Bunyip
pro scapegoat
If you had an argument you would not be posting comments like that.
-
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Jesus or Christ Myth Theory
- Thread starter steeltoes
- Start date
If you had an argument you would not be posting comments like that.
Prophet
breaking the statutes of my local municipality
Who really needs arguments when my adversary so readily testifies against himself by making contradictory claims and yet refusing to retract even one?
Please do show us all this great point you have made that Legion is actively evading!
Last edited:
"Religion in the Ancient World
I find myself in the peculiar position of having offered
My initial response is here).
I requested for an argument, but instead I am accused of making "the worst rebuttal imaginable" to an argument never made. So I will provide my detractor(s) with an actual rebuttal to dismiss and to provide those actually interested in the topic with information.
How 19th Century Historians "Created" Greco-Roman religion
Historians of the 19th century faced numerous problems when it came to writing about ancient history, from its "armchair" nature to a paucity of evidence (let alone methods to make sound inferences from them). But religion especially posed a problem for them. There was orthodoxy or really even a belief system, so these historians culled the literary remains and created a kind of canonical mythology that never existed.
For the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc., there wasn't even really a word for "religion", and to the extent we can say that these peoples were indeed religious is by artificially dividing customs and beliefs regarding family, politics, war, economics, and so on. Those, like Plato, that came closest to developing a theology and doctrine did so by arguing that the closest thing to a bible the Greeks had should be outlawed (i.e., the Homeric epics and the works of Hesiod). Such arguments had no effect: religious life continued to be dominated by ceremony, ritual, and practice that was often as much political as religious or as grounded in beliefs about the gods as it was beliefs about familial customs & roles. When Herodotus wished to describe what we would call the "religion" of a particular people, he did so (and could only do so) by describing which gods they worshiped using what customs performed in which ways. Even deities worshipped across the Hellenistic and the Roman world were not singular.
There are perhaps three ways to best illustrate how thoroughly disparate even beliefs about a particular deity were using only their names. The first is to note how these changed. For example: pick up just about any mythology collection and find the entry for "Hera". It will probably identify her as a Goddess, as the wife of Zeus, and a few other things. What it will almost certainly NOT do is tell you that she is absent from our earliest references to Zeus' wife (so early they are in Linear B, the script used to write the Greek language before the development of the Greek alphabet), where instead we find Zeus married to one "Dione". Much later, we still find traces of this goddess but her name is now "Dodana" and only for the people of Pamphylia was she the wife of Zeus. For reasons and a time unknown, "Hera" (perhaps from a word meaning "concubine", "mistress", or "lover-spouse") became the wife of Zeus and her functions as a goddess differed depending upon the city/town (on a seashore city like Samos, her worship was tied to boats and sea-faring).
In fact, the ways in which different cities worshipped a deity identified singularly in mythology collections often differed according to function. Thus we often find not "Zeus" and "Hermes" but "Zeus Ktesios" (Zeus of possession/ownership) and "Hermes Agoriaos" (Hermes of the Agora/marketplace). Other times, the difference between ostensibly the same deity was noted by using a name indicating where that deity was worshipped, such as "Demeter Eleusinia" (Demeter of Elyseus).
Finally, we can nicely tie in the ways in which it is inaccurate to think of any singular deity like "Osiris" we can note how deities were freely not only replaced, renamed, but also combined. Long before Paul, when Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt, Osiris in many ways died (i.e., was renamed and altered) to be replaced by Serapis. Of course, Osiris wasn't some singular deity either, as Osiris-Apis pre-dated Serapis but was the Osiris to which Apis bulls were sacrificed in Memphis (not Tennessee). However, the introduction of Serapis was far more influential. Especially after the first century (and likely due to the influences of Christianity) we find references to Helioserapis and even Zeus-Helios-Serapis. Both were distinct from the Isis & Serapis doublet of the Roman empire, themselves distinct from the Isis and Osiris of Egypt.
As with names and functions, the stories about deities also differed from place to place. Ironically, one reason we are so used to knowing of e.g., "Hera" rather than "Heras" was because even pagans recognized the fluid character of their deities and the rather insignificant role as figure-heads in cultic practice. Just as The Athena of Attica could be identified elsewhere in Greece and equated with the Minerva, so too could Julius Caesar categorize Celtic deities by inserting various names into a nebulous Roman pantheon.
Even in the surviving primary literary sources, we find that changes to myths, deities, heroes, etc., weren't just common but expected. Received myth in Attica and its city Athens told of a certain Medea, who had some sort of relationship with the mythic hero Jason and whose children were killed. In many a mythology collection (particularly those limited to Greco-Roman myths), one can read that in "the myth" she killed her children. In fact, Euripides invented this part of the story in his play. Variants survive, and while until a few years ago we had good evidence but reason to doubt, the argument that Euripides was indeed responsible for this plot twist came from a pre-Euripidean story of Medea. After Euripides' play, this aspect of the myth became the most prominent and this variant the most well-known. For many deities, there is no primary literature that tells any story about the deity in question, while for plenty others we are left almost completely in the dark. Theories about the nature of the deity around which was centered the cult of Mithras (originating in the late first/early 2nd century) differ, mainly because he isn't described in Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Virgil, or the Greek or Roman playwrights.
This, actually, is where most of the "religious" stories we commonly identify as Greek or Roman myths come from: plays, comedies, satires, and other works of entertainment. The deities whose worship, rites, etc., permeated the lives of Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Egyptians, etc., were in a very real way entirely independent from the myths (even when these myths were known). This is why it was not considered impious to write plays that made fun of the gods or that offered some new version of an origin myth or treat deities as fictitious. To adopt the god Mithra but supply him with an entirely different story and rely on him for entirely different purposes worked much the way Osiris was simultaneously incorporated into "Hellenism" and transformed into Serapis, or Zeus become Romanized as an amalgam of the pre-Hellenic Jupiter and the post-Hellenic Jupiter. Myths and deities were not quite fundamentally local because individual cities and villages organized their communities and political & socio-cultural structures, customs, traditions, and practices around cultic practices (and vice versa). Religion, in antiquity, wasn't something you believed, it was something you did.
This isn't to say that such practices weren't vitally important. It's just to note how the were or weren't thought of. The word atheos, whence the English "atheist", didn't indicate anything about beliefs. It described someone who didn't honor the gods by the necessary cultic practices. When Christians first began to be persecuted by Roman authorities, the Romans were baffled. Some even offered those accused of impiety or atheism a way out: they were told "just light some incense" or similar offerings (mostly to the Roman state cult) that was thought to be about as minor a request as was possible. The belief system of the Christians made no sense to them, and the only reason the Jews were (usually) more or less tolerated had much to do with both the Persian, Greek, and Roman respect for "ancient" traditions and were suspect of all things novel.
This didn't make Jewish religion anymore sensible to outsiders. The Jews also reacted to "normal" practices, such as the placement of pagan "idolatry" in the temple (not only typical after conquest but a way in which a conquering people were able to blend with those they conquered) with wholly disproportional responses (from a pagan perspective). The Maccabean revolt isn't hardly the only example; the so-called "Third Jewish War" ended with the Romans banishing the Jews from Jerusalem.
