sschlichter

Angel,

There is no evidence for that whatsoever.

angelo

No?
I think there are many similar myths Of Osiris,Dionyus,Mithras.
All were born on the 25th December before shepherds. All were god made flesh, The father is god and the mother a virgin, the offer of the followers is a chance to be born again, Water is turned into wine, death at eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. After death there's a descent into hell, then on the third day there's a resurrection and an anscension to heaven in glory. the followers await a return as judge during the last days. The death and resrrection are celebrated by a ritual meal of bread and wine which symbolize the body and blood.

These are just a few of the motifs shared between the tales of Osiris-Mithras and the ''biography'' of Jesus.

Source.......''The Jesus Mysteries''

avi

In the context of addressing the question of why atheists seek confirmatory evidence apart from the New Testament for people and events described in the Gospels, the five volumes ostensibly authored by "Irenaeous" at the end of the second century were invoked.

When asked about evidence that Irenaeous' famous "Against Heresies" was written in Greek, not Latin, another name surfaced: Hippolytus. Andrew kindly furnished a link to tertullian.org, and at that excellent web site, one finds this introduction, somewhat incongruous, at least as regards evidence supporting the bona fides of Irenaeous, according to Hippolytus:
Is this a component of that mysterious (at least to me, completely unknown) HCM method--using retranslations into Greek of "difficult" Latin documents in order to comprehend the supposed Greek original?

Isn't it a lot simpler to suppose that some Latin guys in the third or fourth century sat in a smoke filled room for a few months to create these various documents which we have in our possession today--Hippolytus, Irenaeous, etc...?

We don't really know what happened, right? We simply can not produce documentary evidence that is convincing. Then, why must we accept the most convoluted hypothesis to explain the situation, why not the simplest--overt fraud?

Certainly everyone on this forum agrees that the vast population of homo sapiens is extremely gullible, we see this today--everywhere in the world, not just among the hundreds of different sects of Christian believers. Is there any reason to suppose that this gullibility did not exist two millenia earlier?

The Celts, 2+ millenia earlier, according to my reading, once traded with/attacked Rome itself, and Greece, going all the way to Turkey, if I have understood correctly. The name Keltai, if I am not in error, is a Greek word, meaning "barbarian".

So what we don't know, is whether "Irenaeous", or whoever composed his supposed several volumes, was referring to a "barbarous" Greek, or a "barbarous" Latin? As I recall, Julius Caesar conquered all of Gallia, therefore, my inclination would be, without any evidence, to suppose that the whole district, including Lyons, was solidly under Roman domination, for the 225 years preceding "Irenaeous", and accordingly, the educated populace, I would have thought, would be speaking LATIN, not Greek.

In our own times, what happened to Viet Nam after the Americans invaded? Did the educated people there, fifty years later, continue to speak French, (with a "barbarous" accent, i.e. "dialect"), or did they speak the language of the new conquerors, English, if we can be so bold as to proclaim citizens of USA fluent in English?

I believe that "Irenaeous", whether a real person, or a fictitious character, spoke Latin to the people of Lyons, and was referring to their Latin, not their Greek, when he complained of their "barbarous dialect".

avi

Thank you very much for teaching me this. Very interesting...

sschlichter

imagine your gratitude if it were actually true.

lpetrich

Horseshit.

There are oodles of differences between the two.

More horseshit.

Try reading some primary sources and standard references some time. Some pagan deities did indeed do some dying and resurrecting, but the details are different. Osiris was killed and dismembered by the evil god Set, and reassembled and revived by Isis. Etc.

You'd do better to see how Jesus Christ compares to Lord Raglan's Mythic-Hero profile. Lord Raglan recognized all the differences in detail between the heroes he analyzed, so when he created his Mythic-Hero profile, he was careful to avoid such preposterous claims of similarity.

Toto

Not this again. There are in fact some similarities, but your list is based on urban myth and outdated scholarship. Mithras was not born of a virgin, but from a rock. Other gods were only born of "virgins" if you reinterpret that word to mean something other than what we think it means.

I think the last extended discussion of these issues was in the Zeitgeist thread.

gurugeorge

As a mythicist, I'd have to agree.

Jedi Mind Trick

Thank You!

Though there are some similarities, I am so tired of seeing these alleged 1 to 1 similarities; it only shows that the person parroting these things never looked into the scholarship.

Jedi Mind Trick

I'm a Christian (of sorts) and I trust the scriptures of other religions as much as I trust my own. I don't think that any scripture is 100% trustworthy and that all that is true is true no matter who said it. One of the things my belief tells me to do is to rejoice in the truth no matter where it is found.