Clivedurdle

jj what exactly is modern about the concept of Achilles being flawed? The gods definitely were not perfect!

I was also very careful to note that Nazarenus probably has pushed the boat out on who and why and how, but please show me where the reconstruction of the passion as a play is crackpot? Argument by insult!

I used to believe in Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, I can still speak in tongues.

Sorry, this religion is human to the core. We are probably looking at something that as a work of art is brilliant at getting to our guts in terms of its power.

But that is further evidence of what us humans can do! And we repeat the story all the time with our modern tales.

Clivedurdle

jj, why does your profile under basic beliefs say "under construction"? Unless I have completely misread you your comments feel like you have very strong (xian?)views!

Clivedurdle

What exactly has noble failure got to do with hubris or Icarus for example? Methinks you are limiting the expressions of human frailties and glories they were all very conscious of! Why should not someone with similar skills to Seneca invent a hero who suffered an unheroic death?

Especially as satire was very popular.....

jjramsey

Nothing. What is modern is the idea of heroes not being larger-than-life, romanticizing the underdog, and so on. You seem to be confusing the flaws used to add texture to modern-day heroes with the sometimes stylized, melodramatic, or contrived tragic flaws of more ancient ones.

We have elaborate, unsupported speculation, based in part on outdated sources like J. M. Robertson, and described as "daring" by its authors. This sets off my crackpot bells.

So? If anything, this makes you more vulnerable to believing fringe ideas that support your new worldview. I have noticed that fundies who deconvert risk keeping the mindset that they had as fundies.

Human to the core, yes. I wouldn't credit it overall with brilliance, though. The success of Christianity had more to do with the persistence of its relatively few adherents in the first few centuries, and with Constantine later on.

I strongly believe that one should believe things because they are a good fit to reality and not because they fit with what one wants to believe. Mythicism is good at solving pseudoproblems like the purported chasm between Paul and the Gospels, but it is terrible at explaining what a historicist view handles trivially, like the lack of OT references to Nazareth despite Matthew's implication to the contrary, or why the three "towns" denounced in Matt. 11:20-24 happened to be walking distance from each other, and one of them not even a town, but a village.

youngalexander

Google "Jesus as king".
You will find any number of sites which proclaim that Jesus was born king in the Davidic line and ruled while he was alive as "king of the Jews". The purpose of this lesson is to uphold the Bible teaching that Jesus now reigns as king and has been reigning since the first century.
, that was just the first.

Before I proceed, we need to remind ourselves of a few things.
1. Raglan never applied his Hero Pattern to Jesus. Despite your protestation to the contrary I doubt very much that it figured in his motivations.
2. It was Dundes the folklorist who did so.

Folklore is characterised by multiple existence and variation and the Bible is permeated with multiple existence and variation. This is especially true of the NT Jesus narratives that provide variations containing numerous significant contradictions. It is not a question of my take upon these narratives, but rather that believing Christians have such views and proclaim them. All the variations are grist to the folkloristic mill.

Thus there is no reason why a mythicist should not point them out as traits that fit the Raglan Hero Pattern.

What you are indulging in is the same old game of denial by narrow definition that has been employed for the last two centuries. I asked you in the previous post why we should not apply such narrow definitions to the Jesus narratives? We might say, for instance, that since the genealogies given in Matthew and Luke are clearly incompatible then they cannot possibly be referring to the same person. Well, they might apply perhaps if the person were mythical, but most assuredly not if they were to be considered historical. I could go on, increasing the differentiation to enumerate multiple Jesi.

Yet you would reject this. Why? Perhaps you would accuse me of making a "difference without distinction" fallacy. In that case you may just be correct. As indeed I am when I accuse you of the same fallacy when you deny the "ideal type" represented by the Hero Pattern that Jesus fits like a glove.

Of course, it was not always thus. Doherty puts it rather succinctly

"we have the witness of a writer like Celsus, around 160-180, whom Origen did his best to refute. He accused the Christians of having nothing new, of borrowing or stealing everything from the widespread myths of the time. Then we have Christianity's own apologists like Justin and Tertullian being forced to deal with such accusations, not by denying that the mysteries had possessed such features before Christianity came along, but by admitting that while they did predate Christ, they were the responsibility of Satan and his demons who counterfeited them ahead of time."

