That stream of thought may be may be a common misconception, but fear or hatred of sex is a misunderstanding or twisting of official church doctrine. Browse any Christian bookstore and you’ll find many books celebrating sex and/or giving sexual advice for married couples, where mutual enjoyment is a major theme.
Besides, we’re talking about BVM - I don’t know how “current Christian social culture” enters into it. Mary’s virginity has been asserted since the first century.
Yeah, would-be Messiahs were a dime a dozen in those days. Interesting that Jesus is the one who stuck.
Was he really? I’d be interested in seeing the ancient documents which tells us that Osiris was called the “Good Shepard” and that any rite involving bread and wine was related to him. Other than that, when I read this description from the Encyclopedia of Religions:
I don’t see much in common between the Osiris myths and the life story of Jesus.
Language proximity is more of a dartboard than a fine-tuned instrument for dating material. The amount that material changes in a given length of time varies hugely from case to case. The Wikipedia page that you linked to says that scholars differe widely on their dating. Other than that, I’ll merely say what I said in my last post, which you edited out rather than respond to.
Since it seems all you want to do is change to the subject of Zoroastrian influences on Judaism at a much earlier date, I’ll assume you’re acknowledging the correctness of my point in this thread.
I’m glad to see you’re back to juvenile name calling. Wouldn’t want to see you exhausting yourself by actually reading the page and responding to what it says. Calling people “uncredentialed” is particularly ridiculous for someone who just used Wikipedia and Google as cites. Why don’t you remind us again of how many credentials a person must have to post on Wikipedia or get their page listed on Google?
Wrong. You’ve obviously never taken any classes on the subject.
I’m not changing the subject. All I ever asserted was that Zorastrianism influenced Judaism (and indirectly Christianity). All the Abrahamic religions can trace their eschatons back to Zoroastrianism as well as some other elements like dualistic forces of good and evil. I never claimed it had a direct influence on Christianity.
I have better credentials than that moron, Holding, does, and it’s funny you want to complain about name-calling since Holding specializes in ad hominem attacks on people who disagree with him. I also happen to know that he engages in dishonest habits like editing his online debates to remove responses which are damaging to him. He is literalist, hack apologist who is infamous on the net for his bad behavior and obfuscatory tactics. You can do better than him, believe me. Try somebody like Stephen Carlson. He’s an apologist with some responsibility and methodology.
Life story? Maybe not. But it may be that being half-deity, born of a virgin, and imbued with miraculous powers were table stakes for introducing Christianity as a new religion into the Roman world.
The primary precursers of Osiris to the Christian mythology and ritual were that Osiris was killed and resurrected after three days, and that he had a eucharist where his “body” was eaten as bread. Osiris was, in many ways, a personification of grain and his myth was in the scattering of his body on the earth and his “resurrection” through the growth of new grain.
This doesn’t mean that Christianity was just some kind of modified Osiris worship, but Christianity did adopt some elements of pagan mystery cults after it went Gentile.
Really? I don’t know anything about this subject but my reading of this (quoted earlier in the thread):
… based particularly on the “divorce her quietly” line is that Mary got knocked up by someone else. His first and understandable reaction was to ditch her, but then he’s decided to marry her anyway. It wouldn’t be the first time some lovelorn suitor has decided it’s worth putting up with some other guy’s baby as long as he gets the girl.
Except the bible makes it pretty clear that it was God that did it. If you read, after Joseph decides to divorce her quietly, an angel comes to him and says, “Hey, Joseph. It was God that knocked your wife up. Don’t divorce her.”
There are 2 volumes of the Osiris and the Egyptian Ressurection, I will post the author tomorrow. I have them both but they are on my second floor book shelves; I can get the direct quote at that time. There is also a woman Archeologist that was on TV in a documentry several years ago that belonged to an Egyptian sect, that said they still had the bread and wine ceremony.
I purched them at the Smithsonian in Washinton DC in 1986.
If you die in sin or not, you are still dead! Where does life go when you die? What is the difference between life and soul? Genesis still doesn’t mention loss of a soul!
Interesting WP article. All this time I thought the original word was “ishah.” That the word used is almah is my New Fact For Today.
Side note. The linked article says the LXX translated the Torah into Greek, but not the Nevi’im (prophets). Someone else later translated the rest. And translators have to adapt words to fit the target language’s concepts.
The Osiris myth had a murdered/resurrected god and a eucharist before Christianity. All of Holding/Turkel’s whining and special pleading can’t change that.
The earliest gospel to be written is believed to have been the Gospel of St. Mark. This gospel begins, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
If Jesus is the Son of God, he could not have been engendered by Joseph. However, the New Testament nowhere asserts the perpetual virginity of Mary. Several passages dispute it. St. James, who was the first Bishop of Jerusalem, was Jesus’ next oldest brother.
Osiris is neither the only other dying/reborn god nor the first, although the similarities in the myths are often over-simplified. But that doesn’t impact the argument for the validity of Christianity.
“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.” C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock.