Metacrock

Meta => How do you know that if it's been destroyed? That's a convient device for explaining away the absense of things like mulitple versions of the Jesus story and all the suppossed reincornation stuff that itsn't there.







Meta =>The argument that the Christian apologists must have seen the similarities becasue they respond to them, (such as Justin) is a fallacious argument.

Justin wasn't responding to allegations that christians barrowed from pagans. pagans didn't care if they barrowed or not. The the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration didn't exsit then, so the idea of barrowing didn't have the same onus it does to you. But, in fact Justin tried to point out the similarities, so the sitatuion was reversed. He did this becasue he wanted to show them that christianity isn't so evil after all, it's not that different from what they believed. He was an apologist, and in those days that meant his main task was to stop them from killing Chritsians.

but Justin never argued that the myths were totally the same. He did come back in the next section and say "yea but there are crucial differnces" and then sketched those out.




They take that apporach (that other faiths were of the devil) because they lived in the 1-4th centuries and Marcea Elliade lived in the 20th. So they didin't know about the mono myth or archetypes.


the real issue is conscious barrowing. IF these similarities, which I 'm quite willing to grant in a limited way, are just archetypes, that doesn't even impendge upon my Christian theology. It is only if the story was made up consciously as Doherty seems to suggest that I have a probelm.


see this link.


http://www.geocities.com/metagetics/mythology2.htm


there's more there you should read, but here is the most relivant part for this point: archetypical associations do not impendge upon historicity of Jesus (or upon Christian belief).



VI.Some Similarities Do Exist Between all Religions as a Result of Human Nature and Archetypical Patterning.


A. Cultural Influences.


But most scholars such as anthropologists and historians of religion today no longer think in terms of out right copying. Rather scholars tend more often to think in terms of influence and cultural drift. "Today, however, most scholars are considerably more caustious about the parallels between early Christianity and the mysteries and hesitate before jumping to conclusions about dependence. To be sure, one religious tradition my appropriate themes from another and so it must have been with early Christianity and the mystery religions. Yet Judaism, Christianity, and the mysteries were equally parts of the religious milieu of the Greco-Roman world, and this explains many of their similarities. As Greco-Roman religions they sometimes faced many of the same challenges, proposed similar ways of salvation and shared simliar visions of the way to light and life"

[Marvin W. Meyer, ed. The Ancient Mysteries :a Source book. San Francisco: Harper, 1987, 226]



(This is Marvin Meyer, the same source recommended by Kane on his website)



The notion of outright copying is silly. This depends upon a conspiracy which would produce a wooden figure rather than the vibrant breathing unique personality we find in the Jesus of the canonical Gospels. Moreover, Jewish and Hellenistic thought both grew up together in the Eastern end of the Mediterranean. Both owed a little to Egypt and a great deal to the civilization of the Trigris-Euphrates valley. Both alike deriving something from Aegean culture." [D.E.H. Whitely, Jesus College Oxford, Theology of ST. Paul, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966, 5]. This makes the cultural influence theory all the more likely, but rules out any sort of direct barrowing. These people thought alike in many ways, but why would a Jewish sect go to pagan cults to barrow their mythology consciously?



B. Archetypical Patterning


1) Mythical elements derive from psychological archetypes

"Through out the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance the myths of man have flourished and they have been and they have been the inspiration for whatever else has appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind....Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of permeative and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the very basic magic ring of myth. The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale--as the taste of the ocean is contained in a droplet, or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the Symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bares within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source."

(Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949, pp. 3-4)

[One would assume than that they cannot, with any great success be artificially copied, and produce anything with the power of the character of Jesus in the four Gospels.]





2) Definition of Archetypes


The psychologist Carl Jung defines archetypes as "forms or images of a collective nature which occur practically all over the earth as constitutes of myths and at the same time autochthonous, individual products of unconscious origin" (C. G. Jung Psychology and Religion [collected works vol II New York, London: 1958 par. 88]). Campbell tells us "The archetypes to be discovered and assimilated are perciely those that have inspired, throughout the annals of human culture, the basic images, mythology, and vision." (Ibid. 18).

So these images, symbols, and notions about religious figures are in large part products of the human psyche the world over, each viewed through the lens of some particular culture, and with cross fertilization and cultural influences. Now one might object that this makes it all the more likely that the Jesus story is also being viewed through the lens of culture and is merely the product of these archetypes. That is what Campbell himself said, but he also said that that didn't make it unimportant, that doesn't mean that there is no supernatural reality behind it. He was not a Christian, and didn't like Christianity, but he did recognize that there is more to it than just "copying" and more to religion than just "a mere myth."



