skepticdude

But Acharya's arguments are the weakest in the skeptical repertoire. I watched the whole debate. I hold to the copycat thesis, I would not have given arguments that Holding mentioned. Holding said it would be ridiculous to think Mithras was a virgin-birth parallel to Jesus, by carping that being born from a rock constitutes "virgin-birth". I know of no copycat advocate who would compare birth from a rock with birth from a woman. Holding was attacking weak arguments and strawmen only.

Christians never consider that their position makes all the pagan gods unique. After all, they cannot show a genealogical dependence between them, so each one must have been created entirely free of the culture that influenced the monster's first story-tellers.

Christians also never quite explained the force of the argument from uniqueness. Given their above-stated failures to show interdependence between the pagan god stories themselves, how exactly does the uniqueness of Jesus contribute ANYTHING to his probable historicity as god-man? What exactly does the argument from uniqueness prove? As far as I can see, classic metal lighters.

Hold it right there...if the gospels are 100% historically true, why would Jesus' attributes necessarily have similarities? I caught Holding on that point years ago in a debate and he never answered it.

The only way to defend the necessity of similarities is to answer as Holding did; it's what people expected of god-men. That makes the problem worse: What... the gospel authors were therefore describing this god-man in conformity to what that culture expected such beings to be like? Sounds like invention and copycat to me! There is no reason whatsoever for Jesus to have necessary similarities to other god-men, except on the hypothesis that the storytellers knew they'd have to apply such common attributes to their own story hero to give the report some chance of taking root and becoming popular.

They don't really need to be examined, if the parallels are close enough. Unless you are willing to say Perseus' birth story wasn't conformed by his first story-tellers to the expectations of the hearers, but "just happens" to "sound" similar to the miracle-births of other similar gods, then you have no reason to think Jesus' birth story was any more free of such conformist fabrication. What...it "just so happens" that Jesus really was born in a way that the pagan culture would expect for other god-men? Sorry, that's too much of a stretch.

Yeah, all of them, because his rebuttals don't adequately answer your own observation; namely, why there would "necessarily" be any similarlities. What fact of reality would make similarities "necessary"?

Wrong, when his non-uniqueness is established, he is by definition a common man, thus nothing close to what the gospels say he is. Christians better hope the non-uniqueness argument fails. Their Jesus surely wasn't just any ol' common dude, was he!?

Well I'm no scholar, but I'm specifically talking about Osiris. His being ripped apart to insure he'd stay dead is a unique story element, but uniqueness means nothing, as we agree. You must then agree that apologists who argue from uniqueness, like McDowell, thereby blunder?

Which are especially weak arguments, which is why my original criticism stands, namely, Holding chose to address the weakest arguments. I know of no scholar at infidels.org who would use the work of F and G the way they'd use the work of recognized scholars in other fields.

But Holding wasn't addressing the more general similarities. He didn't dare try to explain why there would need to be some similarities. If Jesus really were a god-man, there is no necessary reason why his attributes would need to echo those of other god-men. If similarities convince you that the Perseus story was probably influenced by earlier myths, then you have no reason to think Jesus is a different case.

Yeah, McDowell. Of course, refuting McDowell hurts the Christian case about as much as refuting Archyra and Feke/Gandy hurts the skeptic's case.

But his pagan audience would know whether a similarity he mentioned, was less accute than he said, and would easily spot the embellishment. Justin would know that, and is therefore not likely to say something he knew his audience knew wasn't true.

The very fact that Justin resorted to this especially ridiculous "retroactive mimicry" argument is an assurance that he knew the parallels to Jesus pre-dated Jesus, and was therefore pressed to offer this absurd explanation. If the parallel god-men stories came AFTER Jesus, Justin could have won the argument easily by saying "Jesus was the first, the other who are similar to him have simply copied the story!" Sorry, that's not the case.

ALL of them. God-men were expected by that pagan culture to do wonderous deeds, and Jesus fills that expectation perfectly. He does all sorts of neat tricks that dazzle the delights of skeptics everywhere, so did all other god-men.

Jesus also parallels the earlier god-men by being in trouble with his own Father. Matthew 26:39, Jesus expresses a desire to have the cup pass from him, when in fact it was never the Father's will that Jesus avoid his fate. Jesus even specifies "NOT my will but yours be done", which doesn't makes sense unless his will was contrary to the Father's, and he simply went along reluctantly. Reluctance toward authority is a sign of two opposed wills. Bye Bye trinity doctrine.

