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The story of Jesus was stolen from other religions?

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Felix

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I can only hope it's true, but I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to verify.

When they say Dionysus rose again and ascended the prophecy, isn't it obvious the devil has imitated the prophecy?
Hehe, obviously. Our god, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen to allow Satan to be prescient, duh!

What did the pope say/"quote" about Islam bringing nothing new to religion (except violence)? I love irony.

...okay I'm done :(

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Thang is, when Constantine the great wanted to unify the two opposing parties, (pagans and early christians) he knew the pagans weren't going to follow some prophet (thats all jesus was at the time) so what he did was make jesus a deity and add in many pagan stories and elements. Such as resurection and the halos around anybody holy, which is a sun-god thing.

The davinci code's saying that it is based on 100% facts is surprisingly close (almost everything but the priarie of scion which was a spectaclular hoax) 70% is a better estimate.

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yes, and I remember something about Constantine choosing Dec 25 as a significant pagan date for worship of the sun, so why not use that date to celebrate the birth of the new religion's deity,so his subjects would not have such a difficult transition to a new belief?

Saturnalia was the celebration he used to replace with Jesus' birthday.

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Saturnalia was the celebration he used to replace with Jesus' birthday.

You don't mean replace right,? They just celebrated Jesus' bday on Satrunalia. People got to keep their to keep their pagan holiday, but, wink, wink, nudge, nudge it was now "Christian". To my knowledge, there was no real celebrating of Jesus' birth prior to the the emperor mass converting the empire.

Sneaky devils....

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I stumbled across this 3 minute video on youtube.

Can someone verify what it says? I'd like to know this for sure.

I'm not sure if each of the specific claims made in that video are true or not (several of them I've heard before), but I do know that there are many myths in many different cultures prior to Christianity that share many resemblances with the Christian mythology. In fact, the entire philosophy of early Christianity was in almost every conceivable way identical to countless other popular cults at the time in Rome, and previously in Greece, referred to as the "Mystery Religions." Informed Christians make no denial about this, but for some reason*, it just doesn't bother them. <_<

*not literally.

Thang is, when Constantine the great wanted to unify the two opposing parties, (pagans and early christians) he knew the pagans weren't going to follow some prophet (thats all jesus was at the time) so what he did was make jesus a deity and add in many pagan stories and elements. Such as resurection and the halos around anybody holy, which is a sun-god thing.

The davinci code's saying that it is based on 100% facts is surprisingly close (almost everything but the priarie of scion which was a spectaclular hoax) 70% is a better estimate.

Well, of course, Jesus wasn't actually a prophet. But in fact, his followers considered him to be more than that from the beginning. His earliest disciples thought that he was the Messiah, who was supposed to be a political liberator of the Jews, foretold in prophecy-- in addition to being a prophet. The Apostle Paul is usually credited with being the first to deify Jesus, and, heavily influenced by the Mystery Cults, elevating Jesus' status from liberator and prophet to full-on God.

By the time of Constantine, Christianity had already achieved a high status among the various Mystery Cults in Rome. Constantine just made it official. But, I haven't read The Da Vinci Code-- maybe you learned something in that that I don't know.

watch this movie for the full story. It's about how jesus wasn't even a real person, let alone the son of god.

I haven't seen this particular movie, but I've seen claims like this about Jesus before. I've also seen claims that Socrates wasn't a real person, but was invented by Plato. I think it's kind of silly.

If Jesus wasn't real, then it was someone else who lived at the same time and taught the same things. Might as well just assume he was a real person. And Socrates, too. What difference does it make whether it was a guy named Jesus or a guy named Bill Smith, if the resulting philosophy and historical impact is the same?

Edited by Bold Standard
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I haven't seen this particular movie, but I've seen claims like this about Jesus before. I've also seen claims that Socrates wasn't a real person, but was invented by Plato. I think it's kind of silly.

If Jesus wasn't real, then it was someone else who lived at the same time and taught the same things. Might as well just assume he was a real person. And Socrates, too. What difference does it make whether it was a guy named Jesus or a guy named Bill Smith, if the resulting philosophy and historical impact is the same?

