Jesus myth theories

No you are calling a human being a spade. What is the same is the same and what is different is different and not the same. This colorizing statement causes you to miss the signs. There is nothing he said that wasn't accurate in the spirit of that quote. The spirit is in the summary, does it matter if myth is not factually accurate. Of course it doesn't unless you are confused about the difference between metaphor and statistics.

 

To me it seems that if Jesus did actually exist, nonetheless he was turned into a myth by his followers.
Not a bad thing in a way, as we need myths. The problems arise when people insist that only one myth is 'true' and seek to ban the rest, as happened in the Roman Empire as Christianity gained ground.

 

This is what is talked about in the saying, let he who is blameless cast the first stone. The stone you cast isn't the one that convicts someone, it's the stone you cast for truth. Where are the accusers now, go and sin no more. Stop missing the sign with these erroneous accusations. Be blameless not seven times but seventy times seven squared indefinitely to identify the innocent truth. Innocence stands blamed and is convicted having never been allowed to say anything in defense. Let science reassure you. You can't undo conviction except
through pardon and I haven't got time to be a judge and a jailer, i want my freedom.

 

Different truths is a contradiction in terms. My fathers house is meant for all children's natures. Problems arise when you sin, misidentify the facts, misapprehend what is so. Sin is not a moral issue but a practical one. We labor under intolerable effort because of ignorance. The cause of ignorance is self denial, you might recognize it's effects as shame. I desire mercy not sacrifice.
The truth is behind the things you face, not an enemy to be defeated.

 

I agree,for the most part. Problems also arise when people say it's all just myths and miss the distinctive contributions of each.

 

Different truths is a contradiction. Contribute or detect meaning take away. He who does not gather scatters. What is the same is the same and... This is a statement about perception, not moral virtue.

Do we start to get the picture of how moral outrage is constructed here?

 

That is contribute to the body of knowledge or keep looking. Look at the anxiety in the battle for rightness and be still and know that i am god, to phrase myths and magic and metaphor.

 

A major problem in discussions of the "Jesus myth" theory is terminology. What is "resurrection"? what is "baptism"? what is "virgin birth"? what is crucifixion? what is the eucharist? what is a "savior'? and what does it mean to say that two different beliefs are "basically the same" or that one "borrowed from" another? I’ll try to cover the first of these now and get to the others later.

Resurrection: As understood by Christians, resurrection refers to a person who was dead returning to life in this world, as opposed to going off directly to another world. There are some ancient pagan deities, like Osiris, who were reanimated but spent the rest of their existence in the netherworld. Does that count? When they were alive, Egyptian pharaohs were thought to be incarnations of Horus; when they died, they became Osiris. What about Attis, who died but, thanks to his consort Cybele’s intervention, was still able to move a finger and his hair continued to grow?

There are other deities who come back as part of a cycle. Persephone and Dumuzi are examples. Persephone was carried off by Hades to the Underworld, but her mother Demeter, the Earth goddess complained. So Zeus worked out a deal in which Persephone would winter with Hades in the Underworld and return to Demeter in the spring. The myth obviously reflected the seasonal cycle of vegetation. The Sumerian god of vegetation, Dumuzi (Tammuz in Babylonia), had a similar pattern. He offended his wife, the goddess Inana (Ishtar in Babylonia), who bought her own way out of the netherworld by having him shipped down there half of every year, and her sister-in-law taking his place the other half.

