I think that’s more of a Catholic doctrine than a Christian doctrine.
Of course, you’re right.
Hey…who’s that guy on the cross at the front of all the Catholic churches?
(Hint: It ain’t Odin. Quite.)
But still mythology, even if not what we might consider as pagan.
Dionysus?
I’m not aware of a number of any story from the life of Jesus that is a ripoff of a pagan religion. I’ve heard several claim that stories from the life of Jesus are ripoffs of pagan religions, but whenever I ask for cites they either change the subject or insist that they’re not under any obligation to provide cites. (The only exception being the fact that the date Dec. 25 was a festival prior to Christianity.) See this thread for discussion.
I don’t think there are any blatant rip offs - outside of one and I’m not even sure about that. The one I’m thinking of involves Jesus healing a blind man with spit, which was ripped off of a Caesar doing essentially the same thing.
Again, this is a vague memory and I definitely don’t have a cite handy, so take it with a box of salt.
I already pointe out the wine into water story was a rip off from Dionysus. The Eucharist is a rip off from pagan traditions too.
Unless you’re quibbling about the difference between pagan religion and pagan myths, you can’t be serious. The Greek and Roman myths are filled with heroes who are the result of a mating between a god and mortal. And they are filled with heroes who were the targets of assassination attempts as infants (referring to Herod story): Hercules, Oedipus, Paris, (and even Moses, in the Hebrew Bible) for a few. And they are filled with heroes who were taken up to heaven (or Olympus, or became a constellation) after their deaths.
Very clever.
Jesus is prominently featured in Mormon churches, too. Would you call it a Christian doctrine that Jesus visited the Indians in the Americas, and that Joseph Smith was led by an angel to a cache of scriptures written on golden plates?
Are you seriously arguing that Catholics aren’t Christians?
I think brock’s point was only that you can’t universalize the particulars of individual denominations to the entire religion.
You mean how
[QUOTE=Dan Brown]
The practice of ‘god-eating’ - that is, Holy Communion - was borrowed from the Aztecs
[/QUOTE]
? :rolleyes:
It takes more than similarity or parallelism to demonstrate that something’s a rip-off.
For an even closer analogy, the following is copied from the study guide to Bart Ehrman’s audio course, “The Historical Jesus”:
"II. I’ve decided that the best place to begin our study is by summarizing for you the life of a remarkable man who lived nearly 2,000 years ago.
A. The accounts of his life may sound familiar to you.
- Before he was born, his mother knew he would not be a normal child. An angelic visitor told her that her son would be divine.
- His birth was accompanied by miraculous signs and wonders and as a child, he was religiously precocious.
- As an adult, he left home to engage in an itinerant preaching ministry, teaching his good news that people should live for what is spiritual, not the material things of this world.
- He gathered disciples and did miracles to confirm them in their faith.
- He raised the ire of many of those in power, who had him brought up on charges before the Roman authorities.
- Even after he left this world, though, his followers claimed that he had ascended to heaven and that they had seen him alive afterwards. They wrote books about his life, and some of these writings still survive today.
- I doubt if any of you has ever read them, and I doubt if many of you have even heard the name of the man I’ve been describing: Apollonius of Tyana. He was a famous neo-Pythagorean philosopher of the first century AD, a worshiper of pagan gods, whose life and teachings are recorded for us in the writings of his later follower Philostratus, The Life of Apollonius of Tyana.
B. Apollonius lived at about the same time as Jesus, although they never knew each other. Their followers, though, knew each other and had heated debates about who was superior. "
Good Lord.
If I say that most Christians do not acknowledge the Pope as their spiritual leader, is that saying that Catholics aren’t Christians?
I would be ashamed of any sixth graders who couldn’t follow my argument, even if they weren’t happy with the exact phasing.
There are many Pentecostal Christians who claim that Catholics and Mormons are not Christian. I was asking for clarification.
It seemed to me that you were questioning more than my semantics, but fine.
Based on what you just said, would you, or would you not, say that it is a Christian doctrine that Catholics and Mormons are not Christians?
