Freethought & Rationalism Archive

spamandham · 10-10-2008, 12:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

Do we have ancient texts that say "Hey lads, the pagans celebrate xxx on day yyy, so let's do the same!"? If not, I doubt the above statement can be justified.

How Christmas came to be Dec. 25 is unknown, as far as I know. But there is late 4th century statements in the Fathers that connect it with pagan festivals at the time, which the church sought to replace.

Roger, for most of us, those 4th century statements are sufficient to show Hellenistic (aka "pagan" as it's being used in this thread) influence. Is there any reason to require an ancient text which explicitly spells it out? Even if such a text existed, why should we believe it?

Student of Sophia · 10-10-2008, 12:35 PM

Here is an excerpt from The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (or via: amazon.co.uk)

"And so it appears that in the Book of Genesis there are two contrary theologies represented in relation to the Deluge. One is the old tribal, popular tale of a willful, personal creator-god, who saw that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth...and was sorry that he had made man on the earth...and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them' " (Genesis 6:5-7).

The other idea, which is fundamentally contrast, is that of the disguised number, 86,400, which is a deeply hidden reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of the ever-revolving cycles of impersonal time, with whole universes and their populations coming into being, flowering for a season of 43,200 (432,000 or 4,320,000) years, dissolving back into the cosmic mother-sea to rest for an equal spell of years before returning, and so again, again, and again.

The Jews, it will be remembered, were for fifty years exiled from their capitol to Babylon (586-539 b.c), when the were subject, willy nilly, to Babylonian influences, so that although the popular, exoteric version of their Deluge legend is from the period of David's kingdom, tenth century or so b.c., the exquisitely secreted indication of a priestly knowledge, beyond that, of a larger, cyclic version of the legend - where the god himself would have come into being and gone out of being with the universe of which he was the lord - is post-Exilic, as are, also, the genealogical datings of Genesis chapter 5, which are so very nicely contrived to join the 600 years of Noah's age at the time of the flood to furnish a total of exactly 1,656."

bacht · 10-10-2008, 12:53 PM

Campbell is a lot of fun, great talker, he really inspires enthusiasm, though I think his scholarship has been criticized.

Manjushri · 10-10-2008, 04:18 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bacht

Campbell is a lot of fun, great talker, he really inspires enthusiasm, though I think his scholarship has been criticized.

I think you are right. Back in college I took a class on Indian epics. We studied and discussed the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Once when I was talking to the professor I brought up Campbell in relation to something or another from the Ramayana. She said that she did not think too much of his work. She criticized him for attempting to blur the real distinctions between different cultures. He is overeager in showing how the same ideas can appear across different societies without contact. In doing so he can ignore important cultural distinctions about a particular symbol that do not easily correlate.

I agree that Campbell is entertaining. He has some interesting ideas, I just recognize that he approaches myth from a Jungian perspective and take that into account when reading him.

lycanthrope · 10-11-2008, 09:30 PM

As I was having a discussion in another forum with regards to pagan practices predating christianity, another forumer came up with these quotes. Now I must admit I dont have such books and I do not know if he/she was just quote mining or if there really is no evidence to suggest that pagan practices predates christianity. I am under the impression that modern scholars agree that the cult of Osiris, Dionysus all predates Christianity, and some of their practices like water baptism and the motif of a resurrecting god were also practiced long before christianity came onto the scene. These scholars cant be both correct at the same time?

Quotes against pagan practices predating christianity

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ancient Mystery Cults. Walter Burkert. Harvard:1987, Pg101
"It is appropriate to emphasize in this connection that there is hardly any evidence for baptism in pagan mysteries, though this has often been claimed. Of course there are various forms of purification, of sprinkling or washing with water, as in almost all the other cults as well. But such procedures should not be confused with baptism proper--immersion into a river or basin as a symbol of starting a new life"

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anchor Bible Dictionary, David Noel Freedman (main ed.), DoubleDay:1992
“Moreover, the key examples so favored by the early myth-ritualists and their followers among biblical scholars—the Babylonian Akitu Festival and Enuma Elish, and the tales of Attis, Osiris, and Adonis—all turn out to be examples supportive of myth-ritual conclusions only if one utilizes very late and unreliable evidence (Burkert 1979: 100–1)."