3) Source of the archetypes



Jung didn't really stipulate what the final source of archetypes was, it was psychological, and indicative of some higher reality in a Platonic sense perhaps. Marcea Elliade was the other great Mythological scholar; founder of the field of History of Religions at University of Chicago. He was also an official Guru in the Hindu religion (although he was Rumanian) and was a believer in mystical consciousness and Higher reality (see Dudley Gilford III, Religion on Trail.) Champbell also hints at a higher source for the archetypes. How else could these psychological figures and symbols be embed in the human psyche if not some correspondence to a higher reality? With a strict materialist interpretation it makes no sense to even suppose that they exist. yet they are found all over the world, the same basic heroes doing the same basic things, the same elements (See Champbell The Hero With a Thousand Faces) Therefore, they are the product of the link between the human psyche and a higher reality. Not to suggest that some higher reality is telling us about real people doing real things, but that these heroes are symbols for everyone, for the individual and his/her journey through life.



C. The Archetypical Demonstrates Jesus Deity All the More.


As C.S.Lewis is reputed to have said, with all the dying and rising gods of pagan mythology one might get the idea that it actually happened in some historical enstance. IF someone really embodied the details of these myths it would go a long way toward proving that God designed it that way, especially since that historical figure is recorded living long after most of these myths were told. The myths exist as far away as the other side of the world, and yet here is a man who actually lives them and embodies them.





Eliade quotes Fr. Beirnaert:





[the Christian sacraments direct the believer's mind to the power of God in history] ...This new meaning must not lead us to deny the permanence of the ancient meaning [of the archetypes found in the sacraments]. By its renewal of the great figures and symbolization's of natural religion, Christianity has also renewed their vitality and their powers in the depths of the psyche. The mythical and archetypical dimension remains none the less real for being henceforth subordinate to another. The Christian may well be a man who has ceased to look for his spiritual salvation in myths and in experience of the immanent archetypes alone; he has not for all that abandoned all that the myths and symbolism's mean and to the psychic man, to the microcosm [...] the adoption by Christ and the Church, of the great images of the Sun, the moon, wood, waster, the sea, and so forth, amounts to an evangelization of the effective powers that they denote. The incarnation must not be reduced to the taking on of the flesh alone. God has intervened even in the collective unconscious that it may be saved and fulfilled. The Christ descended into hell. How then can this salvation reach into our unconsciousness without speaking its language and making use of it's Categories?
[Beirnaert, pp. 284-285 quoted in Marcea Eliade, Images and Symbols, Studies in Religious Symbolism,trans. Philip Mairet Kansas City: Sheed Adnrews and McMeel inc. 1952, English trans. Harvil press 1961, pp.160-161.]



In other words, God could still do both, literally fulfill the images of the archetypes in the historical reality of Jesus Christ, and still arrenge them so that they speak of the same transcendent reality through their archetypical symbolism. So Jesus is both the literal historical incarnation, the Son of God, and the archetypical mythical savior figure. But no conscious borrowing is required. All that is needed for this is the human psyche.




D. The Skeptic will argue that the archetypes colored the historical facts


Many of the smaller details of Jesus' life cannot be proven, but the major outline can be. That he lived, was a healer, was a great teacher, was crucified and his followers claimed from an early time that he rose from the dead, that he was the product of Vigin birth ect. these things can be demonstrated as historical. As shown, mos skeptics cannot make good on these cliams either, but to whatever extent they do, these similarities only add to the idication that God was working through Jesus Christ.

Metacrock

Meta =>Obviously I'm arguing that the speicific foudner of christianity was an historical figure. I you think you have a real point there, it alludes me.




So its just mear coinsidence that god wanted burned meat too huh?



Meta =>Not a coincidence, a psychological reality about the way humans understood the divine.read my long post futhre down about archetypes. It's a direct copy, it's a psychological archetype, that's the point!







Meta => well 320 years, is that a long time?




Meta => Yes I can. Because Socrates was born in the center of culture. Jesus was born in the styx. It would be analogus to saying "How come this son of a former president who lives in New York and went to Harvard became famous and this son of a gas station attendent from Buckstrot Texas has never been heard of by anyone?" Because one is an aristocrat and lives in the center of the most imortant circle in the most important part of the world, and the other is from a tiny and obscure farm town in the back water.


