Just as the Persian Zoroastrian system of messianism, apocalypticism, worldwide resurrection, an evil Satan at war with God, and a future heaven and hell effecting justice as eternal fates for all, was Judaized when they were imported into Judaism.
They simply claimed these new ideas were all Jewish. Ordained and communicated by God, through inspired scripture and revelation. The Christians, did exactly the same thing.
And stop denying it. Resurrected savior gods were a pagan idea. All Christianity did, was invent a Jewish one. Could you please quote how the pyramid texts relevant to the resurrection of Osiris are translated by James P.
Allen the most recent translation? Dear Richard, the information in this discussion is excellent, proving continuity between Jesus Christ and the ancient dying-rising mytheme.
However, I disagree with your opening description of the Gospel resurrection story as a prank. Your use of such a term distracts from the serious content and intent of your argument.
Kelly argues that prehistoric societies viewed knowledge as power, and used an initiation system whereby simple public stories were treated as portals into secret wisdom. Then, as the literal gospel story became wildly popular, the original symbolic meaning was suppressed as Gnostic heresy.
A key point here is to see that the non-existence of Jesus entails that the path of causality in the evolution of Christian faith was the reverse of the claim of the church. Rather than starting with a historical Jesus who was then turned into a Gnostic allegory by heretics, the allegory of the sun came first, and the literal faith only came later, as a degraded corruption.
For example, the myths of Adonis and Osiris share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i. Well, yeah. Or perhaps you are underthinking it? A prank is a practical joke or mischievous act. While the April Fool date this year is worth a joke, calling the story a prank adopts a condescending tone that sends an entirely wrong message about the original method and intent of the origins of Christianity.
This hidden meaning was concealed in order to protect the security of the initiated community, following the same method as other initiatic and shamanic traditions.
Now while it is reasonable to call a shaman a trickster, the tricks always have a serious intent, referring to an underlying meaning. None of that has the meaningless jape quality of an undergraduate prank, intended solely to deceive and confuse the victim so the foolish prankers can laugh at his expense.
Use of such joking language mocks and derides the serious intent of the actual founders of Christianity who wrote the book of Mark. His allegory is not astral but socio-political I show this in Ch. And Mark himself is condescending about his actual intent to deceive Mark That was the method and intent of that Christian author.
Mark was trying to make fools of literalists. To hide the truth only told to insiders. Whereas by the time we get to John, John is outright lying to his readers to deceive them, forging evidence and testimonies to manipulate them.
Thanks very much Richard, I appreciate your reply. I will get out my copy of OHJ and see how your argument relates to that hypothesis. What Joe Lee said is already on point. First, they were deliberately designed to fool outsiders and protect insider secrets as Jesus himself explains in Mark 4 , a fact I discuss in On the Historicity of Jesus e.
Elements 13 and 14 in Chapter 4. Anyone who takes them literally, is being fooled. As for the original and actual creed, which did not involve such stories, I already cover that in the article. The prank there is either in pretending to have had divine communications to sell a social reform movement, or having fooled themselves that their dreams or induced altered-state experiences were divine communications promoting and endorsing and ensuring the victory of that social reform movement.
See my discussion of revolution cults in anthropology e. And of the science-backed possibility of actual or faked hallucination as the basis for founding new movements in Element 15 Ch. Richard, please tell me where you get your sources.. I have been living with religion for years and lost so much, I am a truth seeker and I want to move on with my life and be the best I can be without being a slave to religion.
Without knowing what you mean, the best I can do is refer you to my book catalog. Update: Made several slight wording changes in the article to ensure accuracy where needed e. Hi Richard. In this post and in your piece on the virgin birth, you mention ancient ideas about the Holy Spirit. Could you say more about ancient views of the HS, or point me to another post where you cover it more fully?
In my article on spiritual bodies in The Empty Tomb I cover the evidence that the ancients regarded the Holy Spirit the sacred pneuma to be a physical substance pervading the universe. This was a widespread theological belief spanning both Judaism cf. Philo and paganism cf. Stoic theology. Fluid is just a convenient metaphor for the concept. You must not be reading the article.
Insults are cute and all and my but you went to the insults awfully fast , but you, not I, chose your words and concepts. You went way, way further than that. Similar to your piece, that author has to flatten out an awful lot of differences.
