jjramsey

The problem is that when someone tries to actually say what the parallels are and what they mean, the parallels turn out to be less than meets the eye. A king tries to ban religious rites that he fears are licentious.The god honored by those rites tricks him into disguising as one of the women who dances in the ceremony. He is discovered and then torn limb from limb. Somehow this is considered a precursor to the story where Paul is knocked down in a blinding flash while on the road heading down to persecute Christians. After hearing the voice saying "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" he becomes what he had formerly persecuted. (source)

Except that here, James is singled out as a brother, which makes no sense if "brother of the Lord" is the same as "brothers in Christ."

jjramsey

Josephus gives maybe a paragraph or so to most of the armed messianic claimants in the first century. About the only other such claimant mentioned by anyone else is Simon of Perea. And you expect that an unarmed claimant would get more of a mention than that? Pliny's problem with handling Christians had nothing to do with them being obviously unruly. He himself had "never participated in trials of Christians," and Emperor Trajan indicated in reply that, "it is not possible to lay down any general rule to serve as a kind of fixed standard.."

Nazareth. Despite Matthew's claim that the prophets said that "He shall be called a Nazarene," there is nothing in the OT on Nazareth.

jjramsey

The problem is that the idea of a godman fitting "classic hero and angel motifs" is a dubious reading of Christian ideas--and post-Nicean Christian ideas at that--into Greek mythology, and as I said in a previous post on the thread, the parallels tend to be less than meets the eye. Where is the evidence for "alchemic gnostic rituals" or that the Gospels are based on a play?

The lack of substantive criticism in your reply is noted.

aa5874

James, the so-called brother of Jesus Christ is still a matter of contention in the Roman Catholic Church, who say that James is the cousin of Jesus Christ. The RCC have this teaching as far back as antiquity.

As I have stated before, the NT is not credible. If information about Jesus Christ cannot be trusted, how can we ascertain he had a brother when we are not even sure who his father is. Is the father of Jesus in Matthew the same as Luke or it doesn't matter?

Biff the unclean

[QUOTE=jjramsey]Yes, that’s the “no dancing Porto Ricans in Shakespeare so West Side Story isn’t taken from Romeo and Juliet” excuse.
In both stories the main character is on the road to do harm to the followers of a demigod. In both the demigod appears and makes the same speech.
Don’t forget that Maria doesn’t kill herself in WSS either.

And you think that there is a difference between brother OF the Lord and Brother IN the Lord? And you choose to ignore that the church of the time insisted (as they still do) that Jesus had no biological brothers?

jjramsey

And the reason for the contention is the conflict between the plain meaning of "brother" and the belief that Mary was perpetually virgin.

jjramsey

No, roughly more like saying that The Mikado isn't taken from Romeo and Juliet because they don't have the same plot, even though both involve a romance that wasn't quite proper.

Pentheus hardly spends most of the play on the road, and that is certainly not where he meets his bad end.

Sorry, but the same figure of speech, "kicking against the goads," does not a derivation make. You haven't even established that the figure of speech was particular to the Bacchae, rather than a more common figure of speech. To get the Bacchae and Paul's conversion story in Acts to parallel, you have to accentuate trivial commonalities and ignore profound differences.

You bet. The contexts in which those are used indicate huge differences in meaning.

I'm not ignoring it. The reason the church had to insist is because there was a conflict with the plain meaning of the text and the dogma of Mary's perpetual virginity.

aa5874

If Jesus Christ was real, and he had a real brother, how is it the meaning of word 'brother' is a problem. Are telling me that no-one in the RCC, since at least the 2nd century, knew anything about the immediate family of Jesus Christ?

The RCC claims that the Apostle Peter is the first Pope of the RCC and they have maintained that Jesus Christ had no brothers, Mary only had one child, Jesus Christ. Who is right Josephus or the RCC?

jjramsey

What part of perpetual virginity of Mary do you not understand? Both Paul and the Gospels indicate that Jesus had brothers, and the plain meaning of the relevant passages would imply that Mary had sex in order to bear those brothers. This does not fit with the later doctrine of her perpetual virginity, which says that she didn't have sex ever.

Err, I don't think it is quite correct to speak of the RCC per se as existing in the second century. The Great Schism hadn't happened yet.

Anyway, the problem was not that they did not know "anything about the immediate family of Jesus Christ." The problem was that they understood full well what the NT passages indicated on their face, and had to work around them to uphold the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity.

Chris Weimer

And this is why all good scholars should learn the language of the texts in question before trying to argue a point.