Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth

That's saddening that so many have been judgmental and unloving in the name of a loving God...

And you bring up a fascinating point about religious similarities. C.S. Lewis, a Christian, mentions that point too in his book Mere Christianity, but sees it as evidence for believing in Jesus.

I must admit that I have not read any CS Lewis. I will try to get a copy of Mere Christianity, it certainly sounds interesting.

I think it's funny how differently people can interpret the same evidence.

Not to forget the myths of Mithra, Dyonisus, Krishna, and many others who share loads of identical characteristics with the Christian myth. See, among others, this site:

http://www.sherdog.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-42809...

The first part of Zeitgeist http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/) covers this very thouroughly. It's incredible that people have such faith in Christianity, while it is just the latest of many of its kind. It is decidedly just an astrological story, telling the tale of the stars, as almost EVERY religion has done.

One caveat on Zeitgeist, which by the way I think is an exceptionally well and insightful film, is that there is some controversy on the comparisons to other Christ like figures. It seems that some people are claiming that many of the comparisons have been exaggerated or altered.

Although there may have been some journalistic embellishing and perhaps some stretching of the truth, the film is extremely compelling and if you have an open mind, then I highly recommend you watch it.

Jesus' mother Mary was a virgin at conception only. This proved to her and Joseph that God created sperm in Mary's womb resulting in her pregnancy. Joseph "knew her not until" biblically means to impregnate. Joseph did not impregnate Mary until after Jesus was born. Joseph took Mary unto him, consummating their marriage (before Jesus was born at the time the priests had set). Mary was not a perpetual virgin (the rest of her life) either. In this the biblical account differs from mythology.

resolute, how would you know that Jesus' mother Mary "was a virgin at conception only", or that this proved to her and Joseph that "God created sperm in Mary's womb resulting in her pregnancy"? The original gospels don't say anything at all about Mary being a virgin, just about her being a young woman.

resolute, your post doesn't make much sense to me

You talk as though you have first hand knowledge of the events you seem to be defending.

Do you know how many mythological god men or messiahs claimed to be born of a virgin?

Horus, Romulus, Krishna, Mithras, the list goes on and on; perhaps you should check out the website link and then make a more intelligent comment of what is presented there.

I love to debate and discuss, but dude you aren't giving any of much to work with here.

Didn't mean to offend anyone. Yes, Mary was a young woman of marriageable age. That is the meaning of the the word "virgin". Joseph was going to "put her away" meaning end his betrothal (engagement) to her when she was found pregnant before the wedding ceremony. The angel told Joseph to marry her because the conception was from God. (She wasn't out fornicating.) Mary was a virgin at conception. Jesus was not born of a virgin. Joseph and Mary got married. The priests set the date they would come together to consumate it. There is no indication this did not happen. Do some study and you will find this to be true.

resolute, the gospels were written over a hundred years after the alleged facts, and were frequently changed and added to. I have done a lot of study on the matter. Perhaps you might gain some insight from here:

http://www.nexusmagazine.com/articles/NewTestament.html

I went to the website. The Protestant and Roman Catholic Church are ignorant on many historical events and choose to remain so. They still teach Jesus was born on Dec. 25th knowing he was born in September. Read the book "Misquoting Jesus" by Bart Ehrman if you want a better history of the New Testament texts. People write all the time about events in general that have happened in the past and nothing is said about their credentials or authenticity-yet we believe them.

Just like the Christians hi-jacked the Pagan's festival of Winter Solstice for political and financial gain it's now about time we realise that Capitalism has hi-jacked the now Christian festival of christmas and turned into something of their own.

Exactly the same method of cultural mythologies and iconography, St Nick, Father Christmas and now Santa Clause. Festivals have historically been hi-jacked time and time again since it is convenient and easy to shift collective sentiment regarding the importance of a specific day. Christmas has nothing to do with the Christian festival any more, it's a capitalist festival designed to make us consume.

The fundamental and un-changeable truth remains that Christmas has and always will be Winter Solstice. A pagan festival to celebrate the re-birth of the sun.

Well said phillyharper!

resolute, the Catholic church basically wrote the Gospels. In the fourth century, at the Council of Nicea, Emperor Constantine ordered a bunch of people to cherry-pick from dozens of gospels and reduce them to four, after having edited and added to them. I am well-versed on the history of the Bible and of Christianity which I have been reading about for at least forty-five years. The date of the alleged birth of Christ was determined centuries after the event, and there is absolutely no historical proof whatsoever that Christ ever existed.

resolute, you may have gone to that website I posted a link to, but you obviously didn't read it all, or if you did, you didn't really pay attention to what you were reading. Try going there and reading the whole thing, taking your time doing so. :)

Vierotchka, This is what your wrote, "the gospels were written over a hundred years after the alleged facts, and were frequently changed and added to." The Nexus magazine article dated June/July 2007 was written thousands of years after the event it is reporting. If you can believe a report as true that was written thousands of years after the event, give everyone else the same opportunity. Otherwise, your web source is no more reliable than the gospels they are trying to discount.