There is a substantial historical question over whether there was a person (leaving aside his hame). By analogy, did Hercules exist or was he mythical; was his name Hercules or something else? This is not a silly question. The historical evidence that there ever was such a Jesus-persona is quite thin. Rather than invent a single person who supposedly existed, we could as easily assume that this is a fictitious character invented by a messianic Jewish cult of that era. Claiming to be the son of god is a pretty extreme and politically dangerous claim, especially if the vast majority of your co-religionists would put the claim to embarassing tests, were such claims actually publically made at the time. It would be much safer to create stories about an event that happened some time recently, and let the word spread. Blogging in that era was pretty primitive, and there aren't any backup copies.
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The historical evidence that there ever was such a Jesus-persona is quite thin. Rather than invent a single person who supposedly existed, we could as easily assume that this is a fictitious character invented by a messianic Jewish cult of that era.

If we did assume that he was a mythical or fictitious character, would it really change anything, though? It seems to me that the actual "story" and events in the life of Jesus are of minor or secondary importance to the teachings of Jesus, such as "The Sermon on the Mount." Who do we ascribe these teachings to, if not to "Jesus"? Someone had to have originated those things.

But I don't mind assuming that Jesus' early followers exaggerated (or possibly originated) any claims to deity that Jesus might have made. It seems clear to me, from reading the New Testament, that Paul took this idea much further than the authors of the Gospels. My understanding is that the claim to deity was almost a cliche among Mystery Religions at the time, and that the Roman authorities didn't mind, as long as you were willing to acknowledge Caesar as the principal god, which was more a political gesture than a religious one. The exclusivity claimed by Christianity was one of the aspects that made it unique among Mystery Cults, and I've heard it conjectured that that might have been one of the tactical factors that led to its success and eventual dominance. People thought, if they're so sure they're right that they won't take a chance with any other religion (because many people belonged to multiple cults at once, so as not to put all their eggs in a basket), then maybe there was something to it.

Edited by Bold Standard
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Gotta love the David Bowie background music. :thumbsup:

And actually, as we were taught in our humanities class, Jesus never recorded his teachings. They were recorded by the apostles and each recorded a different version, some many years after the other. In fact, the further from the actual event it gets, the more outlandish it becomes. For example, one of the earliest accounts of the crucifixion states that Jesus died in the normal fashion- no heroic pleas to God.

Edited by Ravane
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I do not have any knowledge about the accuracy of the specific claims in the video, but I would be more surprised to find that they were not true.

I have read a few books on Hypatia of Alexandria and a commonly held belief amongst those scholars is that Saint Catherine is a caricature of Hypatia. Rather then an intellectual pagan woman persecuted by christians, Saint Catherine was persecuted for her belief in Cheeses. I can (with some effort) provide references if anyone is interested in research, but it seemed pretty well documented.

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Thinking about the possibility that Christ could simply be a version of a myth that has other versions in other cultures, and about the church adopting the Winter festival as its own, another parallel struck me: the practice of the Catholic church in assigning special "roles" to various saints.

"Pray to XYZ for travel, and pray to ABC before launching a business,..." is exactly the type of advice that Hinduism gives, with its pantheon of Gods and the type of practice one might have found with respect to Roman or Greek gods. Therefore, I figure that this practice of the Catholic church might have been a way to adapt their monotheistic message for a population that was used to, and wanted, multiple Gods.

I can just picture the Chief Marketing Officer of the ancient church thinking up the scheme. Sure, we can give them that! They'll be like minor Gods. There are none in the bible, but we'll promote famous dead humans to semi-God status. That ought to work.

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Thinking about the possibility that Christ could simply be a version of a myth that has other versions in other cultures, and about the church adopting the Winter festival as its own, another parallel struck me: the practice of the Catholic church in assigning special "roles" to various saints.

"Pray to XYZ for travel, and pray to ABC before launching a business,..." is exactly the type of advice that Hinduism gives, with its pantheon of Gods and the type of practice one might have found with respect to Roman or Greek gods. Therefore, I figure that this practice of the Catholic church might have been a way to adapt their monotheistic message for a population that was used to, and wanted, multiple Gods.

