ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

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Jatheist
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ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by Jatheist »

Hi, can you please find some actual parallels to Jesus and Christianity, not terrible ones like Arvharya S makes? Archarya S dies a terrible job with her research. She is also some kind of conspiracy nutjob. I know some parallels such as Elija's feeding of the 100, other OT parallels, and dying and rising gods Richard Carrier recently pointed out, but I really need paralles so I can have an idea about the origins of Christianity.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by brimstoneSalad »

I don't think you need parallels to understand the origins of Christianity.

Just look into the history, and the founding figures, and parallel religious development at the time.

You'll get most of what you want to know from Saul's letters, and those of other early Church fathers (mostly, regarding what they were criticizing).
Jatheist
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by Jatheist »

I have apocrypha and Church father's on Kindle
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by brimstoneSalad »

That's about as good as you can get. Focus on the things they argued about.

Most of the rest is just speculation at best, and sometimes just making things up conspiracy theory style (spotting vague coincidences and blowing them out of proportion to assume causation).
Not that there's anything wrong with theorizing; sometimes it's the only way to put a plausible story together.
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divisionbyzero85
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by divisionbyzero85 »

What is your notion of an "actual parallel?" Generally when scholars (or amateurs like Acharya S) speak of parallels they are talking about mythemes. A mytheme is not a simple condescending. It is a deliberate literary construct.
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garrethdsouza
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by garrethdsouza »

I recall seeing a parallel being drawn with Horus in bill maher's documentary religulous, a clipping https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx9WMbCljdo
I don't know about the validity of this as its been contested.
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EquALLity
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by EquALLity »

garrethdsouza wrote:I recall seeing a parallel being drawn with Horus in bill maher's documentary religulous, a clipping https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tx9WMbCljdo
I don't know about the validity of this as its been contested.
(for anyone who wants to see the full documentary): https://vimeo.com/53480379
"I am not a Marxist." -Karl Marx
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divisionbyzero85
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Re: ACTUAL parallels to Christianity

Post by divisionbyzero85 »

Awesome! Documentaries like Religulous and Zeitgeist get a lot of criticism for having "bad scholarship" and being "factually inaccurate." Comparative mythology is highly nuanced though and the parallels Maher is speaking of are indeed mythemes.

Take the virgin birth for example. Some point out that Horus was conceived by Isis having sex with a dead Osiris so this is not a virgin birth and not a parallel. There are usually two camps of people that do this:

1. Those who want to exalt the uniquely miraculous nature of Jesus from any pagan god as much as possible.
2. Those who do not fully grasp the complex nature of Egyptian myth.

The truth of the matter is that Isis refers to herself as an eternal "hwnt." This is the Egyptian word for virgin. R.E. Witt discusses this at length in his awesome book Isis in the Ancient in World. Amateurs like Achraya S actually have this right but considering that she's an amatuer she does tend to have holes in her arguments and Christian apologists tend to use those holes in an attempt to smear and discredit her.

When Isis "has sex" with Osiris she fashions and magical penis (after not being able to find his earthly one). This is a deliberate literary plot device. The magical penis is used to show that when Orisis passed his "child" (Horus - who reigns on earth while Osiris lives on in the neither world) was created by the magic of a virgin birth. That is why Isis refers to herself as an eternal virgin.

While the story is very different from the birth of Jesus, the mytheme of "a divine child was born from a miracle (virgin birth)" isn't. Hence the parallel.
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