I believe the Dionysan myth predates the Christian one, and also that the Slaughter of the Innocents in Matthew is a deliberate (not to mention fictional) echoing of the account in Exodus. And that Christ is a solar deity sharing many characteristics with both Dionysus and Herakles.
May I ask for a cite of Dionysus not merely squeezing wine for the first time, but magically transforming water into wine?
I’ve been to many Wiccan circles where everyone takes a sort of communion – cookies or bits of bread are handed out with the formula, “May you never hunger.” But that is exactly what it says on the tin, no more. It is a communion, it is not in any sense a eucharist.
I can think of only one pagan tradition where the worshippers eat something symbolizing God: The cult of Dionysus (before it became state-sponsored and half-civilized). And it’s hard to spot any lineage-of-influence at all between that and early Christianity.
Plutarch is the source for the resurrection of Osiris after three days (which included a disappearance from a coffin, by the way).
The inscription desribing the Eucharist is on the Osiride Temple at Denderah. I can’t find a good image of it online, but it wouldn’t much matter if I could. No matter how many cites I rub your nose in, you just go running to your apologist cites and parakeet back some kind of lame equivocation, or ad hominem against some “atheist” scholar attempt to move the goal posts in some way or all of the above. You’re a true believer, and you will always find a way to convince yourself that your mythology is true and real and historical while everybody else’s mythology is made up.
When I search for “Temple of Denderah” and “eucharist”, I get stuff like this. Presumably even you would think twice before using that as a cite. When I search for just “Temple of Dendara”, I first get several Wikipedia and Facebook pages, but then I get this:
That page gives a complete and thorough description of all of the inscriptions at the Temple at Dendera. Concerning the shrine to Osiris, it says this:
They also have a photograph of the inscription in question. (And more detailed photographs can be found here.) The sentence that I have put in bold is the only one in the paragraphs about Osiris that mentions food in any way. Indeed, as far as I can tell, this is the only inscription of Dendarah that makes any mention of food. As you can see, the reference does not involve bread, nor does it involve food representing the body of Osiris, nor does it involve anybody eating bread as a representative of the body. It’s a fertility rite. So the Osiride Temple of Dendarah does not say that the followers of Osiris ate his body as bread.
No, of course not, but it is interesting that the miracles themselves are quite similar, isn’t it?
I suppose you would have to argue that Tacitus simply made it up, basing Roman historical miracles on Jesus, since technically speaking, the Gospel of Mark is believed to have been written prior to the Histories.
I find this a bit strained though, since Tacitus didn’t appear to know much about Christians (only writing about Christian beliefs in his annals, which was later) or Jesus.
I’ve been reading that the actual ‘cure’/‘miracle’ is an ancient Egyptian style miracle, but I have been unable to verify that so far. So, if true, it’s interesting that Jesus would be engaging in ancient Egyptian sorcery…
It’s a fertility rite, yes. It was a harvest ritual as I said. And the inscription says that the ritual cuminated with the consumation of the cakes of bread as a kind of communion with Osiris. What you quoted is not a translation, but merely a brief description.
So, to put it in plain English, you refuse to provide citations to back up your claims.
What exactly is your logic there? Are you saying that at any time when you find two stories of events with vague similarities it’s okay to ignore the many and large differences and simply declare that there was “some influence”? A few days ago I read a story about American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. Its sounds to me like that’s very similar to the Iliad. After all both stories features armies from the west who traveled to the Middle East to attack somebody there. Sure, there are minor differences, and someone might suggest that argues against copying. This is fallacious because we aren’t talking about point by point plagiarism, but the incorporatation of common mythological themes which were already prevalent. So did the story I read copy from the Iliad, or is the case that sometimes very vague and broad similarities between two events arise by chance?
On the particular issue of whether the very early Christian community would incorporate Pagan myths into their religious documents it’s necessary to remember that the early Christian community was a Jewish community and the Jews of the first century were very strict about the purity of their religious practices. Their worldview was shaped by Jewish scripture, which emphasized again and again the necessity of not mixing ideas from other nations with Jewish religious teaching and practice. In the first century many Jews lived in the diaspora and some scholars speculated that this would lead to them breaking free from Jewish tradition and incorporating Pagan religion with their worship. However, the actual fact is that living side-by-side with non-Jews may have made them more strict in holding to their traditions, not less. (Perhaps roughly analogous to how some Muslims todays, living in non-Islamic cultures, are drawn to the strictest interpretations of Islam.) Quoting from Greg Boyd and Paul Rhodes Eddy in this book:
Diogenes will presumably go his usual route of insulting the authors and complaining that they are Christians while not tackling the actual argument, but for anyone who’s truly interested in the historical facts that argues against the copying hypothesis.
I also would like to see more cites in these threads. My impression is that 100’s of URL’s were given before I joined SDMB, and reposting the links seems too tedious now. Still, in another recent thread claiming Judaism derived from Zoroasterism we were told to just Google “Zoroasterist influence on Judaism” or some such and the first two search hits informed us that the other hits, claiming influence, were crackpot! :smack: