The title has two different inflections so that it can apply to most people on the board.
Myself, I lie in the hybrid, “Jesus was a pagan!?” I recently read the book, “The Templar Revelation” which attempted to lead the reader down a convoluted path linking “true” Christianity to Egyptian Mystery School religions; of course, all our favorite players are here: Freemasons, Knights Templar, Rosicrucians, and these Elders of Sion characters who apparently nudged the authors here and there. (unfortunately no mention of the Illuminati, but I find they are conspicuous in their convenient absence ;))
I’ve seen the book come under some criticism from others who have researched the topic, and yet there are still people who continue to see the writing on the wall that Jesus was, in fact, a pagan. The book itself was descirbed by some as shoddy research, though I don’t think many disagreed with the conclusion-- only the presentation-- and found that others who had had similar conclusions were correct.
Here on the SDMB we have a number of people who seem to dedicate quite a bit of time to matters religious in nature, whether to attack beliefs, question authority, or worship their God. As this board is also, in many respects, dedicated to fighting ignorace I proclaim myself, here and now, as ignorant on the subject, but currently persuaded to think there might be something to all of this.
So what is the apparent scoop on that lovable guy? Was he a pagan setting up a new mystery school, or someone else?
As near as I can tell, the guy was a Jew. A radical, perhaps, but his words documented in the Bible don’t seem to me to indicate that he was trying to create a new cult.
Of course, even if that were his goal, I don’t see that it would make him a pagan.
Yeah Jesus’s teaching more or less jive with Judaism pretty well as far as I can tell. I know a bit about christianity and a bit less about Judaism but from what I know of what Jesus taught, he more or less wanted to eliminate the hypocrisy and politics from Judaism. You can trace common threads of all religions in the world to common themes if you try hard enough. That’s the strongest evidence to their being a universal truth in my opinion.
I am pretty ignorant on the subject of all the New World Order conspiracies myself, but isn’t the Illuminati more or less a conspiracy theorist term for Jesuit influenced freemasonry? I just read Shogun and I am all hyped up to learn all about The Society of Jesus at this point.
And once early Christianity started proselytizing among the pagans and accepting converts from other religions than Judaism, it did acquire some of the mystical concepts and iconography associated with those religions. But none of that implies that the Big Guy himself was a pagan.
Oh, that’s one cover. But the Illuminati are more, greater, and beyond.
They own the IRS. They play with the CIA and GRU like Hot Wheels. They own presidents, kings, nations. They have owned this nation since they first put Weisshaupt into office.
Much of the evidence was drawn on clues in the canonical works of the New Testiment themselves, and drew largely upon the similarities between the Mystery Schools dedicated to Isis/Osiris and the events as they occur in TNT.
For example: the annointment of Jesus, the baptism of baby Jesus by John the Baptist, death-and-resurrection, possible inconsistencies in the punishment of Jesus…
The work I mentioned above goes into great detail about linking Mary Magdelene to be representative of Isis while Jesus was, of course, Osiris.
Oh, and the mystery Schools are your “typical” cults/conspiratory groups: as an initiate, you are told one thing. This is either outright false, or is deliberately misleading, or is very incomplete. As you advance in the ranks you are told more of the mysteries. There is little doubt that many groups practice this behavior, so no matter what you think of conspiracy theories themselves those named in such conspiracies do exhibit such behavior.
Thus, Christianity as we know it today (so goes the theory) is really the intitiate’s understanding of the religion. Hence why it is apparently inconsistent and widely disagreed on its more technical points. Only the heritage of Christian heretics-- those who were persecuted for being christian incorrectly over the years-- actually had the true understanding and were living up to that standard.
I haven’t read the work referenced in the OP, but it sounds like a survival of Gnostic heresy. The Gnostics, inspired by Greek philosophy, bleleived that matter was inherently evil and therefore Jesus, being good, had to be a pure spirit only pretending to be human. Gnostics, again isnspired by the mystery cults like the Eleusinian Mysteries devoted to Demeter and the cult of Hekate, had levels of initiation, imparting sacred teachings to initiates as they achieved higher degrees of wisdom.
Through the past 2 millennia there have been many heresiarchs who have taught that Jesus learned wisodm from Tibetan lamas, or that he taught the Indians in North America, or that he only pretended to die on the cross and secretly moved to England. None of these have any basis in fact.
