MechAnimal

In regards to Christianity, I believe that the miracles and the resurrection in the New Testament are all made up. As far as where they got them is concerned, I've heard about the gospel authors borrowing them from Greek/Roman myths, and maybe the Egyptian myths? Sorry but I don't know a lot about this, and so I'm asking you guys.... I'm really interested though. Does anyone out there know exactly what the correlations are? Could anyone point them out to me, or give me a website that has a list of them? I find the notion extremely intriguing.

Vorkosigan

Jesus' miracles are taken from several sources, but one important source is the Elijah-Elisha cycle in the OT. A good start would be A Crucial Bridge by Thomas Brodie. Brodie's thin volume first describes the cycle, and then describes how it relates to Jesus. Randel Helms' Gospel Fictions goes into more detail about that and other sources. Intriguingly, the amatuer scholar Harold Liedner has argued that the Elisha-Elijah cycle is missing from Josephus, and that this gap indicates that the Gospel writers did draw their ideas from that cycle.

Vorkosigan

Steven Carr

Try http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/mirc1.htm

As an added bonus, it even shows where some of the Koran and the Book of Mormon came from as well.

Zinc

Maybe it comes down to translation:

Turning water into wine
At the banquet there was no wine, only water to drink. But because of the atmosphere Jesus created, everyone had such a great time - as if the water had been wine.

Feeding the five thousand
Jesus turns up wherever it was, to give his talk. A-lot more people arrive than expected. Some have food and some do not. Because of Jesus' words, the people with food were inspired to share that food with those who otherwise would have gone hungry.

Maybe someone read something literally, like "Jesus turned water into wine".
Someone else says "Was that a miracle?"
Then you get to: "Yeah I suppose it was".