I asked you to pick a single miracle description out of those that I supported but you didn't dare to.
Please pick one of the miracles that I have shown support for, and then show me your fine academic evidence to disprove it. Then I'll offer my reasoning to show how it could be a real event, withing the balance of probabilities. Make sure you pick an event that I sup[ported. Just one.
Let's see how clever you really are, Joel. It should be a push over for you, debating with a 'nine year old'.
Dying/rising demigod myth from Hellenism. 6 known confirmed resurrecting savior sons/daughters of a God before Jesus.
Not in ancient Asia. Or anywhere else. Only the West, from Mesopotamia to North Africa and Europe. There was a very common and popular mytheme that had arisen in the Hellenistic period—from at least the death of Alexander the Great in the 300s B.C. through the Roman period, until at least Constantine in the 300s A.D. Nearly every culture created and popularized one: the Egyptians had one, the Thracians had one, the Syrians had one, the Persians had one, and so on. The Jews were actually late to the party in building one of their own, in the form of Jesus Christ. It just didn’t become popular among the Jews, and thus ended up a Gentile religion. But if any erudite religious scholar in 1 B.C. had been asked “If the Jews invented one of these gods, what would it look like?” they would have described the entire Christian religion to a T. Before it even existed. That can’t be a coincidence.
The general features most often shared by all these cults are (when we eliminate all their differences and what remains is only what they share in common):
- They are personal salvation cults (often evolved from prior agricultural cults).
- They guarantee the individual a good place in the afterlife (a concern not present in most prior forms of religion).
- They are cults you join membership with (as opposed to just being open communal religions).
- They enact a fictive kin group (members are now all brothers and sisters).
- They are joined through baptism (the use of water-contact rituals to effect an initiation).
- They are maintained through communion (regular sacred meals enacting the presence of the god).
- They involved secret teachings reserved only to members (and some only to members of certain rank).
- They used a common vocabulary to identify all these concepts and their role.
- They are syncretistic (they modify this common package of ideas with concepts distinctive of the adopting culture).
- They are mono- or henotheistic (they preach a supreme god by whom and to whom all other divinities are created and subordinate).
- They are individualistic (they relate primarily to salvation of the individual, not the community).
- And they are cosmopolitan (they intentionally cross social borders of race, culture, nation, wealth, or even gender).
You might start to notice we’ve almost completely described Christianity already. It gets better. These cults all had a common central savior deity, who shared most or all these features (when, once again, we eliminate all their differences and what remains is only what they share in common):
- They are all “savior gods” (literally so-named and so-called).
- They are usually the “son” of a supreme God (or occasionally “daughter”).
- They all undergo a “passion” (a “suffering” or “struggle,” literally the same word in Greek, patheôn).
- That passion is often, but not always, a death (followed by a resurrection and triumph).
- By which “passion” (of whatever kind) they obtain victory over death.
- Which victory they then share with their followers (typically through baptism and communion).
- They also all have stories about them set in human history on earth.
- Yet so far as we can tell, none of them ever actually existed.
Not all these savior gods were dying-and-rising gods. That was a sub-mytheme. Indeed, dying-and-rising gods (
and mere men) were a
broader mytheme; because examples abounded even
outside the context of known savior cults (I’ll give you a nearly complete list below). But
within the savior cults, a particular brand of dying-and-rising god arose. And Jesus most closely corresponds to that mythotype.
Other savior gods within this context experienced “passions” that did not involve a death. For instance,
Mithras underwent some great suffering and struggle (we don’t have many details), through which he acquired his power over death that he then shares with initiates in his cult, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a death. Mentions of resurrection as a teaching in Mithraism appear to have been about the
future fate of his
followers (in accordance with the Persian Zoroastrian notion of a general resurrection later borrowed by the Jews). So all those internet memes listing Mithras as a dying-and-rising god? Not true. So do please stop repeating that claim. Likewise, so far as we can tell
Attis didn’t become a rising god until well after Christianity began (and even then his myth only barely equated to a resurrection; previous authors have over-interpreted evidence to the contrary). Most others, however, we have pretty solid evidence for as
actually dying, and
actually rising savior gods.
