Steven Carr

I shall quote Clement again.

'Let us consider, beloved, how the Lord continually proves to us that there shall be a future resurrection, of which He has rendered the Lord Jesus Christ the first-fruits by raising Him from the dead. Let us contemplate, beloved, the resurrection which is at all times taking place.

Day and night declare to us a resurrection. The night sinks to sleep, and the day arises; the day [again] departs, and the night comes on.


Let us behold the fruits [of the earth], how the sowing of grain takes place. The sower goes forth, and casts it into the ground; and the seed being thus scattered, though dry and naked when it fell upon the earth, is gradually dissolved. Then out of its dissolution the mighty power of the providence of the Lord raises it up again, and from one seed many arise and bring forth fruit.

'Day and night' - how cyclic do you want?

And when do sowers sow seed, if not on a cyclic basis?

Miller tells us that Christian conceptions of resurrection never involved the pagan ideas of cyclic rebirth.

This is not so.

youngalexander

My quick answer to your quick answer is to confirm what you say. However, I have also consulted Raglan who says that {Oedipus} Jocasta (1) is a princess, {Romulus} Rhea (1) is a royal virgin, {Hercules} Alcmene (1) is a royal virgin, {Jason} Alcimede (1) is a princess, {Bellerphon} Eurymede (1) is a princess, {Pelops} Dione (1) a demigoddess, {Zeus} Rhea (1) a godess, {Joseph} Rachel (1) a patriarch, {Moses} (1&2) principal family of the Levites, {Watu Gunung} Sinta (1) a princess, {Nyikang} Nyikaia (1) a crocadile princess, {Siegfried} Siglinde (1) a princess, and {Arthur} (1) a princess. I have left out the others Theseus, Peseus, Asclepios, Dionysus, Apollo and Llew Llawgyffes who are all designated as royal virgin births.

Now, since it is Raglans scheme, and he did not dream it up overnight, it is quite clear that the category 'royal virgin' caters for a multitude of sins. I say that you are nitpicking. What does Raglan say?

"The fact that the life of a hero of tradition can be divided up into a series of well-marked features and incidents - I have taken twenty-two, but it would be easy to take more - strongly suggests a ritual pattern"

This from pg.148 of IQotH. I have not quoted the rest, for you will like it even less. Thus to Jesus;
No. The full Raglan list I gave above. Jesus is absent! Why so? Pg.180 IQotH 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"

As it happens, we have reached a development where "upsetting anyone" is quite on the cards.
The patterns are not vague. We are discussing (w/r Jesus) the ANE culture developed over hundreds (thousands?) of years encompassing a wide and extremely volatile geographical/sociological/political/religious range. That Oedipus and Moses get similar scores ought to alert you to the realisation that their mythic narratives are almost identical in structure.

Steven Carr

Presumably, if JJ Ramsey is right, then when the villagers told Paul and Barnabas that they thought they were Zeus and Hermes, Paul would have said 'Who?'

Doesn't Acts record Jesus as quoting a line from classic Greek to Paul?

jjramsey

With the exception of Luke, they did not know Greek well; their style was pretty bad. This would be consistent with them learning Greek outside of the schooling context where they would have learned pagan myths, etc.

Paul, I'm sure, did know, but he's an educated Roman citizen, and as I pointed out, he seemed to prefer to work from Greek philosophy rather than Greek myth. A Galilean fisherman like Peter would have been another story, as would Palestinian peasant Jews in general.

Given the folk memory of the Maccabees, who tried to cleanse Judaea of the Syrian Greek paganism less than a couple centuries earlier, I'd be skeptical that you were looking at actual syncretism of pagan myth into Judaism rather than more superficial use of pagan imagery.

Greek religious philosophical thought is not the same as Greek myth.

I already mentioned, "Magic (and esp. magical medicine) involves much more ritual and rigamarole." More specifically, in magic, one tended to see long incantations, often with nonsense syllables, and/or complex rituals done by rote.

You were comparing that with the fancier efforts of a "doctor or alchemist," which seemed pretty silly.

Notice that you had to add "help from the martyrs and saints" to make the connection, and again, there is problem of the cures in the temple of Aesclepius often being quasi-medical, that is, using herbs, surgery, etc.

Christians destroyed a lot of pagan artifacts, yet you are writing as if they singled out Aesclepius.

And this is exactly the problem. From Allen Glenn's Prophecy for Dummies:

The word "king" is then interpreted to mean

The term "royal virgin" has a similar problem.

I think you showed my point. Raglan was likely inspired by the stories of Jesus.

When the individual pieces of the pattern are vague enough, then the whole pattern becomes vague. Again, look at what Allen Glenn did in his Prophecy for Dummies.

Day and night is cyclic, but doesn't mirror the supposed seasonal dying-rising god schema. Clement's seed metaphor is about the non-cyclic action of the seed ("dying" and then sprouting), not the yearly activities of the sowers.

k_smith123

Here is parallel associated with Christ which I have never seen discussed before, and although it does not directly involve a Greek mythological figure, I believe that it offers a significant clue as to why the other parallels exist.

In Theaetetus, Plato has Socrates remark:

"In the name of the Graces, what an almighty wise man Protagoras must have been! He spoke these things in a parable to the common herd, like you and me, but told the truth, his Truth, in secret to his own disciples."

Compare this with Mark 4:10-12:

10 When he (Jesus) was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables.
11 He told them, "The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables
12 so that, "'they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!'"

