Jesus/Yeshua/Joshua paralleled with Horus -- my final link here on XMas
by MadTiger 10 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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MadTiger
OK, I was mistaken, like my JWs.
Here is a link that is a video preview of Zeitgeist, and goes into detail about the above link.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5216975979627863972 -
MadTiger
By the way, I am not an atheist. My posting is an FYI to check out the TRUTH, and deal with it. I don't care about comments. I don't want this to be a thread. If I had mod privileges, it would be locked. It's an FYI.
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BurnTheShips
My posting is an FYI to check out the TRUTH
Oy Vey!
This was discussed recently.
http://www.jehovahs-witness.com/12/148190/1.ashx
Please note Leolaia's posts.
Burn
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MadTiger
Noted. *NFL ref voice* After further review the post stands.
Oy vey back to you. Look it up point by point, like LEOLAIA said. That's what I am doing. -
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BurnTheShips
What are the chances of a purely pagan legend or myth becoming the center of a new Jewish sect? I'll take whatever odds you want to lay out.
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Liberty
Hi Burn,
I am sure that Leolaia would agree that Judaism borrowed heavily from many different pagan sources as it evolved. Keep in mind that the Hebrews/Jews were always a tiny minority culture constantly influenced and/or conquered by more ancient and far supierior civilizations like Summaria, Phoenecia, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome and others I can't remember.
Though I agree we need to be careful about overdoing the "exact" similarities between myths it is very clear even from the Bible itself that Judaism evolved new ideas based upon the influences of the conquering cultures. The development of a personified Devil and of Hell are two examples which I clearly remember coming from Persia and obviosly unknown to early Bible writers.
In short, yes I think it is very possible that a pagan myth could be the center of a Jewish sect. The wine as blood/bread as flesh symbolism of the Last Supper is certainly counter to all Jewish sensabilities since Jews would not even eat animal flesh slaughtered without blood draining rituals let alone eat unclean human flesh and drink blood. It is the equivelent in our culture of symbolizing lemonaid as urine and chocolate as feces, it just wouldn't be done among polite circles. This alone is evidence that the Last Supper ritual is more likely of late Roman origin than from early Jewish Christians.
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Leolaia
If you are looking up these things up, be sure to go further than Massey or any other 19th-century Theosophists or amateur Egyptologists from whom these ideas originated in the first place. Look up a good reference work on the religion of Egypt, or a technical monograph on Horus in Egyptian thought, and see if you see anything like "Anup the Baptizer" (as opposed to the embalmer Anubis), "El-Azur-us", or the many other suspicious features of the "Horus story" found in these lists.
I believe if you examine the (modern) critical literature, you will see scholars do agree that there was some influence in a number of areas, particularly on Egyptian Judaism and Christianity. Alexandrine Jewish ideas of divine kingship and struggle against the forces of evil were possibly influenced by the Horus vs. Seth/Typhon rivalry and some have seen a Typhonic character to the "Beast" described in Daniel, ch. 7 (and possibly the figure of Satan in John and the dragon in Revelation, although here native Canaanite parallels may be more relevant). Egyptian hermetic texts are relevant to early Christian revelatory literature, and especially for Coptic gnosticism, which shows the direct importation of philosophical concepts and language (such as the Ogdoad). And it has been widely noticed that Egyptian Christian iconography of Mary and the infant Jesus was directly influenced by Isis-Horus imagery.
But I never see any responsible scholar claiming that there is close match between the story of Jesus (in either gospel or even in a harmonization between them) and the mythology of Horus, i.e. that Horus was born through a virgin birth (as opposed to Isis copulating with Osiris), that Horus raised a man El-Azur-us from the dead (I believe this is a gross distortion of the name "Osiris," the father of Horus, but it was Isis who brought Osiris back from the dead in order to copulate with her, i.e. Horus was not even born yet), that Horus was baptized at age 30 in the river Eridanus by Anup the "Baptizer" who was later beheaded (Anubis was an embalmer, who embalmed Osiris as opposed to the reborn Horus, and Eridanus was from Greek mythology, and was Anubis ever beheaded?), that Horus was crucified (Osiris was dismembered into many pieces by Seth, and I know of no reference to "crucifixion" for Horus), etc. These "parallels" distort the Egyptian Horus-Osiris mythologies to make them closer to some generic "story of Jesus" than they really were. It would be better to give an accurate and unbiased portrayal of the Egyptian belief of Horus rather than selectively present it in a way that makes it look identical to the "story of Jesus".