You conveyed yourself similarly to that fringe author. Again, maybe you should actually read it. Yeah, Richard could not have been more clear. Of course they do. In fact, here and elsewhere, Richard explains at length which parts are Jewish and which parts are not. He goes out of his way to identify how the hybridization works. Syncretism is well-studied and there are reasonable ways to try to argue whether or not a specific constellation of traits are unique or not.
I was aghast to see that Ehrman tried to deny the similarities between Osiris and Jesus. The object the relevance framework is carefully laid out in the paragraph, and article itself. And not cherry pick sentences that terrify you because of your own reading comprehension fail. Then I checked the history books. And the ethnographic record.
More a question than a comment here: am I misreading or was Dionysus born as a girl then became a boy? If true, interesting. If typo, typo. This is really interesting, given the common association of Mithraism with Rome rather than Greece in my reading anyway. It leads me to a view of the centrality of early Hellenistic Platonism in the construction of Serapism in Egypt, Christianity in Israel and Mithraism in Babylon.
The implication is that of these three competing memes, Christianity won the evolutionary struggle, and incorporated features of Serapism and Mithraism, which were all then mushed and hushed and crushed in the Constantinian settlement half a millennium later. I have a question about the style of argumentation found in this article, as well as many other articles arguing that Jesus is essentially just another iteration of some broader phenomenon in religious history. Authors of these articles start by defining a set of deities that Jesus supposedly belongs to by listing properties that these deities have.
Then they list other deities that supposedly also belong in the set and show that these deities also have these properties. But for each of these deities, the articles usually only show that they have some of the properties and remain silent on the rest. For example, do we know there was a personal salvation cult of Heracles?
Do we know Heracles was claimed to guarantee the individual a good place in the afterlife? Do we know the cult of Heracles had membership that followers joined with? Do we know the cult of Heracles enacted a fictive kin group? Do we know the cult of Heracles was joined through baptism and maintained through commination? In at least half of all cases, we do have complete verification every property is attested , so we already know the set exists.
Then there are a few cases where one or another property is not fully or clearly attested owing most likely to loss of access to sources that would tell us , then we infer, based on the pattern established by the others. I am planning another that will deal with the baptism attribute, for example. But in the present article, we should expect fewer instances of that, lest the model be challenged.
Not all the dying and rising gods listed, are personal salvation deities e. And more importantly to your question not all who are personal salvation deities, have every attribute. Awesome, thanks a lot. This error is what you get when your premise is that nature predates Christ and the Bible is merely a younger more inaccurate written record of older oral traditions.
Just baseless assertions and facts irrelevant to your conclusions. What do you think about this? Were there mystery cults that had the same concept? The mystery religions were all transactional, i. And many may have had purgatory-like systems in place for those who misbehave, but so did Christianity. This was pretty standard across pagan theology at the time e. Other than trivia Jews used goats; Christians used Jesus; pagans used Purgatory; etc.
I want to know how you rule out the possibility that Inanna was not a historical figure. I know that Jesus is a myth because there were previous dying and rising gods and he fits the established pattern. However, you cannot say the same thing about Inanna. Note that Dumuzi is listed on the Sumerian Kings List. Sumerian historians considered him an actual person.
I do not think this is likely. I think Dumuzi, at least, was real. The story goes that Inanna was the queen of Sumer and Dumuzi became king because he married her.
We can contrast this to the Epic of Gilgamesh in which Gilgamesh refuses to marry the goddess Inanna and this supposedly symbolized a shift in Sumerian society towards a patriarchy. Note that after Inanna rose from the death she was displeased with Dumuzi and had him dragged down to the underworld to take her place. One reason to think that Inanna was not real is the graphic nature of the Wedding of Inanna and Dumuzi. If it were simply a report about the marriage of two real people then it would not have graphically described Inanna performing oral sex on Dumuzi.
Submitting a report will send us an email through our customer support system. Submit report Close. The former stresses that the Old Testament is primarily ideological rather than historical; the point seems to be that one cannot use an ideological work to describe the way of thinking Journal Journal of Theological Studies — Oxford University Press Published: Apr 1, Recommended Articles Loading There are no references for this article.
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals. Already have an account? Log in. APA Curtis, A. Journal of Theological Studies, 55 1 , MLA Curtis, Adrian.
