Layman

Of course it makes sense. That Christians saw no connection or even parrellels worth noting until 300 years later diminishes the argument that they based the resurrection on the pagan Easter goddess.

And as Bede has pointed out, the correlations are more hype than history and they completely ignore the fact that Jesus' resurrection is portrayed in accordance with Jewish Pharasiac beliefs about a bodily resurrection.

Dr S

(L) Of course it makes sense. That Christians saw no connection or even parrellels worth noting until 300 years later diminishes the argument that they based the resurrection on the pagan Easter goddess.
(S) Huh? Are you saying that the Christians of the fourth century were idiots?

(L) And as Bede has pointed out, the correlations are more hype than history and they completely ignore the fact that Jesus' resurrection is portrayed in accordance with Jewish Pharasiac beliefs about a bodily resurrection.
(S) Which, according to you, existed in a vacuum, with no connection to the same myths in the surrounding cultures?

NOGO2

Thank you.
You raise the bar far too high for me.
I have read the OT and never came across any idea of resurrection. It simply is not a Jewish concept. So they must have obtained it from somewhere. The Pharisees believed in it so that it predated Jesus in Jewish circles. This is enough for me to assert that Christians got these ideas from other cultures.

Josephus tells us that there were buddhist monks preaching in the middle east when he wrote his book on the Jewish Wars. Ideas travel. The idea of the Christian soul is also foreign to the OT.

A few comments

a) there is a specific one to one correspondence between the pagan and Christian doctrine or myth. Use of universal religious language is not enough.

Ideas are not always borrowed as is (ie copied) often they are modified and adapted to ones culture.

Communism was born in Europe but the Chinese have their own kind.

b) that the paganism came first. So that on the front of the Jesus Myteries is not evidence as it is third century AD.

To me it is enough to know that the idea of resurrection and soul is not found in the Jewish bible. I conclude that it was borrowed.

c) that the much stronger Jewish connection cannot work in that case - hence the virgin birth is more likely to come from the Septuagint than paganism.

I assume that you mean the verse from Isaiah 7:14
Even if one assumes that the septuagint was badly translated and is indeed saying virgin the context is inapropriate.

When Joseph learns that his wife is with child he is wandering what happened. In other words the NT makes a case that a virgin birth is exceptional.

Isaiah 7:14 says that a virgin is with child as though it is a very ordinary thing.

Clearly the Gospel author had a virgin birth in mind first and then went looking in the septuagint for support.

For this reason I do not agree with your example.

d) that Christians could be expected to know about the pagan forerunner. Hence a crucified hero from Sumer from 2000BC does not count.

Funny, even in some of the most remote areas of the world people know about Jesus Christ even 2000 years later, yet you seems to say that this is an unlikely scenario.

If Josephus had not told us that Buddhist monk preached in the region who would have believed it today.

[ September 05, 2002: Message edited by: NOGO2 ]</p>

GunnerJ

Messainic prophesies, even if valid, do not seem pertantent to OT condonement of the Trinity.

I don't doubt you could elaborate, but I'd still fail to see how this helps the case for OT endorsement of the Trinity.

This is true only in the vaguest and therefore most meanigless sense. It is arguable that much of the NT was not even written for Jews, but for Greeks and Romans.

In any situation, the fact that a primary work of literature has a later-written derivative peice of literature written in the same place as the primary piece and concerning the same subjects does not mean that the primary work endorses all the ideas presented in the derivative... Unless, of course, you'd like to convert to Islam, whose Quaran is basically derivative of the OT, and covers a lot of the same basic subject matter (the Abrahamic god and his true people.)

Again, even if true, I fail to see how this supports OT endorsement of the Trinity.

Maybe so, but again, this seems unrelated to OT endorsement of the Trinity.

Jesus, as presented in the NT, was not overly afraid of saying contraversial, hard-to-explain things. And are you sugesting that an omnipotent god could not explain this concept?

Perhaps so, but scratching the surface of the mystery would be more worthwhile if we knew that the mystery is a real concept, and not some arbitrary patchwork from the early church.

Again, where else was Jesus afraid to say difficult things because they might not be understood? This idea seems to run entirely counter to the picture of Jesus presented by the NT.

Irrelevant to establishing if Jesus taught the Trinity.

Of course not, you live sixteen centuries removed from the conflicts over this. Depending on where you were, claiming that the Trinity was wrong could have gotten you killed in the early days.