That sort of thing will not wash in these enlightened times. Neither will the 'narrow definition' denial.

jjramsey

As you quoted from Dundes, "he had thought of Jesus in connection with the hero pattern, but that he had no wish to risk upsetting anyone and therefore he elected to avoid even so much as mentioning the issue." That's pretty clear. Raglan thought of Jesus in connection with the hero pattern, but avoided mentioning him in connection with Jesus for fear of social reprisal. That suggests that it did figure in his motivations.

Please. Demanding that a king be a king, a royal virgin be a royal virgin, a beast be a beast, and subjects be subjects is not unreasonable.

Or we can say that the genealogies were attempts to cook up a Davidic ancestry for Jesus, just as the birth narratives were attempts to rewrite history to place Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. Just as the fabricated birth narratives in the gospels of Matthew and Luke don't quite mesh together, the fabricated genealogies also don't mesh, only there's less room for ambiguity in genealogies, so the contradictions end up more clear-cut. You're dealing with a historicist, not an inerrantist.

Obviously I don't agree with GakuseiDon on everything, but he pointed out in his review of The God Who Wasn't There that "diabolical mimicry," at least as Justin used it, was not a technique to explain away parallels with paganism that might indicate derivation, but an attempt to show that Christianity was not novel by using stretched parallels between pagan myths and Christianity. Doherty has misread Justin Martyr.

Your quote of Doherty was from his critique of Mike Licona's review of The God Who Wasn't There. Unfortunately, the text attributed to Celsus in that critique was from R. J. Hoffman's translation, which Roger Pearse has discussed. This is Doherty's quote from Hoffman: "Are these distinctive happenings unique to the Christians--and if so, how are they unique? Or are ours to be accounted myths and theirs believed? In truth, there is nothing at all unusual about what Christians believe." Another Jesus-myth site has an extended form of the quote:

This is apparently derived from this part of Book II, Chapter LV in Contra Celsus:

For Celsus, Christianity was "nothing new" in the sense that its claims were no more credible to him then the other "juggling tricks" of which he heard. I would also point out that Celsus argued not that Jesus himself was a myth, but that he was not as the Christians claimed him to be. Doherty has also misread Celsus.

GakuseiDon

Actually, Justin was attempting to show that the parallels were between pagan myths and Old Testament stories. Christianity, in effect, pre-dated the pagan myths, according to early apologists.

But Justin believed that Satan misunderstood the OT prophecies of the coming Messiah, which is why the pagans couldn't see the similarites. (I'd actually started a new thread on the "diabolical mimicry" question as I didn't want to derail this one).

Amaleq13

You seem to me to be reading things into that quote a bit. There is nothing in it to suggest that the connection occurred to him prior to creating the scale let alone that it was a motivating factor.

lpetrich

Yes he does, and it's necessary to do so in order for anyone to get a high score. For a good introduction to this question, check out In Quest of the Hero, which contains some of Raglan's and Dundes's own writings.

I'll analyze GakuseiDon's arguments and give scorings for JC and some other mythic heroes: Moses, Romulus, Hercules, and Krishna.

Heroes are usually their mothers' first or only children.

JC: 0.5
Moses: 0.5 (a Levite)
Romulus: 1 - Rhea Silvia, daughter of King Numitor
Hercules: 1 - Alcmene, daughter of King Electryon of Tiryns
Krishna: 0.5 - Devaki, daughter of the very rich Devaka and sister of wicked King Kamsa; however, she had seven sons before Krishna.

Although Joseph was a commoner, both Matthew and Luke attempt to demonstrate that he's descended on the male line from King David and is therefore a successor of him.

JC: 1
Moses: 0.5 (a Levite)
Romulus: 1 - King Amulius (in some versions)
Hercules: 1 - King Amphitryon
Krishna: 1 - Vasudeva, son of sort-of-king Surasena

JC: 0
Moses: 0
Romulus: 1 - King Amulius was Rhea Silvia's uncle
Hercules: 1 - first cousin
Krishna: 0

JC: 1
Moses: 0
Romulus: 1 - Rhea Silvia was made a Vestal Virgin
Hercules: 1 - hard to tell
Krishna: 1

JC: 1
Moses: 0
Romulus: 1 - Mars
Hercules: 1 - Zeus, impersonating Amphitryon
Krishna: 1 - Vishnu

JC: 1 - King Herod
Moses: 1 - the Pharaoh
Romulus: 1 - King Amulius
Hercules: 1 - Hera, his aunt and stepmother
Krishna: 1 - King Kamsa

JC: 1 - his parent flee with him
Moses: 1 - floated down the river
Romulus: 1 - floated down the river
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 1 - was switched with the girl Yogamaya

JC: 0.5 - part of his childhood is in Egypt
Moses: 1 - he was raised in the Egyptian royal court
Romulus: 1 - raised by a wolf, then by a human peasant family
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 1 - raised by commoners Yasoda and Nanda

This ought to be clarified; we seldom learn as much about someone's childhood as compared to their adulthood. However, if one learns much more about someone's infancy than their childhood, as seems to be the case for many mythic heroes, then that is reasonable. We also may want to make an exception for child-prodigy stories, like Jesus Christ in the Temple (Luke).