Protagoras reportedly lived in the 5th century BCE and belonged to the philosophic group known as "Sophists". Plato devoted an entire dialogue to Protagoras and at one point in this dialogue he has Socrates explain:

"Now the art of the Sophist is, as I believe, of great antiquity; but in ancient times those who practiced it, fearing this odium, veiled and disguised themselves under various names, some under that of poets, as Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides, some, of hierophants and prophets, as Orpheus and Musaeus, and some, as I observe, even under the name of gymnastic-masters, like Iccus of Tarentum, or the more recently celebrated Herodicus, now of Selymbria and formerly of Megara, who is a first-rate Sophist. Your own Agathocles pretended to be a musician, but was really an eminent Sophist; also Pythocleides the Cean; and there were many others; and all of them, as I was saying, adopted these arts as veils or disguises because they were afraid of the odium which they would incur."

If Homer and Hesiod were indeed Sophists, then it appears that the Greek myths were a disguised form of Sophism. (Most likely through the use of allegory.) We also have here an admission that Sophists relied on disguises to hide their true nature, and this provides at least one explanation for Christ’s efforts to hide his true identity (Messianic Mystery).

Then in his dialogue Sophist Plato opens with the following remarks:

Theodorus: Here we are, Socrates, true to our agreement of
yesterday; and we bring with us a stranger from Elea, who is a
disciple of Parmenides and Zeno, and a true philosopher.
Socrates: Is he not rather a god, Theodorus, who comes to us in
the disguise of a stranger?

Here Plato (through Socrates) is implying that the Sophist’s will even disguise themselves as a “god� and as this dialogue continues the “stranger� makes the following observation:

Stranger. By heaven, they are cousins! It never occurred to us.
Theaetetus. Who are cousins?
Stranger. The angler and the Sophist.
Theaetetus. In what way are they related?
Stranger. They both appear to me to be hunters.

In other words, the Sophists could be referred to as “fishers of men� and this provides yet another association with Christ and his disciples.

It appears that not only was Christ modeled after various myths, but he was also portrayed as a Sophist. For those that do not believe in “miracles�, these observations seem to provide a significant indication as to Christianity’s real origin and the motives behind it.

youngalexander

I am reversing the order here, cos we should start at the beginning. I think that you should really read IQotH.
No, he wasn't. Raglan says that he started with Oedipus. Not everyone regards Christianity as the center of all endeavour. Furthermore, if this were so, it is rather odd that he does not analyse Jesus and spent the rest of his life studiously avoiding mentioning the obvious connection.

Raglan admits that his 22 points are somewhat arbitrary, as indicated in a previous post. Analysis of the scheme by others indicates that it is less suitable for non-European heroes and that even amongst them the frequency of traits varied somewhat. This is hardly surprising given the 'geographical/sociological/political/religious range' from whence they derive.
You have a point here, but I think that you make too much of it. Dundes discusses the schemes of von Hahn, Rank and Raglan and is well aware of the shortcomings. For instance he mentions a (slightly tongue in cheek) example whereby Abe Lincoln scores 22. However, he goes on to say

"The fact that a hero's biography conforms to the Indo-European hero pattern does not necessarily mean that the hero never existed. It suggests rather that the folk repeatedly insist upon making their versions of the lives of heroes follow the lines of a specific series of incidents. Accordingly, if the life of Jesus conforms in any way with the standard hero pattern, this proves nothing one way or the other with respect to the historicity of Jesus".

The work of Talbert, Burridge and others convincingly demonstrate that the canonical gospels (& Acts) are a particular form of ancient biography. That biography conforms to certain mythic patterns belonging to the ANE. This does not mean that Jesus was mythical any more than Caeser or Alexander.

What is the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus about? It is the recognition that the gospels are an amalgam of successive layers of biography, midrash, allegory, etc. and an assumed historical core. The Quest has been to extract the historic core. Personally, I do not think that it has succeeded and I think that is because there is no historic core. However, that is a different argument to the OP, to which we might now return.

Is Jesus a Copycat of other saviour gods? No.
Does Jesus conform to the ANE Hero Pattern? Yes.
Should we find this surprising? Of course not.:angel:

PS: we haven't discussed Rank's (Freudian) scheme yet.:grin:

Roger Pearse

Surely you don't want to seem to endorse, encourage, or support common myths, tho.?

The Mithraeum is of course across the street from what remains of the Roman villa, on which the church was built.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

jjramsey

Judging from the old book The Historicity of Jesus, it's a bit more than an assumption that Jesus existed. This piece of history from the book is interesting. In discussing the theory of Jensen that the Gospels "are merely literary imitations of the Babylonian Gilgamesh epic," Case writes,

The point is that mythicists have been coming up with bad arguments for a long time. This one goes back to around the start of the 20th century. After enough of this, the historicists stopped giving much credence to the mythicists because they kept making junk. A historical core has been "assumed" because the case for mythicism has historically been inferior.

Actually, I'd say the theory that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet fits the data very well, so I don't think it is quite appropriate to call the Third Quest a failure.

Wads4

Just to add my bit: Is it not true to say that the Gospels and Acts are full of comments about how things were done "in order that the prophecies might be fullfilled"? So surely that is blatent copycatting and deliberate artificial self-fulfillment?

Amaleq13

Do you reject the theory that Q was a layered text which suggests Jesus was initially a teacher of wisdom and that apocalypticism was a later development (response to rejection)?

I've always liked how this theory explains both the commonalities and divergences between Q and GThomas. The move toward apocalypticism by part of the "community" is accompanied by a move away from apocalypticism (toward gnosticism?) by another .