out of Judaism because it had become too literal. This message is contained in John's Gospel where the body of Christ is compared with the manna that was second hand to the children of Isreal through Moses and therefore they died. Catholicism was an upgrade of Judaism in a re-back way to mysticism and from here Christians broke away just as they did when Jesus first said that his "body was real food" and his "blood was real drink." Correct and that is why it is just opposite to Catholicism where beauty and truth are the natural consequence of achievement. These kind of richess are eternal and can only benefit mankind without pain and suffering attached to them. Such, in my view, is how nature would show its majesty and religion is just a way to unfold it.

Its easy to confuse Christianity with Catholicsm which, in its mystery, is really not part of this world and therefore has been the enemy of Christanity throughout the ages.

capnkirk

Congratulations! I want to thank all of you for your insightful responses. Your analyses of the macrolevel of the subject reflect essentially the same understanding as mine. Especially Spin's. :notworthy

Focusing primarily on Spin's last four paragraphs provides the foundation for what I would like to do in this thread. That is, to discover more of the historical details of the process he describes. I think most of the posters thus far essentially in agreement with his analysis. I want to see how much information we can find to flesh out this scenario, to provide a much finer resolution to our insight, focusing on the mezzolevel and microlevel of events.

P.S. Spin, Toto, and Amaleq13: You guys will probably recognize this as an outgrowth of the discussion on the LOST CHRISTIANITIES thread, but with a more neutral starting point.

P.S.S. Toto: All except the first of your links are relevant to the building of the synthesis of the construct that I hope this thread can achieve.