Dharma

The evidence of pre-Christian, non-Judaic influence is perhaps more proveable:

This would invariably mean that the Jesus myth was later made up, as the original Nazarenes were more strict followers of Mosaic laws and had no divine myth of Jesus.

edited by mod to add link: http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/nazarenes.html

and remove copyrighted material

Clivedurdle

Isn't there a direct connection here? Xianity has very strong bits that look very like sun worship - churches facing east for example, I'm sure there are many more!

And isn't Gregory to Augustine 660 AD very important?

temples of idols..should not be destroyed...aspersed with holy water...in this way we hope people may abandon idolatry....impossible to eradicate all errors from obstinate minds at a stroke; and whoever wishes to climb to a mountaintop climbs step by step.

countjulian

Great question! To answer this, we have to look at the context of the early Christian movement.

Christianity arose from the turmoil and hardship embroiling the Jewish people in the aftermath of Jewish wars I & II. During these wars, the already high emphasis placed on martyrdom for Yahweh, dating back to Maccabean times, was stressed even further thanks to the great cost of life in the war (these strains of thought would heavily influence both the Christian and Muslim traditions). In both wars combined, thousands, maybe over a million, Jews died, and many by crucifixion. In the his works, Josephus records many would be messiahs and Jewish resistors who were crucified (many with the name of Jesus- after all, it means "God saves" and was also the name of the character we call Joshua, the successor of Moses who led the Jewish people to victory over the pagan Caananites in the book named after him; many reformers and would-be messiahs took that name for themselves, though even without the pretenders it was very common). The crucifix came to be a symbol of the suffering of the Jewish people as whole. One interesting event comes from the Life of Josephus, 75:" And when I was sent by Titus Caesar with Cerealins, and a thousand horsemen, to a certain village called Thecoa, in order to know whether it were a place fit for a camp, as I came back, I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered." Three crucified, one fsurvived? Sounds a bit familiar eh? In my opinion, all the gospel writers, even Mark, were familiar with Josephus, but that's a different topics with for a different thread. Anyway, the Jews suffered greatly in the wars, and they were looking for a reason why, and a way to redeem themselves in the face of the loss of their temple.

Flash forward to the early gospel writers. When they wrote their stories about Jesus, as Porphyry said, they were not acting as historians, worried about the man Jesus, but they were instead worried about crafting a hero for their narrative- a Hellenistic hero. Like the greatest of all Hellenistic heroes, such as Asclepius and Heracles (who was the patron of Paul's hometown, Tarsus), he would do amazing deeds and conquer death. Since the first gospels were aimed at a Jewish audience, intimately acquainted with the Jewish wars, it would only be fitting that the hero be crucified. Jesus may never have even seen the cross close up; this did not matter to the early Christian gospel writers, sitting down to write their stories. They were concerned with what Jesus symbolized, salvation for a people who god had turned his back on (even Jesus is latter made to say "My god my god, why have you forsaken me?"). Mark's gospel ends much in the manner of contemporary Hellenistic romance novels, as Robert Price pointed out, and later they will end in Jesus conquering death, much like Osiris and Serapis (popular in the major early Christian center of Alexandria) and ascending to heaven, like Heracles, the ultimate Hellenistic hero. Eventually, he will stay on earth for a time after rising to converse with his disciples, giving authority to this or that one, depending on whose church the gospel was being written in.

Did I answer your question satisfactoraly?

Amaleq13

What is your source for this claim?

countjulian

Jospehus:

Jesus ben Ananias-- famous for his prophecies against the temple, in my opinion an archtype for Jesus Christ's prophecies against that same temple

Mysterious Jewish rebel leader Jesus the Egyptian

Jesus ben Saphat, Galilean wannabe who led an insurection, and failed

Jesus ben Gamala, hippie peacnick who lead a peace party within the Jewish ranks, saying that war would bring nothing good for the Jews; was put to death by said Jews

For more, see Josephus Jeiwish War, here http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/ , or if you want to go on the lazy side, see here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_(disambiguation) .

Amaleq13

How do you know they "took that name for themselves" rather than simply sharing a common name?

GakuseiDon

Yes, you did, and very well, too. And given me food for thought as well. The influence of a culture of crucifixion that the Romans brought to Judea (even if the Romans didn't invent that punishment) on the Jewish psyche is an interesting point.

CJD

One major nit I have with your answer is that you single-handedly removed the TNK as the foundation and narrative of Jewish thought in the first century and replaced it with Josephus' Wars (not to mention Greek myths). The stories of Jesus and his conception of his vocation (as a suffering-servant-messiah king) portrayed therein, find their substance in the TNK, at least far more than in the Hellenistic mythologies. If you think your list suffices, you are wrong, for it is missing one major element: You must first show why the supposed parallel you are drawing does not proceed from the TNK (and how it was understood in a first-century Palestinian context); then, and only then, are you free to look elsewhere.

In short, your list is bunk until you do some real work showing us the right you have to even compile it.

CJD

CJD

Indeed. "Yeshua" was as common then as "Joe" is today.

countjulian

When did I ever "single-handedly remove" the influence of the OT on the NT? It seems to me that you have committed a logical fallacy here. Just because the Gospel writers were influenced by Hellenic mythology does not mean they could not also have been influenced by Hebrew mythology. One does not preclude the other; indeed, it follows that, if they were being syncrestic, as I have claimed, they would have seen the to as complementing each other. Indeed, this is the view Justin Martyr and several other church fathers took with regard to pagan myths, attempting to utilize their similarities to win converts. There were many scriptural influences of the NT on the OT; the Gospels are little more than imaginative Midrash of the OT, and Paul frequently quotes (and misquotes) the OT. Of course, they were using the inaccurate Septuagint translation, but it was Jewish scripture none the less. But the influence of the Hebrew Bible does not necessarily preclude the influence of well-known Hellenic mythology (especially considering that the said mythology would have been better known to most new converts in the Mediterranean world than Hebrew scripture).

As for your assertion that that the stories of Jesus, "find their substance in the TNK, at least far more than in the Hellenistic mythologies", all I can say is that you are grossly misinformed. The only support you might be able to find for this is the suffering servant passage in Isaiah. Other than that, the idea of a virgin born son of god, descending from heaven, doing miracles, dying, and then returning to heaven, is completely alien to the Hebrew Scriptures. Nothing but tortured Christian exegesis of the OT could lead to any other conclusion. Indeed, one of the main ideas, a god actually having a literal (not figurative) son with a woman is a concept completely alien to Judaism as it existed in the 500 years so preceding the 1st century, while it is one of the most common threads of thought in pagan religious expression prior to that time.

Also, you say "You must first show why the supposed parallel you are drawing does not proceed from the TNK", committing another logical fallacy. I have given a reasonable source for the myths of Jesus, namely pagan mythology, and if you believe otherwise it is up to you to prove otherwise. You must show why the similarities I have shown are not valid, and why they came from the Hebrew scriptures instead. As for showing the "the right you[I] have to even compile it", I must ask, what exactly is required for this right? You have failed to make this clear, and your previous logical fallacies and irregularities make me apprehensive about trying to guess what you are saying.