This bears repeating and more repeating.
It should be noted that there was no “one set” of Egyptian beliefs. There were many, many, different sets - it’s not even comparable with the early Christians (and their sects). Further, what we know about Egyptian religion comes from, primarily, their tombs and such. We have the ‘book of the dead’, but that really isn’t a complete view of their religion in the way that the Bible is for Christians and Jews.
Cite, please? Who exactly has “established” this fact. I’m guessing it’s you. Also, would you mind telling exactly which “features” are included in the Mithras cult or the Dionysius cult and also in Christianity?
Cite, please? According to Dr. Edwin Yamauchi, a professor and archaeologist of the Mediterranean World, in The Case for the Real Jesus:
“Mithraism as a religion cannot be attested before about 90 A.D. … The earliest Mithraic inscription in the West is a statue of a prefect under the Emperor Trajan in AD 101. The earliest mithraea are dated to the early second century. There are a handful of inscriptions that date to the early second century, but the vast majority of texts are dated after 140 AD. Most of what we have as evidence of Mithraism comes from the second, third, and fourth centuries AD. That’s basically what’s wrong with the theories about Mithraism influencing the beginnings of Christianitiy.”
So there are the facts about the dates of the Mithra cult from a real scholar.
Cite, please?
Cite, please? Would you mind telling us exactly what “substantive reading of history or mythology” you’ve done that makes you so certain of this claim? Would you mind giving us actual titles and authors of up-to-date works that would validate anything that you’ve posted in this thread?
It is true that Justin the Martyr wrote those two passages. However, once one comprehends the argument that Justin was actually making, it actually doesn’t support the copycat thesis at all. In the mid-second century, Christians in the Roman Empire were violently persecuted for their beliefs. Pagan sources accused Christians of horrible crimes, sex with animals, and other things of that sort. Justin’s goal in his first and second Apologies was to show that Christian belief and practice was not completely antithetical to norms in the Pagan society. To that end, Justin highlighted parallels between Christian scriptures and certain pagan stories. However, to do so he had to stretch the facts quite a bit to get even loose parallels. For example, he argues that the resurrection is comparable to the story of Dionysius (the same character as Bacchus). In fact, the myths of Dionysius are a confused jumble. Some of them may vaguely point to Dionysius going to the underworld and returning and others make some mention of Dionysius being torn to pieces. Nothing would actually suggest any story surrounding the death and resurrection of Dionysius with even a remote similarity to any part of the Gospels.
Frankly, the notion that the Gospel authors copied from myths of Horus or Dionysius or Mithras or any other Pagan deity is comparable to Holocaust denial as far as how much respectability it gets among mainstream scholars. We’ve had many threads debunking such claims on this board:
And there are outside sources debunking the claims, readily available to anyone with Google. This is one of many.
Further, whenever anyone on the SDMB comes in advocating the copycat theory, they have to turn around and run as soon as cites are called for. Here’s one of many threads where that happened:
I’m not advocating a copycat thesis. All I’m saying is that there are similarities/parallels with Hellenistic myths and Justin was blasted by the Jews (Trypho) for it and he also advocated the first argument for diabolical mimicry.
Two things - this doesn’t address his dialogue with Trypho at all and Trypho blasts Justin for Christianities similarities to Roman religions. In particular the virgin birth as well as some others.
The second thing, in the apology Justin was arguing that Christianity was superior to Roman beliefs because of the morality issue. In short, he’s arguing that Satan (or his cronies) put forth all these false beliefs out there and you can the true beliefs because of the moral character of the people in them.
Here’s what he says in his first apology:
You are leaving out half of what his apology was all about. What he argues, at length is that Christianity is superior to the Roman religions and that the Christians should not be put to death. Christianity is true, Roman religions are false.
That’s what his apologies are about, but his dialogue with Trypho is an attempt to argue that Christianity is line with the ancient Scriptures - which Trypho expressly denies.
Trypho states flat out:
Now, is anyone saying they are a one to one copy cat? No, not even me, although you attempt to strawman me into that. I’m saying that they had pagan influences, which is hard to deny since that’s what they were accused of by the Jews and how they defended their religion to the Romans (and how they attempted to show Christianity was superior).