The matrix in which the Jesus tradition developed was, then, one which was almost completely foreign to the disparate peoples who made up the Roman empire (excepting the Jews, of course). By Jesus' day, scripture was already important enough to be equated with God's law (torah could refer to the Books of Moses, the scriptures, or most broadly simply that which YHWH decreed). The Rabbinic jurisprudence approach to the Torah was already present in pre-Rabbinic debates over the interpretations of the law and the existence of what would eventually become the Mishnah. Some of this kind of debate can be found in the NT between Jesus and the "scribes", Pharisees, even his own followers.
How, then, could anybody possibly think that the Jesus tradition was built upon borrowed myths? Enter Part II
I find myself in the peculiar position of having offered
to an argument never made.
My initial response is here).
I requested for an argument, but instead I am accused of making "the worst rebuttal imaginable" to an argument never made. So I will provide my detractor(s) with an actual rebuttal to dismiss and to provide those actually interested in the topic with information.
How 19th Century Historians "Created" Greco-Roman religion
Historians of the 19th century faced numerous problems when it came to writing about ancient history, from its "armchair" nature to a paucity of evidence (let alone methods to make sound inferences from them). But religion especially posed a problem for them. There was orthodoxy or really even a belief system, so these historians culled the literary remains and created a kind of canonical mythology that never existed.
For the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, etc., there wasn't even really a word for "religion", and to the extent we can say that these peoples were indeed religious is by artificially dividing customs and beliefs regarding family, politics, war, economics, and so on. Those, like Plato, that came closest to developing a theology and doctrine did so by arguing that the closest thing to a bible the Greeks had should be outlawed (i.e., the Homeric epics and the works of Hesiod). Such arguments had no effect: religious life continued to be dominated by ceremony, ritual, and practice that was often as much political as religious or as grounded in beliefs about the gods as it was beliefs about familial customs & roles. When Herodotus wished to describe what we would call the "religion" of a particular people, he did so (and could only do so) by describing which gods they worshiped using what customs performed in which ways. Even deities worshipped across the Hellenistic and the Roman world were not singular.
There are perhaps three ways to best illustrate how thoroughly disparate even beliefs about a particular deity were using only their names. The first is to note how these changed. For example: pick up just about any mythology collection and find the entry for "Hera". It will probably identify her as a Goddess, as the wife of Zeus, and a few other things. What it will almost certainly NOT do is tell you that she is absent from our earliest references to Zeus' wife (so early they are in Linear B, the script used to write the Greek language before the development of the Greek alphabet), where instead we find Zeus married to one "Dione". Much later, we still find traces of this goddess but her name is now "Dodana" and only for the people of Pamphylia was she the wife of Zeus. For reasons and a time unknown, "Hera" (perhaps from a word meaning "concubine", "mistress", or "lover-spouse") became the wife of Zeus and her functions as a goddess differed depending upon the city/town (on a seashore city like Samos, her worship was tied to boats and sea-faring).
In fact, the ways in which different cities worshipped a deity identified singularly in mythology collections often differed according to function. Thus we often find not "Zeus" and "Hermes" but "Zeus Ktesios" (Zeus of possession/ownership) and "Hermes Agoriaos" (Hermes of the Agora/marketplace). Other times, the difference between ostensibly the same deity was noted by using a name indicating where that deity was worshipped, such as "Demeter Eleusinia" (Demeter of Elyseus).
Finally, we can nicely tie in the ways in which it is inaccurate to think of any singular deity like "Osiris" we can note how deities were freely not only replaced, renamed, but also combined. Long before Paul, when Ptolemy was ruler of Egypt, Osiris in many ways died (i.e., was renamed and altered) to be replaced by Serapis. Of course, Osiris wasn't some singular deity either, as Osiris-Apis pre-dated Serapis but was the Osiris to which Apis bulls were sacrificed in Memphis (not Tennessee). However, the introduction of Serapis was far more influential. Especially after the first century (and likely due to the influences of Christianity) we find references to Helioserapis and even Zeus-Helios-Serapis. Both were distinct from the Isis & Serapis doublet of the Roman empire, themselves distinct from the Isis and Osiris of Egypt.
As with names and functions, the stories about deities also differed from place to place. Ironically, one reason we are so used to knowing of e.g., "Hera" rather than "Heras" was because even pagans recognized the fluid character of their deities and the rather insignificant role as figure-heads in cultic practice. Just as The Athena of Attica could be identified elsewhere in Greece and equated with the Minerva, so too could Julius Caesar categorize Celtic deities by inserting various names into a nebulous Roman pantheon.
Even in the surviving primary literary sources, we find that changes to myths, deities, heroes, etc., weren't just common but expected. Received myth in Attica and its city Athens told of a certain Medea, who had some sort of relationship with the mythic hero Jason and whose children were killed. In many a mythology collection (particularly those limited to Greco-Roman myths), one can read that in "the myth" she killed her children. In fact, Euripides invented this part of the story in his play. Variants survive, and while until a few years ago we had good evidence but reason to doubt, the argument that Euripides was indeed responsible for this plot twist came from a pre-Euripidean story of Medea. After Euripides' play, this aspect of the myth became the most prominent and this variant the most well-known. For many deities, there is no primary literature that tells any story about the deity in question, while for plenty others we are left almost completely in the dark. Theories about the nature of the deity around which was centered the cult of Mithras (originating in the late first/early 2nd century) differ, mainly because he isn't described in Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, Virgil, or the Greek or Roman playwrights.
This, actually, is where most of the "religious" stories we commonly identify as Greek or Roman myths come from: plays, comedies, satires, and other works of entertainment. The deities whose worship, rites, etc., permeated the lives of Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Egyptians, etc., were in a very real way entirely independent from the myths (even when these myths were known). This is why it was not considered impious to write plays that made fun of the gods or that offered some new version of an origin myth or treat deities as fictitious. To adopt the god Mithra but supply him with an entirely different story and rely on him for entirely different purposes worked much the way Osiris was simultaneously incorporated into "Hellenism" and transformed into Serapis, or Zeus become Romanized as an amalgam of the pre-Hellenic Jupiter and the post-Hellenic Jupiter. Myths and deities were not quite fundamentally local because individual cities and villages organized their communities and political & socio-cultural structures, customs, traditions, and practices around cultic practices (and vice versa). Religion, in antiquity, wasn't something you believed, it was something you did.
This isn't to say that such practices weren't vitally important. It's just to note how the were or weren't thought of. The word atheos, whence the English "atheist", didn't indicate anything about beliefs. It described someone who didn't honor the gods by the necessary cultic practices. When Christians first began to be persecuted by Roman authorities, the Romans were baffled. Some even offered those accused of impiety or atheism a way out: they were told "just light some incense" or similar offerings (mostly to the Roman state cult) that was thought to be about as minor a request as was possible. The belief system of the Christians made no sense to them, and the only reason the Jews were (usually) more or less tolerated had much to do with both the Persian, Greek, and Roman respect for "ancient" traditions and were suspect of all things novel.
