Banzaibee

Huh? A geological rock formation, interpreted by human pattern recognition as a carving of a human face, is a valid rebuttal of an Egyptian God sharing similarities with another God? Sorry, you will have to elaborate further, especially on what is “profound” and “superficial”. The analogy doesn't work for me as proof at the moment.
Huh? So you make a nifty edit of my “worry”, slice off my acceptance of good practices in modern NE archeology, and used that to state “are you kidding me” about modern practices. Uhhu. Anyway my worry is not that a bunch of jumper wearing diggers are sitting round a hole with the bible in hand going “SEE, THIS IS THE CUP OF JOSHUA”. No, my worry is that even in “establishment” archeology (and that phrase makes me go, oh no, as I am establishment) there is a inevitable tendency to subtlety interpret fragmentary evidence for various reasons. When you have a (guessed) 99% failure rate on material culture then texts, regardless of how fictional they are, is going to have an influence. I would bet 10 dollars every archaeologist working in the Levant area in the classical era has read the bible. Do you deny that has any influence? Put it this way, is there any difference in the excavation, interpretation, and publication of sites with texts and without? Is having a text always a good thing?

gurugeorge

No, you have it the other way round - the differences (such as Jesus not having a beetle's head or green skin) are what's superficial, it's the commonalities (such as being superhero-like entities whose devotees can expect a happy afterlife) that are profound.

Solitary Man

Sigh, are you sure you're an archaeologist? I would have thought that someone with your level of training would avoid parallelomania. In other words, human beings find patterns in nearly everything. Conspiracy theories are born out of this type of pattern fabrication. Pseudo-numerology survives because of it. Have you never seen A Beautiful Mind? If you want to posit some sort of relationship between the two Gods, you'll have to do a lot better than point to one or two "parallels" and call it a day.


Yes, no kidding. I see it all the time.

Why shouldn't they have read the Bible? I would expect anyone working in the Levant to have read Levantine texts, just like those in Egypt need to read Egyptian texts, those in Anatolia need to read Anatolian texts (it would be beneficial to be familiar with all possible texts, too, Hittite, Luwian, Lycian, Greek, Latin, etc.).

You yourself put it best, you can do all the work without the texts and get it wrong. Why would you want to debilitate yourself by refusing evidence? Why exclude a priori?

Banzaibee

You are overplaying your hand in order to invalidate a comparative analysis. The perceived similarities of a geological rock formation on a different planet and a human face is not valid counter to the argument that Egyptian gods share qualities with non-Egyptian gods. Can you link me any sources on "Parallelomania"? The one I am familiar with is "argument from spurious similarity". Your second counter, that I have not provided enough examples, is easy to rebut.

Take Osiris, a god with a resurrection myth who judges the evil of followers as a method of passage into the afterlife (the weighing of the heart ceremony), and whose Son, Horus, is depicted as this: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore...is__horus.aspx
Several centuries before Jesus was born and centuries before Mary and child imagery became popular. I could go on and on about parallels between them. Now, can you dismiss this on the grounds that the similarities are superficial and the example is spurious, and a bad analogy? I await further reference to Martian rock formations, and conspiracy theories. Perhaps a cloud formation next?

Oh, and I appreciated the "are you really an archaeologist" ad hominem attack. Yes, I really am. I studied the UNESCO Libyan Valleys Survey (ULVS) of the late 1970s and early 1980s for my post-graduate work, and after that I was responsible for the research and publication of a classical and near eastern collection, then I was the archaeological curator/officer for a museum service. Then I was a field archaeologist on a 3 year Mesolithic project. I also do freelance research, but the pay is a pittance and I wish I had studied Greek marine archaeology. Scuba diving and beaches.

To drag this back to the thread OP. To what extent do existing myths/gods shape the authors and editors of the NT? If this is so, then at what point does Jesus become a mere cypher for pre-existing concepts? Can he be considered a composite of them? If so, then is the historical analysis unravelling an archetype? (by archetype I mean an idealized model from which others are copied).

Didymus

[QUOTE=Joan of Bark;5304305]Bad analogy. Columbus had an enormous impact on the history of America, and particularly on its native peoples.

There is no consensus regarding Jesus' impact on Christianity. It depends on whether his life and sayings were accurately described by Paul and by the gospel authors. If one thinks, as I do, that those writings were extrapolations from the OT presented in a first-century contemporary context and peopled with legendary first-century folk heroes and villains, then the "actual" Jesus character(s) had little direct impact on the religion.

As you suggest, the importance of Theodosius I is generally under-rated.

