steve_bnk

How would the idea of wandering mystics from Persia/east based on a prophesy or vision following a new star come into a Jewish story? Certainly not from Jews.

The birth of JC was written in the stars.

If you look at where the biblical stories are placed it is in a small region.

Egypt, Palestine, Rome, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, with Persia nearby. Certainly people traveled and carried stories and myths retold.

Hey Tiberius, man I saw this awesome snake cult in Persia...ya gotta come with me next time. Great babes. And those funky dudes that sit around worshipping a fire...wierd.

GakuseiDon

Obviously because when they wrote the Gospels, they forgot to include that bit about Dec 25. Or maybe their zodiac model was faulty. So about three centuries later, they said to themselves, "Damn!" and then added it.

So why do you think they did it? The Catholic Church wanted people to know that they were copying pagan stories by adopting more of them? Because I thought the idea was that the early church were claiming, you know, "diabolical mimicry". Kind of a shot in the foot to then adopt the birthday of Christ from pagan gods way after the fact.

In fact, even the early Christians admit they don't know when Jesus was born. Various dates were chosen. Even today, the Greek Orthodox Church celebrates Christmas on 6 Jan. The winter solstice was a time of celebrations, which is why the date was selected. There is no evidence to suggest it has anything to do with the zodiac or Christ being the sun.

steve_bnk

The gospel writers and the dominating monster the RCC became centuries later were not connected. The RCC fabricated a theolgy based on the sparse NT.

agnosticchristian

1 question. Where in the Bible does it claim that Judeo/Christianity is an original idea? In fact the Bible to me says the opposite. So finding similarities in other places is irrelevant.

steve_bnk

No where. However to the believers it is the inspired word of god.

If you have just joined in recently debates are quetioning whether the gospels were an isolated fiction. The dichotomy between us non believers is some as me who believe in the liklihod of a huuman Jesus who was the basis for the story, and others who believe the gospels were a complete fiction with no Earthly basis.

That all leads to questions of where the gospels came from and what the writers drew on for inspiration. Hence this thread showing Hiundu myth of god becomming incarnate as a saviour predates Chrtistianity. There are other culturral/mythical paralllels.

The inference of the believers is the bible is unique and uniquely given to a specific people over time. If not, modern Christianity collapses.

agnosticchristian

Does similarity = inspiration?

steve_bnk

Ask Shakspeare. Unanswerable, but we speculate.

Tom Sawyer

Generally. If you have a common type of story in a particular area and someone writes a story which is very similar to that common type, it's safe to assume that the common story was an inspiration.

For instance, if someone in our culture wrote a story about an immensely strong superhero who flew around solving crimes and battling villians, one would be hard-pressed to argue that the similarities to Superman were coincidental as opposed to him being an inspiration for the new story.

The mythical parallels in the Jesus story aren't significantly different than that.

seeker

Actually there is no extra-biblical evidence that the Yahweh worship was 'strict' before the Hellenistic period. I would be more inclined to suggest that the switch to monotheism is around the same time that the Persians start to become monotheistic, just before the end of the Achaemenid Empire.




If history is about plausibility then you have destroyed your own argument as the Jesus depicted in the bible is largely implausible. You can only get to a plausible HJ by dropping most of the characteristics of biblical Jesus.



More than a slight influence when there are so many astrological correlations. The point is that once you acknowledge that there had to be some distortion of the story in order to wedge it into the astrological template then you have to question how much, if any, underlying truth the story began with.




On the contrary, one would expect the story to resemble tales from the OT, it was constructed that way. The fact that it gets so many of its correlations are based on misinterpretations points to the precise sort of construction errors one would expect to find in a story based on someone else's work.

Far from being shot down Jesus Mythicism is sort of like the minimalist movement in biblical criticism. When you really examine it only the most extremist of scholars think that a historical Jesus existed that was exactly as described in the bible. Everyone else is basically already saying that if there was a historical person that inspired the Jesus myth that he was probably not fully as the bible describes him. Essentially the HJ ends up being so vague that he becomes completely meaningless as less and less of the only description we have of him becomes useful in determining who he might have been.

aa5874

There was NO such thing as a NEW TESTAMENT before the RCC. It is not at all logical that any cult would use FOUR CONTRADICTING Jesus stories.