This didn't make Jewish religion anymore sensible to outsiders. The Jews also reacted to "normal" practices, such as the placement of pagan "idolatry" in the temple (not only typical after conquest but a way in which a conquering people were able to blend with those they conquered) with wholly disproportional responses (from a pagan perspective). The Maccabean revolt isn't hardly the only example; the so-called "Third Jewish War" ended with the Romans banishing the Jews from Jerusalem.
The matrix in which the Jesus tradition developed was, then, one which was almost completely foreign to the disparate peoples who made up the Roman empire (excepting the Jews, of course). By Jesus' day, scripture was already important enough to be equated with God's law (torah could refer to the Books of Moses, the scriptures, or most broadly simply that which YHWH decreed). The Rabbinic jurisprudence approach to the Torah was already present in pre-Rabbinic debates over the interpretations of the law and the existence of what would eventually become the Mishnah. Some of this kind of debate can be found in the NT between Jesus and the "scribes", Pharisees, even his own followers.
How, then, could anybody possibly think that the Jesus tradition was built upon borrowed myths? Enter Part II
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Legion
You say:
"How, then, could anybody possibly think that the Jesus tradition was built upon borrowed myths? Enter Part II"
Indeed. And of course nobody was making that argument. Very, very long post though.
None of that actually addresses the contention being discussed.
I will happily discuss it at another time, but prefer not to cloud the point in hand.
You say:
"How, then, could anybody possibly think that the Jesus tradition was built upon borrowed myths? Enter Part II"
Indeed. And of course nobody was making that argument. Very, very long post though.
None of that actually addresses the contention being discussed.
I will happily discuss it at another time, but prefer not to cloud the point in hand.
Last edited:
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Who really needs arguments when my adversary so readily testifies against himself by making contradictory claims and yet refusing to retract even one?
Please do show us all this great point you have made that Legion is actively evading!
Certainly. And here I refer to the last response I gave to Alt Thinker, to which Legion responded to me.
We had established that 'we do not know' was in fact true in this case. The argument was about why Alt Thinker sees 'we do not know' as an inferior answer to a claim of knowledge.
His rebuttal was that although correct 'we do not know' is less useful, or less appropriate than to claim to know that historcity in this case had been established.
Alt's rebuttal also claimed that saying 'we do not know' is somehow a barrier to seeking further knowledge - I argued otherwise as curiosity is at the heart of all knowledge.
Woukdn't it be great to doscover some basic details about Jesus? Like his date if birth, his origins and his life between chidhood and his mission for which we know nothing? Surely we do not know any of these historical details - so why pretend that we do?
Prophet
breaking the statutes of my local municipality
The contention being discussed is that you do not support your claims. You are providing yet another unintentional demonstration of the validity of Legion's position. In this way, you testify against yourself as a dishonest debater.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Then identify a claim instead of insulting me. I can, will and have defended every claim I make. I am considerably less interested in defending claims that I did not make and your imaginary ones.
Death, Deities, and Duties: The Functional Basis for "Dying" Gods
For most of human history, the connection between religion and daily life, natural phenomena, politics, etc., was direct, clear, and indivisible. Waves of religious fundamentalism in the ancient world, such as that for which Andokides was put on trial and Socrates executed, occurred when the state sponsored comic depictions of the gods which drew upon received myths but freely altered it. There was no orthodoxy, but there was orthopraxy. If one didn't peform religion, one could be executed.
One reason for the absolutely, deadly seriousness of cultic practices was that the not only deities, but the various practices related to them, were intimately tied to all aspects of life. Don't participate in the proper rituals for the local variant of the goddess of fertility? You'll end up without children. Fail to make the proper sacrifices to the god of trade and/or possession? There goes money.
However, not all cults were equal and there were some in certain places that had no equivalent elsewhere. One of the most important across all of Eurasia, though, was related to harvest. As far back (and almost certainly farther) as we have writings and similar indications of religious practice, we find religious representations of the cyclical nature of the harvest upon which every civilization depended on in very direct and vital ways. Perhaps the best example is the myth of Persephone. While variants were ubiquitous, the essential nature remained unchanged because of the purpose it served. The harvest was a seasonal affair.
Where the cult was practiced, the sacrifices to Demeter, the enacting of Persephone's rape (both in the modern sense of the word and the Latin raptus, which could mean "rape" but also capture), and other ways in which this cult was practiced determined whether or not everybody starved to death. If one didn't do what was necessary Demeter wouldn't provide a bountiful harvest but famine.
To equate all cyclical death/rebirth cultic practices with the harvest, though, would be almost as mistaken as seeing these as equitable with the resurrection of a re-interpreted restorer of Israel (or messiah). After all, many cosmologies West & East were cyclical. Time and basically everything was just endlessly repeating. We can even find this kind of understanding within the Hebrew and subsequently Christian scriptures:
"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
See, this is new?
It has been already
in the ages before us"
So thorough a component of Christian worldviews was teleology that even an ardent atheist and anti-religious intellectual like Marx simply replaced religious teleology with a socio-economic one. This concept of progress, an "end goal", and a quite literal "end of days" was utterly foreign to most peoples for most of human history. Even in cases where it seems there are exceptions, we run into problems: the Norse myths weren't recorded by the Norse but by Christians who were converting or had converted them. Christian symbolism runs throughout what were (before the 20th century) believed to be fully pre-Christian myths of Celtic or Nordic cultures. Not even in Christianity itself, however, do we find the Jesus tradition's and early Christian's version of teleology. Rather, parallels to early Christian soteriology and eschatology are found in Jewish texts. A central different is that the messianic savior figure and indeed the concept of eschatology is earthly. The Jewish "messiah" or "anointed" was most readily identified with the Davidic kingship and restoration of Israel to its people by YHWH. It was most certainly not the end of the world and an ascension into an afterlife (with, again, some possible and rare exceptions).
This brings us to another vital point. In order to understand what it meant for some myth or cultic enactment to represent death/rebirth and what it meant to die in general were related largely by oddly distinct they were. The concept of an afterlife in most cultures (including, for a long time, Jewish) was largely insignificant and definitely not actually any sort of "life". In the Odyssey, we find our hero traversing the underworld only to find shadows of former people incapable even of speech. Exceptions, such as Achilles, openly admit they'd rather be living in squalor as the lowliest peasant than be ruler of the underworld.