Ddms

patcleaver

It is very exciting to have access to ancient books - its like having access to an archeological site. The books of the bible are similar to thousands of other books ancient scriptures that we have access to.

The first requirement for researching and understanding anything in these ancient books is to jettison your unsupported presuppositions about them. The thousands of ancient books of scripture are all, as far as we can tell, either fiction or documentation of oral mythology, or pious forgeries. Scripture is religious propaganda written by fanatics, and you have to understand that all fanatics are willing to lie and commit fraud and forge works, in order to convince others that their beliefs are true. Although the characters and story-lines are almost certainly false, they are a window into the mind of people who lived and wrote in those ancient times.

Troy is a mythological name for a mythical city just like Nazareth and Shambhala and Atlantis. The earliest reference to a town called Nazareth is a Hebrew inscription found in Caesarea, dating to the late 3rd or early 4th century.

Solitary Man

You mean unsupported presuppositions like this?

So when they found a city in the exact location which is told in the Iliad, matching several important features, that really wasn't Troy at all? What's your criteria other than your own ignorant unsupported presuppositions?

Solitary Man

Samuel Sandmel in JBL 81 with the same title.

All you've done is list things. You didn't even show how they are parallel. You're just assuming things now. Please do go on. And show how they're significant while you're at it.


You haven't shown any significant similarities. Isis holding Horus, her child? Isn't there a much more obvious explanation, namely that ALL MOTHERS HOLD THEIR CHILDREN. It's human behavior. What next, Jesus spoke, Osiris spoke, THEY MUST BE SIMILAR LOL!!!!11!11one!eleventyone!!!111.

Perhaps you'd like to explain how Osiris/Horus imagery (and try not to conflate them) explains earliest Christian movements. Otherwise, what you're arguing is no different than a saying that the Chinese knew the Sumerians since they both had bowls.

Great, I guesss that means that even professionals can make stupid methodological errors. You yourself pointed out that it's pretty common.

You can ask questions all you want, but there's no evidence for the hidden assertions in those questions. There's no evidence that Jesus was a "cypher" for pre-existing concepts, nor a composite of them, nor an emergent archetype. It's a load of baloney. But I suppose you've dug up some cup or bowl or coin that proves this, right?

Yeah right.

Toto

Don't have time to look it up, but the image of the Madonna holding Baby Jesus was adapted from the Isis-Horus image. IIRC it was several centuries too late to show a connection in the origins of Jesus in Horus, but someone saw a connection there. All mothers might hold their babies, but not all are pictured in religious art work holding their babies in a similar manner. (I hope you are not going to claim that someone painted the Virgin holding Jesus at the time.)

The parallels between Jesus and Horus go beyond superficial. Robert Price thinks that Horus might have been the origin of Jesus, but thinks the evidence has been lost.

patcleaver

Is the movie "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" written by Steve Kloves, derived from the book "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" written by J.K. Rowling? There are dozens of significant differences between the two stories. Perhaps they developed independently in some delusional parallelism denier world.

The fact that you can search though hundreds of independent stories and find two that have similarities is irrelevant. If you select two independent stories using some other basis besides these similarities, then you do not expect to see any significant similarities between them. In this case we have nearly adjacent cultures in Egypt and Judea, and if you compare their religious stories, they are about sons of god and suffering and resurrected redeemers that have lots of other similarities. There are also some similarities between the suffering and resurrected Tummuz, the only other religion known to be traditionally worshiped by people in Judea. There are also some similarities with Mithraism, one of the most important religions of ancient Rome. We would not expect to see any important similarities at all between these stories if they were independent.

In evaluating parallelism, differences themselves don't usually matter at all, but even minor similarities are evidence of parallelism. The reason is based on experience, we expect lots of important differences between stories when one is derived from the other, but we do not expect any important parallels between two arbitrarily selected stories that are really independent. Any important similarities between arbitrarily selected independent stories are unusual, and have to be explained.

If we select two stories based on some predetermined similarity criteria, and they were independent, then we would not expect to find any other important similarities between them. For example, we choose the five most popular pagan religious stories of the region around Judea, and compare them to the Jesus of Nazareth story then we would not expect to find any other important similarities at all. Instead we find pre-existing stories about sons of gods and heroic suffering redeemers known by the very people who invented the Jesus story. We also find a history of these types of stories mutating and borrowing from each other. The mere fact that there are several important parallels between the Jesus of Nazareth story of a tiny 3rd century cult, and the preexisting stories of major religions in the Roman Empire, is proof that the Jesus story is derived from these preexisting religions for those not blinded by their religious prejudices.