jcobbins

Hello,

Does anyone have any links to good articles/docs regarding the jesus story and it's similarities to older pagan hero/savior myths?

Thanks

Toto

Welcome to the forums, jcobbins.

This question comes up so often it's time for a sticky. Let's start accumulating links here.

The first thing to realize is that there is a lot of bad scholarship and outright nonsense on the web on this question, and you need to be a bit critical of what you read. But this does not mean that everything on a link between Jesus and pagan gods is nonsense.

Start with Richard Carrier's introduction to Kersey Graves 16 Crucified Saviors:

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...er/graves.html

Anyone who quotes Graves is not a reliable source, including Acharya S ( www.truthbeknown.com ), although Acharya S is sometimes fun and has a lot of followers on the web.

Here is Robert Price's critic of Acharya S:

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

Robert Price himself thinks that there are many significant parallels between the Jesus Story and Osiris, but has not published anything signficant on that issue.

Read this thread for the latest scholarship: Book Review: Thompson, The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David

Other threads:

God figures and Jesus

Another link that might be of interest:

Christmas

Beware of parallels with Mithras. Roman Mithraism was more or less contemporaneous with early Christianity, and Constantine made Christianity, Mithraism, and the worship of Sol Invictus official religions of the Roman Empire, so there was a certain amount of cross fertilization. Search this forum for prior threads on Mithras.

That's all I have time for now.

Zeichman

I think this apologist response deserves a mention:
http://www.tektonics.org/copycat/copycathub.html

as does this one, slightly less so than the last: http://www.christian-thinktank.com/copycat.html

Some of the apologetic elements (i.e. all NT written before 70 CE) is problematic in the latter, but is by no means central to the arguments.


I tend to side more with these folks rather than the Comparative Religions school. Either way, I think it's definitely better to get both sides before coming to a conclusion.

jcobbins

Thanks for the links, I thought there would be a lot more info out there regarding this.....especially after watching The God who Wasn't There.

Toto

The God Who Wasn't There features some of our favorites.

Robert Price The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?

Price, Lowder et al. The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave

Earl Doherty: The Jesus Puzzle

But Jesus mythicism involves a lot more than the idea that Jesus might be a replica of a pagan God. There is a Jewish root to mythicism that is probably more important.