Egypt is an important enough case that I'll use a quote, but to avoid the inaccurate charge of appeal to authority, I'll quote a text I don't agree with which uses terms I disagree with, and do so only to set the stage:
"The cult of Isis goes back as far as the fourth millennium BCE, dated by a document which associates her with insisting on a respectful attitude to the dead. She is herself immortal, and the life-giver to and sexual partner of her brother Osiris; Isis saves and restores Osiris. Furthermore, it was by becoming Osiris, and through the salvific intercession of and reflexive identification with Osiris, that Egyptians of all status would experience a going out into the day, something which made their funerals an experience of hope and rebirth. Osiris had been killed and dismembered by his brother Set, a figure who remains to threaten the introduction of a rather alien dualism into the predominantly benign system. The sister-wife of Osiris, Isis (goddess of resurrection, of fertility, of the moon), was the deity whose activities made the whole cult of Osiris possible. When, with the aid of Horus and of the dog-headed god Anubis, Isis reassembled the body of her murdered and dismembered brother Osiris, she laid the basis of a major cult of death and rebirth. Osiris presided over the Day of Judgement, with each incoming person being weighed against a feather. Failure would result in being eaten by the Eater of the Dead, the crocodile-headed Ammit, and thus sent to the second death, to the total oblivion and chaos beyond the grave which was the greatest dread of the Egyptians. Death is followed by a journey; this journey after death, through a series of tests and trials, was aimed at passing the Judgement, at becoming Osiris, at salvation. In the Judgement Hall of Osiris lay eternal life. Forty-two netherworld judges assessed the deceased, who then passed into the abode of Osiris, in a chamber or place whose roof was of fire, whose walls were of gigantic living cobras and whose floor was primeval water from which sprang the blue lotus, symbol of the external womb."
Davies, J. (1999). Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (Religion in the First Christian Centuries). Routledge.
The above collapses various layers to simplistically, uses resurrection and rebirth in misleading ways, and presents "the" myth as it existed in a patchwork of the latest and most complicated versions we possess. That said, it does give us a starting place to understand how a would-be exception to the general finality of death in the ancient world.
First, the Egyptian had more reason than most to lay such importance on cyclical death/rebirth representations, enactments, depictions, etc. The reason is related to a theme absent in virtually all other fertility cults and in cultic traditions in general: the fundamental fear, hatred, and rejection of "chaos". The Egyptians did not live or die the way that agricultural communities of the ancient world did in general. The same natural phenomena required for the harvest could destroy it and more: the flooding of the Nile. This cyclical flooding wasn't cyclical the way seasons are. One year it could be too little and not enough for to nourish the crops. Another it could destroy villages. It was cyclical in that the flooding was assured; it was chaotic in that this had a range of possible outcomes which included destruction & death via a means that no famine could.
Second, the Osiris "resurrection" was a later addition woven into an already complex narrative. Isis, not Osiris, was the key figure and had been. Osiris' role wasn't that of savior nor was he the one who made rebirth (or resurrection) possible. Instead, after he was reassembled he became the embodiment of ultimate justice, while death/rebirth was still ultimately Isis' province. Third, in the variants of the myth that we have in which Osiris is killed, he isn't sacrificed and his death serves more to define Set than Osiris, who continues not to play much of a role even after he put back together. He is not said to have been reborn or even to be "alive", but quite literally reconstructed or assembled. It is only after Isis puts him back together that he starts being important to doing "religion". Like Demeter, Cybele, Hera, etc., Isis was integral to "the myth" before Osiris was part of it. Also like many such goddesses, the death/rebirth was not entirely limited to the harvest. Harvest cults were frequently also fertility cults as the fertility of the earth was readily extended to the fertility of people. However, unlike crops, people died. And when they died, there was no after life but at best some shadowy kind of "hell" where the remnants of people faded. The words for "soul" and "spirit" in Greek, Latin, and even non-Indo-European languages also meant (and originally meant) things like "breath" or "air". Thus the death of the "soul" happened when one stopped breathing. Very little in the way of any development of an eternal soul seems to have occurred anywhere for most of pre-Christian antiquity; exceptions are often found only in highly idiomatic, non-representative texts like those of Plato.
For most of human history, the connection between religion and daily life, natural phenomena, politics, etc., was direct, clear, and indivisible. Waves of religious fundamentalism in the ancient world, such as that for which Andokides was put on trial and Socrates executed, occurred when the state sponsored comic depictions of the gods which drew upon received myths but freely altered it. There was no orthodoxy, but there was orthopraxy. If one didn't peform religion, one could be executed.
One reason for the absolutely, deadly seriousness of cultic practices was that the not only deities, but the various practices related to them, were intimately tied to all aspects of life. Don't participate in the proper rituals for the local variant of the goddess of fertility? You'll end up without children. Fail to make the proper sacrifices to the god of trade and/or possession? There goes money.
However, not all cults were equal and there were some in certain places that had no equivalent elsewhere. One of the most important across all of Eurasia, though, was related to harvest. As far back (and almost certainly farther) as we have writings and similar indications of religious practice, we find religious representations of the cyclical nature of the harvest upon which every civilization depended on in very direct and vital ways. Perhaps the best example is the myth of Persephone. While variants were ubiquitous, the essential nature remained unchanged because of the purpose it served. The harvest was a seasonal affair.
Where the cult was practiced, the sacrifices to Demeter, the enacting of Persephone's rape (both in the modern sense of the word and the Latin raptus, which could mean "rape" but also capture), and other ways in which this cult was practiced determined whether or not everybody starved to death. If one didn't do what was necessary Demeter wouldn't provide a bountiful harvest but famine.
To equate all cyclical death/rebirth cultic practices with the harvest, though, would be almost as mistaken as seeing these as equitable with the resurrection of a re-interpreted restorer of Israel (or messiah). After all, many cosmologies West & East were cyclical. Time and basically everything was just endlessly repeating. We can even find this kind of understanding within the Hebrew and subsequently Christian scriptures:
"What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there a thing of which it is said,
See, this is new?
It has been already
in the ages before us"
So thorough a component of Christian worldviews was teleology that even an ardent atheist and anti-religious intellectual like Marx simply replaced religious teleology with a socio-economic one. This concept of progress, an "end goal", and a quite literal "end of days" was utterly foreign to most peoples for most of human history. Even in cases where it seems there are exceptions, we run into problems: the Norse myths weren't recorded by the Norse but by Christians who were converting or had converted them. Christian symbolism runs throughout what were (before the 20th century) believed to be fully pre-Christian myths of Celtic or Nordic cultures. Not even in Christianity itself, however, do we find the Jesus tradition's and early Christian's version of teleology. Rather, parallels to early Christian soteriology and eschatology are found in Jewish texts. A central different is that the messianic savior figure and indeed the concept of eschatology is earthly. The Jewish "messiah" or "anointed" was most readily identified with the Davidic kingship and restoration of Israel to its people by YHWH. It was most certainly not the end of the world and an ascension into an afterlife (with, again, some possible and rare exceptions).
This brings us to another vital point. In order to understand what it meant for some myth or cultic enactment to represent death/rebirth and what it meant to die in general were related largely by oddly distinct they were. The concept of an afterlife in most cultures (including, for a long time, Jewish) was largely insignificant and definitely not actually any sort of "life". In the Odyssey, we find our hero traversing the underworld only to find shadows of former people incapable even of speech. Exceptions, such as Achilles, openly admit they'd rather be living in squalor as the lowliest peasant than be ruler of the underworld.
