I knew a douchebag in college who used to write bad Jesus poetry conflating “son” and “sun.” Went on to found a megachurch franchise, get fired from that megachurch franchise for being an alcoholic, and last I’ve heard have his wife file for divorce. So at least there is some justice…
If I may attempt to speak seriously, the closest I’ve heard to combining Jesus and the sun seemed to be mingled with a desire to combine Jesus and everything essential for life, i.e. “Jesus is the air we breathe” and, less poetically, “Jesus is in the fine-tuning of the universe that allows life to exist”, i.e. existence itself is held up as evidence for the truth of Christianity. I have to say it strikes me as one of the more infantile lines of religious thought, but if you listen to Ray Comfort and his ilk, it’s likely to come up sooner or later.
There is, in fact, solid evidence that some early Christians conflated sun worship with Christianity:
Tertullian (3rd century) (Apol., 16; cf. Ad. Nat., I, 13; Orig. c. Cels., VIII, 67, etc) had to assert that Sol was not the Christians’ God.
Augustine (4th-5th century) (Tract xxxiv, in Joan. In P.L., XXXV, 1652) denounces the heretical identification of Christ with Sol.
Pope Leo I (5th century) (Serm. xxxvii in nat. dom., VII, 4; xxii, II, 6 in P.L., LIV, 218 and 198) bitterly denounces Christians who worship the sun — “Christians, on the very doorstep of the Apostles’ basilica, turn to adore the rising sun.”
Christmas ‘just happens’ to fall on 25 December, the festival of the Birth of the Sun (Sol Invictus).
St John Chrysostom (“del Solst. Et Æquin.” II, p. 118, ed. 1588) says that Christians deliberately chose to celebrate the birth of Jesus on the same day as the birth of the Sun.
TZA305, I think what you’re asking is if the beginning of Christianity is someone (or some group of people) taking pieces of various mythologies and putting them together to create the myth of a person named Jesus. This lead them to then make this imaginary Jesus to be the center of a religion. The answer is that the vast majority of religious scholars don’t think that happened. This is the case regardless of what religious beliefs or lack of any religious beliefs these religious scholars have. They believe that Jesus was a real person. What he did or didn’t do is disputed. It’s disputed which elements of other mythologies got attached to Christianity. Whether any of the theological claims of Christianity are true is disputed. The existence of Jesus is not disputed except by a small set of religious scholars:
You want to be sold on Jesus? … please forward 1/3 of your after tax income to SDMB Moderator’s Widow Fund, 30 N. Racine Ave, Suite 300, Chicago, IL 60607 … we’ll get back with you right after you die …
I think you’re misreading your sources. Tertullian for example does not conflate sun worship with Christianity, but rather in his Apology specifically says why non-Christians make that error (predominantly from the habit of Christians at the time facing east while praying toward Jerusalem, but also towards the rising sun.) Apologies is actually him talking to non-Christians saying why Christianity is not sun worship. Augustine’s Tract 34 is talking about why the Manicheans believe that Christ is the sun. Unfortunately for your argument, Manicheanism is not Christianity, nor would it have been conflated with such at the time. It was a syncretic religion and Augustine would have known that. I’m not familiar with the Leo text unfortunately.
The Chrysostom text you refer to “De Solstitiis et Aequinoctiis” is actually not by Chrysostom at all. It’s an erroneous attribution. Nonetheless, it certainly does draw a parallel between Roman and Christian feasts, but you’ve apparently not read the tract. The whole thing is actually about setting the date according to a calculation regarding the births of John the Baptist and the Annunciation. It goes off on tangents about agriculture and how John and Jesus must have been a perfect 6 months apart and that the quickening of John would have occurred at a certain time and it gets into quite the logical knot, but it certainly wasn’t stating that the Feast of the Nativity was based on Natali Invictus.
Many modern Christians have bent over backwards - and bent the texts over backwards too - in an attempt to refute the conflation of Christ and Sol Invictus by some early Christians.
However, all my quotes come from the Catholic Encyclopedia, and I’ll rest on accepted Catholic scholarship, which I think is most likely to be correct in this case.
Nor is it at all unlikely on the face of it. Early Christianity was rife with variant beliefs and variant scriptures that were later discarded. Anyone who thinks that the early church had standard beliefs similar to modern Christianity, or that the early church didn’t incorporate pagan elements into its worship, doesn’t know much about early Christianity. Modern Christianity is the outcome of a process taking centuries, during which beliefs gradually crystalized and became coherent. The whole religion could easily have gone in a different direction.
Also, it would be reasonable to assume that there were plenty of people who partially followed Christianity and partially followed other religious sects. It was normal in the ancient world that there were many gods and many types of worship, which were not seen as being contradictory or mutually exclusive. There was a hard core of fanatical, exclusivist Christians, but there must have been many who simply included a bit a of Christianity along with their other beliefs, as it suited them. It took a long time for Christian authorities to come up with, and enforce, a standard version of Christianity.
Glance through the list of so-called ‘heresies’ for an idea of early variant beliefs - even without conflation with pagan deities. Wikipedia lists over 30 different sets of beliefs in the early church.
For books later excluded from Christianity:
There are literally dozens and dozens of gospels that were excluded.
To the best of my knowledge, the bible makes no mention of the number of Magi, so there’s not really a scriptural basis for identifying them with the three stars of Orion’s belt. Although I don’t know when (western Christian) tradition settled on the number three.
