skepticdude

truth does not matter in a debate. All that matters is that your position is rational. You do not need the absolute truth in order to hold a rational position regarding a debatable issue.

This is where Christians lose. They act as if the lack of absolute proof of the pagan borrowing thesis means there was no borrowing. Not so.

Unless the Christians wish to claim that Christians were the only people in history to never incorporate older motiffs from different religions into their own, the fact that such incorporation took place to various degrees between all other religions creates the rational presumption that the Christians did it too.

It doesn't matter if the current state of comparative mythology leaves the door open to the possibility that nothing about Jesus was borrowed from non-Christian non-Jewish sources, the skeptical viewpoint remains RATIONAL regardless. This then would be a rebuttal to most fundie Christians, who insist that the lack of absolute proof for the copy-cat thesis must somehow automatically mean that this thesis is irrational. That's not how it works. You can be justified to have held a theory for so long, even if it is later proven wrong.

No non-Christian scholar on comparative mythology will say that nothing about the Jesus story was stolen from earlier myths.

However, it IS irrational to claim that virgin birth and bodily resurrection never entered anybody's mind Christians and Old Testament authors came up with them.

Zeus apparantly made some woman pregnant by means of showers of gold. It takes excessively little creativity in a person reading that story to imagine other ways that a god could impregnate a woman. Therefore, even if direct obviousl copy cat proofs never surface, everybody must acknowledge that stories of Gods becoming born to women on earth were nothing knew, and that kind of general knowledge is all that is needed to spin up a story about a god having sex with Mary.

Therefore, I honestly do not understand what the Christians think they are gaining by proving that nobody else in the history of the world was claimed to be born of a virgin or bodily resurrected from the dead. I cannot immediately think of a direct obvious precursive parallel to Perseus, some dude with flying sandels, but no Christian will argue that this unprecedented detail must mean there was a real man with real winged feet behind this story.

And I still insist that "overshadow" (episkiazo) in Luke 1:35 means exactly what the Mormons think it means: God had physical sex with Mary, except that it was the magical kind that left her hymen intact. If all God did was make her pregnant by miracle alone, "overshadow" was not only unnecessary but misleading.

spamandham

Some of the primary sources are readily available for some of this. For example, the parallel between beer and bread vs. wine and bread is one that even I as an amateur stumbled across by directly reading translations of pyramid texts online.

If Christianity were not such a dominant religion, I think these conclusions would be uncontroversial. Price has always been left of mainstream, so this is not his shark jumping moment.

dog-on

Perhaps their god simply has a wee winky...

GakuseiDon

Then let it be stated like that. Why say that Krishna was born of the virgin Devaki, when a billion Hindus know that Krishna was the eight son of Devaki?

They gain nothing, other than being possibly right. What do "mythicist detractors" gone by declaring that virgin-born saviours were a dime-a-dozen back then? They gain nothing, except being wrong.

GakuseiDon

Really. Then do you agree with Dr Price that the evidence shows the following:

The tale of Joseph and his brethren is already transparently a retelling of Osiris and Set. The New Testament Lazarus story is another (Mary and Martha playing Isis and Nephthys). And so is the story of Jesus (Mary Magdalene and the others as Isis and Nephthys). Jesus (in the “Johannine Thunderbolt” passage, Matthew 11:27//Luke 10:21) sounds like he’s quoting Akhenaten’s Hymn to the Sun. Jesus sacramentally offers bread as his body, wine as his blood, just as Osiris offered his blood in the form of beer, his flesh as bread. Judas is Set, who betrays him...

I am pretty much ready to go the whole way and suggest that Jesus is simply Osiris going under a new name

Because that is what Dr Price is claiming.

Toto

You might want to compare Price's review of Harpur.

spamandham

I think these are more reasonable than the endless historical Jesus speculations which pass for scholarly work. The rather bizarre Christian myths and rituals had to come from somewhere. Either someone just invented them in a vacuum, or they were influenced by pre-existing ideas. The latter is simpler, since we see this all the time when new religions start up.

If we had only a single instance with Egyptian parallels, we call it coincidence, or perhaps a contrivance. But if there are several such similarities, it becomes reasonable to conclude influence, which isn't surprising anyway, considering that both Egyptian religion and Judaism are offshoots of the same Sumerian root, and the OT is filled with curses against Jews worshiping other regional gods (you don't pass laws and condemnations unless there's a problem being addressed). It would be more surprising not to find such influence.

Solo

Oh, hilarious - thanks for that Toto !

If you do some googling around you will find some commotion in the chatting circles over Price's sudden turning from implacable lampooning <edit>

<edit> after seeing Price's review of Suns of God. When I first saw it, I could not believe what I read. I went back to the Price's review of Christ Conspiracy. Hey, here is what I found : the man no longer wishes us to compare what had to say in 2001 to what he delivers after he had seen the light.

So, I suppose, at least Robert Price is aware of what his change in intellectual standards looks like to the outside of world. Whether he is trying to pre-empt a perception as the writer of 2 Peter 1:16 naively did when he crossed his heart on his eye-witnessing of the Lord's majesty, I don't know. Robert now says his 2000 essay on Acharya's Christ Conspiracy was misinterpreted. I don't know that either. But what I do know is that the new buddies of Robert Price took it off the archives, just so the Christ conspirators would not get the wrong impression of it. I guess that is really all that matters.

Too bad to see Price desert the one thing that made him an appealing figure; he sure is one smart cookie and I am truly sorry that he feels he has to sell cheap. Whatever the real reason.

Jiri

Rick Sumner

See his review of Eisenman, where he neglects to mention the single biggest caveat in the book. Price has always sold cheap. The negative review of Acharya S. has been employed as some sort of testament to his objectivity. I've never found it to testify to any such thing.

No Robots

Price has graciously allowed his original review of The Christ Conspiracy to remain at the internet archive here.