Debate Question: Do the pagan gods really corrospond to the pattern set for Jesus as crucified and rising from the dead?
Ferell Till says:
"I could take saviors like Krishna, saviors like Osiris, saviors like Dionysus, saviors like Tammuz, who presumably lived centuries and centuries before Jesus of Nazareth allegedly lived, and they were born of virgins, they worked miracles, they died, most of them through crucifixion, and they were resurrected from the dead, and their followers were zealous for them."(Geisler-Till debate, 1994)
The thing is when we use evidence from real mythology books, books written by schoalrs just for the purpose of talking about the myths, not written by Jeus Mythers with an ax to grind againt Christaintiy, all those similarities just vanish. The real key is the acadmic sources and the real mythology sources as oppossed to Jesus myther sources.
the Jesus mythers lie!
First here are the sources I sue, which are real academic mythology books, not Jesus myther books. these are all recongized schoalrs.they are all non christians
I use evidence from a couple of christains but these are the non christian sources I use:
Non Christian scholarly sources used
Conze, Edward. Buddhist Scriptures, ,Penguin:1959.:35)
Cumont, Franz. The Mysteries of Mithra. New York: Dover, 1950.
Gordon, Richard. Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996.
Hamilton,Edith. Mentor edition, original copywriter 1940 Mythology, 172). See also World Book Encyclopedia, "Hercules" 1964)
Klausner,Joseph. From Jesus to Paul (New York: Macmillan, 1943), 104
Kramer,S.N. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 183 [1966],
Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies. Manchester U. Press, 1975.
La 'resurrection' d'Adonis," in Melanges Isidore Levy, 1955, pp. 207-40).
Meyer,M. (editor) The Ancient Mysteries : A Source Book , San Francisco: Harper, 1987, pp.170-171).
Robinson,Herbert Spencer. Myths and Legends of all Nations, New York: Bantum Books, 1950, 13-16
Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, New York: Thomas Y. Corwell Company, 1960.p 176).
Ulansey, David. Cosmoic Mysteries of Of Mithras (website).
________________.The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1989.
World Book Encyclopedia, "Hercules" 1964
I cover every name that Till uses and then some. none of them are found to match any of the criteria.
Hercules
Mithras
Dionysus
Osirus
Attis
Buddha
Krishna
Tamuz
not a one of them was truely born of a viring, crucified, or risen from the dead.
here's Mithras as an example:
Mithras
The Mythic Mysteries are very complex, and the only real similarities to Jesus are minute ones.. Most of these alleged similarities are suspect or unimportant. It is often claimed by skeptics on the Internet that "there is so much similarity" but I find very little. Mithra comes from Persia and is part of Zoroastrian myth, but this cult was transplanted to Rome near the end of the pre-Chrsitian era. Actually the figure of Mithra is very ancient. He began in the Hindu pantheon and is mentioned in the Vedas. He latter spread to Persia where he took the guise of a sheep protecting deity. But his guise as a shepard was rather minor. He is associated with the Sun as well. Yet most of our evidence about his cult (which apparently didn't exist in the Hindu or Persian forms) comes from Post-Pauline times. Mythic rituals were ment to bring about the salvation and transformation of initiates. In that sense it could be seen as similar to Christianity, but it was a religion and all religions aim at ultimate transformation. He's a total mythical figure he meets the sun who kneels before him, he slays a cosmic bull, nothing is real or human, no sayings, no teachings.
1) no Virginal Conception
Mithra was born of a rock, so unless the rock was a virgin rock, no virginal conception for him. (Marvin W. Meyer, ed. The Ancient Mysteries :a Sourcebook. San Francisco: Harper, 1987,, p. 201). David Ulansey, who is perhaps the greatest Mithric scholar of the age, agrees that Mithras was born out of a rock, not of a virigin woman. He was also born as a full grown adult.(Ulansey, David. The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World. New York: Oxford U. Press, 1989.)
2) No crucifixion or resurrection.