The “dying and rising gods” theory was popular during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a result of Sir James Frazer’s influential book, The Golden Bough. Frazer painted with a broad brush, but as scholars began to take a more critical look the thesis fell into disrepute, especially after A.Z. Smith pointed out that many of these gods never came back and some went back and forth in cycles. By the end of the 20th century, the scholarly consensus had swung to the extreme of completely rejecting the category. Mettinger argued that this had gone too far. His research identified three possible examples that fit the old model: Baal, Melqart (Heracles; Hercules), and Dumuzi (Tammuz). I’ve already mentioned the problem with Dumuzi. Actually, a better case might be made for his wife, Innana (Ishtar), who was executed after she invaded the netherworld, but was restored to life by the god Enki and managed to bargain her way back to earth by exchanging her husband and sister-in-law. As for Hercules, he doesn't quite die after Nessus tricks Herc's wife into poisoning him. The gods intervene, give him eternal life, and he ascends directly to Mount Olympus. That leaves Yahweh's old rival Baal, the Canaanite storm god, who was slain by Mot (death) but brought back to life by Baal's sister Anat.That would be an ironic choice for Christians to borrow for an invented Jesus, and the worship of Baal seems to have died out long before the Christian era. Even Mettinger doesn’t think that Jesus was based on a pagan dying and rising gods theory. He concludes; “there is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world.”

 

There is another and that is the redundant life theory of resurrection. An important point about this theory is the meaning you are going assign to the word redundant. It means undulating or rising and falling like a wave. It does not mean superfluous because what we discount doesn't figure in to the apprehension of what is. The signs inspiring this theory are all around and among us. We know from the astronomical observations, the geological records records, the seasonal transitions and our life transitions. In this theory resurrection means rebuilding. The resurrection of life is exactly that, rebuilding life. It is not the resurrection of dead bodies but the resurrection of the body of life. Leave the dead to bury the dead. Now what about jesus raising others from the dead. It is possible to demonstrate something by raising the dead body. The raised dead body is not imperishable, Lazurus does not become immortal but goes to ground again. So is this miraculous sign important proof of something untoward? We revive drowning victims who have been underwater for some time.
To think of this phenomena as a mighty demonstration of gods power in his prize race pony is to miss the point of what he was able to accomplish, the miracle to rebuilding life is the love that inspires it. That is what complex creatures like human beings call it. Creatures call it I'm hungry and horny.

 

Baptism: Whether sprinkled or dunked, Christians regard baptism as a transformative event, symbolizing a one-time cleansing of the believer from original sin and the beginning of a new life as a believer. The practice was started by John the Baptist who practiced mass baptisms in the Jordan River—symbolizing the entry of the Exodus Jews into the Promised Land across the River Jordan.

When mythicists say that this or that non-Christian sect practiced "baptism", they tend to mean that getting wet was involved in some ritual that was done regularly or periodically. For example, it’s been said that John the Baptist got his idea from the Essenes, a Jewish sect which practiced frequent bathing as a cleansing ritual. But that was different from the one-time transformative event practiced by John. He may have gotten the idea from the Essenes, but the way he and the early Christians practiced it was not the same. The cleansing rituals practiced by various pagan sects, likewise, were different from the Christian practice. Mithraism, for example, seems to have involved frequent sprinkling of water just about everywhere, which is quite different from the Christian practice. It was not a transformative event; it was a regular occurrence. A more spectacular event was the taurobolium, in which participants bathed in bull’s blood. This was a feature of worship in the cult of Cybele and Atis and was thought to provide health and renewal for the initiate. This practice developed in the middle of the second century C.E., so it couldn’t have been “stolen” by the Christians. It’s possible it was the other way around.

In the film Religulous, Bill Mahr repeats the ridiculous howler that the Egyptian god Horus was baptized in a river by “Anup the Baptizer”. There was no such person in all of Egyptian mythology. Bill obviously got his information from the Zeitgeist film or its principal “scholarly” consultant, S.Acharya (aka, Dorothy Murdock), who got it from Gerald Massey, granddaddy of Jesus myth theorists--poet and amateur Egyptologist who died in 1907. Massey wrote at a time when Egyptology was in its infancy. He isn’t taken seriously today because of his tendencies toward wild overgeneralization where matters of relating Jesus to Egyptians are concerned. For example, Massey said that Herod, the king of Judea when Jesus was supposedly born, was really derived from the Egyptian myth of Herrut, a serpent. But actually Herod the Great was a real king with abundant historical documentation. There was no Anup. The title “the Baptizer” is Massey’s way of emphasizing his theory of a parallel to John the Baptist. In trying to defend Massey, Murdock says he really meant the god Anubis, the god associated with mummification and the dead. Part of the mummification process involved washing the corpse with palm wine. Is that baptism? Hardly. And Horus was never mummified, because he didn’t die.

