LogicandReason

This thread is dedicated to the idea that Christianity is the product of Hellene syncretism and that Islam is but a further example.

I posit with others that:

1. The first Christian writings, the epistles from the letter-writer known as Paul (others write in his name), describe a spiritual, non-earthly, dying/rising Savior. This is a Greek, not Jewish concept.

2. Christianity is but one group of sectarian Jews who broke from Judaism just after the civil war (Seleucid conflict/Maccabean revolts) in the middle of the 2nd century BCE. The eschatology come from writings of that period, Daniel and Enoch.

3. Christianity is born in the Diaspora, not Jerusalem.

4. The Gospels created an earthly Jesus from oral traditions to reinforce local teachings.

Those ideas presented for a framework, let's look at some obvious mythology. You know your Savior is myth when:

He/she is born of a virgin.

Antecedents:

Pereus: Born of Zeus and the virgin Danae
Heracles: Born of Zeus and the virgin Alcmene
Romulus: Born of the God Mars and unnamed human virgin
Alexander the Great: Legend says that Zeus, not Philip, sired Alex with Olympias when she was still a virgin
Dionysus: (post Christian sources) Born of Zeus and the human virgin Semele

We notice old Zeus really got around in his day. We also notice that virgin birth is a very Greek idea. Is Christ's virgin birth dependent on Greek myth? Christian apologist Ronald Nash, Ed Komoszewski, James Sawyer and Daniel Wallace will all argue otherwise...saying that Christainity is not 'dependent' on the prior myths. We know, from another Christian apologist, Church father Justin Martyr that the Greek stories were well known to him and others...as he cites them in his First Apology.

Two of the Four Gospels mention a 'virgin birth.' Many scholars believe this to be confusion or mistranslation of the Hebrew word 'alma' (which literally means 'young woman' and may infer a virgin) into the Greek word 'parthenos' which is literally a virgin.

Why the myth? Simple, early Christians were competing against the legends of pagan gods, many of which were magically born of a virgin.

So post 1: If your Savior requires a virgin birth then he/she is a myth.

Biology: people are born when a male sperm fertilizes a female egg...no Holy Spirits required.

GakuseiDon

1. Paul describes Christ as earthly, in the flesh, which means not spiritual (at least while he was in the flesh).
2. I'm not aware of any Greek concept about a spiritual, non-earthly, dying/rising Savior. Do you have a source for this?

gurugeorge

The trouble with "myth" is that it's a bit misleading because the Christ myth as we have it is obviously a myth, there is no doubt about it - the entity has fantastic elements that a modern scientific understanding cannot allow to be real. So from a rationalist point of view, the answer to the question "Is Jesus a myth?" is quite clearly, obviously, certainly: yes.

The trouble is, the textual (and archaeological) evidence we have - i.e. the story that's come down to us about Joshua Messiah - is ambiguous between two kinds of myth:

1) The kind of myth you get when some real person accumulates fantastic elements in the retelling of their story.

2) The kind of myth that's "myth all the way down"

Both kinds of myth exist in the world, and the problem is really distinguishing which kind of myth the Joshua Messiah myth is.

If you look at it that way, it seems to me that the probability is around 70/30 that he's myth all the way down, but it's arguable and at times I waver into more like 50/50.

It's a tremendously complicated puzzle.

I think people also get misled by terms like "fiction". If Joshua Messiah is myth all the way down, that doesn't mean he's fiction, unless you strain the category "fiction". Actually, just as with option 1), there are lots more precise sub-categorisations to be made - fiction, certainly (i.e. he could have been just some literary exercise or jape, or cunning ploy to unite the Empire with a unified grab-bag eclectic religion, etc., etc.); but also (and more likely to my mind) he could be an entity seen or conceptualised in visionary experience, either a shared vision (i.e. people egging each other on to experience the same kinds of hallucinations) or some private vision like Paul's. He could also be a more philosophical kind of exercise - e.g. an entity concocted as an intellectual exercise to represent Israel in its travails and eventual victory. Lots of interesting possibilities.

To my mind, it seems most likely that he is a variant of an entity we already know to be "myth all the way down" - the pre-Christian Messiah myth - a trope reversal that puts the cult entity in the past instead of the future, and revalues some of the other values of the Messiah myth.

So, partly a philosophical construct, partly a personified visionary/ecstatic experience, partly a visionary entity (met and spoken to in waking hallucinations of a certain class). The construct may have triggered the mystical experience and imaginary friend episodes. (It's pretty clear from Paul that what he and his religious cohorts enjoyed was a charismatic "old time religion" - prophecy, speaking in tongues, ecstatic trance.)