Egypt is an important enough case that I'll use a quote, but to avoid the inaccurate charge of appeal to authority, I'll quote a text I don't agree with which uses terms I disagree with, and do so only to set the stage:
"The cult of Isis goes back as far as the fourth millennium BCE, dated by a document which associates her with insisting on a respectful attitude to the dead. She is herself immortal, and the life-giver to and sexual partner of her brother Osiris; Isis saves and restores Osiris. Furthermore, it was by becoming Osiris, and through the salvific intercession of and reflexive identification with Osiris, that Egyptians of all status would experience a going out into the day, something which made their funerals an experience of hope and rebirth. Osiris had been killed and dismembered by his brother Set, a figure who remains to threaten the introduction of a rather alien dualism into the predominantly benign system. The sister-wife of Osiris, Isis (goddess of resurrection, of fertility, of the moon), was the deity whose activities made the whole cult of Osiris possible. When, with the aid of Horus and of the dog-headed god Anubis, Isis reassembled the body of her murdered and dismembered brother Osiris, she laid the basis of a major cult of death and rebirth. Osiris presided over the Day of Judgement, with each incoming person being weighed against a feather. Failure would result in being eaten by the Eater of the Dead, the crocodile-headed Ammit, and thus sent to the second death, to the total oblivion and chaos beyond the grave which was the greatest dread of the Egyptians. Death is followed by a journey; this journey after death, through a series of tests and trials, was aimed at passing the Judgement, at becoming Osiris, at salvation. In the Judgement Hall of Osiris lay eternal life. Forty-two netherworld judges assessed the deceased, who then passed into the abode of Osiris, in a chamber or place whose roof was of fire, whose walls were of gigantic living cobras and whose floor was primeval water from which sprang the blue lotus, symbol of the external womb."
Davies, J. (1999). Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (Religion in the First Christian Centuries). Routledge.
The above collapses various layers to simplistically, uses resurrection and rebirth in misleading ways, and presents "the" myth as it existed in a patchwork of the latest and most complicated versions we possess. That said, it does give us a starting place to understand how a would-be exception to the general finality of death in the ancient world.
First, the Egyptian had more reason than most to lay such importance on cyclical death/rebirth representations, enactments, depictions, etc. The reason is related to a theme absent in virtually all other fertility cults and in cultic traditions in general: the fundamental fear, hatred, and rejection of "chaos". The Egyptians did not live or die the way that agricultural communities of the ancient world did in general. The same natural phenomena required for the harvest could destroy it and more: the flooding of the Nile. This cyclical flooding wasn't cyclical the way seasons are. One year it could be too little and not enough for to nourish the crops. Another it could destroy villages. It was cyclical in that the flooding was assured; it was chaotic in that this had a range of possible outcomes which included destruction & death via a means that no famine could.
Second, the Osiris "resurrection" was a later addition woven into an already complex narrative. Isis, not Osiris, was the key figure and had been. Osiris' role wasn't that of savior nor was he the one who made rebirth (or resurrection) possible. Instead, after he was reassembled he became the embodiment of ultimate justice, while death/rebirth was still ultimately Isis' province. Third, in the variants of the myth that we have in which Osiris is killed, he isn't sacrificed and his death serves more to define Set than Osiris, who continues not to play much of a role even after he put back together. He is not said to have been reborn or even to be "alive", but quite literally reconstructed or assembled. It is only after Isis puts him back together that he starts being important to doing "religion". Like Demeter, Cybele, Hera, etc., Isis was integral to "the myth" before Osiris was part of it. Also like many such goddesses, the death/rebirth was not entirely limited to the harvest. Harvest cults were frequently also fertility cults as the fertility of the earth was readily extended to the fertility of people. However, unlike crops, people died. And when they died, there was no after life but at best some shadowy kind of "hell" where the remnants of people faded. The words for "soul" and "spirit" in Greek, Latin, and even non-Indo-European languages also meant (and originally meant) things like "breath" or "air". Thus the death of the "soul" happened when one stopped breathing. Very little in the way of any development of an eternal soul seems to have occurred anywhere for most of pre-Christian antiquity; exceptions are often found only in highly idiomatic, non-representative texts like those of Plato.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Legion
Sure, the details are different. Osirus is still a character in a resurrection myth. You wrote another very, very long post - but are not addressing the point.
Nkne of what you wrote in your last post refutes my claim - which in this case was that resurrection myths are commonplace.
Yes Legion, the Osirus myth is different to the Jesus story - it is still a resurrection myth. You are not engaging with the contention.
Sure, the details are different. Osirus is still a character in a resurrection myth. You wrote another very, very long post - but are not addressing the point.
Nkne of what you wrote in your last post refutes my claim - which in this case was that resurrection myths are commonplace.
Yes Legion, the Osirus myth is different to the Jesus story - it is still a resurrection myth. You are not engaging with the contention.
Myth vs. Legend, Cults vs. Sects
We have a few reasons for recognizing what those who "invented" the religions that one finds in mythology collections but which were never practiced failed to recognize about the Jesus tradition and so-called dying and resurrecting gods.
1) We have the fact that these religions were invented fictions by armchair historians who couldn't understand a religion that wasn't based on orthodoxy and doctrine.
2) We can examine the matrix in which the Jesus tradition developed. It developed out of a thoroughly Jewish foundation, but was distinct enough from various other Jewish sects to be persecuted by its so-called "2nd founder" Paul (among others) and as early as the 60s by the Roman emperor. The persecution by other Jews (as the Jesus movement began as a Jewish one) is not really persecution- Jewish factions had been arguing, with sometimes violent results, about proper observance of Torah and the nature of Torah before Paul or Jesus and or the Roman empire. Also, there is no evidence that this "persecution" was from Jewish authorities (apart from the execution of Jesus, anyway, and even then there all the evidence points to bottom-up disputes as happening first). The important point is that, like Judaism, the Jesus tradition was about belief from the very beginning, and the poorly developed theology of Paul was entirely novel, thanks to its foundations in Jewish scripture reinterpreted through a "post-Easter" lens. While the Jewish nature of the Jesus movement remained long enough for the divisions it caused to be evidenced in our texts, the complete divide between all factions and the entire gentile world can't be underestimated.
3) The figure of Jesus did nothing to make Christianity palatable to pagans without considerable and for a long time largely unsuccessful work by Christian apologists before there was a "Christianity". The parallels drawn by Justin Martyr and others were flimsy at best, often relied on changes to religious practices in the Roman empire that were either partly caused by Christianity or at least post-dated it, and were contradicted by the parallels drawn by pagans. Celsus, for example, whose work survives almost completely thanks to extensive quotations by Christian apologists, doesn't make the leap from the legends about Jesus to a mythical Jesus that some 19th century historians and countless internet-educated mythicists do. Instead, he tells us of what was probably a long-held tradition in which Jesus' "virgin birth" was a cover-up for his mother's rape by a Roman soldier. Celsus does point out that nothing Jesus was said to have done was anything new, but unlike Christian apologists goes out of his way to de-emphasize the relationship between Jesus and mythical heroes or deities.