Touche

wow

http://current.com/items/85024941_zeitgeist_the_movie

Well, Zeitgeist is unwatchable poppycock. IMHO, of course. If you want some documented, footnoted research into world myths, check out the work of Joseph Campbell. If you prefer irrefutable and unverifiable revelation, ask Resolute. He knows Mary wasn't out whoring. God only knows what else he knows. As for predecessors of parts of the Christ myth, also check out The Bacchae.

As for the content of the disturbing video: makes me SO GLAD that I didn't marry that woman I was engaged to when she and I were both fundamentalist Christians. She still is. Me, not so much.

I can't believe that anyone is talking about Christ. As Vierotchka said, there is no historical context for his existance. Many historians were present at the time, but none recorded a fringe prophet walking on water, turning into wine, or performing any other miracles.
Resolute, contemporary accounts of history are verrifiable. They are based on historical accounts from HISTORIANS. An historian is a person who researches and studies the past, trying to figure out exactly what happened. They confirm to the best of their ability what they postulate. There are no citations in the gospels, and no historical context for them to be based on. Furthermore, we don't even knoe who wrote the gospels. Vierotchka's link is written by a living or recently living person and more importantly, its sources are checkable. If you are proposing that we simply can't trust history, well that's just preposterous.
Phidippides, I don't cite Zeitgeist as factual report, more as inspiration for paranoia. There are massive conspiracies in our government and clergy, and people need to get exited about it. If people watch this movie, they'll get paranoid, and they'll want to do something about this serious and growing problem. Zeitgeist informs us of the men behind the curtain, it's up to us to decide whether they exist. Personnally, I am enthralled by the things that movie claims, and they seem sensible enough. I should do more research, though.

DCO, I think lots of people will continue to talk about Christ because, whether he is a mythological or was a historical figure, he is a player in modern times. Just check out the candidates for president.
Your faith in historians is as touching as Resolute's faith in other authorities. We need authorities - I don't want just informed opinions from someone designing an airplane, for example - but we also need to treat all of them with skepticism. The Internet should make that perfectly clear. For every site like the POCM site cited above, you can find other authoritative sites that "prove" that the gospels are literally true. Along with our skepticism we should pack a week's supply of humility, too.
As for Zeitgeist and conspiracies and paranoia: Zeitgeist is poppycock (am I repeating myself?), and if it's not factual, it can't very well inform us. Conspiracies are unlikely amongst the gang that couldn't shoot straight that we now have in office (why have a secret conspiracy when the American people go ho-hum when the administration issues press releases telling us that habeas corpus is gone and they're listening to our phone calls?). Paranoia is much less helpful than the realization that we can make government and industry and clergy much less relevant by taking control of our lives. If we stop expecting them to change and change the way we live, what power do they have over us?

Zeitgeist is a perfect example of a person writing (video) about events that happened in the past and not getting all the facts straight. His first error is citing Dec.25th as the birthday of Jesus. Jesus was born in September. This is a well known fact even in the church who will get their hands slapped for teaching error as truth. I don't fault anyone who can not bring themselves to believe in someone they have not seen. Just don't fault those that do. Those who have not seen Jesus will get the chance.

He was NOT born in September! It was July, I tell you! Maybe March. Some even say May, but definitely, certainly not September. Or December. I can't wait until Jesus comes back and tears the flesh from the hides of the infidels who got his birthday wrong. Bastards! Verily. My only question is, is he supposed to come back before, or after, Arthur?

I have seen Jesus. It was after I finished a bottle of Cognac that was really old. He looked happy. He was shorter than I expected and, well, more Jewish than most of the pictures of him. Skinny, too. Mary must not have been a good cook.

What else you got, Res?

The more you write, the more ignorant you show yourself as. There is a saying-It's better to keep quiet and remain ignorant, than open your mouth and remove all doubt.

"...the more ignorant you show yourself as."

Could you translate that into standard grammatical usage, please? I'm not sure what you're saying.

And I think the general sense of what you're trying to say in your second sentence is that it's better to remain silent and be *thought* to be a fool, than to open your mouth (or to type) and remove all doubt. If you compare your attempted quotation with this variation, you'll see a meaningful difference.

Best of luck at school.

Wait, ok, so i'm going to use a basic atheistic idea to confront the Horus and Jesus comparison:

So one thing i hear a lot from atheist is that all of these things we have today, from your simple bar of soap to this massive expanding universe that works under so many laws (some we know about, and probably many we don't know about) is that its all just here...and its a coincident. Well fine, the Jesus and Horus comparison is just a coincidence. Now I know thats not a satisfying answer, but sorry, the flying spaghetti monster jokes aren't satisfying in my own mind either.

