Malachi151

There is a lot of Jesus Myth trash floating around the internet, and it strikes me that this field of study is perhaps getting a little too trashy for its own good.

Perhaps its about time that a pro-Jesus Myth scholar wrote a good solid article that separates the wheat from the chaff so to speak.

I think that a few things up for immediate rebuttal are books like The Jesus Mysteries and The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, which, now that I have fully read, I disagree with Carrier's review of.

I think that there is way too much emphasis on "pagan" influences on the Jesus story, and find most of these claims about Jesus being a copy-cat of dozens of other "pagan" figures to be mostly mis-directional nonsense.

Can we get a collection going here of spurious JM claims which need to be refuted in order to clean up the field?

mountainman

So then, my dear friend, you find worthy of no little admiration the parallel which, embellished with many marvels, this author has drawn between the man of Tyana arid our own Saviour and teacher.

Perhaps we should commence with the JM claims
which are either harmful and/or disreputable?

GakuseiDon

Perhaps it may be better to just deal with spurious points, since I don't think you'll be able to refute the claims themselves. But spurious points on both sides should be addressed so they don't keep clouding debates.

As for addressing claims: Unfortunately, Robert Price withdraw his earlier review of Acharya's "Christ Conspiracy" from his board, and has recently written a strangely almost apologetic review of Acharya's "Suns of God". Apparently Acharya and Price had a bit of a falling out over Price's last review, but they have now come to an understanding. Price appears to bend over backwards to make sure that he isn't too negative about Acharya's latest book, and the result comes across as quite uneven.

The review is hosted on Acharya's website:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/price-sog-review.html

The very learned Acharya S has spoken again. In a sequel to her wide-ranging The Christ Conspiracy, she has redoubled her efforts to show the solar - that is, the astro-theological - basis of all religions and mythologies, and to demonstrate that the great savior figures of the world's religions are late historicizations of the sacred sun myths. At the outset, let me make clear that I regard Acharya ("the Teacher," as she was dubbed by friends and students) as a colleague and fellow-laborer in the field of Christ-Myth scholarship. The issues over which she and I differ are secondary, though important and fascinating. In my review (which I fear has done at least as much harm as it may have done good) of her previous book, I focused on our differences, disliking to be held responsible for certain specific views set forth by one with whom I am nonetheless in fundamental agreement. Some readers have opportunistically used my review out of context in order to rebut views on which Acharya and I are in fact in basic accord. So, hoping to avoid such a reading this time out, I would like to underline the fact that our differences over secondary points are legitimate differences in the way we weigh the evidence. I hope that readers of my review will take these differences as signals of where more research is necessary on all our parts. I know Acharya has given me many new questions and much to think about. That was true of her first book and equally true of this one. I do not mind acknowledging her as my teacher as well...

First, her catalogue of parallels is so impressive as to press home the question: how can all these disparate cultures have come up, independently, with ceremonial crosses, sacrificed saviors, common myth-plots, etc.? Must these things not all be analogous responses by human brains, built the same way all over the earth, to the same stimulus? And what might that stimulus have been? It had to be something available to everybody, everywhere: Every eye shall see him. What else but the movements of the sun and the other lights through the heavens? We know astrology/astronomy to have been widespread across the ancient globe, and when we find such a correspondence among myths and ritual symbols, too, we naturally trace them to the same source. I don't believe I had ever faced the force of this argument before reading this book. Some might prefer to advance a Jungian explanation, but that is pretty much another way of saying the same thing: the deep structures of the mind will spit out the same creations faced with the same raw data. And in this case, that data would seem to have been astronomical...

Acharya also argues that the far-flung similarities between myths and faiths are the result of dissemination. There was borrowing, cross-pollination, at least where travel was imaginable. She accepts the theories of various nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars to the effect that just about all ancient languages (at least including Hebrew, Welsh, and Sanskrit) were cognate cousins, and that faith communities as seemingly disparate as Buddhism, Druidism, and Essenism represented different branches of a single denomination whose priests were sometimes in communication with one another. It was a conclave of such secret brotherhoods that invented Christianity. Here, I confess, I am way over my head. I am no linguist, much less a comparative linguist. Some of the writers Acharya cites seem to have been grinding an ax, e.g., to demonstrate that all Western culture had roots in Ireland, including the Bible. She quotes Freemasonry apologists who have their own reasons for wanting to see Egyptian connections all over the place. But motive matters not. They might be right anyway. But I can't say. I know I was quite surprised reading Jaan Puhvel's comprehensive Comparative Mythology to see how modern scholarship does trace a wide arc of linguistic and mythic dissemination from India to Ireland. But does Phoenician Baal equal Irish Bel? Do the Samana ascetics of India have anything to do with Semitic sun-worship? I suspect a lot of this amounts to lucky false cognates. But I can't say. I plead ignorance.

Does anyone else find those last few sentences kind of weird? "They might be right anyway. But I can't say" ... "I suspect a lot of this amounts to lucky false cognates. But I can't say."

neilgodfrey

If you fully read The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark you will know that Dennis MacDonald is not a JM'er. MacDonald treats the Greek influence on Mark in the same way as he and others treat the OT literary influence. He is no more a mythicist than any other scholar who admits to the OT influence in the way the Jesus story is presented. Yes he speaks of the myth of Jesus but only in the same sense of "myth" as most other biblical scholars do -- in its technical sense. They do not deny -- they fully embrace -- the historicity of Jesus.

Neil Godfrey
http://vridar.wordpress.com

Malachi151

True, that was a confusing point on my part. His claims are still nonsense I think though.

jakejonesiv

You better add Justin Martyr to the list of those you want to refute.

And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter.