4) Like the figure of Jesus, Christology from Paul onwards further alienated gentiles and Jews alike. It even alienated Christians, who spent the next several centuries trying to figure out the relationship between Jesus and God and ended up deciding to avoid diminishing Jesus and avoid polytheism by a logical contradiction. Most importantly, unlike all the death/rebirth cults in which some deity is connected to fertility, the harvest, both, or a more general extension of these, there was nothing cyclical about even the earliest Christian tradition. Paul and those like him believed that Jesus would return in a few years. One of the first serious problems for the earliest Christians was reconciling the fact that Jesus didn't come back and the end result was ~2,000 years of various doomsday, "end-of-time" eschatological predictions, movements, sects, cults, etc. For more mainstream Christians, the eschatology of the first Christians became teleology. Never, though, was there anything other a completely incompatible function of/belief system about Jesus resurrection and cyclical nature of all death/rebirth cults. In fact, the (likely Christian influenced) savior deities that appeared later, such as Mithras, didn't die nor were resurrected (or reborn). For the earliest Christians to today's Christians, Jesus' resurrection was inexorably bound to his role as a savior through his sacrifice. Moreover, it was Jesus who made possible human life after death through this sacrifice and resurrection.
There is no cyclical theme present everywhere else we find death/rebirth cultic practices, there is no eschatological sacrifice and resurrection elsewhere, and not only was the core of Christianity a matter of faith/belief (contrary to virtually the entirety of "religion" in the ancient world), but to the extent there existed a "functional" component to Jesus' death & resurrection it was tied to a belief about human life and the possibility of a single resurrection in the form of a "spiritual" restored Israel. This was how the followers of Jesus were able to apply the title "messiah" to him in the first place. He hadn't just failed to restore Israel, but had been executed. But his followers were able to claim he had in fact fulfilled the role of messiah by redefining the restoration of Israel and God's kingdom by making the new kingdom a heavenly one and the resurrection of Jesus allow for the resurrection of all (and an afterlife). Not really equivalent to Attis' "resurrection" in which he turns into vegetation that can continue to grow as a post-Christian addition to a fertility/harvest cult or to Isis' lover being put back together so that followers could continue to celebrate death and rebirth independently of so irrelevant a "resurrection" that Osiris isn't described as ever really living after being cut into pieces.
5) The stories about Jesus are so similar to those told about people like Alexander the Great, Socrates, Augustus, etc., that the (incorrect, IMO) consensus among scholars is that the gospels belong to a genre of ancient biography. I would argue that the distinctions between would-be ancient biographies don't allow for any such genre, but what is important is that rather than the kind of myth which is (due to the fundamental way in which myths served as "scripts" for cultic practice, not doctrine or belief) ritually carried out in order to ensure some result (like fertile earth or fertile wife) and is necessarily distinct from any specific context. Unlike every, single other savior deity or "dying/resurrecting" deity (including those likely influenced by Christianity and allowing for the inadequacy of "dying/resurrecting" applied to gods that neither killed nor brought to back to life or were just killed and never said to be alive again), Jesus was rooted in a very specific socio-cultural, geographic, and temporal context. Moreover, this wasn't the kind of specific context that the Greeks located heroes such as Achilles- so long ago they didn't even know whether the person credited with the stories, Homer, even existed. rather, Jesus was contemporaneous with the earliest author of Christian texts.
6) Finally, and relatedly, there is the question of how such a movement spread. Apart from the fundamentally practical and practiced aspect of ancient religions, there existed a clean divide between the nature of mythic deities and figures and those who were historical (even when legendary). Most deities really couldn't be worshipped if they were actually historical because this destroyed a central aspect of their role in cultic practice. Moreover, the Greeks and Romans expressed doubt about the historicity even of Homer, questioned the nature of the gods, and to the extent they built "religions" around legendary figures these were figures widely regarded to be historical (like Pythagoras), also anchored to a specific time, and also independent of religious practice.
The comparisons between Jesus and Greco-Roman deities of the type mythicists make are based on summary descriptions of myths that are divorced from the reality of the roles they played, are usually inaccurate or just plain wrong, ignore the fact that such deities had to be divorced from the kind of setting Jesus had to have for our sources to exist, and fundamentally misunderstand the nature of religion in the ancient world.
We have a few reasons for recognizing what those who "invented" the religions that one finds in mythology collections but which were never practiced failed to recognize about the Jesus tradition and so-called dying and resurrecting gods.
1) We have the fact that these religions were invented fictions by armchair historians who couldn't understand a religion that wasn't based on orthodoxy and doctrine.
2) We can examine the matrix in which the Jesus tradition developed. It developed out of a thoroughly Jewish foundation, but was distinct enough from various other Jewish sects to be persecuted by its so-called "2nd founder" Paul (among others) and as early as the 60s by the Roman emperor. The persecution by other Jews (as the Jesus movement began as a Jewish one) is not really persecution- Jewish factions had been arguing, with sometimes violent results, about proper observance of Torah and the nature of Torah before Paul or Jesus and or the Roman empire. Also, there is no evidence that this "persecution" was from Jewish authorities (apart from the execution of Jesus, anyway, and even then there all the evidence points to bottom-up disputes as happening first). The important point is that, like Judaism, the Jesus tradition was about belief from the very beginning, and the poorly developed theology of Paul was entirely novel, thanks to its foundations in Jewish scripture reinterpreted through a "post-Easter" lens. While the Jewish nature of the Jesus movement remained long enough for the divisions it caused to be evidenced in our texts, the complete divide between all factions and the entire gentile world can't be underestimated.
3) The figure of Jesus did nothing to make Christianity palatable to pagans without considerable and for a long time largely unsuccessful work by Christian apologists before there was a "Christianity". The parallels drawn by Justin Martyr and others were flimsy at best, often relied on changes to religious practices in the Roman empire that were either partly caused by Christianity or at least post-dated it, and were contradicted by the parallels drawn by pagans. Celsus, for example, whose work survives almost completely thanks to extensive quotations by Christian apologists, doesn't make the leap from the legends about Jesus to a mythical Jesus that some 19th century historians and countless internet-educated mythicists do. Instead, he tells us of what was probably a long-held tradition in which Jesus' "virgin birth" was a cover-up for his mother's rape by a Roman soldier. Celsus does point out that nothing Jesus was said to have done was anything new, but unlike Christian apologists goes out of his way to de-emphasize the relationship between Jesus and mythical heroes or deities.
4) Like the figure of Jesus, Christology from Paul onwards further alienated gentiles and Jews alike. It even alienated Christians, who spent the next several centuries trying to figure out the relationship between Jesus and God and ended up deciding to avoid diminishing Jesus and avoid polytheism by a logical contradiction. Most importantly, unlike all the death/rebirth cults in which some deity is connected to fertility, the harvest, both, or a more general extension of these, there was nothing cyclical about even the earliest Christian tradition. Paul and those like him believed that Jesus would return in a few years. One of the first serious problems for the earliest Christians was reconciling the fact that Jesus didn't come back and the end result was ~2,000 years of various doomsday, "end-of-time" eschatological predictions, movements, sects, cults, etc. For more mainstream Christians, the eschatology of the first Christians became teleology. Never, though, was there anything other a completely incompatible function of/belief system about Jesus resurrection and cyclical nature of all death/rebirth cults. In fact, the (likely Christian influenced) savior deities that appeared later, such as Mithras, didn't die nor were resurrected (or reborn). For the earliest Christians to today's Christians, Jesus' resurrection was inexorably bound to his role as a savior through his sacrifice. Moreover, it was Jesus who made possible human life after death through this sacrifice and resurrection.