It also doesn't hurt that Jesus was documented by non-Christian sources back in his time.

I'm not the most religious christian, i don't go to church every sunday, I don't read the Bible on a constant basis, and I do a lot of things that are looked down upon in the book and I do agree that religion can used to do bad (just look at our world now) but that doesn't stop me from believing. I have more faith in God than I do in my religion (mainly because of what the acts of HUMANS can do with it, come on, when we talk God we aren't talking about something earthly here)...you may not understand this concept but its a rather common one.

Also, when I look into all the science thats out their about the universe and how its...so structured, like i can't even begin to comprehend how well made it is. I just can't think that was made by nothing.

Oh btw, that mother blurting out the Christmas comment is a perfect example of what humans can do with religion. Jesus wasn't even born in December and the vatican just hijacked a pagan holiday that they all enjoyed and turned it into a religious celebration. Thats why some Christian groups don't celebrate it...i think of x-mas as just being a time to get free stuff (until you get a job -_-)

One more thing to my long and rather young liberal way to look at my religion, resolute and phidi, I enjoyed reading your intake. I always find it annoying when people cite Zeitgeist as their source to a discussion.

Hey, Charlatan, glad you weighed in.

First, a couple of context-setters: I'm an agnostic. I have no gripe with Christians who have a sense of humility about their beliefs and whose mission in life is higher than saying no to sex for everyone or telling others how to live our lives.

I appreciate your qualified allegiance to religion/Christianity, compared to your allegiance to God. My agnosticism is basically an expression of the tension between beauty and order on the one hand, and evil on the other. So far as Christianity goes, when reduced to the broad strokes and taken literally, as so many mindless drones insist that it must be, it makes less than no sense to me. In fact, taken literally, it may explain the world, but not in the way Christians intend.

So here's God. He makes humans. Doesn't know enough about them to know that when he points out ONE TREE in the Garden, THAT's the one they'll focus on. They eat. He shoouldn't be surprised, but he gets all pissy. (They suddenly can't think about anything but sex and how bad it is: and the beat goes on.) God throws 'em out of the Garden, holds a grudge for a LONG time. Finally, he figures out a way to get over his grudge: have the people against whom he is holding the grudge kill his son as a sacrifice. HOLD ON! What about that makes it better? I want to get a bumper sticker made that says Jesus was the son of an abusive father. Personally, I would not want to spend any quality time, much less all of eternity after this short life, in the presence of a being whose idea of closure is the murder of his son.

Now, as to your observation about the laws of the universe, I don't think scientists, agnostics, or atheists would say that there is any coincidence here. That's a non-sequitir. No matter in which manner the universe came to be, if it exists, it would have certain characteristics, and its inhabitants would have similar characteristics, since they (we, in this case) are part of the selfsame universe. We belong here. This universe is hospitable to such beings as we are, because it is the environment that has given rise to us. Saying this is coincidental makes no more sense than saying, "Isn't it coincidental that the puppy knows, at birth, where to find milk?" No, it's not.

As for satisfying answers, saying that God created the universe is not satisfying, either, is it? Doesn't it raise LOTS of thorny questions? For example:

What kind of god would create a world with child abusers and rapists, even as a possibility?

There is evil in the world. We know this viscerally, if not through our own experience. So God must countenance evil, not recognize evil, like evil, or be powerless to do anything about evil. I'm supposed to worship a being like that?

Why did God create the world? Does God need company? Entertainment? Given what he is alleged to have done to his son, who's to say that he won't just get bored with his creation and let it run down, or amok? Maybe that's what's going on. Who's to say this despot won't just erase the board and start over?

Who created God? The whole concept of creation and creator presupposes an infinite series of questions like this. Talk about an unsatisfying answer. It's like a parent answering every question of "Why" with "Because".

I don't discount the usefulness of religion, myth, fairy tale, and other stories. These things may belong to us as surely and inevitably as we belong to the universe. We may give rise to story as surely as the universe gives rise to order and time. But what fundamentalists do with it is harmful, and I'm against things that are harmful . . . though, like story and myth, harm and evil may just be something that humans give rise to, because it's our nature to do so.

Enough for now. Happy New Year, denizens of Current!

Resolute, are you a Jehovah Witness, no offense intended, just curious. I used to be one back in the 90s.

That is a horrible mother!! Just because your children decide not to walk down a blind path that the parents lead you don't treat them like that. And i don't think screaming and threatening like that is going to change his mind anyways.

this video is classic

jesus fills me with his love from behind
one day you will feel his love deep inside you