Malachi151

Many, if not most, of the Christian references to the OT make no sense, because they reference scriptures that can't possibly realistically be viewed as prophecies or related to "Jesus". They are just small references to other stories or songs in the scriptures that are talking about other things and are completely unrelated to any "Messiah savior" business.

Hence, I say that they make no sense. Its as if I were to write a story and then quote from a book on the lives of the Founding Fathers, and my story is about a savior of the world, and I make references to little one line bits from the book on the FFs, and then claim that my story is true because the book on the FFs is a prophesy for the person that I am writing about, or some such nonsense.

Why do the Jews have stories about people who were oppressed, pierced, abused, despised, disbelieved, etc.? Because they as a people were oppressed, despised, abused, enslaved, beaten in war many times, slaughtered, downtrodden, etc. Their stories reflect their reality, and their reality was one of a bottom tier civilization that for almost all of its existence was nothing but slaves, beggars, people living on the fringe of civilization, desperately seeking the glory that was always out of their reach.

The story of Jesus does, ultimately reflect this reality.

Dean Anderson

I'd be careful about the authenticity of the Havamal text that we currently have available.

The various English translations are nearly all taken from Snorri Sturluson's classic 12th century written version of the (normally oral) Eddas.

Sturluson was a Christian, and also was a strong proponent of euhemerism - the hypothesis that the "gods" of mythology are elevated tales of the actions of mortals. As such, any parallels between the stories of the god Odin and the human Jesus may well owe more to Sturluson's deliberate fitting of the saga to his euhemerist hypothesis and less to any similarities to older versions of the Odin story.

gstafleu

Yup, that would explain it. Except that the Wikipedia article does say "The only surviving source for this poem is contained within the Codex Regius and is thought to be no older than c. year 800 ." That would be before Sturluson. Furthermore, the piece I quote is presented by the Wikipedia article as a translation of the Old Norse. So unless Sturluson fiddled with (all versions of) the old Norse...

Gerard Stafleu

Malachi151

That may be, but we still have many problems here. The main problem is that there is a well known phenomenon of Christians and/or natives seeking to gain the favor of Christians, altering old stories to be more like Christians ones. This has been seen over and over again, and is particularly well known in the Americas and Africa when dealing with origin stories.

You have to be very careful with anything that is claimed to have been a story from prior to Christian times or independent of Christianity, which nevertheless comes down to us via Christian sources, or via a population that has already been in contact with Christians for some time.

I don't know the particulars of this case, but I'm just saying that people are rightfully wary of these comparisons and stories because of so many known cases of corruption.

The Evil One

If true, all this would be is a recorded instance of the second of my options - showing how easy it is for important story elements to be lifted from one mythic tradition into another. Sturluson being the one doing the lifting.

Re Malachi's last post - agreed, absolutely, but the very fact that myths get modified in this way tell us something interesting about the plasticity of belief, and that in turn should inform our scepticism WRT christian origin stories.