There is no cyclical theme present everywhere else we find death/rebirth cultic practices, there is no eschatological sacrifice and resurrection elsewhere, and not only was the core of Christianity a matter of faith/belief (contrary to virtually the entirety of "religion" in the ancient world), but to the extent there existed a "functional" component to Jesus' death & resurrection it was tied to a belief about human life and the possibility of a single resurrection in the form of a "spiritual" restored Israel. This was how the followers of Jesus were able to apply the title "messiah" to him in the first place. He hadn't just failed to restore Israel, but had been executed. But his followers were able to claim he had in fact fulfilled the role of messiah by redefining the restoration of Israel and God's kingdom by making the new kingdom a heavenly one and the resurrection of Jesus allow for the resurrection of all (and an afterlife). Not really equivalent to Attis' "resurrection" in which he turns into vegetation that can continue to grow as a post-Christian addition to a fertility/harvest cult or to Isis' lover being put back together so that followers could continue to celebrate death and rebirth independently of so irrelevant a "resurrection" that Osiris isn't described as ever really living after being cut into pieces.
5) The stories about Jesus are so similar to those told about people like Alexander the Great, Socrates, Augustus, etc., that the (incorrect, IMO) consensus among scholars is that the gospels belong to a genre of ancient biography. I would argue that the distinctions between would-be ancient biographies don't allow for any such genre, but what is important is that rather than the kind of myth which is (due to the fundamental way in which myths served as "scripts" for cultic practice, not doctrine or belief) ritually carried out in order to ensure some result (like fertile earth or fertile wife) and is necessarily distinct from any specific context. Unlike every, single other savior deity or "dying/resurrecting" deity (including those likely influenced by Christianity and allowing for the inadequacy of "dying/resurrecting" applied to gods that neither killed nor brought to back to life or were just killed and never said to be alive again), Jesus was rooted in a very specific socio-cultural, geographic, and temporal context. Moreover, this wasn't the kind of specific context that the Greeks located heroes such as Achilles- so long ago they didn't even know whether the person credited with the stories, Homer, even existed. rather, Jesus was contemporaneous with the earliest author of Christian texts.
6) Finally, and relatedly, there is the question of how such a movement spread. Apart from the fundamentally practical and practiced aspect of ancient religions, there existed a clean divide between the nature of mythic deities and figures and those who were historical (even when legendary). Most deities really couldn't be worshipped if they were actually historical because this destroyed a central aspect of their role in cultic practice. Moreover, the Greeks and Romans expressed doubt about the historicity even of Homer, questioned the nature of the gods, and to the extent they built "religions" around legendary figures these were figures widely regarded to be historical (like Pythagoras), also anchored to a specific time, and also independent of religious practice.
The comparisons between Jesus and Greco-Roman deities of the type mythicists make are based on summary descriptions of myths that are divorced from the reality of the roles they played, are usually inaccurate or just plain wrong, ignore the fact that such deities had to be divorced from the kind of setting Jesus had to have for our sources to exist, and fundamentally misunderstand the nature of religion in the ancient world.
Prophet
breaking the statutes of my local municipality
Doesn't Bunyip mean nash8?
...and of course Bunyip refuses Legion's challenge to live up to his own word. Bunyip is NOT happy to elaborate as he claims, likely because he has the insecure position of having no evidence to present after claiming he did. Thus, he returns to questionable, evasive tactics in order to not give up the ground he believes his unevidenced claims won him. This tactic is invariably to accuse us all continually of this exact sin he is committing. Because Bunyip is being evasive, he must accuse his adversaries of his own sin of evasiveness to dissociate with his own flaws.
I'm afraid Bunyip needs to...
...as he is VERY confused and is crossing two different debates. Note the difficulty, confusion and utter lack of self-awareness caused by juggling lies and unevidenced claims that one cannot face as such.
Perhaps Bunyip should...
...and practice what he preaches.
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After he was killed, what source tells us Osiris ever lived again? And as long as we are making such comparisons, there is greater similarity between the legends about Jesus and those about Alexander the Great and August Caesar. Come to think of it, you'd have an easier time comparing Alexander the Great to Osiris than you would Jesus. Let's look at some points of comparison and departure:
1) Jesus was said to be born of when god (or the holy spirit) impregnated Mary. Osiris was not. However, Osiris was supposedly at one time a living god and Pharaoh. Alexander's mother was said to be impregnated by a god (or holy fire/divine thunderbolt). However, he was also believed to be the son of a god-Pharaoh (in some reports, Nectanebo II) and was very publicly involved in and behind the sacrifices to Apis that became the basis for Serapis, the deity whom Osiris was equated with.
2) Jesus was called the son of God. So was Alexander the Great. Osiris wasn't.
3) Alexander and Jesus are both said by "biographers" to have lived in a specific place and time to which they are both rooted. Osiris isn't.
4) The legends about Jesus have a basis in the literary tradition of Judaism and the famous King David. The legends about Alexander are rooted in Homeric epics and the famous hero-king Achilles (so much so that he was also said to be descended from Achilles). No version of any Osiris myth had such a basis.
5) "In his role as pharaoh Alexander was a living Horus who would fuse with Osiris at death. It should be mentioned here that, according to Herodotus, the Egyptians equated Osiris with the Greek god Dionysus" (O'Brien, J. M. (2003). Alexander the Great: the invisible enemy: a biography. Routledge.). Well, the parallel to Osiris here is just blatantly obvious, but we can point out that no such parallel exists for Jesus.
6) The deaths of Jesus and Alexander were said to be prophesized. This isn't true of Osiris.
7) Jesus said to be put to the death. Both Osiris and Alexander were believed to be murdered by those close to them.
And so on.
Basically, Alexander the Great was actually equated to Osiris, quite literally connected to the development of the myth, and has more variations of stories told by historians about him that can't be true than does Jesus. On the other hand, to the extent we find points of comparison between Osiris and Jesus, we find more between Jesus and Alexander the Great.
So, either your casual treatment of the details renders Alexander the Great more likely a myth (or, alternatively, more likely historical) than Osiris than Jesus, or it's simply completely inadequate and absolutely baseless. Given how much it ignores, such as the core components of the Jesus tradition and the entirety of Egyptian religion as well as the nature of our sources AND how much is "massaged" to make the few comparisons you do, I'd say the latter.
But then, I find logic, reasoning, and truth more important than dogma.
You mean, the reasons why I failed to rebut an argument you refused to make?
No, it wasn't:
You mention "messiah" first and have utterly failed to even suggest you can support this claim, and have not in anyway related anything you think is true of our primary sources for Osiris (or his various incarnations) to "the whole messiah...thing". Also, even if we granted that your claim that Osiris was resurrected was true, that is a single instance, not a "pretty common theme". You haven't supported anything.
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Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Legion, that point and the ones that follow don't change the fact that Osirus is a resurrection story. You are attacking claims that nobody has made again.