Neither Pausanius nor Catullus make any mention of a resurrection of the god. However, he was certainly seen as a dying and rising god by the 5th century AD. Osiris : When Osiris is killed, the scattered pieces of his body are collected by Isis and reassembled. However, the reassembled body does not rise. Both apparently involve a symbolic resurrection of the god.
However, in order to leave the Netherworld, she must provide a substitute. She chooses Dumuzi, who has failed to mourn her properly. Mettinger interprets this passage as proclaiming that Dumuzi will spend half the year in the Netherworld and the other half on earth.
Thus, this is a myth that explains the seasonal cycle, much like the Baal myth. Mettinger presents all of this is in a clear and readable manner, with the unavoidable exception of some technical sections dealing with linguistic issues.
Although most of the material presented has been known for some time, Mettinger also brings in some new material relevant to the debate. He is judicious in his arguments, and takes proper caution when advancing tentative arguments such as one for a Damu-Adonis connection.
Oddly, his end-of-chapter summaries occasionally seem more optimistic than is warranted by the evidence presented—at least in the opinion of this nonexpert reviewer. But with a stricter definition of resurrection—such as requiring that a dead body revives—it is clear that there is only one god Heracles who definitely qualifies in pre-Christian times.
Does it accurately reflect the textual evidence, or is it a scholarly construct that has outlived its usefulness? Here are three examples:. Mettinger disposes of the first two rebuttals in a convincing manner, but his response to the third one is rather weak. Hittite religion has a dozen divinities that disappear and then return. The notion that human sacrifice and even cannibalism could be considered a holy act is inconceivable. Yet there is strong evidence for human sacrifice in NW Europe.
This is the challenge of this original, but often disturbing book. Having explained the nature of sacrifice in antiquity, Green looks at the different aspects of the subject: the notion of flesh for the gods; rites of fire and blood; suffocation, whether by drowning, strangling or burying alive; the significance of de-fleshing heads and of skulls; the selection of victims, and the evidence for the sacrifice of children. The multiple deposits of bog-bodies at sites like Tollund and Lindow illustrate the importance of place in the sacrificial rite.
Highlights the role of the priesthood in sacrificial murder. The Dying Sun tells the story of an empire at the end of a dynasty, a world on the verge of a new age. Priestesses of the Old Gods have escaped their enchanted prison and seek royal aid in releasing their masters. The High Priest of the Akhenic Temple, faithful to the One God, denies the existence of other gods and demands a holy inquisition to destroy the Pantheon Cu.
Giant corporations collapse overnight. Newspapers are being swallowed. Stock prices plummet with a tweet. More crime now happens online than offline. Facebook has grown bigger than any state, bots battle elections, coders write policy, and algorithms shape our lives in more ways than we can imagine.
The Death of the Godsis an exploration of power in the digital age, and a journey in search of the new centres of control.
From a cyber-crime raid in British suburbia to the engine rooms of Silicon Valley, pioneering technology researcher Carl Miller traces how power is being transformed, fought over, lost and won. Essential reading. Author : Kathy J.
Tammuz, Osiris, Baal, and Adonis are well-known from J. Frazer's Golden Bough. These gods have been a hotly debated issue for a whole century. During the 's, a consensus developed to the effect that the "dying and rising gods" died but did not return or rise to new life. In the first monograph on the whole issue subsequent to the studies by Frazer and Baudissin, professor Tryggve N.
Mettinger offers a detailed critique of this position. The work is based on a fresh perusal of the source material from the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and Egypt. It profits from new finds of great importance. Modern theory in comparative religion and anthropology on the nature of rite and myth informs the discussion. The author concludes that Dumuzi, Baal, and Melqart were dying and rising gods already in pre-Christian times and that Adonis and Eshmun may well have been so too.
After his magisterial presentation of the ancient Near Eastern and Mediterranean material, the author provides some succinct notes on the resurrection of Jesus in the light of his findings. The author, Tryggve N. Ares, god of war, is leading the other dying gods into battle. Which is just fine with Athena. She's ready to wage a war of her own, and she's never liked him anyway.
If Athena is lucky, the winning gods will have their immortality restored. If not, at least she'll have killed the bloody lot of them, and she and Hermes can die in peace. Cassandra Weaver is a weapon of fate. The girl who kills gods.
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