Jake Jones IV

aa5874

Are looking for a pro-Jesus Myth that is not trashy to you? It is evident that what appears to be trashy to you may not be others.

From statistics alone, at least 2 billion 'believers' regard JM as trash, and these 'believers' also regard each other opposing belief or view as trash.

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

gstafleu

What I find really weird is the surprise Price evinces at reading things that are far from original with Acharya S. Take the second paragraph you quoted: "First, her catalogue of parallels is so impressive as to press home the question..." Well, yes, it no doubt is. It also has been known since the beginning of the 20th century, roughly. That is when books like Fraser's The Golden Bough and Arthur Drew's The Christ Myth were written. Then around the middle of the century Joseph Campbell repeatedly and convincingly pointed out the same thing in great detail. And NT scholars have never heard of this? Incredible. "I don't believe I had ever faced the force of this argument before reading this book" he says. Well, if you don't read the relevant literature you probably won't find the arguments, I'll have to give him that.

His second paragraph starts with "Acharya also argues that the far-flung similarities between myths and faiths are the result of dissemination." Oh gee. That was exactly what Campbell argued in great detail with lots of examples in the 60's. But maybe I'm being to harsh here. Doherty, in his novel version of the Jesus Puzzle, has his lead character remark how apparently lots of arguments that show the mythical origins of the Jesus story keep being discovered time and again, after which they are repressed time and again by the vested interests. The result of this is, his character points out, that any JM researcher has to keep reinventing the wheel. If Price has now discovered there is such a thing as a wheel, well, that would be progress.

I also don't want to sound to harsh about Acharya S. If she manages to finally get some attention to what has been known for a long time, she performs a valuable service. Now like some people on our forum who turn a reasonable hill into a speculative mountain, Acharya tends, judging by her previous book, to get carried away a little every now and then. So when she says that "Buddhism, Druidism, and Essenism represented different branches of a single denomination whose priests were sometimes in communication with one another" as Price has it, she may be overstating her case. No doubt these three share common elements, and we may be able to trace these back to a common root. But to say they are a single denomination may be a bit much.

I wonder if that is the problem when it comes to seeing Christianity as a mythology. There can be little doubt that it is a mythology and that it shares a lot with other mythologies. But I wonder if there isn't a tendency to take one or more of these similarities and raise them to absolutes. This is done both by the defenders, who get carried away, and the attackers of the mythological similarities; the latter use the technique to set up straw men in the hope that exaggerating the importance and scope of the similarities will disqualify the similarities that are actually there.

I think I'm with Roger Pearse here: let the mythologies speak for themselves without us assigning all kinds of a priori interpretations to them, and let us see where that takes us. That means both that we shouldn't dismiss the common elements where we find them and that we should not raise them to the one and only absolute of any given mythology. All mythologies share common elements, but they all use them in their own way. Neither the commonalities nor the singularities are by themselves the whole story: we should always look at the combination of both.

Gerard Stafleu

Zeichman

I would DEFINITELY NOT include Dr. MacDonald on any list of dubious scholarship.

Unfortunately, I think this topic is way too subjective. What makes Doherty much better than others? Reading his chapter on Q, it's clear that he often either doesn't understand Kloppenborg's hypothesis, or is simply intellectually dishonest and doesn't let others know that he undermines its premises with his own arguments. Before someone gets up in arms over me saying that, specific examples:
p177: an oral Q1 suggested
p162-163: equating tradition-history with compositional history
p153: Q order shifted by redactor


Other times he is simply wrong:
158/159: "scarcely a Jewish idea in Q1." - what of Q 16:16(which he inexplicably places in Q2 p166)? or of the obvious allusion to Isaiah in Q 6:20ff? or to the Elijah allusion (i've forgotten the verses)? or of the oddness of gentiles being exemplary characters (6:33f, 12:30)?
147/152:That scholars describe Q1 as authentic and all the rest of Q as inauthentic - Wrong. Kloppenborg has argued against such a use of Q's stratigraphy, and Crossan, the Jesus Seminar and other find a good amount of authentic material (admittedly less than Q1) in Q2. But such reductionistic uses of Q are not used by the Jesus Seminar, which he cites as an example.
146: he says the Son of man will come at the end of the world to judge - NOWHERE in Q does the Son of Man judge anyone. I'll assume that he was just being sloppy, as this doesn't play strongly into what he says later.

Other times he makes extremely controversial suggestions and does not justify them sufficiently:
-Thomas and Q being related
-Q2 community had nothing to do with Q1 community
-Q1 community was not Jewish
-Q1 IS cynic is a GROSS misunderstanding of the cynic hypothesis (though, he does often, properly, refer to them as cynic-LIKE)
-Q3 author invented Jesus

I could cite many more examples of each of these categories, but I hope this suffices to demonstrate the subjectivity of this thread's goal.

Malachi151

I agree with Gerard Stafleu.

I find all of the comparisons to various pagan myths distracting and counter productive. I know that a lot of people like these comparisons, but most of them are tedious, stretched way to thin, and much weaker than other Jewish themes and influences.

It's like the Homeric Epics book, I mean the problem is that I can point to Jewish stories that the themes come from that are obviously a much stronger influence.

I think that before this field can be come really scholarly a lot of these pagan comparisons have to be dropped.

The stuff by Drews and Doherty is good because it focuses a lot on Paul and the scriptures, which is good I think, but as pointed out, there is still too much focus on non-Jewish stuff.

I think that there is some way that mystery religions fit into this, but not in the way that most people claim. I think early "Christianity" was a Jewish mystery religion, not that early Christianity was a Greek mystery religion with a Jewish name.

All of the major themes and ideas in the New Testament can be found in the Old Testament, that's the best place to look for the basis of Christianity, not Homer, not Greek religion, etc.