Archetypes? Are you claiming that god experimented with prototypes of j/c?


Meta =>No, I told you I wasn't definding inspiration at the moment, can't you just accept that and not bough the debate down in this unnecessary stuff?


If you really care how I handle archetypes, here's a page on my view of Christianity and other faiths.

http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...n_others1.html


Here's a link to my page where I talk about my view of inspiration. Then I also talk about archetypes in a thread which should before this one by now, so presumpably you've seen it.



Models of revelation
http://www.geocities.com/metacrock20...Models_rev.htm


put the two together, with what I said about archetypes, and you will get the drift. But I would just as soon leave it as saying that similiarites are not major and don't contitute conscious barrowing.



You sure like to have a lot of "proof" don't you? It's strange how a mystic wants proof when it is to their benefit, but rejects the notion of proof when it is not to their benefit.


Meta => I haven't seen any proof from you guys. All I've seen is argument from silence. it's not strange that a mystic is into intellectual argument and logic. St. John of the Cross was the top teacher in Thomistic logic in his day. Reinhold Niebuhr said that mysticism is the ultimate rationalism.





Meta => what are you talking about? IN this thread I'm the one whose saying that someone has failed to prove something. You are the one's with circumstantial evidence. Well it ant good enough!




Meta => by "court room style" You mean it's too much to ask that the examples you give really show what you say they do?

Gurdur

I would say something, but perhaps it would be mythplaced.

Metacrock

Meta =>Yes, at the time Zeus screwed her! but not in concieving the god


Mary didn't have sex with God! The point of Greeks speaking of virigins in connection with mothering gods is not the same point being made about Mary. The reason Mary is a vigin is because it is a miracle, a sign that Jesus' birth is from God, and maybe a prophesy. The reason for including that tid bit in the story in Greek mythology is not to show that it was a miracle. Since these gods were never historical people (or maybe they were at one time, but long long ago and have become totally disconnected from the myths they spawned). The reason there is merely to show the worhy nature of the woman. It is not the same motivation, and not the same kind of "virginity" since the woman in the Greek myth is beded by the God, and not in the Bible.


As to the name Iasius and its meaning, this name is found in various forms such as Iasius, Iasion, Jasion. The connection with healer is through Iaso. However I must admit I can find no reference to this specific character being called "Iason" or "Iaso".


Meta =>So how many years did you study Greek? Me, I took it as an undergrad language, then went to seminary. It's univerally understood as a translitteration of Yeshua, which littterallly the name Joshua and is found in Exodus, dating back to perhaps 1200 BC. I don't know when the word [i]christos] (litterally "hero") dates to.

But to say that Jesus is not dervied from Joshua is just linguistically naive. if you are trying to make some mythological connection it wont work. I've seen people try to derive the name Zeus out of it, as though it is Je-Zeus. Just nuts!

JERDOG

OK guys here's the condenced version of what meta just said.

I want proof proof proof! That's not proof proof proof!
That's not EXACTLY the same so it has nothing to do with it at all!

The End.

I bet meta doesn't use the same standards of proof when it comes to the existence of a god.

JERDOG

Main Entry: ar·che·type
Pronunciation: 'är-ki-"tIp
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin archetypum, from Greek archetypon, from neuter of archetypos archetypal, from archein + typos type
Date: 1545
1 : the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies : PROTOTYPE; also : a perfect example
2 : IDEA 1a
3 : an inherited idea or mode of thought in the psychology of C. G. Jung that is derived from the experience of the race and is present in the unconscious of the individual


Now would you care to explain to me which one of these definitions of this word you are using fits what you say? I'm sorry but I do not have the time to brows your 50 web pages and read all night.

GakuseiDon

Yes, I did. I was extending the analogy to include the part about Peter sinking - I thought that would be picked up. I apologise for the confusion.

Metacrock

Meta =>No I don't. Because I don't alim to prove the existence of God, and because history is more of an empirical study than is metaphysics. I claim only to prove that belief is not irrational in a non Kerikegaardian sense. In history I calim only to provide the most likely probablity.


but look, stop talking as though I'm demanding some exacting standard! man, come on! the myther sources are taken out of context and invented. they are dishonest! that's not some amazing standard of proof I'm aking for. I'm just asking that they document something with scholarly sources that is true to the nature of the myths.

Metacrock

Hey I have time limits too you know! I should be writting my dissertation right now!

but had you just read my post cleary you would see that it's the Jungian sense with which I'm dealing.

Metacrock

I thoguht it was clever!