Quote:

Originally Posted by The New Testament Background, C.K.Barrett (ed), Harper Collins: 1987
“It is not until we come to the third century A.D. that we find sufficient source material to permit a relatively complete reconstruction of their content. Far too many writers use this later source material (after A.D. 200) to form reconstructions of the third-century mystery experience and then uncritically reason back to what they think must have been the earlier nature of the cults. This practice is exceptionally bad scholarship and should not be allowed to stand without challenge. Information about a cult that formed several hundred years after the close of the New Testament canon must not be read back into what is presumed to be the status of the cult during the first century A.D. The crucial question is not what possible influence the mysteries may have had on segments of Christendom after A.D. 400, but what effect the emerging mysteries may have had on the New Testament in the first century."

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Encyclopedia of Religion [Macmillian: 1987; article is by Jonathan Z. Smith
"Osiris was murdered and his body dismembered and scattered. The pieces of his body were recovered and rejoined, and the god was rejuvenated. However, he did not return to his former mode of existence but rather journeyed to the underworld, where he became the powerful lord of the dead. In no sense can Osiris be said to have 'risen' in the sense required by the dying and rising pattern (as described by Frazer et.al.); most certainly it was never considered as an annual event."

"In no sense can the dramatic myth of his death and reanimation be harmonized to the pattern of dying and rising gods (as described by Frazer et.al.)."
"The repeated formula 'Rise up, you have not died,' whether applied to Osiris or a citizen of Egypt, signaled a new, permanent life in the realm of the dead."

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Encyclopedia of Religion [Macmillian: 1987; article is by Jonathan Z. Smith
"The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.

"Definition. As applied in the scholarly literature, 'dying and rising gods' is a generic appellation for a group of male deities found in agrarian Mediterranean societies who serve as the focus of myths and rituals that allegedly narrate and annually represent their death and resurrection.

"Beyond this sufficient criterion, dying and rising deities were often held by scholars to have a number of cultic associations, sometimes thought to form a "pattern." They were young male figures of fertility; the drama of their lives was often associated with mother or virgin goddesses; in some areas, they were related to the institution of sacred kingship, often expressed through rituals of sacred marriage; there were dramatic reenactments of their life, death, and putative resurrection, often accompanied by a ritual identification of either the society or given individuals with their fate.

"The category of dying and rising gods, as well as the pattern of its mythic and ritual associations, received its earliest full formulation in the influential work of James G. Frazer The Golden Bough, especially in its two central volumes, The Dying God and Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Frazer offered two interpretations, one euhemerist, the other naturist. In the former, which focused on the figure of the dying god, it was held that a (sacred) king would be slain when his fertility waned. This practice, it was suggested, would be later mythologized, giving rise to a dying god. The naturist explanation, which covered the full cycle of dying and rising, held the deities to be personifications of the seasonal cycle of vegetation. The two interpretations were linked by the notion that death followed upon a loss of fertility, with a period of sterility being followed by one of rejuvenation, either in the transfer of the kingship to a successor or by the rebirth or resurrection of the deity.

"There are empirical problems with the euhemerist theory. The evidence for sacral regicide is limited and ambiguous; where it appears to occur, there are no instances of a dying god figure. The naturist explanation is flawed at the level of theory. Modern scholarship has largely rejected, for good reasons, an interpretation of deities as projections of natural phenomena.

"Nevertheless, the figure of the dying and rising deity has continued to be employed, largely as a preoccupation of biblical scholarship, among those working on ancient Near Eastern sacred kingship in relation to the Hebrew Bible and among those concerned with the Hellenistic mystery cults in relation to the New Testament.

"Broader Categories. Despite the shock this fact may deal to modern Western religious sensibilities, it is a commonplace within the history of religions that immortality is not a prime characteristic of divinity: gods die. Nor is the concomitant of omnipresence a widespread requisite: gods disappear. The putative category of dying and rising deities thus takes its place within the larger category of dying gods and the even larger category of disappearing deities. Some of these divine figures simply disappear; some disappear only to return again in the near or distant future; some disappear and reappear with monotonous frequency. All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case, the deities return but have not died; in the second case, the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity."

