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Gamera, you have totally mis-represented the mythicist position.

You are fully aware, the similarities, in description, between Unicorns and Mermaids are virtually zero, yet they are are both regarded as mythical or fictional. This categorisation is based on the fact that no-one can demonstrate that these creatures existed at any time or at any place.

Osiris and Jesus have not been demonstrated to exist anywhere or at any time, however, remarkably both were raised from the dead, but these resurrections only reinforce their mythicism.

Gamera

Heavens, I don't think the mythicists position is simply that Jesus is a myth, period, end. That of course is assuming a conclusion. They argue much more than that.

They use purported structural similarities between various mystery myth narratives and the gospel accounts to claim a geneaological relationship, and thus argue that Jesus was mythological in nature, just like Osiris and a half dozen other fertility gods.

I'm attacking that methodology for the reasons I listed.

But if I'm mischaracterizing the JM argument, let me know how.

Toto

There is no single JM argument. Most mythicists emphasize the relationship between elements of the gospel stories and the Jewish scriptures. Few mythicists (none that I can think of offhand, offhand) claim a simple copycat, "geneological" relationship between the Christ myth and other dying and rising gods.

Cheerful Charlie

Parallels are to be found in the myth of Hercules. Most of the early ceasars are claimed to have been born of gods and to become gods when they died (apotheosis). Apollonius of Tyana was a miracle working wise man who is very Jesus like in many ways.

Earlier myths include soter Gods like Osirus who was slain by Seth, resurrected by Isis and reborn as the God of the Western World, the Egyptian heaven who will lead all good Egyptions into eternal life there.
The granddaddy of all Soter gods. The eucharist of the gospels is straight from Osirian religious ritual. Tammuz (Damuz) and other soter Gods go back millenia before Jesus. Many mystery religions are based roughly on Osirian ritual purification of one's sins to guarantee a future life.

Google soter gods for more. The Christian critic Celsus relates a number of similarities to Jesus in various pagan mythologies.

There have been a number of books on the subject, avoid the dreadful and error filled "16 Crucified Saviors" by Kersey Graves, or at least taking it too seriously. It is an interesting read but full of errors and rather uncritical. Written in the late 1800's, it is available online.

There have been as number of books in recent years on the parallels between Christianity, Jesus and pagan religions and mythical figures.
Just be aware, the entire field is some what controversial and full of nonsense.

Cheerful Charlie

Cheerful Charlie

dog-on

Hey Don, fancy meeting you here!


Nice website. Especially love this line:

"Christians felt that Christ didn't fall into the category of 'mortal turned god' since Christ was the pre-existent Logos and so had never been a mortal."

cool...

"And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter." which seems to be part of what Justin is comparing to pre-existing Pagan beliefs. Can you show me where the ancient Jews happened to believe something similiar, or did those ancient Greeks discover the hidden mystery centuries before poor old Saul...

I know what Justin was trying to do. The problem is that in doing so, he exposed the fact, to posterity, that there were, indeed, parallels between Christianity and the preceding pagan religions. His apologetic, that they got it from the Hebrews and/or the Devil, aside.

Satan, of course, would have known how to properly quote mine the OT in order to come up with the revelations which led to the NT...but was too stupid to actually get it right...my bad! :angel:

...and regarding parallels...

If I wanted to write a story about a boy wizard. It would do me little good to name my character Harry Potter and have him attend Hogwarts...

Come on man...

gurugeorge

Pardon me, that's sometimes what's been done, and I agree it's wrong (I don't think it's right to accuse Christians of outright theft or copying in this instance) but actually the link is more often pointed out simply to show that there is a lot of mythical content in the Jesus story.

Do you disagree that there's mythical content? It's all historical, the whole thing?

See, it's not an exclusive proposition - there's Jewish content, mysteries content, dying/rising content. The point is, when you mark all that and put it to the side, how much of the story doesn't fall under any of these rubrics?

What do you mean "meaningful" - they rose from the dead already!

(More properly, they both represent continuity of life - in a larger sense of "life" - through life and death, a "conquering" of death, the apparent finality of death.)

I think this has happened in some cases, but it's not just a "mythicist" error (when it has occurred), it's also been perpetrated by people who believe there was a historical Jesus but he was mythicised (e.g. some Protestant thinkers).

But actually, thanks to the counter-arguments from apologists, us mythicists can now sharpen up the argument and put our pattern-recognition intuition into sharper focus.

But as I said, there are as many differences between Tammuz and Osiris as there are between Jesus and Osiris, so if your argument holds, it holds against categorising Tammuz and Osiris as similar too.

Yet they are obviously similar, functionally similar (as dying/rising, as saviours), and Jesus clearly belongs in the same company (as I said, whether one is thinking of a historical Jesus mythologised, or an outright mythical Jesus, it's the same - for the mythicist this is just part of a larger argument).

More to the point, it shows that at least some of the ideas in Christianity were taken from a surrounding culture, were "in the air", which makes it much less likely (though not impossible of course) that they come from any actual biographical details.

