crownboy

Well, according to this Christain scholar it would appear not. I don't know a great deal about the topic, but if he is correct (but I suspect he probably isn't entirely), this does raise some questions.

Does this article raise issues that have already been well refuted, a la YEC arguements, or is there legitimate merit to it?

GreggLD1

This looks like a pretty good paper, seems very scholarly and objective from the little I've read of it so far (I'll have to read the whole thing at home later). Of course, if this paper was written FOR the "church of the lamb" web site, one has to consider that it might contain some bias toward a particular conclusion.

I don't think there's any way we could know for certain if there was any DIRECT or CONSCIOUS "borrowing" from Mithraism by Christianity. Of course, Mithraism wasn't the only mystery cult--there were also the cults of Attis, Adonis, Osiris, etc., and these preached dying/rising savior gods as well.

However, there's also no way we can be sure that there was NO "borrowing" of any kind. It's possible that these beliefs in dying/rising saviors (many of them quite ancient, but recast in Greek philosophical terms) were "in the air" of the times, and in this way they may have influenced the thinking of early Christians.

Gregg

Greg2003

I got a malicious script alert on that link and had to shut it down. I hope nobody got a virus or other damage from that link.

I think the problem with arguments refuting the borrowing from other belief systems in the same cultural milieu is that they ignore the obvious implication that nobodies ideas are unique. Just because many little details of a story aren't that same does not mean that people are not talking about the same basic issues of divine sacrifice of the son and redemption for all who would believe.

My point is simply that you can't say that Chrisianity is a unique revelation of God. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. If xianity has all the elements of older myths about divine sons coming down to man and suffering unjust deaths in order to provide some greater enlightenment to man, then it probably got its ideas from those myths. There doesn't have to be a smoke filled back room conspiracy or a deliberate intertextual reconstruction to connect the different religious movements. They exist side by side because these are the common issues that people are talking about at the time.

I do understand why that's hard for true believers to understand, but I don't understand why that's so hard for others to understand.

CX

We had a thread about this a little while ago Misconceptions on Mithraism