And Zeitgeist, btw, is pretty laughable in its absurd linguistic speculations, e.g. trying to draw similarities between the words "sun" and "son" (which are homophones only in English), "Seb" and "Joseph" (unrelated philologically, and one should also note that Seb was not the father of Horus but the father of Osiris), "Horus" and "horizon" (cf. Egyptian Heru, whereas Greek horizein "to limit" is unrelated), "Seth" and "sunset" (again, totally wrong, this is an English compound that means, "the sun is setting down"), etc. It would be funny if it weren't for the fact that so many people think that this is credible or "the truth".
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Leolaia
I am sure that Leolaia would agree that Judaism borrowed heavily from many different pagan sources as it evolved. Keep in mind that the Hebrews/Jews were always a tiny minority culture constantly influenced and/or conquered by more ancient and far supierior civilizations like Summaria, Phoenecia, Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Rome and others I can't remember.
Absolutely, and I have posted many times in the past on how Hellenistic, Persian, and other ANE influences are manifested in early Jewish texts, such as 1 Enoch. For heavens sake, Gilgamesh is one of the antediluvian giants in the Book of Giants in the Dead Sea Scrolls. But most of all I have drawn attention not to pagan parallels but to the native Canaanite heritage from which Judaism grew. I believe there is probably a relationship between older beliefs about El and Baal and Christian theology about the God the Father and Jesus, the Son (especially through the christological influence of Daniel, ch. 7 which seems to appropriate traditional language). Jewish dualism and apocalypticism shows clear signs of influence from Persian thought, and the Zoroastrian savior Soshyant (if clearly pre-Christian) may represent one of the best pagan parallels with the eschatological dimension of Jesus in the NT (cf. "Zoroastrian Savior Imagery and its Inflence on the New Testament," John R. Hinnells, Numen, December 1969, pp. 161-185). One obvious clue of Persian influence in apocalypticism is the fact that the Oracles of Hystaspes was reworked into a Jewish apocalypse which itself (if the quotations by Lactantius are accurate) may have influenced the book of Revelation (particularly ch. 11-13). And of course, Hellenistic influence is too common to ignore.
Though I agree we need to be careful about overdoing the "exact" similarities between myths it is very clear even from the Bible itself that Judaism evolved new ideas based upon the influences of the conquering cultures. The development of a personified Devil and of Hell are two examples which I clearly remember coming from Persia and obviosly unknown to early Bible writers.
Hell (i.e. Gehenna), the resurrection, a final judgment, an eschatological savior/deliverer who comes prior to Judgement Day -- all these are apocalyptic ideas paralleled by Persian religion. As well as the concept of four kingdoms prior to the eschaton, although this concept was also picked up by the Greeks. The way these kingdoms are described in Daniel however suggests a Persian perspective of world history mediated by the Jewish exilic experience (whereby "Babylon" replaces "Assyria" as the first kingdom).
In short, yes I think it is very possible that a pagan myth could be the center of a Jewish sect. The wine as blood/bread as flesh symbolism of the Last Supper is certainly counter to all Jewish sensabilities since Jews would not even eat animal flesh slaughtered without blood draining rituals let alone eat unclean human flesh and drink blood.
This particular element of Christian tradition is probably the most impressive parallel with the Hellenistic mystery cults (noted even by the apologists), although IIRC the parallel isn't exact in Mithraism at least. But there are differences in how the eucharist was conceptualized if you compare John with the synoptics/Paul and either with the Didache, which did not employ this symbolism at all. Early Christianity was a very diverse movement that drew from different streams of Judaism (which already was very diverse in the first century AD), so what I suspect is that Hellenistic/mystery cult motifs played a larger role in some Christian groups (such as those in the diaspora), whereas others drew less on these. I am reminded of how Paul struggled to explain the foreign concept of the resurrection to the Gentile Christians in Corinth in 1 Corinthians and eventually accommodated himself more to the Hellenistic view and used more overt Platonic language in 2 Corinthians. The wide panoply of christology in the NT and extrabiblical tradition suggests to me that the figure of Jesus was differently conceived in different places (compare Matthew 16 and parallels). We know very well how Jesus was conceived by Paul, but did Paul's Jewish-Christian adversaries (such as those sent by James the Just) share the same view? And the bulk of what we find in the gospels shows more direct influence from OT exegetical traditions than anything else. I think it is probable that while quite a few basic themes, roles, and narrative elements derive from the fertile soil of Hellenistic syncretism, it was the native literary and religious heritage of the Jewish people that played the dominant role.