There no story of Mithras death and no references to resurrection. The only similarity about him in this relation is that his shedding of the Bull's blood is said by H.G. Wells (Out Line of World History ) to be the prototype for Jesus sacrifice on the cross. But in reality the only similarity here is blood, and it wasn't even his own. It may even be borrowing form Christianity that made the shedding of blood important in the religion. Gordon says directly, that there is "no death of Mithras" -- (Gordon, Richard. Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World. Aldershot: Variorum, 1996.(p96)
3) No Savior, no baptism, no Christmas
Moreover, one of the major sources comes from the second century AD and is found in inscriptions on a temple, "and you saved us after having shed the eternal blood." This sounds Christian, but being second century after Christ it could well be borrowed from Christianity (Meyer, p 206). (This source, Meyer, is used by Kane as well, but it says nothing to back up his claims, and as will be seen latter, Meyer disparages the notion of conscious borrowing] (More about this ceremony on Page II)
"Mithra was the Persian god whose worship became popular among Roman soldiers (his cult was restricted to men) and was to prove a rival to Christianity in the late Roman Empire. Early Zoroastrian texts, such as the Mithra Yasht, cannot serve as the basis of a mystery of Mithra inasmuch as they present a god who watches over cattle and the sanctity of contracts. Later Mithraic evidence in the west is primarily iconographic; there are no long coherent texts".(Edwin Yamauchi, "Easter: "Myth, Hallucination, or History," Leadership University)
4) Most of our sources Post Date Christianity.
(a) Almost no Textual evidence exists for Mithrism
Most of the texts that do exist are from outsiders who were speculating about the cult. We have no information form inside the cult.
Cosmic Mysteries of Mythras (website--visted Juldy 1, 2006)
David Ulansey(the Major scholar of Mithrism in world)
Owing to the cult's secrecy, we possess almost no literary evidence about the beliefs of Mithraism. The few texts that do refer to the cult come not from Mithraic devotees themselves, but rather from outsiders such as early Church fathers, who mentioned Mithraism in order to attack it, and Platonic philosophers, who attempted to find support in Mithraic symbolism for their own philosophical ideas.
"At present our knowledge of both general and local cult practice in respect of rites of passage, ceremonial feats and even underlying ideology is based more on conjecture than fact."(Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First International Congress of Mithraic Studies. Manchester U. Press, 1975. ,437)
And Cumont himself observed, in the 50s
"The sacred books which contain the prayers recited or chanted during the [Mithraic] survives, the ritual on the initiates, and the ceremonials of the feasts, have vanished and left scarce a trace behind...[we] know the esoteric disciplines of the Mysteries only from a few indiscretions."(Cumont, Franz. The Mysteries of Mithra. New York: Dover, 1950.152)
(b) Roman Cult began after Jesus life
Our earliest evidence for the Mithraic mysteries places their appearance in the middle of the first century B.C.: the historian Plutarch says that in 67 B.C. a large band of pirates based in Cilicia (a province on the southeastern coast of Asia Minor) were practicing "secret rites" of Mithras. The earliest physical remains of the cult date from around the end of the first century A.D., and Mithraism reached its height of popularity in the third century.(Ulansey, David. Cosmoic Mysteries of Of Mithras (website)
(c) No Continuity between Ancient Persion past and Roman Cult
Throught most of the twentieth century Franz Cumont so influenced scholarship that the entire discipline followed in the wake of his assuption that the Roman cult was spread by the Persian cult. In the early 70's David Ulansey did for Mithric scholarhsip what Noan Chomsky did for linguistics, he totally refefined the coordinates by which the discipline moved. Ulansey showed that the Roman cult was not the continuuence of the Persian cult, that there was no real evidence of a Persian cult. He showed that the killing of the great comic bull which latter became the major event in Mithrism, and the parlel from which Jesus Mythers get the shedding of blood and sacrafice, was not known in the Perisan era. This was be like showing that the story of the Cross was not known to Chrisitians in the first century. The major likeness to Christinaity and the centeral point of the cult of Mithrism was not known in the time of Christ, in the time Paul, or for at least two centuries after:
"There were, however, a number of serious problems with Cumont's assumption that the Mithraic mysteries derived from ancient Iranian religion. Most significant among these is that there is no parallel in ancient Iran to the iconography which is the primary fact of the Roman Mithraic cult. For example, as already mentioned, by far the most important icon in the Roman cult was the tauroctony. This scene shows Mithras in the act of killing a bull, accompanied by a dog, a snake, a raven, and a scorpion; the scene is depicted as taking place inside a cave like the mithraeum itself. This icon was located in the most important place in every mithraeum, and therefore must have been an expression of the central myth of the Roman cult. Thus, if the god Mithras of the Roman religion was actually the Iranian god Mithra, we should expect to find in Iranian mythology a story in which Mithra kills a bull. However, the fact is that no such Iranian myth exists: in no known Iranian text does Mithra have anything to do with killing a bull." (David UlanseyMithras Mysteries).