(But note: if there were a grain of historical truth to the Joshua Messiah myth, similar visionary and ecstatic experiences might have accumulated around the memory of the real man.)

LogicandReason

Romans 1:3 reflects a 'Christology' which taught that the intentional object has at one time (ambiguous) been born and descended from David, This tautology never references the Gospel details or biography. This is because the Gospels develop later, from oral tradition. Historical anchors, like Pilate, Herod and John the Baptist attach to these oral traditions to create a time period unknown to Paul.

If Paul thought that Jesus was a man from Galilee, recently crucified by the Roman authorities, he would never have written Romans 13. Paul never mentions Jesus of Nazareth or death in Jerusalem.

Paul tells you where he gets his myth: Gal 1:11-12. It is all revelation.

Columbia University philosopher John H. Randall Jr., in his book Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance (or via: amazon.co.uk), suggests, “Christianity, in the hands of Saul of Tarsus, the real formulator of Christian theology, and certain other early Christians, notably the author of the Fourth Gospel, became one such incarnation and mystery cult among many other competitors. It became the Jewish rival of the cults of Isis, of the Great Mother (Cybele), of Mithras, and many Gnostic sects. (Pg 105)


Poor choice of wording on my part...when I used 'Savior' versus gods. The dying/rising (imitating the nature cycle) gods didn't claim to be either the Son of God or to have died for mankind's redemption...those ideas were exclusively Christian (to my knowledge). Philo's 'Logos' or 'Word' has similar cosmology and epistemology to the early Christian beliefs and he is quite known for his midrash of Judaism and Plato.

I'm not saying that Jesus is dependent on dying/rising gods, but I agree with Doherty and G.A. Wells that this was part of the antecedent for this sectarian version of Judaism.

DO YOU BELIEVE THAT JESUS WAS BORN OF A VIRGIN? IS THIS MYTH?

GakuseiDon

You wrote:

The first Christian writings, the epistles from the letter-writer known as Paul (others write in his name), describe a spiritual, non-earthly, dying/rising Savior. This is a Greek, not Jewish concept.

If that is a poor choice of words, can you rephrase, please? What is the Greek concept, and what is the evidence for it?

No, I don't believe that Jesus was born of a virgin. Yes, I think it is a myth.

LogicandReason

Since Jesus himself is inferred and not historically proven...evidence is a trick word of sorts. I've seen multiple references of the Hellene connection to dying/rising gods, Bultmann certainly brings us good scholarship on this. My favorite is George Gilbert's Greek Thought (or via: amazon.co.uk).

Reading Christian apologist, like Nash, only reinforces the extreme polemics employed in rebuttal. Osiris, Attis and Adontis are but a few examples.

This does not imply that early Christians took the Hellene cookie-cutter and superimposed Jesus on older tales. It does show that the 'resurrection' idea was not exclusive to Christianity. OF course, we see glimmers of this coming theology in Job and Isaiah...just not well developed.

What I see as the main difference between the developing Christ cult and other mystery religions was the eschatology and soteriology.

GakuseiDon

I'm unaware of any ancient writings where Osiris, Attis and Adonis are depicted as rising/dying spiritual beings. I've read where they were thought to be actual people who were 'euhemerized'; I've read where the stories involving them were thought to be analogies for cosmic principles (like love and beauty), whereby the stories didn't actually happen.

But I've never seen ancient writers refer to them as rising/dying spiritual beings. Can you cite where you are getting this information from, please?

aa5874

It is absoluetly not complicated at all. That is a most erroneous and bogus claim.

We have a creature describe as a myth.

There are no historical records of the creature.

There are no historical records of anyone directly associated with the creature.

There are no historical records of any events with respect to the creature.

Writers who lived while the creature was alive and supposedly worshipped him did not write a single word about seeing the creature on earth.

Writers who lived while those who worshipped the creature were supposedly alive did not write a single time that they saw a single person directly associated with the creature.

It is as simple as can be that the creature called Jesus was a MYTH.

arnoldo

So who were the persons responsible for inventing this myth and when was the approximate date of this fabrication?

aa5874

That is like asking me to name the persons responsible for the Egyptians Gods, the Greek/Roman Gods, or the Jewish God called the God of Moses.

I do not know the name of any Jesus story writer, except that the creature's birth was described in Matthew 1.18 and left the earth in Acts1.9.

A most comprehensive myth, acknowledged hundred of times by the church writings.