Chris Weimer

Please explain what specific hellenistic and persian myths you found rehashed in the earliest portions of the NT.

Chris Weimer

I disagree. Anyone, Christian, atheist, or agnostic, can successfully be a top-rate scholar.

jgibson000

And also please explain why it would have been inevitable, as you seem to think it was, that if an HJ existed, he would have had this particular "bunch of myths", whatever they are, attributed to him.

And why only the particular "bunch" you "found"? If an historical Jesus was a myth magnet, why not all Hellenistic and Persian myths. Why some and not others?

Jeffrey Gibson

jgibson000

As an agnostic myself, I'm puzzled by how you have come to this conclusion and whether it is based on a sufficiently significant survey of the scholarship you decry to be taken as an objective statement of fact, let alone as true.

So I wonder if you'd be kind enough to tell us just what the nature and extent of your acquaintance with scholars who are also Christians, and the work that they have produced, actually is?

A golbal claim such as the one you are making presupposes and depends upon for its validity an exceptionally wide and deep familiarity both with Christian scholars of a variety of national and denominational backgrounds and with what has been produced by such scholars over a large span of years.

Do you actually have it? Or are you claiming a knowledge base you actually do not possess and have no right to lay claim to?

Jeffrey Gibson

JAK1

Can Be...

is relative to one’s capacity to be dispassionate, detached, and unbiased. Absent that scholarship particularly in the study of religious myths is suspect.

Those “scholars” who are committed to Roman Catholicism have different notions than “scholars” who are committed to evangelical fundamentalism. That they reach different conclusions demonstrates an absence of consensus. In science, for example, there is enormous agreement consensus on fundamentals. That is not the case with individuals schooled (indoctrinated) in some particular mythology.

Religious scholarship remains an oxymoron.

JAK

Biff the unclean

Oh good grief, the whole thing is just a rehash from conception to resurrection and beyond. There isn’t an original fable in the entire book. Haven’t you ever read any comparative mythology? And it’s all really old. I mentioned Persian and Hellenistic because they had versions of the stories that were contemporary when the bible was written. But even their stories were copies of earlier ones. The infant hero escaping the slaughter of the innocent babies by the evil king is standard mythological fare that can be traced to ancient India.

The Jesus character was cobbled together from stories of a handful of different gods. About half are stories of Dionysus which should explain such weird things as Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding, why the Trinity makes no sense and why, in Acts, Jesus is quoting Euripides Bacchae of all things to Paul.
Didn’t you ever wonder why the celebration of Jesus’ resurrection strangely has the name of the Goddess Easter?
You should pick up a copy of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces it’s pretty basic comparative mythology but it’s a good start.

But we aren’t talking about the mythical Jesus who is the Jesus of the Bible. We are talking about the historic Jesus. The real guy who had all of these myths hung on him. Like Robert Hode, King Henry’s archer who turned robber and lived in the forest of Barnsdale with his wife Matilda, had all those Celtic/Saxon myths hung on him. We call him Robin Hood. But the historic Robin Hood was this Hode guy. The mythic Robin was just that; a myth.
So again I ask, where is this historic Jesus that all these experts are agreeing on? What was his name, what do we know about him?

gnosis92

Correlation does not imply causation. while i agree the virgin birth is a fable, and it has similarities to persian and hellenistic myths, most scholars believe the virgin birth story is the result of a misreading of isaiah in Greek.
I'd like to see some substantive claim that a Jewish author specifically borrowed Dionysus to concoct the Wedding in Cana wine to water pericope. These claims are long on promise, short on substance.

I am curious as to which quote attributed to Jesus in acts you believe comes from Euripides and where in Euripedes.

Biff the unclean

Because they are all classic magical stories that predate the time of Jesus. So we know they didn’t actually happen to Historic Jesus because there is no such thing as magic.
It’s sort of like if I told you how, on my last vacation, I found the lost Ark but had it stolen from me by Nazis who locked me up in a pharaohs tomb that was filled with snakes before I escaped with my trusty bull whip…you would easily pick out that you were dealing with mythic Biff and not historic Biff.

Oh they originally had a bunch more. They took stories from Angra Mainyu to the Mahayana Buddha (Gospel of Thomas). The ones that were not cut by the editors (AKA Ecumenical Councils) were the ones which appealed to the Emperor Constantine I the most. Since he made his capital at Byzantium you would of course expect Dionysus to be a favorite.
They find copies of the alternate source god Jesus every now and then in jars in the desert.

Doug Shaver

I'm not. I'm upset by the absurdity of your argument for the MJ position. Even when it leads to the truth, irrationalism is bad.

There is evidence for and against a historical Jesus. I believe there was no historical Jesus because in my judgment the evidence against it is much stronger than the evidence for it.

Biff the unclean

Plagiarism was not considered the crime in those days that it is today.

You really have to question the honesty of such “scholars” then. Virgin birth was a classical mythological motif. The virgin human mother conceiving the hero/demigod by a God is standard fare. There is no need to “misread” something, the same scenario is already repeated again and again in both the Greek and the Roman mythologies.

I never said that a Jewish writer did. The Gospel writer was reworking the Dionysian holy day of turning a spring on the island of Andros into wine to celebrate Hieros gamos the “sacred marriage" of Zeus and Hera. For Dionysus it was the start of his ministry, the "birth of the god in man."

Jesus repeats Dionysus’ famous “kicking at pricks” speech. In fact he repeats the entire epiphany on the road to Thebes scene with Paul filling in for the original character Pentheus and Damascus for Thebes. Apparently “Luke” was a theater goer who loved Bacchae which was already hundreds of years old when he copied it.


I'm still waiting to hear about this historic Jesus all the experts agree on. Why do you folks keep bring up the mythic one? I'm not claiming there is not HJ too, I'm just stating that I've never heard of him. So please tell me his name at least.