(5) Mithrism Emerged in the west only after Jesus' day.
Mithrism could not have become an influence upon the origins of the first century, for the simple reason that Mithrism did not emerge from its pastoral setting in rural Persia until after the close of the New Testament canon. (Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago: Open Court, 1903), 87ff.)
(6) We Don't know what any of it means.
"No one can be sure that the meaning of the meals and the ablutions are the same between Christianity and Mirthrism. Just because the two had them is no indication that they come to the same thing. These are entirely superficial and circumstantial arguments." (Nash, Christian Research Journal winter 94, p.8)
(7) MIthraism was influenced by Christianity
a) Roman Soldiers Spread the cult.
Roman soldiers probably encountered Mithrism first as part of Zoroastrians when they while on duty in Peria. The Cult spread through the Roman legion, was most popular in the West, and ha little chance to to spread through or influence upon Palestine. It's presence in Palestine was mainly confined to the Romans who were there to oppress the Jews. Kane tries to imply that these mystery cults were all idigidous to the Palestinian area, that they grew up alongside Judaism, and that the adherents to these religions all traded ideas as they happily ate together and practiced good neighborhsip.
b) Mithric Roman Soldiers Influenced by Christians in Palestine
But Mithrism was confined to the Roman Legion primarily, those who were stationed in Palestine to subdue the Jewish Revolt of A.D. 66-70. In fact strong evidence indicates that in this way Christianity influenced Mithrism. First, because Romans stationed in the West were sent on short tours of duty to fight the Parthians in the East, and to put down the Jewish revolt. This is where they would have encountered a Christianity whose major texts were already written, and whose major story (that of the life of Christ) was already formed.
"There is no real evidence for a Persian Cult of Mirthras. The cultic and mystery aspect did not exist until after the Roman period, second century to fourth. This means that any similarities to Christianity probably come from Christiantiy as the Soldiers learned of it during their tours in Palestine. The Great historian of religions, Franz Cumont was able to prove that the earliest datable evidence for the cult came from the Military Garrison at Carnuntum, on the Danube River (moern Hungary). The largest Cache of Mithric artifacts comes form the area between the Danube and Ostia in Italy."(Franz Cumont, The Mysteries of Mithra (Chicago: Open Court, 1903), 87ff.)
3) Mithrism was not Christianity's Major Rival
Mithraism
The Ecole Initiative:
http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecoleweb/a ... raism.html
Mithraism had a wide following from the middle of the second century to the late fourth century CE, but the common belief that Mithraism was the prime competitor of Christianity, promulgated by Ernst Renan (Renan 1882 579), is blatantly false. Mithraism was at a serious disadvantage right from the start because it allowed only male initiates. What is more, Mithraism was, as mentioned above, only one of several cults imported from the eastern empire that enjoyed a large membership in Rome and elsewhere. The major competitor to Christianity was thus not Mithraism but the combined group of imported cults and official Roman cults subsumed under the rubric "paganism." Finally, part of Renan's claim rested on an equally common, but almost equally mistaken, belief that Mithraism was officially accepted because it had Roman emperors among its adherents (Nero, Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and the Tetrarchs are most commonly cited). Close examination of the evidence for the participation of emperors reveals that some comes from literary sources of dubious quality and that the rest is rather circumstantial. The cult of Magna Mater, the first imported cult to arrive in Rome (204 BCE) was the only one ever officially recognized as a Roman cult. The others, including Mithraism, were never officially accepted, and some, particularly the Egyptian cult of Isis, were periodically outlawed and their adherents persecuted.
Let's examine these claims, and I'm going to use mostly secular, classical or pro-pagan sources to show:
1) Calling them all "saviors" distorts the evidence
None of them are saviors in the manner of Jesus Christ They are all heroes, so they all saved people in some sense. Some of them did offer eternal life to their followers so we can look at that latter. But none of them are saviors in the sense of dying for the sins of the world.
2) "Presumably lived..." is a big distortion, no proof that they did live.
