Pendaric

Given the amount of other gods out there, how would you construct a God story that didn't have parallels with others already present? Whatever attributes you give to your god, certainly in general terms, someone else will have given before you.

It is the specific claims that some websites make that I find difficult to believe and have seen little back up for. The following claims were made on the website sourced on the OP which if true would be difficult to explain away as generalities:


They aren't broad similarities or generalisations. They are claims that if true are almost exact blueprints for Jesus, to the extent that the names are recognisably the same - Lazarus as a corruption of El-Osiris for example, Isis-Meri for Mary. How many of these claims have authentic primary sources and how many are sensationalist claims based on nothing but fantasy?

edited by mod to add source for above quotes: Pagan Christs

Rick Sumner

Few, if any, have legitimate grounds. Most, if not all, are originally from Acharya S. book (and subsequently, Acharya S. imagination).

I invite anyone who has evidence to the contrary to provide primary texts.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Steven Avery

Generally they lack primary sources, the krishna case being a perfect example to research, since we have a wealth of written hindu religious literature that dates to before Jesus. Others often don't really have much in the way of ancient writings at all. Some, like December 25, are true in the sense that the "Christian" church many hundreds of years after the NT adopted pagan customs, but have nothing at all to do with the New Testament or the 1st century Messiah movement. Syncretism is another element, you can find some hindu legends that are quite parallel, but they are not supported by ancient writings, so easily the Occam explanation is that the hindus incorporated Christian-type stories in legends say around 100-300 AD and after. However if the 19th-century mythicists heard of such stories, they got elevated to primary status.

That is a short summary why even many of the skeptics on this thread are so skeptical of the pagan parallel proposals, while folks like myself find it mostly entertaining, while trying to counteract some the heavily propagated misinformation.

Did you ever see the disclaimer that was put in front of the Kersey Graves book ?

Shalom,
Steven Avery
Queens, NY
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Steven Avery

Rick, does she go way beyond the Graves and Doane stuff, or basically does she recycle their info? which has been passed around and embellished by many. After you see how a few claims vaporize away, you lose some interest in the details, so I dunno if she does her stuff from imagination or recycling or channelling or what :-)

I think it might be a mistake to overestimate her significance, when you have others like Bushby giving similar riffs. Even the cover of the Freke & Gandy book used a cross image from 400 AD ! With syncretism being again the simplest and likeliest explanation.

Shalom,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Rick Sumner

Oh she doesn't just recycle it at all! She's keen to make up her own stuff too, or misquote Frazier, who was wrong on most points before she even started with him. See my post on 12:00 noon above for an example.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

anthony93

Fair enough, though I don't think much of the symbolism arguement to begin with since it tends to be along the lines of 'oh, twelve apostles and twleve signs of the zodiac? They must be the same!' . So I just ignore that sort of thing. If there had been 329 apostles then a symbolic parallel might be more interesting but with 2,3,4 etc there is bound to be some coincidences.

I agree, but I would say that the 'symbol' is the unnatural circumstance, not the specifics. For instance, there are legends of Siddartha being born out of his mothers right side. The cultural differences, I think, can account for the variations in specifics but maybe you are right and I am being to broad. I do find it disingenous when orthodox 'defenders' dismiss the idea out of hand with, in my view, counters like 'Semele had sex with Zeus but the the holy ghost just popped little fetus Jesus right in'. It says, I think, more about the rather weird relationship with biology orthodoxy has rather than a clear difference.

OF course the same claim could be made for JC, and have been made. The Empty Tomb edited by Robert Price (re your remark below) has several really good articles covering the Bodily ressurection, esp. Richard Carrier's The Spiritual Body of Christ which makes an excellent argument for the view that Christ NEVER reappeared bodily and that in fact his body was/is still in the tomb it was laid in and the idea of a physical ressurection was a matter of legendary accretion during the course of the first century of Christianity. Thus, he would have been the Lord of the Afterlife...

Like I said that particular book is of interest because so many people have read it. The author does have her point of view but her discussion of the early church, the church fathers etc is, while not fair, based on the sources.
Some of the other sources she uses are a lot more questionable, and I tend to give Massey and his contemporaries the benefit of the doubt. They were, after all, writing over 100 years ago and the sources they drew from were what they had. Barbra Walker, for instance, is a contemporary author whose work is quoted all over the place, mainly, I suspect, because she just makes things up as she pleases, but does so forcefully and in detail so it sounds very persuasive. (the Isrealites were Serpent worshippers?!, etc.)

Is that review on the web? I haven't seen it, and yes I am familar with JHC, though only the website. Anyway I am not a subscriber to the pure myth theory, though I do find many of the specific arguments compelling. Again, as Price would, I think, say; it isn't that there is no historical Jesus, we just can't tell which parts of the gospel stories are him.