I can just picture the Chief Marketing Officer of the ancient church thinking up the scheme. Sure, we can give them that! They'll be like minor Gods. There are none in the bible, but we'll promote famous dead humans to semi-God status. That ought to work.

And make,"The Buddy Jesus."

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And make,"The Buddy Jesus."
True. Indeed, that is an additional integration. i.e., that the "Buddy Jesus", the T-shirts saying "Jesus is my Homeboy", the Christian video-games, etc. are part of a pattern of adaptation that goes back centuries.
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The claim that the Jesus-myth was descended from elements of other religions is a very old one (and a true one). Some people have already noted that Christianity was just one of mystery cults that became popular in the later Roman Empire, which often involved Greeks and Romans worshipping Eastern deities in an adapted way: the Mithras cult (Mithras being an Indo-Iranian god) is perhaps the most famous of these. If you'll take a look at Charles Freeman's The Closing of the Western Mind, he also mentions the 'theos hypsiostos' (highest god) cult which seems to have existed before Christianity and to have promoted an exclusive (Jewish in origin?) god.

There is also the intriguing, yet harder to verify, suggestion of Frazer, whose seminal anthropology tract The Golden Bough casts the Christ figure as a dressed-up version of the nature religions of primitive cultures in Africa etc. : the nature-god, personifying the harvest, is killed (harvest), dies in a period of darkness (winter), and is reborn (spring, planting). The 'hanged god' is also supposedly a common motif in several mythologies (the only one I know of myself is the Norse version: Odin hung from Yggdrasil, the world-tree, with his side pierced through by his spear (as Jesus was), in order to gain knowledge of the runes. There is also a Norse parallel to the resurrection: after Ragnarök, the battle in which the gods and their enemies obliterate each other, the young god Baldr, whose death starts Ragnarök, is resurrected and presides over a rejuvenated world).

Furthermore, when Christianity was developing, the understanding of sanctity was changing in the Roman world: from impersonal forces associated with places, divinity increasingly came to be regarded as residing in a specific individual: a holy man, or prophet. (See Peter Brown, The Making of Late Antiquity) These sort of characters gained followers in late antiquity (as they do today), and many of these were Christian holy men whose deeds and sayings were adoringly chronicled and embellished in the early Christian writers. Interestingly, these holy men promoted a deified holy man on their own model. In fact, the Jesus persona is more appropriate to Late Antiquity than to the time when he supposedly lived.

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Yes, I'd be interested to see that video as well; it says the user removed it. Does anybody remember any phrases in the title that could be used to search?

Totally aside and completely unrelated:

Ragnarök, the battle in which the gods and their enemies obliterate each other

The parallel is too striking to me, but then again, I am not at all familiar with the Swedish language -- Ragnarök? As in Ragnar Danneskjöld?.. is this the idea that Ragnar is, to an extent, symbolic of?

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nope

Sure, they have the name ragnar, then the crazy o with dots, is that enough? Which reminds me:

Nathaniel Branden changed his name to branden (ben+rand = hebrew for son of rand)

Ayn Rands first books published by RANDom house?

CONSPIRACIES!

Edited by orangesiscool
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Ragnarök? As in Ragnar Danneskjöld?.. is this the idea that Ragnar is, to an extent, symbolic of?

The same element is in the name: Old Norse regin, genitive ragna. I'm not completely sure of this, but I think the modern name Ragnar comes from the loss of the older second element (Germanic names normally are composed of two elements): a name such as Rögnvaldr/Ragnvaldr (Rögn 'the gods' + vald 'power' + ending -r, the only Norse name I can currently think of with the element 'rögn') may have become shortened to Ragnar or Ragner.

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Read Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces"

The various hero myths across human cultures heed to a basic pattern.

Why this pattern exists is an interesting question, and probably gives psychological insight into the human mind.

But the point is the same elements occur over and over.

For the most part, it looks like these stories are independently created rather than stolen from some ur-story.

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If true, that is very interesting, that the stories are created independently. It would dispell the 'evidence' that proponets of theories such as Atlantis use -- that some proto-culture travelled the world handing down their stories to the ancient civilizations, which is why most of the stories have common themes or striking similarities.

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