hinduwoman

Do you think all such common myths mean that there was originally one culture where such stuff was common?

lpetrich

Interesting question, but I prefer the hypothesis that there is some sort of psychological quirk behind it, something in he way that our minds work that make this an interesting storyline.

i got that idea from considering how Charles Darwin's career is sometimes made to seem like parts of the Hero's Quest that Rimstalker had mentioned. In particular, his voyage on the Beagle is sometimes made to be much like the "Preparation, Medatation, and Withdrawal" and the "Trial and Quest" phases -- according to some naive popularizations, he is made to discover evolution by natural selection by studying the famous Galapagos finches when he visited those islands.

However, in his case, we have an abundance of documentation of him that is both first-hand and non-hagiographical, and this documentation tells a very different story. He had started off with Biblical literalism, though he was not obnoxiously dogmatic about it; when comparing the faunas of Australia and the northern continents, he commented that the first thing that one might think is "there were two Creators at work". However, he did not start thinking about evolution until after he finished that big trip, and about those finches, he had not been very careful in keeping track of which ones were from which islands. It was only until several years later that he understood their significance, recognizing that they are an excellent example of adaptive radiation -- a recognition that has stood the test of time.

Loki

It was Constantine who quit persecuting the Xians, but wasn't it the emperor after him who made it the official religion of the Roman Empire?

thaiboxerken

Oohh... Someone do Li Hongzhi, creator of Falun Gong/Dafa. First rate his real biography, then rate the one he made up.

lpetrich

I'm willing to do that if you will tell me where to find these biographies.

thaiboxerken

Well... I forget links.. But China has one biography and Li Hongzhi has another.

Start with <a href="http://www.falundafa.org" target="_blank">http://www.falundafa.org</a>

sorry I can't give you more, otherwise I'd do it myself..

Metacrock

Meta -&gt;Unfortunately for you, most of those don't apply to mythical figures. The list is written pruely to fit Jesus, when you study actual mythic figures they don't fit.

Now I'm not going to say that the birth narratives wheren't influenced by ancient world concepts of mythical hero. But to even consider that the whole of Jesus' story was copied after some ancient check list of mythical herodom is to totally misunderstand what ancient mythic hero's were about anyway.

btw Cambell is so bad when it comes to Christianity that he actually said that Luke was the only Gospel that has the infant narrative.


<a href="http://pub18.ezboard.com/bhavetheologywillargue" target="_blank">http://pub18.ezboard.com/bhavetheologywillargue</a>


[edited for length - mt]

[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]

[ January 21, 2002: Message edited by: Metacrock ]</p>

Vorkosigan

Do us a favor, Meta, when you quote, don't quote the whole post; just the important parts. Bandwidth and storage cost money. Thanks.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Metacrock:


Meta - Unfortunately for you, most of those don't apply to mythical figures. The list is written pruely to fit Jesus, when you study actual mythic figures they don't fit.

Can you elaborate? Which aspects don't apply to mythical figures? How is the list wrong?

btw Cambell is so bad when it comes to Christianity that he actually said that Luke was the only Gospel that has the infant narrative.

Where does he say this?

Of course, he also said that it's a bad idea to historicize myths, and doesn't have good things to say about Christianity at all.

Michael

[ January 20, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

RyanS2

The proponents of the "Christ Myth", (Doherty, Acharya, Wells, Price, et al.), believe the collaborations lie largely in that:

1.) Pagan religions rarely get rid of Gods. They subvert them to lower deities, make them a generic god, make them the same thing as another God, turn them into humans, etc., but they almost never get rid of them. If you read Luckenbills', "The Annals of Sennacherib", you find that on line 68, all of the Gods of Sumeria have survived into Assyrian forms and counterparts.

2.) Pagan religions usually equate on God or Goddess with another one that is concurrent to that time period. For instance, as an example, Winnet and Reed, "Ancient Records from North Arabia", pg. 79, 126-127, 245, and 253 show that on a stone from Al-Ula in North Arabia, at the 500 BCE mark, a contemporary God was positively identified with his older counterpart. The God Mar-Allah, (Lord God) was found with Adar'IL, a contraction of the Root form "LIL", which came to basically mean "God". Though it doesn't actually translate as that, LIL came to mean the personification of a God force, and later actually meaning "God".

3.) Pagan religions are all based off the same thing, astrotheology. The movement of the Sun, the Stars, the moon, the seasons, the Zodiac Cross, etc. Thus, different Godmen in different areas share the same stories.

4.) Pagans assimilate each others myths into the same story. W. Montgomery Watt tells us in "Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman" that Muhammad was actually a pagan, and that his religion was put forth to people who believed in "Allah" or "Al-ILAH (The God). Watt theories that Muhammad wasn't powerful enough yet to establish the worship of himself, (The Qur'an gives Muhammad some high worship positions, including having Allah praise him and tell him not to take off his sandals in heaven because it would be too much of an honor for Allah to have his feet touch the floor. References available upon request. Another one is in the Qur'an where Muhammad informs his followers that he is forgiven of any sins he may commit, which is why he had more wives than the Muslims were allowed, (which was four). A good book that gives a thorough discussion on the subject of Muhammad's sources of the myth is "The Original Sources of the Qur'an", by Rev. St. Clair.

If you're wondering why I'm using Islam instead of Jewish beliefs, it's because no one ever disagrees with anything I say about the Qur'an, but I can easily make this same case with Christianity by comparing Ugaritic and Canaanite religion with the henotheistic beliefs of the Jews and the migration of their myths from one source to another.

"Now I'm not going to say that the birth narratives wheren't influenced by ancient world concepts of mythical hero. But to even consider that the whole of Jesus' story was copied after some ancient check list of mythical herodom is to totally misunderstand what ancient mythic hero's were about anyway."

I thought ancient mythic hero's were stories where the Sun was turned into a human, and this human went about doing miraculous things.

Reactor

Aside from all the really big fat theories(tm) in this thread, can someone give me some hard-hitting evidence to explain how Jesus has suddenly become this mythic hero? And, last time I remember, Robin Hood didn't claim to be the son of God. I don't even think he was raised from the dead... and... and... nope, he isn't seated at the right hand of God at the moment, either