Gamera

Exactly, the issue is not the verisilimitude of various narrative tropes in the gospels, but rather the mythicists' practice of relating them to alleged prior myths (and that's an issue in itself!) in order to build an argument against the historicity of Jesus.

Basically, you can use this form of argument to argue virtually any historical figure is a myth. It emcompasses everything and so explains nothing.

jgibson000

Let's remember please, that even if this is so (Heracles when born was mortal, not divine, and was, to my knowledge, always considered a hero not a god, even after he had been granted immortality), the original question was not which -- or whether any -- god had a human mother and first took breath after coming out of that woman's vagina. It was the truth or falsity of the claim that Dionysus was a figure who was thought by the ancients to have come to full term inside, and then delivered from, as ordinary human beings are delivered from, the womb of a human woman through her vagina.

As far as Dionysus goes, this is simply not the case.

Jeffrey

jakejonesiv

Yes sir, I see what you are saying. Thanks.

Jake

jakejonesiv

Hi Ben,

I don't see any overt connection between Gal. 4:4 and
Dionysus. (The miraculous birth narratives of Matthew
and Luke may well have been influenced by the tales of
pagan gods and heroes).

Why would the author of Gal. 4:4 insist that Jesus was
born of a woman? It does nothing to anchor Jesus in
time or place in the historical sense. If everyone
agreed that Jesus was a mere a human being, with a
natural birth, the statement serves no purpose.
Everyone is born of a woman, everyone is made of
flesh, and everyone has ancestory. Why waste the
ink to belabor the obvious?

Her's why. With a few possible exceptions, the
majority of early Christian sects believed that Jesus
was in some sense divine. The divisive question was in
what sense could the divine become human?

The most likely context for Gal 4:4 is that someone
else was teaching that Jesus was not born of a
woman and was not born under the law. The
argument would be that Jesus was a divine being who
only temporarily seemed to be a man, but never really
was, much as when God was believed to have appeared to
Abraham.*

Gal. 4:4, Romans 1:3, etc. are clear rebutals of this
Docetic doctrine. But as such, these texts are
theological statements, and have no bearing on the
question of the historicity of Jesus Christ.

As I have stated before, the alleged apperances of God
to Abraham cut the legs from under the arguments used
to deduce an historical Jesus from the Pauline epistles.

Wasn't God supposed to have appeared within history to
Abraham? And wasn't God supposed to have appeared in a
form that could not be distiguished from a man by
sensory input? But this alleged form in which God
appeared was no real man. The apparent body was
not born of a woman, was not descended from the
Patriarchs. Apparently, the body appeard and
disappeared just as God desired.

But unless we forsake naturalism, we know that no such
thing actually happened. No matter what generations
might believe, it is not an historical event.

Obviously, this can only happen in the imagination,
but if the Theophany of God that appeared to Abraham
stood side by side with "Historical" Jesus, how would
you tell that one was human and one wasn't?

Jake Jones IV

*This was one of Marcion's arguments. To see Tertullians absurd rebutal, see Adv. Marc. V3, chap IX.

Chris Weimer

Jake,

We have people here on this board that claim that God appeared to them. Heck, we even have one guy who claims to be the messiah. How can you tell they're real?

Logical answer - your criterion in this case is useless.

GakuseiDon

I don't know why this keeps coming up. Paul wasn't *just* claiming that Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law". That's only the first half of that sentence, and it contrasts with the second half of the sentence. Jesus was a seed of Abraham, and heir to the promise according to the flesh. Christians, through Jesus, are now "adopted" and thus also regarded as heirs to the promise.

If anything reveals Paul's thoughts of Jesus as a human being, it is that passage:

Gal 4:1 Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all,
2 but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father.
3 Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world.
4 But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law,
5 to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons.

Trying to make it sound like Paul was involved in an argument with those who thought that Jesus wasn't born of a woman by focusing just on Gal 4:4 ignores the rest of the context.

Ecrasez L'infame

As Jake says: the virgin birth didn't happen! Aren't we all agreed on that, all of us, HJers and MJers, even the Christians? Other parts of the Gospels might have - we can talk about it - but THIS didn't. It's - a - myth. But myths are naturally syncretic - they link and morph across cultures, grow into each other, they're messy and promiscuous. Therefore it's valid to look for the syncretic links between the Gospel's virgin birth and alleged parallels in other ancient Mediterranean cultures. Isn't that obvious? And shouldn't this project appeal to all who want to know the historic truth, regardless of whether they're HJ or MJ? Isn't that so?

Ah, but there's a funny thing. In practice it's only mythicists who look for parallels. HJers - even though they know full well that the virgin birth (or the other miracles) are not historic events - still resist allowing that the normal process of myth-making (borrowing, adapting, re-interpreting) known from throughout the world and history ever happened with the Gospels. Why is that? Syncretics has been used for thousands of years to get a grip on myth - surely HJers would leap at such a tool? Could it be that they know that once any part of the Gospels (even the virgin birth) is shown to have been derived from another source, people might wonder what else is mythical? If so - that is intellectual dishonesty.

Jake's question in the above post still stands - if the virgin birth isn't based on other stories, then where did it come from?

Robert

Chris Weimer

E L'i: That's just simply false.

You could read what others have said here on IIDB, or relevant journal articles. Jeffrey Gibson offered up one - the virgin birth is an anti-imperial polemic.

Moreover, you and "mythicists" keep making the fundamental error of treating the entire NT or all four gospels as a single monolithic entity, and in fact all literature as such, when such is never the case. You can't talk about the virgin birth in one breath while referring to Markan narrative and relate them both to Greek myths. It says nothing. You need a trajectory and you need it for each individual story. Mark shows no such signs of a virgin birth, and neither does Q or Paul, all of them the earliest sources we have for Christianity.

If you have to go later and later for parallels, perhaps it's YOU who ought to be accused of intellectual dishonesty, abusing the sources to fit your preconceived notions.

Solo

You evidently forgot how that debate went. Imperial polemic or imperial borrowing, the issue remains that the Augustan "virgin" birth was pagan myth. Further, Ben, despite heroic efforts, was not able to provide any Judaic precedents for Mary's pregnancy beside a lame annunciation parallel with Manoah's barren wife from Judges, one which Luke borrowed for Elizabeth's conception of John. So, unless the Judaic traditions establish impregnations by Yahweh (via non-human agents), the virgin myth is by definition pagan, and no matter how distasteful to one's politics or confession, there is no other reasonable explanation for it than syncretism.

With respect to the "trajectory for each individual story" I replied to Ben that he was asking me which particular fox Aesop had in mind for his fable. That is an absurd way to dispose of the reality of pagan borrowing in early Christianity. There was a clever ruling handed down by Lord Atkin in jurisprudence. He said that the Christian duty to love one's neighbour becomes a chore in law to find who is the neighbour, whom we are not to injure. I propose the same method for determining the origins of mythical origins of certain traditions in Xty. What is the neighbourhood in which they arise ?

As for the rest, it is obviously lame logic to conclude on the basis of evidence of syncretism in the New Testament, that Jesus originated as a mythical mud-man. But to my mind it is just as wrongheaded to take the "no proven mythical origin of Jesus" as evidence for "no pagan influence in mythologizing Jesus".

Jiri

gstafleu

That is irrelevant to the present discussion. Ben's question (one of them) was:
He doesn't require that the "certain" gods are only those for whom we can establish a link to JC.

Gerard Stafleu