Um, ignore this.
The waters would have had to be parted for a long time for that many people to cross. And why a loving God would kill all the Egyptian soldiers, horses etc. doesn’t add up ,when one considers that God could have just struck down all the Egyptians that were enemies of the Israelites with a wave of it’s hand, doesn’t make sense to me. The OT doesn’t seem to think of other people as the Children of God,which is so different that Christianity or even Islam think of them to be. A good father doesn’t have one of his children’s family go and kill the other of his children’s families, innocent babies, little children etc..
If this same God knew all things ahead of time he could just have had the Pharoh not be born, I find it hard to swallow that such a God would go to such extremes, then have his people live for 40 years in a desert,feed them with manna etc. when he could just have had his people go to a differnt place, and why he hardened the heart of the Pharoh makes no sense to me either.
If so, then whoever made The God Who Wasn’t There is wrong. There has never been an official response the copycat thesis from any major Christian denomination (nor any minor one was far as I know).
“The Golden Bough” by Sir James George Frazer deals with these parallels (and a host of others.)
It is considered one of the authoritative texts on myth and magic. It tends to be be a bit repetitive in places, as it shows “variations on a theme” of many superstitions of related cultures, but it is worth reading. It WILL take you a while.
One can tell you don’t like Bill Maher. Many don’t. I take exception to your comment “The real difference between Egyptian mythology and the story of Jesus is that the former is clearly a fable full of beings with super powers, whereas the latter is told in realistic terms…”
From my study and readings I’ve learned that the bible is the vocation and avocation of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people over hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years, altered, amended, changed to reflect their thinking, their beliefs, and the thinking of the times. There may be Egyptian mythology. There is religious mythology, all religions have their own myths. For christians it’s the mythology of the bible. Religions look to a mythical being or thing to provide succor or sustenance and something after death. Wishful thinking, fear of the unknown, the need for something beyond the present world.
What about the need for coherent and cogent arguements?
Welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board, jakebean, we’re glad to have you with us.
For the sake of consistency, I’ve merged your post with an earlier thread on the same topic. No biggie, just helps keep like-discussions together.
I’ve read that the early origins of Communion, particularly transubstantiation, was a deliberate ploy to convert adherents of Mithra. Also that Mithra died, stayed in a cave for a bit, and then came back out.
Osiris seems like a bit of a stretch, but I personally do not doubt Egyptian religion and Judaism influenced one another. Jewish, and by extension Christian, eschatology was borrowed almost entirely from Zoroastrianism.
The violent history of ancient Mesopotamia makes it impossible that any religion originating in or near there developed in isolation. There was a lot of cultural exchange as people fought, conquered, overthrew, and migrated. It’s a “chicken or egg” situation, however, as written records “proving” which came first don’t exist – we have to draw conclusions from iconography and texts by self-interested historians and prophets as to the provenance of their mythology.
C.S. Lewis has an essay in his book God in the Dock called wherein he addresses the pre-Christian myths of dying Gods and virgin births and the like. He calls them pre-echoes of Christ; myths conceived by men who were inspired by God before the ‘real’ events actually happened. Here’s a brief quote:
It is easy for some Christians to believe that their deity was preordained from the beginning of time and therefore all other deities with similarities were merely copies of the ‘real’ deity regardless of whether the other deity was extant before or after the birth of the Christian deity.
Similarly, I think it is much more difficult for some Christians to accept the more likely conclusion that Christianity is the result of religious syncretism. This is especially true in those denominations that strongly believe in scriptural inerrancy.
Story, nothin. This needs to be a major motion picture!
Powers &8^]
Christian communion was institued long before the Roman Mithra religion existed. Communion is mentioned in all the gospels and Paul’s epistles, so Christians practiced it by about 40 A.D. at the latest, but probably since the foundation of the Church. The Roman Mithra religion (distinct from the earlier Persian Mithra cult) came into being around 90-100 A.D.
As for Mithra dying and being resurrected, the evidence is:
I see no references anywhere in the Mithraic studies literature to Mithra being buried, or even dying, for that matter [Gordon says directly, that there is “no death of Mithras” – Gor.III, 96] and so of course no rising again and no “resurrection” (in a Jewish sense?!) to celebrate. … Wynne-Tyson [Wyn.MFC, 24; cf. Ver.MSG, 38] also refers to a church writer of the fourth century, Firmicus, who says that the Mithraists mourn the image of a dead Mithras – still way too late! – but after reading the work of Firmicus, I find no such reference at all.
There’s no evidence for this, and indeed there’s no solid evidence that Zoroastrianism existed prior to Judaism.