Yet that’s something I’m not actually advocating, so I agree with you here. Why you would bring this up in a response to me is kind of puzzling though. Unless you are denying there are any similarities at all and if you are then I’m afraid you are clearly mistaken (as noted above). Jesus performed miracles that were widespread throughout the culture (one being his curing blind people with spit - which Vespasian was said to have done).
It’s like if you strawman the notion that Christianity had similarities with pagan religions into Christianity merely cut and paste Jesus into pagan religion you can forget about any of the similarities.
Life doesn’t work that way though.
I don’t have any particular attachment to any religion or to anti-theism. I would, however, as a person without particular religious faith, find it difficult to believe that Christianity might be the only non-syncretic religion on the planet. I enjoy comparative religious studies. I do not accept that if Judaism and Christianity were influenced by other religions in their long history, that they are somehow “debunked” (any more than any mythology can be “debunked” as bunking isn’t the point). On the contrary, I find it inspiring to see the cultural and historical context out of which they arose. So there’s no point in defending Christianity’s honor to me. In my opinion, those aren’t grubby fingerprints smearing the religion, they’re the souls of our predecessors which instill life, inspiration, and humanity into the traditions of Christianity et al.
Christianity was founded in the 1st century by the followers of Jesus of Nazareth who they believed to be the Christ or chosen one of God.
The Mithraic Mysteries were a mystery religion practised in the Roman Empire from about the 1st to 4th centuries AD. (Which says nothing about when it was founded nor whether it had precursors to which Paul and other early Christians may have been familiar).
That Christian communion existed “long before” Mithraism would difficult if they were founded around the same time. However, I did not say that communion was taken from Mithraism, I said that transubstantiation may have been influenced by Mithraism. Considering that the doctrine of transubstantiation is not universally accepted by Christians and that we don’t know for sure when the belief came about, only that it was written of in around the 1st century and formalized in the 10th century, I see nothing in what you said that concretely disproves the possibility.
Particularly if you recall that Roman Mithraism didn’t come out of thin air in the 1st century, that there was a pre-existing tradition, as some evidence indicates.
Tradition holds that Abraham founded the Jewish religion in Israel, around the year 2000 BCE. Although, no exact date or year is known.
Zoroastrianism … was probably founded some time before the 6th century BCE in Greater Iran. Zoroastrianism emerged out of a common prehistoric Indo-Iranian religious system dating back to the early 2nd millennium BCE (2000 if you please).
Luckily Zoroastrianism per se, and even any religious tradition from which it stemmed would not have needed to exist prior to Judaism in order to influence Jewish eschatology. It would only have needed to exist prior to those portions of Jewish eschatology it is believed to have affected. Which, strangely enough, is the entire reason many religious scholars believe this. Because of certain Jewish beliefs that arose and gained prevalence only during and after a period during which Persia dominated Mesopotamia.
If you’re assuming they designed it deliberately, maybe. But human sociology simply doesn’t work this way. It’s like saying that African-American subculture wasn’t influenced by forced relocation and immersion in the white majority’s culture. Certainly slaves must have more than adequate reason to despise their persecutors, band together, and create an exclusionary subculture. Yet it’s simply not possible on a personal and mass level to respond to changes in cultural context.
I’m afraid I can’t cite most of my sources as they are books that I read over the last 15 years. However, I’ll take Joseph Campbell’s word over a random internet site any day. The internet contains a lot of good information, but it’s difficult to verify. One can say anything one pleases, and lack of a historical record is not proof of a lack of history.
I believe I have done enough research over the years to legitimately draw my own conclusions. While those conclusions may not be correct and may someday be conclusively disproved, as yet they remain valid theories.
For Old Testament Jews this probably true. But the Christians set out to convince as many people as possible to join them. There is a lot of discussion in the New Testament about whether the Gentile converts should be required to conform to Jewish law - see all the references in the new testament to “circumcision” to get a sense of how Christianity diverged from its Jewish roots, and how controversial that was.
The original message of Jesus Christ was directed at Jews, predicting the coming of a Jewish Kingdom. This message had to be altered to appeal to a wider audience. Yes, the Christian proselytizers wanted to make a clear distinction between what they were offering and what the Gentile audience already had, but they certainly also tried to make it palatable to the Gentile crowd. A few miracles spice up the story nicely.
I guess it still boils down to what human one wants to believe!