Anyway, the historical Jesus was a good Jewish boy who got nailed by the authorities for teaching rebellion against Rome.
Ah, erislover, fist a Discordian and now a Sionite as well, I knew I liked you.
I too have been fond of “alternative” interpretations of things most people regard a sacrosanct and having been raised as a fundy baptist I always suspected there was more to JC than they force fed me three times a week. But while I do love books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail and other even less substantial “Jesus was really a…” type ideas, there really is no way of proving them to anyone who doesn’t want to be convinced. Perhaps that shouldn’t be surprising. I’m of the opinion that, in this culture at least, Jesus is a perfect Rorschach test. Contrary to church dogma, men make god in their own image, or perhaps a twisted and enlarged version thereof.
That being said I always suspected that the early churches prosecution and virtual erasure of it’s more Gnostic elements was something of a classical defensive overreaction. Sure, anyone who claims that personal experience may be as important as fixed dogma will make few friends with the orthodoxy, but the obsessive march toward doctrinal uniformity speaks to me of insecurity and fear. Which begs the rather salacious question of what were they so worried about?
Generally speaking, people seem to find in Jesus precisely what they presuppose to be there.
For those who believe that the Bible is exactly like all other works of literature, and that it ought therefore to be read precisely as one reads any other book, with the expectation that any supernatural claims made therein can be explained in purely natural terms, Jesus generally comes across in some sort of History of Religions permutation, teaching precepts that sound like something between Deepak Chopra and John Shelby Spong.
For those who accept the Bible’s truth claims, Jesus is precisely what the NT claims he was on its face: the fulfilment of God’s everlasting covenant with His people and the only acceptable propitiation for sin, eschatologically speaking. Under this view – of course – Christ’s teachings and the church he founded are related to Judaism in that they represent Judaism’s completion, clarification and extension to the whole of mankind. And related to Isis/Osiris worship, et al not at all.
I won’t tell you which view you have to take, but I’m sticking with the second. No offense, I hope.
As Jews view Jesus, it is my understanding that Jesus qualifies as a Jew only in ehthnic terms. Theologically, he is a long way off of the reservation, in that – to pick perhaps the key difficulty – he claims for himself a degree of theological authority exceeding that of Moses and even the Torah itself (eg: “You have heard…But I tell you the truth…” – Matt 5). A fantastic book on this question is: “A Rabbi Talks to Jesus”, by Jacob Neusner (I think that’s the title). The book is written for more-or-less general audiences and does a pretty excellent job of giving Jesus a full, charitable examination in light of rabbinic teachings and the NT account.
As for the apparent contradictions inherent in Christian theology, I’m not sure what you mean, specifically. But I will point out that difficulty within a system of thought does not necessarily imply that that system is therefore philosophically untenable. It seems like something of an unwarranted leap to conclude that – because Calvinists and Arminians have had a centuries-long disagreement about the mechanism by which salvation is accomplished and applied, for example – we are therefore required to understand Christianity through the lens of its accumulated heresies and the vast corpus of other religions roughly contemporary with the events chronicled in the NT.
I really enjoy folks who have questions like yours. I’m sure we disagree about lots of things, but thanks for taking an interest. Seriously.
A large part of the problem with gnosticism, as far as Christianity is concerned, is simply that it makes a hash of orthodox Christian theology. The Bible doesn’t talk about God, Jesus, creation, human nature or the passage of human events in bifurcated spirit v. matter terms. At least, not unless you are working over-hard to accomodate the Gospel to an audience steeped in Greek and Roman philosophy.
The early church took a fervent interest in doing away with gnostic elements because, in a world without printing presses, where your religion is among the speedier ways in the empire to get yourself persecuted, despised or just plain dead, there are a vey large number of difficulties involved in disseminating consistent teaching.
If you want to make sure everyone’s singing from the same page under those circumstances, you really don’t have the luxury of letting just anyone say anything from the pulpit. You need to get serious about drawing distinctions, and you need not to be squeamish about telling people when they are skating on thin ice. That’s what the church was doing while the NT was getting written. Notice – for example – that the majority of Paul’s letters are written to churches in the middle of one theological wrangle or another.
Gnostics got written out of the history of the church for no other reason than that they didn’t want to be part of the church. They wanted to be gnostics.
Quiet, you fool! Sim’s one of them!
(Actually, he got the Weisshaupt thing from the UL that Adam Weisshaupt replaced George Washington around the time of his inaguration.)
