OK. I can accept that — but do realize that Sol Invictus reflects a prior astrological event, and as those events — solstice and equinox — are entirely natural, there is no reason why they should not take their place in the Christian liturgical cycle. I tend to see it as Christianity 'baptizing' nature rituals, rather than incorporating nature rituals into Christianity — it doesn't alter the doctrine.
Sun worship et al is not a revealed doctrine, but rather reasoned and personified from observation of the annual cycle. There is no reason why Christ should not or could not be represented as the Sun (which corresponds to Logos); nor why the Father and Son relationship could not be imaged as a Saturn-Jupiter relation, except that what we can derive from such observations is peripheral ...
OK, you do realize that by definition nature religions are Pagan, right? Here you seem to acknowledge, freely and unabashedly, a Pagan influence on Christianity; yet chafe at the thought when anybody else suggests the same thing? Do you see the lapse in the logic, here? Either Paganism influenced Christianity, or it did not. You can’t be “a little bit” pregnant.
(There is also material evidence in Scripture that would argue for a birthdate of Christ in December.)
Hey, I like the annunciation story too, Luke is my favorite. One problem, the sheep were still in the fields. You are aware it snows in Palestine, yes? The sheep would have been brought in from the fields before then…
My own view is that the natural reflects the supernatural, and that the supernatural prefigures the natural, so personally I have no problem with the incorporation of lesser truths into the greater truths.
So here we get to the crux of the matter…and I would suggest this has been an ongoing (and successful I might add) strategy the Church has employed basically since Paul, although it was taken to new heights after Nicaea. The strategy of incorporating native beliefs and superstitions into the core Christian praxis in order to make it more palatable to the masses, pun intended. This is precisely that I alluded to earlier regarding Haiti and Mexico as just two examples.
OK, but let's place them in their proper historical context. Wildman traditions are everywhere (and I believe a reflection of the sub/unconscious)? and the Mummers were mid to late medieval era? Prior to the Mummers were the Mystery Plays.
The Wildman tradition and various Mummers and Mystery Plays (I understand the Mummers to be much older than the middle ages) precede our modern Christmas…but it still remains how Christ’s birth got entangled in a *very* Pagan tradition that dates into antiquity. It’s not as easy as “oh, it’s just a natural event,” it is *much* more than that. There are so many Pagan overtures in Christmas alone…Yule logs, decorated trees, and more…that are comfortably rolled into the Christian usurping of that holiday alone. Shall we go further and discuss Easter (worshipping the rising sun) or Halloween?
OK, but then Christ presents Satan as 'a murderer' and thus reveals something about Satan that is not immediately apparent in the Jewish tradition.
Indeed there are conflicts I intend to raise for BB. According to Vermes (I finished his book today, now I want the two sequels), Jesus was likely a Jewish healer. That meant something a bit different back then, because health was directly attributed to devils…Jesus was an exorcist. There were others too, so he was not unique. I am left wondering just what the Jewish view of devils (there is even mention of a queen of the devils), particularly in light of what I have been told repeatedly regarding Satan. If I understand correctly, Satan is a district attorney on G-d’s payroll so to speak, but there also seems room for devils in one guise or another…
I tend to think far more knowledge is claimed about Mithraism than actually exists, and for a long time many have posed Mithraism as a precursor to Christianity, from which Christianity derives its rituals ... I think the scholarly opinion is now the reverse, we actually know very little, and there is evidence that Mithraism copied Christianity.
I agree there is little understood about Mithraism, but that is not to say there is nothing known about Mithraism, and I have seen absolutely nothing to suggest that Mithraism copied Christianity. That actually makes no sense to me…Mithraism came from Persia and predates Christianity by some time. There *is* suggestion that within the military ranks…where it is universally acknowledged among scholars of the period…Mithraism was a popular religion. It was secretive, and it was male oriented. What I have suggested is the possibility that within the ranks…particularly among the ranks of Constantine’s army specifically…Christians and Mithraic soldiers, among others, would have fought side-by-side, lived and died for each other as only comrades in arms can understand. There would have been an intimate intermingling of ideas, memes, thoughts and superstitions; it could not have been otherwise and still maintain a cohesive fighting unit. Constantine’s army proved itself to be a cohesive fighting unit time and again.
Again that is, I suggest, an invention. Baptism in Judaism is to make clean, but baptism in Christianity is a rebirth, of which remission of sin is a part, but not the totality. Again, this element is not present in contemporary religious traditions.
I can understand that, but I do think you've been misled by anti-Christian polemical writings. The influence of Mithraism on Christianity is now largely refuted (it's been discussed elsewhere here) and I would say the actual archaeological evidence points in the other direction.
Please show me, I have seen zero to suggest that Mithraic influence is soundly refuted regarding the formulation of later Christianity. What I have seen suggests the Mithraic baptism is a “once and for all” initiation (just like Christianity), it is for remission of sin and to make the initiate whole and pure to start their new life (just like Christianity), and just like Christianity the initiate is “saved by the blood” of the sacred bull, although Christianity substitutes Christ for the sacrifice. I do think these alone are significant points of intersection between the two faiths.
Christianity adopted pagan religious sites, and in some instances pagan religious festivals, but always by showing the supernatural Christian aspect that informs the vestigial pagan cosmological dimension.
OK, you do see how logically you contradict yourself here, right? Again, a person cannot be “a little bit” pregnant…either you are or you ain’t. Either Christianity was, or it was not, influenced by and an influence upon regional Paganism.
But the doctrines are uniquely Christian, and the liturgical practices are proto-Jewish.