And finally, considering that a sizable minority in the US are convinced that the world is about to end any minute now based on a 'literal' reading of these same stories, then sensational or not I hope Acharya sells twice as many copies of her new book.

Rick Sumner

But the "symbolism argument" is a huge part of Acharya's book.

It's a question of what the miracle is. In the case of the pagan myths, the miracle is the mating of gods with women. In the virgin birth, it's the complete absence of mating. An "unnatural circumstance" isn't enough to establish dependency--as I noted above, "unnatural circumstances" are fairly common, across all cultures, including ones that can't possibly be linked.

By way of analogy, virtually all stories can be shown to have Shakespearean themes in them, but not all stories are based on Shakespeare.

He wouldn't have been Lord of the Dead in the sense that Osiris was, however. Osiris is more analogous, at least in that regard, to Hades.

And, while the essay was interesting, I must confess to being unpersuaded by Carrier's argument.

But that has no bearing on whether or not they were right. Acharya S. isn't writing over 100 years ago.

http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/rev_murdock.htm

I don't disagree with this. But that we can't tell what parts are authentic doesn't mean we get to arbitrarily decide where they came from. Perhaps most importantly, the only source we know was used is the Old Testament, yet one doesn't even need to look outside this very thread to see people ignoring it as a source, even when it's the most obvious.

Dishonest is dishonest. It's not a better kind of dishonest because it serves your ends.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

countjulian

No, I haven't, I've been consistently arguing both. You've been able to prove nothing more than that later Christians read things into the texts of Matt. and Luke that are not there, and you have been able to do nothing more with the sexual language used by Luke than point and say "Not so!" And the text of Origin proves that not everyone (at least not pagans, who the Gospel of lUke was aimed at) believed that Yahweh had impregnated Mary without some type of a sexual encounter.

The only thing Melanippe has in common with Mary is that she was virgin when Zeus got randy. Again, you've been able to do nothing with the actually texts of Matthew and Luke, as far as the Holy Hymen was concerned. ='

Okay. How's this?

My Latin is not that good, how is that translation? Again, if a girl cannot lose her virgnity to a spirit, than she cannot lose it to a shower of gold.

And the Holy Spirirt didn't enter her womb? Then how did Jesus get there?
When you're dealing with magic, mystery, and nonsense, anything oges, including virgin birth in a shower of gold. Some accounts do say that the gold entered Danae's womb other remain silent, kind of like Luke and Matthew on the status of the holy hymen. Thems' the breaks.

To you they are. To pagans like Celsus and early Christians, they seemed to be nothing special, and to me today, the myth itself is just another silly story being floated around the 1st and 2nd century Mediteranean. Your particular ascetic attatchment to the myth proves nothing.

Hebrew mythographers stole Greek myths for their sotires, such as the story of Samson (from the Herakles narrative) and Jephthah's sacrifice of his own virgin daughter (Agammemnon's sacrifice of his own virgin daughter).

Well, for one thing, the vast majority of Greeks could not read Hebrew (while the same was not true of many Jews), and the myths mentioned above were in circulation way before the Septuagint was translated. For another, most Greeks before the time of Alexander had never heard of the Jews; Herodotus in his sweeping survey of the different ehtnicities and religions of the ancient Mediterranean never once makes mention of them, in fact when he mentions the many races (such as the Ehtiopians, Arabs, egyptians etc.) who practiced circumcision, he mentions the Jews not once, in fact he says that if any other races practice circumcision they got it from the Egyptians. Greek culture was expansive, succesful, and well known; Hebrew culture was xenophobic, unsuccessful, and not well known. If their was burrowing, again it had to have been from the Greeks to the Hebrews, not vice versa.

Rick Sumner

No, you haven't. One need only read through this thread to see that.

No, it doesn't. That was a misquote. The actual quote showed quite the contrary.

And, again, we looked at Matthew's use of Isaiah. Matthew, quite clearly, intended to convey this. Every ancient author who read it saw the same thing. And remember, what Isaiah meant to convey is irrelevant, the question is what Matthew meant to convey.

That translation is still wrong. It doesn't say a word about a golden shower. It says golden Jupiter. "Shower" isn't in it at all. It's a question of what is being conveyed. It is not "Jupiter's golden shower," Jupiter was the golden shower--he changed forms, becoming "golden Jupiter."

Not in the traditional sense, no. He got there miraculously--by the power of the spirit.

Perhaps you could cite some of these "accounts," rather than making it up as you go. For that matter, maybe you could cite a single source that states that this was at all viewed as anything but a coupling with Zeus. That is, after all, why Perseus is Zeus' son--direct lineage, not a miraculous impregnation.

You're also far too keen to point to Luke as somehow vindicating you because he was writing for pagans. Luke's source is Matthew, not pagan myth.

This is going nowhere. I happily invite readers to view the thread and draw their own conclusions.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Clarice O'C

I can't find in Luke 1 where this actually happened.


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