A few of them may have been based on actual people. In fact the Greek Herakles (Hercules) was probably two people fussed together into myth from two different times in history (Charles Seltman, the Twelve Olympians, Thomas Y. Corwell company: 1962, p.175-177. But there is nowhere near the kind of documentation for this that there is for Jesus. We have no writings of anyone who claimed to have known Herakles, we have no writings that even approximate eyewitness testimony, we have no proof that he existed at all. No body of his teachings, not even one saying by him has come down to us through history. Everything about him is totally speculative or mythological. And this is also true for every single figure mentioned; it is probable that Mithra was a real figure, or based upon a real figure but we have no way of knowing. Osiris was pure mythology and we have no idea who he might be based upon, it may be a good guess that Krishna was a real figure at one time, but we know nothing about any of these characters that is not purely mythological.
3) "They were born of Virgins" actually none of them were.
This is a tricky one. Some of these figures were not even claimed to have been produced by Virgins. Others, it depends. That is, none of them were produced without the benefit of sexual contact. For some, such as Herakles that contact came between the mother and god, the mother may never have "known" a mortal man, and so in a technical sense is a 'virgin' but she not conceived without benefit of sexual contact. Jesus Christ was so conceived. The notion of the "Virginal conception" does not say that God was Mary's lover, Mary did not have sex with God, when the Holy Spirit "came upon her" it was more like artificial insemination, not sexual contact. And none of these "saviors" were touted as products of "virginal conceptions" as part of their theological doctrine.
In Raymond E. Brown's highly respected work on the Birth Narratives of Jesus, he evaluates these non-Christian "examples" of virgin births and his conclusions are as follows:
"Among the parallels offered for the virginal conception of Jesus have beneath conceptions of figures in world religions (the Buddha, Krishna, and those of Zoroaster), in Greco-Roman mythology (Presses, Romulus), in Egyptian and Classical History (the Pharaohs, Alexander, Augusts), and among famous philosophers or religious thinkers (Plato, Apologias of Tyana), to name only a few.
"Are any of these divinely engendered births really parallel to the non-sexual virginal conception of Jesus described in the NT, where Mary is not impregnated by a male deity or element, but the child is begotten through the creative power of the Holy Spirit? These "parallels"consistently involve a type of hieros gamos (note: "holy seed" or "divinesemen") where a divine male, in human or other form, impregnates a woman,either through normal sexual intercourse or through some substitute form of penetration. In short, there is no clear example of virginal conception in world or pagan religions that plausibly could have given first-century Jewish Christians the idea of the virginal conception of Jesus."(The Birth of the Messiah, by Raymond E. Brown, Doubleday: 1993: 522-523)
From a much less sympathetic perspective, the history-of-religions scholar David Adams Lemming (writing in EOR, s.v. "Virgin Birth") begins his articleby pointing out that all 'virgin births' are NOT necessarily such:
"A virgin is someone who has not experienced sexual intercourse, and a virgin birth, or parthenogenesis (Gr., parthenos, "virgin"; genesis,"birth"), is one in which a virgin gives birth. According to this definition, the story of the birth of Jesus is a virgin birth story whereas the birth of the Buddha and of Orphic Dionysos are not. Technically what isat issue is the loss or the preservation of virginity during the process of conception. The Virgin Mary was simply "found with child of the Holy Ghost "before she was married and before she had "known" a man. So, too, did the preexistent Buddha enter the womb of his mother, but since she was already a married woman, there is no reason to suppose she was a virgin at the time. In the Orphic story of Dionysos, Zeus came to Persephone in the form of aserpent and impregnated her, so that the maiden's virginity was technically lost."
4) "They worked miracles" As mythical figures they did "amazing thing" but none went about healing the sick.
None of the figures that Till mentions above were miracle workers in the sense of Jesus. They did not Rome the country healing people or praying over fish and loaves in order to supernaturally expand one meal into a repast for several thousand people. Mythological events follow them, thus when Mithras kills the Bull wheat springs from its tale. But of course, it is mythology. They were not flesh and blood people whom eye witnesses saw heal the sick. That did not happen in the case of any of these figures.
5) "They died, most of them through crucifixion" This is an outright lie, no credible source shows any of these being crucified.
None of the figures that he names died through crucifixion. Some of them became associated with the cross through pagan borrowing after the time of Christ, but in the pure mythical content of their stories none of them were crucified.
6) "They were Resurrected from the dead" this claim is true of some but not all, and even of those not in the manner of Christ.
None of them were seen by real flesh and blood eye witnesses after their deaths. In stories of Dionysos he does come back to life, but only in a mythology and only in relation to dying rising of nature cycles. see below. And not all of them came back to life.