The "pagan ripoff" argument I refer to is that the trinity concept is not really mentioned in the Bible and was made up to alow the early church to have a pagan-style trinity of gods while still being a monotheism. If it had been stated flat-out in both the Old and New testaments, this argument would be nullified.

Perhaps one might still claim that this was barrowed from surrounding religions... but at least we'd know it was a core part of Jewish and Christian tradition, which is what I contest.

Steven Carr

More Holocaust-type denial. Presumably there are no parallels between Pol Pot's genocides and Hitler's genocides because the Jews were gassed while the word 'gassed' has never been applied to Pol Pot's victims.

Osiris was a god who died and came back to life.
Jesus died and came back to life.

Bede denies that there are any parallels here at all.

As it happens , Paul uses the word 'egeiro' in 1 Corinthians 15:4, and puts the word 'resurrection' (anastasis) together with 'dead', yet Bede would have us believe that Paul was indulging in tautologies as 'anastasis' means 'resurrection from the dead'. Perhaps, Paul was writing of the resurrection of the dead from the dead.

Curiously, Christians in Luke 2:34 used 'anastasis' in a way that does not mean resurrection, as I'm sure Bede was about to explain. When Bede says 'anastasis' was 'a a particular Greek word used by Paul and Christians to describe the resurrection of Jesus', he actually means it was a general word also used by Christians in other contexts.


'In the Word' ministries explain 'anastasis' as follows: 'For the original Christian words for "resurrection" are actually very vague: anastasis and egeiromai, and their cognates, simply mean "rise up, get up" and were hardly ever used to refer to returning from the dead before the Christians used them in that sense. Instead, the usual use of these words was for waking up from sleep or standing up from a prone position.

Thus, the original Christian vocabulary was actually far closer in basic meaning to Nash's idea of "resuscitation" than resurrection. The fact that Christians had no trouble adding many layers of double meaning onto such a concept only further proves they were ignorant of Nash's distinctions.'


<a href="http://www.geocities.com/intheword1/carrier_on_osiris.htm" target="_blank">http://www.geocities.com/intheword1/carrier_on_osiris.htm</a>

Peter Kirby

There is no mistaking, of course, that Richard Carrier and not Mark or Brian of "In the Word" wrote that essay. "In the Word" hosts that article, just as the Internet Infidels hosts articles from theists without endorsing them.

best,
Peter Kirby

Steven Carr

Didn't In the Word commission that article, in the belief that Richard Carrier was an authority on the subject?

However, I hope that nobody was fooled into thinking that Richard Carrier was not the author of that essay.

davidH

Sorry I couldn't get replying since the last time - won't be able to reply at the moment either.

But will be back as soon as I can.

Nogo2 - please tell me what the concept of a Trinity is - maybe that will help answer your question.

NOGO

Interesting!
A Christian asking an atheist to define the concept of the trinity.

DavidH, you have offered the idea that water had three states and that got you in a lot of trouble. Then you said something like the Son and the Father of one but they are not the same. Then you claimed it was a mystery so that we could not understand it anyway.

David, you can use whatever definition that you want and give me an answer and then we will see. For my part I already told you what I believed. I will try and restate it here.

The son of God who is a man presents no problem.
The anointed one (ie christ) of God who is a man is also no problem.
The son of God who is also the anointed one of God but is a man? - still no problem.
The Son of God who is God but is different than the Father, this presents a problem because the OT states quite clearly that there is only ONE God.

So how does one fix this?
Easy one creates the concept of the trinity.
This way we have three Gods and still remain monotheists. This is what the early church did.

It went something like this.

1. Jesus is the anointed one of God as his ancestor David was.
2. Jesus can be called the son of God because he was the anointed one of God.
3. Total confusion.
4. Jesus is God
5. That gives us two Gods but the OT says only one.
6. Solution: the trinity.

The trinity was the solution to a problem which was created when Jesus was deified.

Layman

I'm sure some of them were. But what's your point? The issue is a simple one: your argument that the Christian use of "Easter" as a name for a holiday somehow demonstrates that the resurrection was based on the pagan story of "Easter" is greatly diminished by the fact that no Christian thought to use the name "Easter" until 300 years after they claimed the resurrection.

What existed in a vacuum? Judaism or Christianity? Because neither existed "in a vacuum", but the fact is that early Christianity was Jewish Christianity and early Christian doctrines alleged to have come from pagan sources are clearly descended from preceding Jewish concepts.