Answerer

Oh, I missed out the part that they told me their "rightful messiah" was a divine saviour.

Wyrdsmyth

Yeah, it does sound familiar.

Just once, I'd like to hear some kid caught plagiarizing a paper argue that the early papers that look conspicuously like his are all just "echoes" or "foreshadows" of what was to come.

menj

It is also possible that the Christian position on Jesus is false, and that they ascribe these attributes to a historical Jesus who never claimed to be God.

- MENJ

Metacrock

Yes I used Hamilton in my long post on the dying/irsing savior god thread. Read her way back in 8th grade and have always loved her book. She's not the best, but she'll do.

AS I pointed out on that thread, the Di. type of god is a vegitation/fertility god.His "resurrection" is due to the recurring crop cycles. That's not the same as returning to flesh and blood life as Jesus did.please keep these points in mind:


1) The death of Di is certainy not a crucifiction, and his res is not the res of a return to flesh and blood life, but the cyclical return of a plant.

2) Certainly his cult is a cult of exstatic transformative power (it has an analog to salvation).

But the problem is that the Jewish expectations of Messiah under which Jesus began his ministry were not predicated upon such expectations, but upon the liberation of Israel, the coming of the Kingdom of God, and the like. They were only latter vested wtih the "born again thing" in the form of a soteriological experince. That means that Jesus is not patterned after Di or any other pagan god to any degree!


3) Soteriological experice is common to all religious experince, although it may very in the type of the content.


In the ancient world of late antiquity, there was a movment very similar to our "new age movment." it was very diverse, it was diffused throughout mystery cults, gnosticism and many other sources. It is not unlikely or damaging to the christian cause to say that the early chruch (and heterodox Judaism before it) experinced something of this kind of outlook which was widely shared.

That in itself is not an idication of Jesus being made up.


4) Barrowing between mythologies does occurr, there are similarities, but they are the result of archeypes, not of conscious barrowing. see my thread on dying/rising savior gods

Skeptical

I think you have a very simplisitic view of the way mythology is created. Myths are not typically "copied" word for word or even point for point. They are typically syncretic creations from varying sources. You are quite right in saying that Jesus' supposed resurection is not "the same" as that of Dionysis, but that is not the point. There is clearly a similarity between the general theme of a dying God who is resurrected. Of course there are differences since different mythologies are applied by different cultures and groups to different situations. That doesn't mean they are not myths and that there are not themes that are roughly equivalent.


Again, you are caught up in the details which are of course different. What is important is the similarities in the general theme.

Which is exactly why it is highly unlikely that the majority of 1st century Jews would have regarded the Jesus of the NT as the messiah. To the extent that there even was a "messianic" expectation, Jesus did not fulfill the expectations of the majority of Jews. Certainly by the standards of the OT scriptures he was not the anticipated messiah. See "The scepter and the star" by Collins for a more complete discussion.

Again, your looking at it too simplistically. The question, at least for me, is not whether Jesus was "made up", but to what extent did the mythological accretions of the surrounding cultures influence the mythology that sprung up about him after his death. There are clear commonalities, just as there are clear differences. The question is what can we find that was real about the man and what is later legendary addition.

Of course, some people think that Jesus is entirely mythical and that seems to be what you are arguing against. I don't personally hold this belief, but it is clear to me that there was a lot of mythology created post mortem.

To me, the question of whether Jesus was "made up" is far too simplisitic. We simply don't have enough information to make a positive assertion that Jesus didn't exist. Given that, it seems to make much more sense to take as given that he existed at least as a traveling healer in 1st century Palestine and then ask to what extent the mythology that sprung up around him was influenced by that the existing culture of the Romans and also to what extent we can separate the mythology from the man. Obviously this is not an original idea, many modern scholars take this approach. You might also find interesting "The christians as the Romans saw them" by Wilken.

The idea of "archetypes", as I understand you to be using it, is equivalent to "cultural" and "sociological" influences. If you are saying that non-Jewish cultural influences played only a part in the creation of the Jesus mythology and that it was not a bunch of guys sitting around consciously creating a new spin on an old story, then I agree with you. There were a lot of variables that led to the creation of the Jesus mythology, and its much more complicated than just having stories copied and pasted from other myths.

Viti

What makes you think that...in all of my history research, the Hewbrews were not always Hebrews...the way I read it, they were just Sumerians who separated and become their own group or tribe.