No, I don’t mean the Aztecs or fucking Dan Brown. I was talking about, for example, Osiris, who not only died and was resurrected, but whose ‘body" was eaten as bread. The Osiris myth was an agricultural metaphor for the sowing and "raising’ of grain, just as Dionysus was a mythic personification of the miracle of the vine. I could also mention that the “three days dead” motif is about the death and resurrection of the sun. A great deal of ancient mythology is ultimately grounded in agricultural and/or astrological events.
That’s not to say I’m a Jesus Myther. I think Jesus probably existed, but his cult adopted a lot of pagan mystery cult bullshit after Paul took it to the Gentiles. Jesus himself was probably just a failed apocalyptic Jewish preacher who never had any inkling of what his movment would become. He’d probably be appalled by the eucharist. Consuming blood is right out for kosher Jews.
Let’s recall the claim under discussion. WhyNot claimed that every story in the life of Jesus is “a blatant ripoff of earlier religion”. Apollonius and the myths attached to him are not earlier than Christianity, but rather later. The source we have for the life of Apollonius is the biography by Philostratus written in the third century A.D. There are other bits and pieces or writing about Apollonius of questionable authenticity that may come from slightly earlier, but nothing to suggest that the mythology surrounding Apollonius existed during the lifetime of Jesus or when the gospels were written. According to Philostratus, Apollonius was alive when Emperor Domitian died, and that was in 96 A.D. So even if Apollonius existed and what Philostratus wrote about him was largely accurate, it wouldn’t justify any claims that that the life story of Jesus was a “blatant ripoff” of Apollonius. Any riping off would have to go the other way.
In reality, however, there is no reason to believe that there was any influence in either direction, since the life story of Apollonius has so little in common with that of Jesus. It is true that if you cull a few sentences you can make it look similar, as the study guide you quote above apparently did. However, if you read a more honest summary of the biography of Apollonius, you’ll see that the similarities aren’t nearly so strong. For example, let’s take the first claim that you quoted about Apollonius: “Before he was born, his mother knew he would not be a normal child. An angelic visitor told her that her son would be divine.” This is not actually true. According to Philostratus, his mother was visited by the Egyptian God Proteus, not by an angel. Further, the story of his birth involves swans batting his mom with their wings and causing her to deliver prematurely–not much similarity to the birth of Jesus as far as I can tell. Likewise, if you looked in detail you’d see that all the other supposed similarities to the life of Jesus aren’t really similar at all.
Indeed you have pointed it out, but I don’t think you’re correct about that. As far as evidence that in the relevant mythology Dionysus turned water into wine, my experience has been the exact same as this guy’s: “as for Dionysus turning water into wine, I can find no scholarly or encyclpedic reference which confirms this. He seems to have been the god of wine in the sense that he discovered it and taught man how to make it, not that he actually turned water into wine.” I’m aware of one version of the Dionysus myth that mentions a fountain in a temple to Dionysus which flows with wine, while another says that acolytes would place empty jugs in a temple in the morning and find them filled with wine the next day. But as for turning water into wine, I’m not aware that Dionysus was ever said to have done so, and those incidents bear no relationship to the miracle performed by Jesus at Cana. So I would be forced to agree with this summary:
Stop calling me Shirley.
To show that any story is a “ripoff” or “copy” of an earlier, pagan mythology, you have to show more than vague similarity. You have to show enough precise parallelism that copying becomes a better explanation than any other, such as coincidence. These examples show very little parallelism. You say “Greek and Roman myths are filled with heroes who are the result of a mating between a god and mortal”, but of course the birth story of Jesus doesn’t fit that description. It’s the story of a conception by the Holy Spirit. When the angel tells Mary that she’ll bear a child, Mary responds, “That’s impossible because I’ve never had sex with anybody.” Hence it’s the opposite of pagan myths where Zeus appears in the form of a bull or a swan or whatever and seduces a woman.
Likewise in the case of “assassination attempts as infants”, in the relevant mythology Hera, a goddess, sent two snakes to attack the infant Hercules and he strangled them. The parents of Oedipus nailed his feet together and abandoned him on a road where a stranger rescued him. None of those have any close parallelism to Herod’s slaughter of the innocents. As for “they are filled with heroes who were taken up to heaven (or Olympus, or became a constellation) after their deaths”, I’d need to know exactly which myths you’re referring to in order to see whether there’s any close match-ups with the story of Christ’s resurrection.