JC: 1 - only stories of great precocity
Moses: 1
Romulus: 1
Hercules: 1
Krishna: 0 - dancing, driving out demons, cavorting with gopis

He goes to where he'll be spending his time preaching and working miracles.

JC: 1 - in the wilderness, then off to Galilee
Moses: 1
Romulus: 1
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 1 - he accepts a wrestling-match challenge issued by King Kamsa.

He successfully resists the Devil's temptations, and the Devil gives up.

JC: 1
Moses: 1 - first, an Egyptian overseer, then the Pharaoh himself
Romulus: 1 - he helps Numitor defeat Amulius
Hercules: 1 - he kills a lion, among other feats
Krishna: 1 - he wins, but after King Kamsa kills his family, he kills Kamsa

Mary Magdalene, his extracanonically-rumored girlfriend, is a commoner without anything special about her.

JC: 0
Moses: 1 - the daughter of a priest of Midian
Romulus: 0 - nothing special about Hersilia
Hercules: 1 - King Creon's daughter Megara
Krishna: 1 - several

We have to be a bit broad about this -- perhaps "leader" would do.

JC: 1
Moses: 1
Romulus: 1 - he founds Rome and becomes its first leader
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 1

He "reigned" in the sense of having lots of followers who'd follow him around.

JC: 1
Moses: 1
Romulus: 0 - He led various wars, like the kidnapping of the Sabine women
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 0 - the Kurukshetra War

They are laws in an informal sense; some of them have even been treated as laws in a formal sense, like prohibition of divorce.

JC: 1
Moses: 1
Romulus: 1 - he set up Rome's laws and institutions, like the Senate
Hercules: 0
Krishna: 1 - Bhagavad-Gita

JC: 1
Moses: 1 - he isn't allowed into the Promised Land
Romulus: 1 - in some versions, he turns bad
Hercules: 1 - King Eurystheus becomes displeased with him
Krishna: 1 - his family misbehaves, leading to their destruction

He is put on trial and humiliated; his disciples flee.

JC: 1
Moses: 1 - he is stuck in Moab
Romulus: 1 - in those versions, the Senate condemned him
Hercules: 1 - and sentences him to performing his Twelve Labors
Krishna: 1 - he wanders off

I think he did -- dying in a few hours is rather atypical of crucifixion. And it is very atypical of someone who had worked many miracles over his career, like turning water into wine, walking on water, conjuring up food and drink, driving out demons, zapping a fig tree, and raising the dead. Why didn't he simply jump off that cross?

JC: 1
Moses: 1 - he becomes mysteriously ill after 120 years of good health
Romulus: 1 - in a storm / the Senate executing and dismembering him
Hercules: 1 - he disappears from his funeral pyre
Krishna: 0.5 - shot in the foot by an archer named Jara ("old age")

JC: 1 - Golgotha
Moses: 1 - Mt. Pisgah
Romulus: 0 - Capra Palus (Goat's Marsh) was likely flat
Hercules: 1 - Mt. Oeta
Krishna: 0 - in a forest by the seashore

It's worth counting if the hero had had no children.

JC: 1
Moses: 1
Romulus: 1
Hercules: 1
Krishna: 1

JC: 1 - only temporarily
Moses: 0
Romulus: 1 - become the god Quirinus
Hercules: 1
Krishna: 1 - lifted up into heaven

JC: 1
Moses: 0
Romulus: 1 - Lapis Niger (Black Rock) in Rome's Forum
Hercules: 1 - temples to him
Krishna: 1 - several places

Combined scores:

JC: 19
Moses: 16
Romulus: 19
Hercules: 16
Krishna: 17

Several of Lord Raglan's examples are also not "kings" in the strict sense.

jjramsey

As I said before, that "royal virgin" is one of his criteria is an indication that Jesus' purported life was one of his inputs in creating the scale. It's a criteria that fits the Jesus of the Gospels easily, but not most of the classic heroes. If Raglan wanted to tighten up his pattern and have it fit more heroes better, he could have dispensed with the "virgin" bit.