Godless Raven

"The devil, whose business is to pervert the truth, mimics the exact circumstances of the Divine Sacraments. He baptises his believers and promises forgiveness of sins from the Sacred Fount, and thereby initiates them into the religion of Mithras. Thus he celebrates the oblation of bread, and brings in the symbol of the resurrection. Let us therefore acknowledge the craftiness of the devil, who copies certain things of those that be Divine" - Church Father Tertullian - 160-220 CE.

Of course ! The devil planted tons of Pagan resurrecting Godmen up to 1,000 years before Christ just to throw people off of the real Son of God's trail. It only makes sense...if you've been sadly indoctornated from an early age that is. :banghead: :banghead: :banghead:

dog-on

hehehehehehehehehehehehehe

gurugeorge

Yes, but as I pointed out in my post above, there are just as many differences between all the other saviour/dying/rising/mystery myths as as there are differences between any of them and the Jesus story.

(Mithraist: "how dare you lump us in with those worshippers of Attis, there are so many differences between our respective gods' stories!")

IOW, if there's any rationale at all in lumping a bunch of things together as "mystery" religions or "dying/rising saviour gods", then it applies to "Jesus" as much as it applies to the others. They all share a "family resemblance" - which means, while no one feature may be shared by all of them, there are enough overlapping shared factors to make the category applicable.

Of course there might not be a good rationale for that categorisation - one could attempt to condemn the whole field of study, the very idea of mystery religions or dying/rising saviour gods as nonsense. That's a step some apologists have taken I believe, but it seems to me to be a sign of real desperation.

Roger Pearse

I don't think this is right, you know; it presented itself as a set of statements of fact about the ancient world. I think that we should be fairly determined to see the data which demands those statements, because these vague assertions drift around endlessly without ever being put on the spot. After all, don't we all want to have the raw *facts* right, whatever our opinions?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Does Tertullian say what you attribute to him? (or, in fairness, what you have repeated from elsewhere without reading)

Tertullian is repeating an idea from Justin. Justin says that the devil read the OT, saw the predictions of the messiah, and hoked up cults of that kind in order to poison the well. I'm not sure why that is unreasonable from his point of view.

Incidentally the idea that the cult of Mithras is 1000BC is a myth.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

dog-on

In all fairness though, Justin must have had some reason to write what he actually wrote. Even the explanation you give basically admits to the existence of such "cults". These could have been used by nay-sayers to disparage the Christian myth as being somewhat of a "copy-cat" group. Logic would kind of dictate that therefore such beliefs were actually prior to Christianity itself. Unless, of course, we are to "give the devil his due", I guess the proverbial "proof is in the pudding". :devil1:

robto

There are two different issues here. One is whether the Jesus myth belongs to the scholarly category of "ancient mediterranean mystery religions." The other is whether any similiarities between the myths can lead to the conclusion that one (say, the Jesus myth) was derived from the other.

On the first issue, I'm somewhat agnostic. The category of "dying/rising gods" seems to be a misleading one - how many gods are there that can really be said to die and rise again? As far as the "mystery religion" label - what in early Christianity was kept a "mystery"?

On the issue of derivation, it seems clear that most of the Jesus myth was not derived from pagan myths, but arose out of (hellenized) Jewish motifs.


Just my opinion.

Nylla

I've already conceded this point in post # 16.

GakuseiDon

To quote myself from my website:
http://members.optusnet.com.au/gakus...ysis_Part2.htm

1. Justin was trying to show parallels between pagan religions and Hebrew writings in order to stress Christian's long historical roots via Judaism.
2. It was the pagans who didn't see the similarities. Justin wasn't trying to explain away parallels, he was trying to convince pagans that the parallels existed.
3. Satan didn't anticipate Christianity by looking into the future. He tried to copy from the ancient Hebrew prophets... but according to Justin, misunderstood them. That is Justin's reason why the parallels are so weak.
4. Although Justin is often quoted to the affect that he saw parallels, the actual parallels themselves are rarely quoted as evidence on Jesus Myth websites.

You should perhaps look through the actual parallels that Justin gives, and his motivation. Jesus Mythers quote Justin's conclusions, but rarely (in fact, I would say, never) go into the details. I think you'll find that they are pretty weak, but as Justin explains, the devil got them wrong.

Gamera

My point is not to point out the nonsense of mystery religion (that goes without saying). My point is to show a defective methodology.

The methology of the mythicists is to make general statements about the various structures in diverse myths and use those generalities to claim some affinity. Thus what literature we have of Osirus indicates he rose from the dead, and since the gospels say Jesus rose from the dead, the mythicists claim some historical link between the narratives.

But on closer examination, the stories have very little in common, and the differences are vast. Indeed they have no more in common than the similarities one can descern between the Jesus narrative and an Ikea catalog introduction (I've actually done this analysis). Jesus' resurrection is nothing like Osirus' in any meaningful way.

The mythicists repeat this same process ten times over, finding vague generalized patterns, claiming a relationship, and then moving onto the next.

At the end of this process they claim to have two similar narratives apparently genaeologically related. But in fact you don't. You have a cognitive process that finds patterns and similarities, and ignores all the differences.

The logical term for this is confirmation bias. Mythicists only notice the structures that support their preordained assumption of genaeological relationship. They ignore all the vast numbers of details in the narratives that indicate no relationship.