Quotes supporting pagan practices predating christianity

"There is a baptism ritual which takes place at a time when Horus makes his transformation into the menat, the bird of a soul as a swallow, dove or pigeon. This is when mortal Horus has become a spirit, with the head of a bird whether as the Divine hawk or dove and the same transformation takes place in the baptism of Jesus when the dove from heaven descended and abode upon Him as the sign to show that He was now the Son of the Father in Spirit" - E.A. Wallis Budge

"The Egyptians of every period in which they are known to us believed that Osiris was of divine origin, that he suffered death and mutilation at the hands of the powers of evil, that after a great struggle with these powers he rose again, that he became henceforth the king of the underworld and judge of the dead, and that because he had conquered death the righteous also might conquer death...In Osiris the Christian Egyptians found the prototype of Christ, and in the pictures and statues of Isis suckling her son Horus, they perceived the prototypes of the Virgin Mary and her child." – Egyptologist E.A. Wallis Budge

Water into wine
Again when Jesus turn water into wine at the marriage feast in Cana, it was done before by Dionysus. As Pliny the Elder noted “Water flowing from a spring at a temple on the island of Andros always has the flavor of wine on Jan 5th" (4). And in The Bacchae it was noted that “One woman struck her thyrsus against a rock and a fountain of cool water came bubbling up. Another drove her fennel in the ground and where it struck the earth, at the touch of god, a spring of wine poured out” (5).

lars_egarots · 10-11-2008, 09:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Roger Pearse

Quote:

Originally Posted by lars_egarots

There were influences on the traditions of Christianity. For example, setting the day of worship as Sunday, and setting Jesus's birthday to Dec. 25th.

Do we have ancient texts that say "Hey lads, the pagans celebrate xxx on day yyy, so let's do the same!"? If not, I doubt the above statement can be justified.

How Christmas came to be Dec. 25 is unknown, as far as I know. But there is late 4th century statements in the Fathers that connect it with pagan festivals at the time, which the church sought to replace.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

One can easily argue for the statement, after studying Roman influences upon Christianity. Consider the following, which I will summarize from the book Constantine's Bible.

Throughout history, all religious texts based on written and oral traditions were semi-fluid. The idea of a canon, or limited collection, is a rare event. Early Christians never intended to have a closed canon of scripture. The idea of a canon of scripture only appeared when the Roman government stepped in. When the Roman government interfered, and used coercion, the public debate about scriptures ended, and important elements of Christian culture were replaced with elaborate customs (including calendar dates) of the imperial Roman empire.

To see how the Roman government influenced Christianity, especially Constantine, here is an example:

There was a huge controversy amongst bishops regarding the nature of Christ as the 2nd person of the trinity. Emperor Constantine gathered many bishops together at the council of Nicea to resolve this issue. During discussion, Constantine proposed that Jesus was indeed the same substance as God. Nobody spoke against Constantine, and so the trinity was decided once and for all. Constantine made it a law. (The council decided other things too, such as date of Easter.)

By the end of the 4th century, bishops and emperors were using violence to enforce their version of Christianity. You could no longer understand Christianity in different ways and still remain a Christian. It was only lawful to practice the Roman orthodox version of Christianity.

So it is very likely that the Romans enforced Christmas to be Dec. 25th, and was chosen to coincide with ancient Roman Pagan festivals that were already held on Dec. 25. (It would be an easy conversion from Pagan to Christian)

mountainman · 10-11-2008, 11:31 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by gstafleu

The word "pagan" is a bit difficult to define, so let us ask if there are non-Christian influences on Christianity.

Dear gstafleu,

The documents to which this question of yours needs to be addressed are the Nag Hammadi codices, about which there exists controversy over christian, non-christian, pre-christian and pagan "influences".

Notwithstanding this realtime controversy, there is the question as to the chronological appearance of both "christians" and "pagans", and IMO there is sufficient evidence to take the view that these terms both appeared together --- like the electron and the positron --- in the fourth century, as two sides of the one solidus.

Quote:

That is a very simple question to answer, because no religion develops in isolation, religions always develop from already existing religions.

