countjulian

Ok. My parrallels are right there, complete with primary sources. Instead of issuing vague, unbacked statements like "the parallels I see are too vague" please tell me why I am wrong.

jjramsey

That's about as dangerous a question as "Isn't it obvious"? Most things are messily nonlinear.

Except that many religions promise very sucky afterlives, including early Judaism. Far more probable, IMHO, is that nature's tendency to be a mixture of the predictible and the random is likened to human tendencies to do likewise, so humanlike entities become the explanation for the things that happen in nature.

The problem is that there is no evidence that this story is archetypal, rather than a development specific to Christianity.

Well, I know that it isn't accurate.

No, I'm saying that the "suspicious copying" is nonsense that doesn't pan out when viewed closely. Christians don't have a corner on the BS market, and overzealous atheists are quite capable of producing propaganda as well as sober argument.

There is absolutely no point in being an atheist if you just trade one flawed dogmatism for another.

One problem here is that you are exploiting ambiguities of language to imply that very different things are actually similar. For example, there is a huge difference between doing healing miracles as Jesus did and killing beasts and retrieving magic artifacts as Hercules did. Another problem is the law of large numbers. If you start with a pattern that fits Jesus' purported life, blur it to make it more vague, and then search through centuries of myth to find something that fits that vague pattern, it is almost guaranteed that you will find something. It's a very similar process to that used to match vague prophecies to fact. For the parallel to show derivation, you have to show that process is not at work.

youngalexander

I quite agree, but my point was that Copycat Savior is a misunderstanding of what has occured. It is not that Christianity has 'borrowed' extensively from other saviour religions, altho there are some obvious items as I shall indicate below. Rather that there are certain mythic themes that are widespread in ANE culture, such as the 'immortals' and 'descending-ascending' gods, and that they have influenced the development of the saviour religions. That Christianity also conforms to these myths is idle to deny and argues against its historicity.

You are arguing against Kersey Graves, Acharya S and to some extent Freke & Gandy. The mythicist position has moved on and is based upon sound scholarship as I indicated in my previous post. You may not accept the conclusions of that scholarship, but it cannot be dismissed with a handwave.
Clauss discusses the similarity of the Christian Eucharist and Mithraic ritual meal on pg108-113. A number of other similarities in Ch.14 including both Christ & Mithras being 'divinities of light and the sun' and 'the observance of Sunday and the festival of the god's birth on 25th December' and more. He presents the archeological evidence for various items in 'parallel'.

As I commented in another thread:
"As for the Eucharist: the Titans ate Dionysus flesh and drank his blood, as New Guinea cannibals did of their vanquished enemies until very recently. The Aztecs made figures of the god Huitzilopochtli and then conducted an "eating the god" ceremony. The Spanish saw Peruvian Indian rituals as a Satanic counterfeit of the Christian Eucharist. Frazer (The Golden Bough) has an entire chapter on "Eating the God".

Transubstantiation: Cicero railed against the corn Ceres and wine Bacchus "do you imagine that anybody is so insane as to believe that the thing he feeds on is a god?" The mystery is found from India to Mexico and all parts in between.

Myths may indeed bring us nearer for it is their very universality amongst humankind that points to the commonality of the deeply held psychological and societal reasons that they have arisen."

Do you really suppose that the Christ Myth is any different?

Roger Pearse

Where does Clauss discuss the festival of the god's birth on 25 December? (As opposed to the assertion on p.169)

Clauss, chapter 14 ('Mithras and Christ'), p.168:

Most of the parallels between Mithraism and Christianity are part of the common currency of all mystery cults or can be traced back to common origins in the Graeco-oriental culture of the hellenistic world. The similarities do not at all suggest mutual influence.

Most of the comments made about the two on the internet explicitly affirm that Christianity copied ideas from Mithraists, or allow the reader to infer it.

I suppose people have been making the argument "pagans sometimes did things that sound like (or can be made to sound like) things Christian do, therefore Christianity is derived from paganism or was invented from purely cultural fashions in the same period" ever since Frazer published in the 1920's. What these writers seem always to do is to not actually make this argument explicitly, but instead to talk endlessly about 'parallels' (most bogus) and try to get the reader to infer the argument.