But that is not the end of the story, there is more to it. The doctrines are not “uniquely” Christian if they are shared by others, particularly by other contemporary regional Pagans. The liturgical practices were proto-Jewish only for so long…Nicaea sealed the fate, at which time all semblance of Judaism was erased. (If you’re gonna continue using absolutes, I’m gonna start using them too.)
I think the evidence is there, the Church today does basically what the Church did in the time Luke was writing Acts, and as for belief, then that too is evidenced in first century writings.
But Thomas, we just got done going over this. Please refer to my previous posts which in turn refer to my references regarding the Council at Nicaea (taken by the way, from Fordham university, good Catholic school that it is). After Nicaea, anything to do with what the “Jewish” followers of Jesus taught and practiced was set aside…deliberately…they weren’t even invited to the dance!
There's been a huge industry in trying to disprove and discredit Christian doctrine — the Mithraic thing is one example of it — but following the rule of Occam's razor, it's harder to discredit and requires more assumption without evidence than the contrary.
I agree motivations can be…misguided?...when approaching this subject, and certainly this stuff has been used rather broadly to instill distrust or otherwise undermine the faith of any so inclined. Amergin, for example, is only one example of those who wish to abuse this stuff, and the typical response by the typical person is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As I said to Amergin in my previous post, Occam’s razor is inappropriate in this circumstance. Christianity did not form in a vacuum, and it cannot be appropriately studied in a vacuum. Religion is only a portion…a significant portion, but still only a portion…of the human sociological condition. I am not making this complex, it *is* complex. To unnecessarily reduce it is not an honest enquiry into the subject matter. (I mean no slight by my comment) Other portions must be taken into account and considered.
Without doubt the view of things has changed over time — I could lay out a pattern of how the understanding of the Eucharist has changed over the centuries, and quite a critical and challenging one for Catholics at that — but the evidence for that is drawn from contemporary Catholic theology!
Do you think that for the first 300 years the Church was immune from change? Did change only occur after Nicaea?
I was thinking of a way to try to explain…If you were to pick up and transplant a person born and raised in rural China into New York City, what do you think their reaction would be? I would think the first reaction would be culture shock…no language, no commonality of foods, no common dress, no common religion or beliefs…in other words, short of simply being human, there wouldn’t be a great deal of relevant associations or commonality. Now, could a person adapt? Certainly, or they can curl up inside themselves and shun everything. Now, presuming there is good reason to stay, and there is motivation to relate to the new culture, then that person will make an effort to learn the language, adopt (at least some of) the foods and dress, and might even make a cursory bid for the sake of respect to the local religion. After a while, many years really, that person would end up with an amalgam of cultural ideas and expressions floating through his head and heart.
I made an extreme example to stress the point, but we do this everyday anyway even now. I know the UK well enough to know that you are facing some of the same cultural challenges we face here in the states. That is, how to get multiple cultures to cooperate. In first century Palestine, particularly in Galilee (according to Vermes), there was already a cultural mix clashing in the heads and hearts of the people. By the time we get to Rome more than two hundred years later, we are looking at an advanced cosmopolitan society (like New York) trying now for reasons I have already described weeks ago to incorporate yet another “sub”-culture into the mix (like rural China). For the new guy it is traumatic how much he must change to keep up, for the establishment it’s just another day at the office.
It really isn’t any wonder some things got…adjusted. It would be far more difficult to believe they were not adjusted at all and were accepted completely and totally without change… That’s just human nature and sociology.
Catholicism and the Orthodox Patriarchies have continued to maintain the Mystical (or Sacramental) element as the heart of the tradition, whereas from the Reformation on, the post-reform traditions have been continual attempts to rationalize the Mystery and, in effect, explain it away, leaving precious little more than a pseudo-mystical humanism.
I think I can grant that the effort is there, and I have no objection in that sense. I’m not so certain I agree about the “pseudo-mystical humanism” though, at least not across the board. While there are some denominations that are…intellectually motivated?, ...there are also those that are decidedly emotionally based and have no problem whatsoever swallowing mythos that doesn’t make any sense to a rational mind. It's all a mystery, you're not supposed to understand, all you've got to do is believe!
From the turn of the nineteenth century, institutional religion was seen as part and parcel of the 'establishment' and the Romance Movement rejected 'organized religion' as it rejected organized industrialism — and not without reason, in some respects — and sought other ways of spiritual expression, largely by the reinvention of some perceived 'golden age' in history, hence the emergence of Wiccanism, Theosophy, etc, etc.
I don’t disagree, certainly not in a general sense, but I think this would carry us away from the discussion at hand. It’s difficult enough to focus on the formative centuries of Christianity without clouding it for others with matters that really are not germane to the issue.
... but I'm also aware that the present is largely anti-Catholic, so any anti-Catholic polemic usually gets accepted with far less critical examination than the pro-Catholic — dare I say it, but the 'Mithraism invented Christianity' thing is accepted with far less supportive evidence (I would suggest no evidence at all, in fact) and far less critical evaluation than one applies to the suggestion that surviving text evidence is reliable?
My mom was nominally Catholic, my step-dad was nominally Catholic, I was baptized as an infant, and some of the best people to cross my life have been Catholic. I am not “anti-Catholic” as such…but neither am I averse to pursuing the truth as reality. In doing so, I am not beyond ignoring pleas to forego my quest for whatever polemical reason. As Mulder was famous for saying in the X-Files series...”the truth is out there.” The trick is in finding the truth…because the matter *is* so complex and convoluted.
Baptism in the Christian tradition is a one-time act, it's an initiation and a spiritual seal, and in that sense cannot be repeated as a rite.
Covered above. Considering the excommunication of any who practiced “Jewish ablutions” at Nicaea, I don’t see any corollary…but I do see one with the Mithraic baptismal practices, short of using bull blood to perform the rite.
