joelr
Well-Known Member
Right back at ya. I know the Jewish connection however in the OT we see certain things added only after the Persian invasion.
Good vs evil,
god, vs satan,
world destroyed by fire,
bad people killed
good peopple get to live in paradise
This is Persian Zoroastrianism. Pre-Persian invasion there wasn't much of an afterlife in OT. Witches maybe. People buried in the ground.
But after the invasion we get all sorts of new ideas on afterlife and evil and cosmic wars and so on.
If you want a source, this PhD. biblical historian explains it at 6:16
I'm only using PhD in biblical history sources.
Well......Earlier you mentioned Zeitgeist as if it were a bad source. That material came from D.M. Murdock - truthbeknown.com and she is a qualified bible historian, Egyptain trenchmaster and reads Greek, Hebrew, German, Latin, Aramaic and others.
Not a PhD. however. But I think her work is considered pretty good.
PhD. Carrier has corrected a few of her mistakes so. But she isn't just a crank theory writer, not at all.
All of Christianity is either pagan of Jewish. There is nothing new.
Don't use Wiki for historical sources, it rarely matches current PhD. scholarship.
Not only does Plutarch say Osiris returned to life and was recreated, exact terms for resurrection (anabiôsis and paliggenesia: On Isis and Osiris 35; see my discussion in The Empty Tomb, pp. 154-55), and also describe his physically returning to earth after his death (Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris 19), but the physical resurrection of Osiris’s corpse is explicitly described in pre-Christian pyramid inscriptions!
Plutarch writes that “Osiris came to Horus from the other world and exercised and trained him for the battle,” and taught him lessons, and then “Osiris consorted with Isis after his death and she became the mother of Harpocrates.” It’s hard to get more explicit than that. Contrary to Ehrman, there is no mention of Osiris not being in his resurrected body at that point. To the contrary, every version of his myth has him revive only after Isis reassembles and reanimates his corpse. As Plutarch says, “the soul of Osiris is everlasting and imperishable, but his body Typhon oftentimes dismembers and causes to disappear, and that Isis wanders hither and yon in her search for it, and fits it together again” (On Isis and Osiris 54).
And indeed, carved on the walls of the pyramids centuries before Christianity began were the declarations of the goddess Isis (or Horus, or their agents), “I have come to thee…that I may revivify thee, that I may assemble for thee thy bones, that I may collect for thee thy flesh, that I may assemble for thee thy dismembered limbs…raise thyself up, king, [as for] Osiris; thou livest!” (Pyramid Texts 1684a-1685a and 1700, = Utterance 606; cf. Utterance 670); “Raise thyself up; shake off thy dust; remove the dirt which is on thy face; loose thy bandages!” (Pyramid Texts 1363a-b, = Utterance 553); “[As for] Osiris, collect thy bones; arrange thy limbs; shake off thy dust; untie thy bandages; the tomb is open for thee; the double doors of the coffin are undone for thee; the double doors of heaven are open for thee…thy soul is in thy body…raise thyself up!” (Pyramid Texts 207b-209a and 2010b-2011a, = Utterance 676). That sure sounds like a physical resurrection of Osiris’s body to me. (As even confirmed by the most recent translation of James P. Allen, cf. pp. 190, 224-25, 272. The spells he clarifies are sung to and about the resident Pharaoh, but in the role of Osiris, receiving the same resurrection as Osiris, e.g. “there has been done for me what was done for my father Osiris on the day of tying bones together, of making functional the feet,” “do for him that which you did for his brother Osiris on the day,” etc.)
Plutarch goes on to explicitly state that this resurrection on earth (set in actual earth history) in the same body he died in (reassembled and restored to life) was the popular belief, promoted in allegorical tales by the priesthood—as was also the god’s later descent to rule Hades. But the secret “true” belief taught among the initiated priesthood was that Osiris becomes incarnate, dies, and rises back to life every year in a secret cosmic battle in the sublunar heavens. So in fact, contrary to Ehrman (who evidently never actually read any of the sources on this point), Plutarch says the belief that Osiris went to Hades was false (On Isis and Osiris 78); and yet even in that “public” tale, Osiris rules in Hades in his old body of flesh, restored to life. Hence still plainly resurrected. But as Plutarch explains (On Isis and Osiris 25-27 & 54 and 58), the esoteric truth was that the god’s death and resurrection occurs in sublunar space, after each year descending and taking on a mortal body to die in; and that event definitely involved coming back to life in a new superior body, in which Osiris ascends to a higher realm to rule from above, all exactly as was said of the risen Jesus (who no more remained on earth than Osiris did). The only difference is that when importing this into Judaism, which had not a cyclical-eternal but a linear-apocalyptic conception of theological history, they converted the god’s dying-and-rising to a singular apocalyptic event.
And that’s just Osiris. Clearly raised from the dead in his original, deceased body, restored to life; visiting people on earth in his risen body; and then ruling from heaven above. And that directly adjacent to Judea, amidst a major Jewish population in Alexandria, and popular across the whole empire. But as Plutarch said in On the E at Delphi 9, many religions of his day “narrate deaths and vanishings, followed by returns to life and resurrections.” Not just that one. Plutarch names Dionysus as but an example (and by other names “Zagreus, Nyctelius, and Isodaetes“). And we know for a fact this Dionysus wasn’t the only example Plutarch would have known. Plutarch only names him because he was so closely associated with Osiris, and the most famous.
Hmm, completely wrong?
"The deep anxiety of Christians is often revealed in their desperation to convince themselves they aren’t just new fangled pagans who stole everything from other religions. The virgin birth is a classic example,"
"And that point comes even before we get to noticing that there were also full-on virgin births (at the very least, Perseus and Ra) and conceptions without sexual union regardless of the mother’s virginity otherwise (Hephaestus, directly created in Hera’s womb; Mithras, spontaneously born from a rock; and Dionysus, in the myth by which his mother Semele conceives him a second time by drinking a potion; and many more I’ll enumerate shortly), which are actually far more pertinent precedents of the the ideas stolen by the Jews to invent such a comparable miraculous origin for Jesus"
"Consider the goddess Hera. Definitely not a virgin, by the standard that she has in her mythology plenty of sex. She might not get much amour from her philandering husband Zeus, but at least enough to beget a gaggle of children. And yet she “regains her virginity” every year by taking a magical bath. So technically, by that concept, every one of her children was virgin born. Just not virginally conceived. Well, all except for Hephaestus, who was not conceived by any sexual act at all (not even with magical dildos). Hera simply willed the existence of his fetus into her womb. Sound familiar? Hmm. And since she is per balneum magicum always a virgin when she gives birth, Hephaestus was also virgin born!"
Virgin Birth: It's Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. • Richard Carrier