Once you see the argument baldly stated, it becomes fairly obvious that there are several unexamined assumptions in it.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Steven Carr

I think JP Holding sums it up nicely when he wrote about how Jesus was a deliberate copy-cat '.... the common inclination in Judaism would be to take purposeful, dynamic and obvious actions in order to draw a purposeful parallel and thereby deliver a message: Jesus purposely chose 12 disciples to represent the 12 tribes of Israel, and stayed 40 days in the wilderness to purposefully parallel the Exodus.'

If that is not being a copy-cat, then I don't know what is!

Of course, Christians can see parallels between the 12 disciples of Jesus and the 12 tribes of Israel, when they also point out the differences between Jesus and other ancient figures.

Are there any parallels between the 12 disciples of Jesus and the 12 tribes of Israel, bearing in mind the obvious differences between a disciple and a whole tribe of people?

Steven Carr

'for he was a doer of wonderful works' writes Josephus.

Is 'wonderful works' a very specific term applicable to the miracles of Jesus, while if Josephus had written 'great deeds' , then we would not know that Josephus thought of Jesus as a miracle worker?

Steven Avery

Hi, Alexander.

There is a fundamental problem with many of these types of paralllels. Going back to 'The Two Babylons' by Hislop especially, but also before, Christians themselves often discuss paganism that has crept into "orthodox Christianity" that has no base in either the New Testament itself, or even early historical records, or sound doctrine.

The whole December 25th thing clearly is such an example, a fourth-century (or so) add-on that even was rejected in the USA by the Puritans and others as popery, and only gained commercial acceptance here in the 1800s. A good segment of fundamental and evangelical Chrsitians reject it today. Therefore it becomes an alarmingly poor, albeit very common, example of trying to find pagan parallels with the New Testament.

One can share the same view about 'the observance of Sunday', that it was in fact imported, like December 25, from other cultures and has no place in New Testament Christianity. In this case you do get earlier church writer support, 2nd century, for the Sunday idea, however as Bacchioche (From Sabbath to Sunday) and others have shown there is historical support for early Christian sabbath-keeping, as well as the later groups like the Nazarenes who interpreted New Testament faith similarly. And there is no clear New Testament support for such a doctrine, the proof-texts for Sunday as the new sabbath or being a new special day are experiments in eisegesis.

And 'divinities of light and the sun' is maddeningly vague and unwieldy, you can find a New Testament scripture of Jesus as 'the bright and morning star' in Revelation, but building a parallelism doctrine on that would be a bit like taking 'lion of Judah' and trying to parallel it with a lion-worship cult in Africa or Asia (after you found such a cult). Nothings.

And then Steven Carr mentions Holding discussing New Testament and Tanach parallels as deliberate. Or perhaps providential, ordained. Either way, from most all Christian perspective, Tanach and New Testament "parallelisms" as are an essential element of faith. And if Jesus is a "copycat saviour" to the Tanach Messiah, then the Messianic/anti-missionary debate has been decided for the Messianics. At any rate the whole point of the historic "copycat saviour" argument is generally that the New Testament is linked to pagan mythologies and not the Tanach. Ergo Steven is in a real sense taking our position.

Shalom Shabbat,
Steven Avery
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Messianic_Apologetic

Roger Pearse

I have yet to see clear evidence of a pagan festival being celebrated on this date. The only certain data known to me is the mention in the Chronography of 354; and I know at least 1 scholar considers that the celebration of Christmas and of the Unconquered Sun may have arisen in parallel at more or less the same time.

Don't take this as gospel; I merely highlight my ignorance. Hard data to the contrary would be most welcome! (I've been too busy earning my meagre crust to get to a library and look up various things).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

countjulian

Yes, but the healing miracles of Aesclepius (making the blind see, raising the dead, making the lame walk) fit the bill rather nicely. This is also true considering the vast catologue of healing miracles ascribed to the Christian God and various saints in the centuries after the birth of Christianity. Could you please actually read the list I posted above? I went to some trouble to put it together.

jjramsey

Actually, what Josephus used was paradoxon ergon, literally "surprising works," and the term covers a lot of ground. Context determines whether it is used for miracles or not.

This, however, is beside the point. There is a vast difference between a purported ministry of healing miracles and sword-and-sandal adventures, and describing both of them with the ambiguous phrase "great deeds" hides this.

Except he did it by being an uber-physician. As pantheon.org put it,

He's supernatural, but still very much medical.

What you have is a list of pagan personages who vaguely resemble Jesus in some respects. You are still relying on ambiguity and the law of large numbers, the very things that should make a skeptic's alarm bells ring.