To some extent, yes, it’s true that the historical documentation of religion in the ancient Middle East is thin. However, arguments that either Judaism or Christianity copied from Pagan sources contain a gaping logical flaw. Both the Old Testament Jews and the early Christians did not have any desire to make their religions appear similar to pagan religions from nearby areas. Instead, they wanted the differences to be as large and clear as possible. We can see this clearly in both the Old and New Testaments. Hence just because two groups lived nearby does not mean that we’d expect those two groups to mingle their religious ideas. The evidence in some cases shows that when Jewish communities were in close proximity to gentile communities, it caused the Jewish communities to become more insular and less welcoming to outside ideas.
Perhaps nothing official, but I’ve certainly heard that argument from mainstream Christian sources, though personal conversations, so no cites available.
I’m surprised no one’s brought up Christian borrowings from Hinduism. Anyone who’s ever been to a medieval church must have been struck by all the elephant-headed Jesuses.
On the contrary, this Christian cannot make head nor tail of what you say; it makes no sense at all.
Actually, the Mithraic cult was introduced to the Roman Empire in 200 BCE and became semi-popular a century later, which still leaves plenty of time for early Christianity to have co-opted some of its beliefs and practices.
Yes, there was never any official response - but the early apologists certainly appealed to the notion that Satan performed such tricks. Also, the parallels were not unknown to the Christians - the early Jews criticized them for it:
Trypho critizing Justin for Pagan similarities:
Here’s Justin basically saying that Satan was responsible for the earlier parallels:
Not as far as I know. Note that the name “Mithras” (in various forms) turns up in Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism, as well as in the Roman-era cult known as “Mithraism”. Clear and unmistakeable evidence of actual Mithraism does not turn up until the first century AD or so. Considerably more ambiguous evidence, no earlier than about 100 BC.
Jesus didn’t adhere to the law, and in John 10 is quoted as saying,“It say’s in your law etc.” He is quoted as saying, David ate of the temple bread,(which was against the law), told the people that he who was with out sin to cast the first stone. And seemed to despise the Pharisee’s who were sticklers for the law. Seemed to teach there are exceptions to the law.
It is an interesting and widely-read popular book (or series of books if you have the long version), but it’s generally not considered authoritative by modern experts. Frazer had a strong tendency to blur the line between things he had found evidence for and things he just theorized up out of thin air, and there is a lot of the latter. Many of the sources he used for his information weren’t academically rigorous either.
I think most people have a real problem understanding that “Egyptian mythology” (and the associated religious beliefs) span thousands of years and that within that larger traditions there were many variant beliefs and religious texts. If you are going to compare that to Christianity in any fair way you should compare thousands of years of Egyptian mythology with the thousands of years of Christian mythology, which includes dragons, creation stories, several world-destroying acts by spiteful deities and all the stuff present in all the other myths from the Middle East. If you want to focus specifically on the allegedly realistic Gospels of Christ, even there you have plenty of characters with super powers, multiple people raised from the dead (it actually gets embarrassing to count them up if you had been led to believe Jesus was supposed to be unique in this regard), and so forth, and there are also plenty of Egyptian texts that would be just as realistic which just aren’t as well known to people these days.
Those are some pretty amateurish sources with obvious faith-based agendas at work. I can’t believe anyone would seriously offer them up to try to prove anything. You might as well have just said “here’s what some random nobody on the Internet said who agrees with me so I must be right”.
It is very well established that the cults of Mithra and Dionysus (who had a very popular religious cult, which surprises many people who only know about him as a minor god from what their English class Greek mythology studies told them) had many of the most important features that popped up in Christianity later. And they certainly weren’t the only ones either.
I actually kind of have to laugh whenever someone tries to say Christ was based upon Horus or Osiris. Their myths – which, granted, may not be all of them, since there were so many variants, and there may be some Horus cult later some people refer to – have some similarities but are not the best of fits, especially when there are so many others that are extremely well documented and a lot more relevant. Even if you were to prove the those features of Mithra cult came after the founding of Christianity (which does not seem at all likely based upon what we actually know), you’d have to account for the cults of Dionysus, Adonis, Tammuz and countless others as well.
What? No. Completely the opposite, in fact. Every religious tradition at the time (and now, for that matter) claimed that they were completely different from every other, but all of them, Judeo-Christian beliefs included, copied shamelessly from all of the others. The old and New Testaments are overflowing with material clearly copied from other sources, and poorly at that. A lot of the stories that have puzzling details, are internally inconsistent or have important parts skipped over for no known reason (creation, the Garden of Eden, and Leviathan being some of the more obvious examples) make a heck of a lot more sense when they are read in their original versions.
The idea that the story of the alleged life of Jesus Christ and the features of the religion that sprung up later were in any way unique or the first in any of its tenets or claims is simply laughable once anyone does any substantive reading of history or mythology. Of course if all you read are shoddy Christian apologetics sites and books, this fundamental ignorance of other ancient religious beliefs and myths is understandable, but it’s certainly not excusable in anyone trying to debate the topic.