Are we talking about intellectual property in the religious realm, or religious property in the intellectual realm? One hundred years before the (military supremacy) council of Nicaea, the warlord and king of kings Ardashir, sewed up the game in the Parthian civilisation and invented Zorastrianism whilst at the same time burning practically every line of Parthian literature. This happened close to the Roman empire. The question becomes then did Ardashir create an effective new religion in this "Zorastrianism", as he became the sole ruler of the new nation of Iran in the year c.222 CE.

And of course, old ideas are at that stage rebadged.

Best wishes,

Pete

lycanthrope · 10-12-2008, 07:25 AM

Ultimately I am most interested to know if pagan practices do predate christianity because I keep getting conflicting reports by academics. Some are saying yes, pagan practices such as baptism, breaking of bread and wine, dying and resurrecting godmen, special birth, turning water to wine predates christianity

While other academics claimed that these practices were actually done much later after Christianity has come onto the scene.

andrewcriddle · 10-12-2008, 08:34 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lars_egarots

To see how the Roman government influenced Christianity, especially Constantine, here is an example:

There was a huge controversy amongst bishops regarding the nature of Christ as the 2nd person of the trinity. Emperor Constantine gathered many bishops together at the council of Nicea to resolve this issue. During discussion, Constantine proposed that Jesus was indeed the same substance as God. Nobody spoke against Constantine, and so the trinity was decided once and for all. Constantine made it a law. (The council decided other things too, such as date of Easter.)

The Fifty years of controversy about the doctrine of God that followed Nicea indicate that that council did not decide things once and for all. (Certainly not the doctrine of the Trinity. Nicea carefully avoided saying anything remotely controversial about the Holy Spirit.)

Andrew Criddle

Roger Viklund · 10-12-2008, 08:39 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lycanthrope

Ultimately I am most interested to know if pagan practices do predate christianity because I keep getting conflicting reports by academics. Some are saying yes, pagan practices such as baptism, breaking of bread and wine, dying and resurrecting godmen, special birth, turning water to wine predates christianity

While other academics claimed that these practices were actually done much later after Christianity has come onto the scene.

You could of course check out my article The Jesus Parallels at http://www.jesusgranskad.se/jesus_parallels.htm . There I have collected all the relevant sources as far as I have been able to track them down.

Kindly, Roger Viklund

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10-10-2008, 12:35 PM	#32
Student of Sophia Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Inner Space Posts: 2,707	Here is an excerpt from The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (or via: amazon.co.uk) "And so it appears that in the Book of Genesis there are two contrary theologies represented in relation to the Deluge. One is the old tribal, popular tale of a willful, personal creator-god, who saw that "the wickedness of man was great in the earth...and was sorry that he had made man on the earth...and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, 'I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them' " (Genesis 6:5-7). The other idea, which is fundamentally contrast, is that of the disguised number, 86,400, which is a deeply hidden reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of the ever-revolving cycles of impersonal time, with whole universes and their populations coming into being, flowering for a season of 43,200 (432,000 or 4,320,000) years, dissolving back into the cosmic mother-sea to rest for an equal spell of years before returning, and so again, again, and again. The Jews, it will be remembered, were for fifty years exiled from their capitol to Babylon (586-539 b.c), when the were subject, willy nilly, to Babylonian influences, so that although the popular, exoteric version of their Deluge legend is from the period of David's kingdom, tenth century or so b.c., the exquisitely secreted indication of a priestly knowledge, beyond that, of a larger, cyclic version of the legend - where the god himself would have come into being and gone out of being with the universe of which he was the lord - is post-Exilic, as are, also, the genealogical datings of Genesis chapter 5, which are so very nicely contrived to join the 600 years of Noah's age at the time of the flood to furnish a total of exactly 1,656."

10-10-2008, 12:53 PM	#33
bacht Veteran Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Canada Posts: 2,305	Campbell is a lot of fun, great talker, he really inspires enthusiasm, though I think his scholarship has been criticized.

10-12-2008, 07:25 AM	#38
lycanthrope Regular Member Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Australia Posts: 335	Ultimately I am most interested to know if pagan practices do predate christianity because I keep getting conflicting reports by academics. Some are saying yes, pagan practices such as baptism, breaking of bread and wine, dying and resurrecting godmen, special birth, turning water to wine predates christianity While other academics claimed that these practices were actually done much later after Christianity has come onto the scene.

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