 

the river , my blood , is red
from the war upstream

 

And the cleansing of the mind is that recognition and the war we inherit is the mining of the earth for every valuable thing it may contain. The fat portions of life belong to the provider of life. I hear the ferrous content of your brothers blood crying out from the ground.

 

Virgin Birth. Most of us know what a virgin is: a woman who never had sex. The Christian understanding of virgin birth is that a woman who never had sex before conceived a child without sexual intercourse. That would rule out Hercules and all the other sons conceived by the sexual escapades of Zeus and Apollo. There are other miraculous births that are dubiously virginal: e.g., the birth of Horus after Isis impregnated herself with a prosthetic penis after the death of his father, Osiris; the birth of the Buddah after his mother was impregnated through her rib cage by a white elephant, etc. What about Atis, who was conceived when a nymph came in contact with an almond from a tree which had sprouted from the severed penis of his father, a hermaphroditic daemon whom the gods had castrated? There do seem to be some possibly legitimate virgin births in mythology. Caesar Augustus was supposedly conceived without intercourse when his mother Atia slept in a temple. If his mother resembled the character in the HBO Rome series, all bets are off, but let’s give her the benefit of the doubt. Virgin birth was also claimed for Plato. Pending further study, I'd also tentatively accept the Aztec-Toltec myth of the conception of Quetzalcoatl by the virgin Chimalman after the god Onteol appeared to her in a dream, or Mixcoatl shot an arrow between her legs, or she drank jade, depending on which version of the legend you believe. One quibble: unlike the virgin Mary, she was never regarded as having been human, and was thought of as a spirit. It would be hard to imagine how that story could have influenced the early Christians--unless the Mormons were right about Jesus visiting America.

In sum, virgin births are relatively rare, much rarer than virgins.

 

a man of the Ho-Chunk tribe returned to his ancestoral homeland and
since it now had a library he gave a talk there . he related a story of
when the old people had lived along Lake Superior . one day the figure
of a man was noticed out on the waters . as he walked closer and closer
approaching the village he was seen to have very large ears , long like a
rabbit . Rabbit Man arrived at the shoreline and signed a peaceful greeting .
for all of a week his visitation was celebrated with feasting , eager curiousity
and much joy ; then Rabbit Man went on his way to see all he could see .

the Iowegian Lutherans who had gathered for this story and others took in
all the scholarly Ho-Chunk man who researched and wrote books had to say
- and with great seriousness .

 

I have a friend with really big ears. He takes them seriously, too. Maybe it's the same guy, but he's not from the Great Lakes, and people call him Dumbo Man.

 

I am the one known as Rabbit Man, and I feel that I must be blunt here. I do not like it when people speak of me, and I always know when people are speaking of me, for, as you might expect, I hear all. And to be perfectly honest, I do not like being referred to as Rabbit Man. A kangaroo has ears as long as a rabbit, and yet I am not called Kangaroo Man. Kangaroo Man would be more appropriate. Rabbits tend to be wary and prone to flight when things get tense, whereas kangaroos tend to be bold and prone to punching and kicking when things get tense, and sometimes even when things don't get tense.

Anyway, if you feel you must speak of me, call me Kangaroo Man, or I will hunt you down and show you just how prone to punching and kicking I am!

 

If Jesus existed, he was here to show us who/what we are. Obviously, Jesus wasn't here to make us feel small and weak by comparison. What would be the point in that?

 

Well that is not entirely accurate. Without the gift of spirit there would be no christianty. Stories about a man are far from essential unless they be about your brother.

Best make sense of a myth before we argue if it be essential.

 

The virgin birth was a product of immaculate or "clean" conception. Clean meaning one achieved without orgasm.