Ben C Smith

I encourage anybody who might think that Christians were in no way reacting to imperial propaganda with their claims for Jesus Christ to read the Priene inscription about Augustus. The sending of Jesus, his gospel, his being savior, the importance of his birth, his parousia, his divinity... all these things find precedent in the emperor cult.

This inscription is also tonic for those mythicists who think, oddly enough, that to call somebody a god is to deny him an historical existence, or that to ignore biographical details (in the Priene inscription, only the birthday even marginally comes close) is not to know them.

Ben.

Ratel

I think some of the Renaissance artists, in depicting the impregnation of Danae by Zeus, consciously acknowledged a link between that myth and the Virgin Birth. Obviously, this is not to say that they believed the Lukan account to have been copied from mythology, nor that even if they had believed such it would be evidence for such a process. I suppose they would have viewed Perseus as a "type" of Christ.

Now, I think it can't be denied that there was a certain Christian affinity for Greek theology in its more high-flung modes; in Acts you have Paul quoting Epimenides' and Aratus' statement concerning the deity and applying it to his own god; John's "Word" may have it's thought-origins in Jewish thinking, but that has to be admitted to have been a Jewish thinking influenced by years of Greek influence.

My uneducated opinion on the "parallels" to pagan and Jewish myths is that it is less interesting to be concerned with who copied from whom but rather to try to glean insight on how the thought processes of ancient man worked.
The worldview of that period seemed to create certain expectations of how gods could interact with manking, how god-men were supposed to be birthed and live their lives heroically and conquer death etc.

jgibson000

Is that what I did?

In any case, Justin most certainly does not say that the Gospel stories of the conception of Jesus were derived from "pagan" stories of divine conceptions. What he is up when he points, as he does, to how "pagans" tell and believe in stories of divine conceptions is excoriating his interlocutors for having a double standard when they deny that the Christian claim that Jesus was "produced" without sexual union.

Moreover, even if Justin were saying what you seem to think he said, so what? The issue is what Matthew actually did, not what Justin allegedly thought Matthew did.

JG

Solo

Ben, I said I have no problem with that; where I have problem is if this comes with the denial that both the imperial cult and Christianity owe this metaphor of superiority and triumph to pagan cults. If it was just Mithra, or just Attis, or Osiris, or Dionysius, or Adonis, or Aion who were virgin born, one could say, ok so what? But it's all of them, practically all the cultic godmen known in the era, plus a select crew of intellectual dignitaries (Pythagoras, Plato, Apollonius). That Judaism would develop its own mythical version(s) of "son of God" in this milieu strikes me as hugely more probable than the idea that after Mary gestating for seven months like Semele, the Magi of Mithra come to adore the child born on the same day as their master, announced by the star of the East that also happens to associate with Adonis, and arriving in a cave like Dionysius' they find a cute manifesto in a manger, with no discernible connection to anything other than a wish to challenge the divinity claims of Roman imperators.

Jiri

Solo

I said Justin seemed happy to use the pagans parallels. The "derivation" of the Jesus myth simply follows if you care to consider the timeline.

If you know what Matthew actually did I would love to hear it. If not, all we have is what was generally available to Matthew. And it was hell of a lot more virgin births to pick from and adapt for his purposes than the imperial ones.

Jiri

GakuseiDon

They weren't virgin born. If you want to say "miraculously conceived", why not just say that? IIRC Perseus was born of a virgin, and there may have been one or two others, but it was by no means common.

GakuseiDon

Ben, I totally agree about the link there, but I've always thought of it as "pro-Christian propaganda" rather than "anti-imperial propaganda". Is there a nuance here that I am missing? "Anti-imperial" suggests that Christianity was trying to distinguish itself from the emperor cult, whereas I thought that Christianity was trying to make itself more palatable to pagan ideas. I suppose it could be both, but I'm interested in how it would have been viewed as "anti-imperial" propaganda. It sounds almost as if Christians were trying to provoke them.

youngalexander

I was simply commenting that anti-imperial polemic, with which in fact I agree, is irrelevant to the truth or otherwise of virgin births.

jgibson000

I take it that by "truth", you mean "historicity", yes?

JG

youngalexander

As a scientist, I look at it from the viewpoint of 'reality'.