As I said, so what? That is irrelevant. Osirus is still a resurrection myth.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
Legion
You say: " Also, even if we granted that your claim that Osiris was resurrected was true, that is a single instance, not a "pretty common theme". You haven't supported anything."
Legion, for all of your posturing you are once again AGREEING WITH MY CLAIM and attacking me over and over for claims I have not made.
Yes Legion, Osirus was resurrected - which is what your last three long posts have you lecturing me AGAINST.
You are fighting me on a position you agree with. And which is just a deflection anyway.
I can and will defend any claim I have made, which I can only assume is why you and several others here seem to focus exclusively on claims that I have not made.
__________________
I am not interested in engaging with you on whether or not resurrection myths are common.
You say: " Also, even if we granted that your claim that Osiris was resurrected was true, that is a single instance, not a "pretty common theme". You haven't supported anything."
Legion, for all of your posturing you are once again AGREEING WITH MY CLAIM and attacking me over and over for claims I have not made.
Yes Legion, Osirus was resurrected - which is what your last three long posts have you lecturing me AGAINST.
You are fighting me on a position you agree with. And which is just a deflection anyway.
I can and will defend any claim I have made, which I can only assume is why you and several others here seem to focus exclusively on claims that I have not made.
__________________
I am not interested in engaging with you on whether or not resurrection myths are common.
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Wrong. It is inaccurate to say that Osiris was a dying and resurrecting god, or even that he was resurrected. What I said was that even if this were true, you haven't shown anything. This is generally referred to as a contrary-to-fact or counterfactual conditional. It means you aren't correct about Osiris but if you were it still wouldn't support your claim.
Which you've shown by demonstrating that we have primary sources that describe him as having died and then begin alive. Only you haven't.
Wrong. You seem to forget that you included "messiah" and claimed that this (along with "dying & resurrecting gods") was a "common theme". What I have shown is that Osiris has more in common with Alexander the Great than Jesus, that we have no evidence supporting the claim he was resurrected, that to speak of any Osiris myth is to misunderstand the entire nature of religion in antiquity, and that you can't support anything you claim.
Osiris was not resurrected. The "common theme" you babble on about doesn't exist. You have refused to substantiate all claims you've made. You demonstrate fundamental ignorance about historical methods. What, exactly, do I agree with you about?
Of course you aren't. Because you can't support your claims.
Bunyip
pro scapegoat
I said at the outset that I was not interested in persuing this line of um 'reasoning'. I gave several reasons, none of which you have engaged with and I do not care to repeat myself.
Perhaps somebody else here is interested in discussing whether various deities count as resurrected gods or not? I'm not.
But you don't rely on appeals to authority...well, I suppose if one considers how ridiculous it is to argue that standard academic practice is fallacious (i.e., references to scholarship/citations), then it isn't much of a stretch to find your only support for your claims is a mention of a wiki article.
Despite claiming it was a central point earlier.
A central problem with the whole "dying & rising" god theory à la Frazer is the separation and misunderstanding of the role myth played in ancient religions. You can't even point to any primary sources for the myths you make claims about, still less argue that it is possible (given their function in religious practice in antiquity) for them to be relevant.
Let us imagine there were a list of deities who actually were thought to have died and risen again. Jesus wasn't considered a god until basically the entirety of the NT was written. More importantly, resurrection was fundamentally a matter of human and (until several centuries after Jesus, and indeed in many traditions always) bodily. That is, resurrection meant dead human bodies coming back to life (and not as zombies, FYI). This was absolutely essential for the earliest Christian sources we have. Jesus was said to have been executed an historical person, Pilate, in part due to the clout that an historical Jewish high priest, Caiaphas, had. Paul was alive when both of these individuals were.
Far, far more important is that Jesus wasn't just "risen again" after death. The passion narrative (which is very early, so much so that the precursor is in Paul's letters) is quite specific about the nature of his being alive: his physical body was reanimated such that having physically died his person was alive again in his physical body. That's what resurrection meant, both for the earliest Christians and for many today. It was also unthinkable for the Greeks and Romans and there is no real evidence that such a view was ever held even by the Jews before Jesus. Certainly, none of the so-called "dying & rising gods" actually resurrected. Most of them didn't die, or didn't live again, or never had a body that could have died and lived again.
A central component of the Baal cycle is that the fertility/life god (Baal) can't defeat death but that the two are in eternal struggle. He isn't resurrected: kbl khwy yr hwy. The term used to describe his death yet immortality is not bl mt, or "non-death".
Like Attis, Adonis' supposed "resurrection" is of no consequence because they post-date the entirety of the NT (at least in the forms of the myths in which either supposedly are "resurrected"; personally, being turned into vegetation doesn't seem comparable but apparently to whomever writes these lists of "dying & resurrecting gods" it is).
Eshmun is even worse, as we have to wait ~400 years after Jesus for the suggesting that Eshmun was a deity who "died" and "rose again". For internet mythicists who can't be bothered with primary sources, research methods, or more than "wiki" lists, the fact that a deity is non-Christian and described as dying and then rising/living is all that is needed. The fact that the deity in question wasn't believed to have done so until centuries after Christianity had transformed the nature of religion in the ancient world (and as Christianity had evolved and changed thanks to the incorporation of aspects of Greek philosophy) is irrelevant. Thus the name "Eshmun" in a wiki list is evidence of a "common theme" that we still haven't seen any evidence existed before Jesus in any form, let alone in terms of a figure who was a messiah and who died and was resurrected.
Better still are those names in the lists that were based on incomplete information when e.g., Frazer wrote, but have since been known for over half a century:
"in 1951 a tablet was discovered with the hitherto missing conclusion of the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Dumuzi: instead of his expected resurrection Dumuzi is killed as a substitute for Inanna"
Davies, J. (1999). Death, Burial and Rebirth in the Religions of Antiquity (Religion in the First Christian Centuries). Routledge.
Internet mythicists can't even be bothered to check to see if their information is over 50 years out-of-date.
Alt Thinker
Older than the hills
I never said historicity was established. I said that based on my evidence based arguments a historical Jesus was more likely than not. I said that many times.
Here are my exact words and your response.
You repeatedly claimed that it is not possible to know anything at all and that "I don't know" is the only possible position even with regard to Hercules. I repeatedly quoted you in saying that exact thing multiple times.
And now I find that instead of addressing my arguments as I repeatedly asked, instead of even reading my arguments as I showed you had not, you jump to another thread and lie about me.
Why should anyone take you seriously about anything?
Sapiens
Polymathematician
The issue with that stance is that it does not offer a unique solution. It is true, even if likelyhood of a historical Jesus is 2% while the likelihood of no historical Jesus is 1%, and it is also true if the likelihood of a historical Jesus is 99% even while the likelihood of no historical Jesus remain at 1%, very different answers.
Historicity should be a binary choice, it either is, or it isn't. It does not appear to me that there is sufficient "proof" (especially when you take the "special case" historical analysis that this issue receives ... what with secondary sources becoming primary sources and such) for historicity to stand on it's own (is that not what you are saying when you write, "I never said historicity was established?").