Uncle Onion,
Here are the footnotes for the excerpts I posted. I will post the sentence or phrase just before the footnote and then the reference.
I certainly understand your wanting to check these things for yourself. It’s odd, but I study the Bible more now than I ever did as a JW. What’s even stranger is that I actually enjoy it.
As for books about Jesus, wasasister highly recommended A Marginal Jew by John P. Meier. I have not yet read it, but perhaps she can tell you more about it. Looking at Amazon, I see that there are now two volumes:
A Marginal Jew : Rethinking the Historical Jesus : The Roots of the Problem and the Person
and
A Marginal Jew : Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Anchor Bible Reference Library/Volume Two:Mentor, Message, and Miracles).
I have also been wanting to look into the work of the Jesus Seminar. There are several books by Robert Walter Funk available.
Have fun reading!
Ginny
The Book of Enoch said in the 2nd century BCE that Yeshua or Jesus was the secret name given by God to the Son of Man (a Persian title), and that it meant “Yahweh saves.”
1
Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952: 193.
In northern Israel the name was written Ieu.
2
Albright, William Powell. Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1968: 262.
It was the same as Ieud or Jeud, the “only-begotten son” dressed in royal robes and sacrificed by the god-king Isra-El.
3
Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1922: 341.
Greek versions of the name were Iasion, Jason, or Iasus—the name of one of Demeter’s sacrificed consorts, killed by Father Zeus after the fertility rite that coupled him with his Mother.
4
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (2 vols.). New York: Penguin Books Inc., 1955: 1, 89.
Iasus signified a healer or Therapeuta, as the Greeks called the Essenes, whose cult groups always included a man with the title of Christos.
5
Rose, H.J. Religion in Greece and Rome. New York: Harper & Bros., 1959: 111.
The literal meaning of the name was “healing moon-man,” fitting the Hebrew version of Jesus as a son of Mary, the almah, or “moon-maiden.”
6
Graves, Robert. The Greek Myths (2 vols.). New York: Penguin Books Inc., 1955: 2, 396
“The Semitic religions practiced human immolations longer than any other religion, sacrificing children and grown men in order to please sanguinary gods. In spite of Hadrian’s prohibition of those murderous offerings, they were maintained in certain clandestine rites.”
9
Cumont, Franz. Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism. New York: Dover Publications, 1956: 119.
The names of the apostles attached to these books were fraudulent. The books were composed after the establishment of the church, some as late as the 2nd century A.D. or later, according to the church’s requirements for a manufactured tradition.
10
Smith, Homer. Man and His Gods. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1952: 179-80.
Most scholars believe the earliest book of the New Testament was 1 Thessalonians, written perhaps 51 A.D. by Paul, who never saw Jesus in person and knew no details of his life story.
11
Enslin, Morton Scott. The Literature of the Christian Movement. New York: Harper & Bros., 1938: 233-38.
Like Adonis, Jesus was born of a consecrated temple maiden in the sacred cave of Bethlehem, “The House of Bread.”
12
Frazer, Sir James G. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1922: 402.
The skeptical Celsus noted that . . . “Each has the convenient and customary spiel . . .”
14
Smith, Morton. Jesus the Magician. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978: 117.
Turning water into wine at Cana was copied from a Dionysian ritual practiced at Sidon and other places . . .
16
Smith, Morton. Jesus the Magician. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978: 25, 120.
Many centuries earlier, priestesses at Nineveh cured the blind with spittle, and the story was repeated of many different gods and their incarnations.
18
Gifford, Edward S., Jr. The Evil Eye. New York: Macmillan, 1958: 63.
The ability to walk on water was claimed by Far-Eastern holy men ever since Buddhist monks praised it as the mark of the true ascetic. . . .
22
Bardo Thodol (W.Y. Evans-Wentz, trans.). London: Oxford University Press, 1927: 158.
The cynical Pope Leo X exclaimed, “What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us!”
59
de Camp, L. Sprague. The Ancient Engineers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1960: 399.
. . . Initial incredulousness is soon converted into belief in a probability and eventually smug assurance.
60
Arens, W. The Man-Eating Myth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979: 89.