Gamera

I agree that there are nonhistorical elements in the Jesus narrative (what narrative doesn't have nonhistorical elements). But I don't think that's an argument against Jesus' historicity, which I take is the ultimate conclusion of the mythicists.
It's ok with me. But that's not addressing the historicity issue. My strong impression is the whole point of the JM is that Jesus is a myth and not an historical person, and that's why they purport to find mythic elements in the text -- to support that position (which to my mind is a defective methodology for the reasons I stated)

Oh, it can make a big difference. Osiris rises from the dead in the context of the revitalization of the world and the coming of spring, blah blah blah. Jesus doesn't. Indeed, his resurrection ushers in a time of conflict in Christology. Jesus resurrection has spiritual implications, but doesn't produce good crops. I'm sorry, to pretend these two narrative elements are equivalent is simply a poor reading of the context and the purpose of the narrative (to the extent we can even reconstruct an authentic Osiris myth).

Yep, if you generalize it enough and decontextualize, they can appear to mean the same thing. So too with a Ikea catalog or the story of Snow White. But then you have to ignore alll the details and the differences. So you wind up not comparing two narratives that we have, but two ideas about two narratives, and of course those ideas for the mythicists are destined to be similar.

I think the basic mythicist methodology is to discern structural similarities between the gospels and various (dubiously attested to) fertility myths, and thus conclude that Jesus was not an historical person. I think that whole methodology is defective.

The thing about pattern recognition is that it's always as sharp as you say it is.

I think it does. But regardless, the comparison of Tammuz and Osiris is done for the same purpose as comparing Jesus with either of them. Nobody is concerned with Osiris' historicity. Everybody is concerned with Jesus', including the mythicists. It's a real issue. The methodology used by mythicists to argue against it, is for the reasons I stated, unconvincing and flawed.

Similar is as similar does. I can use your argument and apply it to Snow White just as easily. That's the problem. Generalized similarities discerned in narrative structures can relate almost anything, so they relate nothing.

[

No, it doesn't. That's the problem. If you can show a textual borrowing, that would be different. When actually ms are used to construct a narrative, then we can show a geneological relationship. But in fact most of the mss that contain the fertility myths come after the Christian mss. It would be more convincing to argue that Christianity created the fertility myths, or at least modified them to accord with Christian themes (an argument actually made by some people and very convincing at least in the area of Germanic studies).

But without a showing of actual language borrowing (i.e., a ms history relating two narratives) generalizations about themes is very suspect. You can always find such themes, if that's what your looking for, between any two narratives. Try it out. Take a coyote narrative from Amerindian mythology and see if you can't find thematic similaries with Jesus' narrative, or Osiris' or Freyas. You can and more to the point, if you're looking for them, you will.

gurugeorge

Well, it's not an argument against Jesus' historicity on its own, but it's part of a whole picture. Take it abstractly: you have a bunch of cultic narratives about the supposed existence of entity X at a certain time and place in history. Ok, so there might be some truth in the cultic narratives, there might not, you can't prejudge it. Let's look for some external, contemporary evidence of X. Hmm, not much to be found, a few possible references, but rather dubious. Let's look at the narratives themselves, to see how much historical truth can be extracted from them. Hmm, this bit looks mythological, that bit looks mythological, that bit looks like Midrash. Is there any part of this cultic narrative that seems to be NOT myth, NOT Midrash, NOT part of some internal cultic dialogue reflected in the narrative (e.g. representative of arguments betwen factions)? There doesn't seem to be (so the argument goes).

If not, then it's reasonable to conclude X didn't exist (again, so the argument goes). It's never going to certain that he didn't exist (unless we find some signed confession by Eusebius that he made it all up ), because after all it's possible that some entity could have lived a life that had all these mythological elements, and that the Midrash did actually happen to fit (presumably that's how many Christians in the past thought of it), but I'm sure you can understand that people who are either unbiassed from the start, or have a positive aversion to the cult, aren't going to be convinced, or at the very least, will remain a bit skeptical - and reasonably so?

But that's part of the point Gamera - there's a certain universality to these stories, they're represenative of deep things about human nature, the world around us, etc., etc. Tammuz and Osiris are linked because of the analogy in their stories. The argument against Christ's historicity doesn't arise out of the fact that he, too, is a hero myth, but out of the fact that if the preponderance of his story is hero myth stuff, then that doesn't leave much actual historical detail in the narratives. Therefore it's reasonable to think of him as "just another" one of those kinds of myths.

Gamera

On the contrary it's not reasonable, since heroic mythic elements accrue to any story of a honored personage. Hence Washington and the cherry tree, and Lincoln and his long treks to return library books. Pure myths, but that doesn't mean Lincoln and Washington are mythic characters.

gurugeorge

But we only know that because we have a good deal of evidence independent of Washington and Lincoln "cultists" (i.e. the passers-on of those stories) that he existed, was an honoured personage, and didn't do those (slightly) mythical things. Can we say the same of Jesus?

But come on, let's not kid ourselves with red herrings, there's a world of difference between the kinds of mythological stuff we mean when we talk of myth proper and "mythology" in the looser, more general (as one might call it "journalistic") sense often used nowadays.

Jesus's story has elements of myth proper (e.g. mainly, rising from the dead, a feat neither Lincoln nor Washington have accrued, and would be unlikely to, ever), and elements of mystery religion and astrological symbolism (e.g. last supper, 12 disciples). Mythicists are people who, like Robert Price in his note posted here recently, when they dig deeper, find that most of the supposed historical detail in the cultic documents evaporates in one way or another, either as similar to myth or to mystery religions, or to other ancient or Jewish non-historical elements.

So what's left as definitely historical? Maybe a few vague references, a few possible skeletal factoids. Enough to make the idea that there might have been some obscure person behind the myth tenable; but not enough to make the idea that the whole thing was myth (e.g. based on visions or fevered midrash or whatever) untenable.