How original is Christianity?

[Polycarp]

*Originally posted by Tarantara *
**>“Of course I mean steal”, as if this somehow calls the religion into question or is a strike against it.<

Perhaps “co-opt” would be more appropriate. I can see how realizing that the religion you’ve followed is just a patchwork of rehashed myths from many previous religions would tend to undermine it’s credibility. Each of them was absolutely certain of being the one and only “True Faith.” I don’t blame Jesus. He’s as much a victim of the scam as anyone else. **

Jesus was, at minimum, a man who lived in a particular time and place, whose teachings and the events connected with his death had a dramatic impact on people. Around him has grown a mass of doctrine, much of it mythical in nature (in the sense that they are fraught with meaning beyond the simple denotative event that happened – Jesus was by no means the first or last Jewish man to be acclaimed by his followers as Messiah and executed in consequence, for example, but the Crucifixion means something more to us Christians than the executions by cross of those other guys).

For me, comparative religion enlightens my faith – I can see how Jesus fulfilled the expectations of the Attis-ites and the Celts’ need for a tanist to die in behalf of king and people. Take a *good look at Campbell or another scholarly student of myth before you start throwing “rehashed myth” around as though it disproves something – it doesn’t, to anybody who knows the role of myth in human thought.

[NaSultainne]

This is an point of contention that seems, to me at least, to be easily understood and accounted for. Judaism did not blossom and mature in a vacuum; God spoke to, and interacted with, man over many centuries. Does anyone here actually think that the early Hebrews had no impact on their surrounding communities? Would it not make sense that as God revealed Himself to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, their lives would have been ample demonstration of the power and glory of God? Would not this knowledge and understanding of God have leached into surrounding communities, affecting and attaching to undeveloped spiritual beliefs? And wouldn’t this necessarily limited knowledge have certainly resulted in change to that community?

Let’s take a simple story. Adam and Eve certainly knew the correct unfolding of events in the garden of Eden. Their kids would also have heard the story. The grandkids would have heard, and so on, generation after generation. At some point, gradually, the story changed: times expanded or contracted, blame was assigned, descriptions became less clear, etc. Now, over time, as families grew and separated, this ongoing deterioration of the truth continued. At some point it’s reasonable to presume that the main points would be lost to the fog and vagueries of memory and personal emphasis. In time, individual groups decide to write and record the events as they are now known, and voila you have a variety of storylines for one event. Then, God decides to correct the story, bring back the original acts to man’s awareness, and we have the book of Genesis. Great. Now, today, 3500+ years later, we have people looking for earliest references and assuming, yes assuming that the earliest records are the correct records. Of course, we then have to take into account the vagueries of archaelogical acquisition, don’t we? What has survived the ages and the destructive effects of the elements? What has survived war, natural disaster, intentional destruction by other means?

This is why I find this question to be of little intrinsic value. It presupposes that Christianity (rather Judaism, as the original communication with God) is some hybrid of earlier, less successful so-called religions, rather than a complete, complex, mature and unique theology, intended by God to counter the erroneous history of His relationship and purpose with His creation.

[Dogface]

*Originally posted by Tarantara *
**>“Of course I mean steal”, as if this somehow calls the religion into question or is a strike against it.<

Perhaps “co-opt” would be more appropriate.**

That’s also a negative word. Why insist upon words with negative connotations? The technical term in comparative religion study is “revalorize”. Any religion can revalorize concepts from other religions or non-religion sources.

Yes, Christianity has revalorized a lot of things. So what? obsession on claiming that Christianity is somehow utterly “original” seems to be a more modern fetish. Tertullian, for example, wrote quite a bit on the value of other traditions for Christianity. Likewise, the participants of the first three or so Ecumenical Councils (at least) were very aware of the scholarly and philosophical use of terms like “Logos” and “Hypostasis” for quite some time before the Church adopted them.

Over the last three or four centuries, there seems to have been a general “dumbing down” of doctrine that starts to turn it into empty sloganizing and makes everything rest on a list of absolute statements.

[Yllaria]

<<Then, God decides to correct the story, bring back the original acts to man’s awareness, >>

OK

This, however, is a statement that can be used to support any religion, with any background, anywhere. It does not necessarily apply to Christianity.

[Mothchunks]

The usual trimmings; parthenogenesis, divine paternity, the sacrificed sun king, nothing new. Then it started to get out of hand…

[TGWATY]

The popular Christian apologist C. S. Lewis was fond of pointing out the fact that so many of the world’s religions share elements with Christianity as evidence of their truth. If Christianity were utterly unique that would be a red flag. The pagan stories were rumors of the truth (rumor in the old sense of far off noise, not gossip).

He said (lifted from here)

**Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me … was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all:
again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself I
liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose “what it meant”. Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the other are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things”. Therefore, it is true, not in the sense of being a description of God (that no finite mind would take in) but in the sense of being the way in which God chooses to appear to our faculties. The “doctrines” we get out of the true myth are of course less true: they are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection." **

The myth of the dying god who somewhere, sometime was resurrected, in Christianity becomes the historical – this particular God as this particular man at this particular place and time. That is what distinguishes Christ from the others. It is founded on a historical event, albeit one of mythical significance. The others are just myths.