GakuseiDon

Quite a few mythicists advocate that. I argued against one myself last year here. As in that thread, many use Joseph Campbell's comment that the "Generative Rock" that Mithras was born from represented a "virgin birth".

Campbell, Joseph (1964). The Masks of God: Occidental Mythology. Viking Press. pp. 260-61.

"Mithra...was born beside a sacred stream beneath a sacred tree. In works of art he is shown emerging as a naked child from the "Generative Rock," wearing his Phrygian cap, bearing a torch, and armed with a knife.....The earth has given birth - a virgin birth- to the archetypal Man."

Yes, I agree, "unique therefore true" is a bad argument, if that is all they are using.

I don't think there is much in the way of recoverable historical details in the Gospels myself. Many of the attributes of Jesus appear influenced or modelled from the OT.

I certainly do, if that is all they have.

No, he was trying to CONVINCE the pagans that the similarities existed. That's why he stressed "We propound nothing different to you guys!" Remember, his reason for why the pagans didn't see the similarities was because the devil had misunderstood the OT.

Fair enough.

Analyst

Wasn't one of these man-gods born from a thigh? Apparently the one thing you can't be is to be born from a well used vagina!

Ironically all of these births by parthenogenesis ignore the real fact - that the child would have to be female.

andrewcriddle

Dionysos

Andrew Criddle

Chili

It has to be male because life is first created ex nihilo in the conscious mind of the male and is conceived by the sperm first (later known as the Immaculate Conception or Elizabeth in Matthew) to be transported to the female where it now becomes a hu-man being so conceived in sin by the magnetic attraction between a pair of opposites. They call it love but hate will do it too, with philia being the neuter form of a dud without the polar attraction ('fxxx for fun' in a love-less, life-less society = the basis for the old "for procreation only" argument).

So all we have here is the rebirth of the sperm itself wherein the Virgin is the undefiled make-up of the man that can now be identified as Joseph the upright sinner 'as' Jew with a mandate to find out who he really is . . . because the Immaculate Conception is real and prior to us by nature itself = hence the perennial question "who am I."

The difference between these two is made clear in the lineage of Joseph, with Matthew giving us the lineage of the Jew and Luke the parthenocarpic lineage of the Jew.

Chili

But so do enlightened imposters and use it more so even to show that they are spiritually enriched (Rev.13:13). Just go to a charismatic event and they will be delighted to show you what they can do.

Analyst

In my youth, and to this day, there are preachers going around doing magic tricks, chalk talks and the like to entertain children in the hope of sucking them in to their own delusions. And then there's the 'Creation Museum'.

Chili

And that delusions is permanent for them while for Luke's Jesus it ended after 42 months (Rev.13:5) instead of 40 years (or longer) and still die nonetheless.

In this sense are they the same to make Galilee the place (read 'state of mind') where this all happens. The difference between the two is that in the first beast of Rev.13 the dragon (we call her Mary or Elizabeth) had give its authority to the beast (in Luke 1:25), while the second beast in Rev.13:11 [still] spoke like a dragon (much like Macbeth and Lady Macbeth as the dual nature of a fornicated Jesus who was "from his mother's womb untimley ripped" = fornicated).

The 'sucked in' children can also be adults who so become the nourishment to reinforce his delusion and that is how the nation is set on fire for the Lord in the 'god delusion' that finds "no relief by day or by night" (Rev.14:11), because of what I call 'spiritual fornication.' This conclusion is very evident which in turn becomes the point of departure for the 'no fornication' argument.

aa5874

It is not true that other people did not see the similarities.

In Dialogue with Trypho 67, Trypho did expose similarities, which he called fables of the Greeks.

And later in the same passage Trypho declared, Dialogue with Trypho 67 Unless it is claimed that Jesus of the NT was actually born of a virgin, died and resurrected, in which case the similarities would be irrelevant, it is virtually impossible to show that the authors who manufactured Jesus did not use information already available.

Chili

But it is not a matter of manufactoring Jesus but of expressing Jesus who was the same reality in truth that is solid as a rock or solid as water depending on if you want to plough through it or walk on top of it.