Two origins of Christianity?

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The Biblical Christ is what can be called a “Composite Character.” A Composite Character is a literary creation that is formed by combining traits from several individuals who may be either real or imagined. After being created from an amalgamation of different characters, this new Composite Character is then put into the context of a fictional story.

Included in the mix of Composite Characters who created the modern idea of Jesus Christ, is the Jewish Messiah who was prophesied about for a while before the story of Jesus is supposed to have taken place. The Jesus Christ character is also based and one or more very early rabbis along with several other individuals who lived in Palestina over the course of the First Century CE. In her book titled The Christ Conspiracy, the author who writes under the pseudonym “Acharya S.” outlines how the tale of Jesus Christ has many parallels with much older religious tales.

For example, when studying the state religion of ancient Egypt, one finds that Horus had 12 disciples like Jesus, and one of them was named Matu, which sounds a lot like Mathew. The Hindu tale of Krisha includes Krisha’s primary disciple who was named Arjon, and Arjon is a moniker that sounds a lot like Jesus’s closest disciple who was named John. The Hindu religion also includes a story about a man who was swallowed by a giant fish, so the biblical tale of Jonah is not an original by any means. Jesus Christ is renown for transmuting water into wine, but this same trick was performed by ancient Greece’s Dionysus long before the Jesus mythology ever took the stage.
 
Longfellow said:
I don't remember why, but for some reason I thought that diaspora Jews would have used the Greek word for anointed. What would you think would be most likely?
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For most diaspora Jews Greek would have been the common every day language spoken by them in contrast to the Aramaic spoken, with some regional dialect differences, in Judea and the surrounding area. Contrary to what some believe, Hebrew remained a spoken language by a limited group of people in limited circumstances. That said, in specifying Jesus in the way you have done in your post it would either have been in Hebrew or Greek, not a mixture of the two.
 
@mystic_friend -

I’m sure you are aware that just about anything said about Acharya S in the present tense is not accurate since it has been 10 years since her death.

I assume, as well, that you are aware that her views are not widely held and have been refuted and/or disputed by others. Given that, could you lay out why you find her arguments persuasive?
 
RabbiO said:
@mystic_friend -

I’m sure you are aware that just about anything said about Acharya S in the present tense is not accurate since it has been 10 years since her death.

I assume, as well, that you are aware that her views are not widely held and have been refuted and/or disputed by others. Given that, could you lay out why you find her arguments persuasive?
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1.) the bible was also written 2000 years ago and the writer is also dead
2.) a lot of people also refute the bible
3.) a lot of people dont believe in the bible as well
so by your logic the bible is also false
and to answer your second question, i feel like there are way too many parallels from other religions, which makes me feel like archarya s's theory is true
 
mystic_friend said:
1.) the bible was also written 2000 years ago and the writer is also dead
2.) a lot of people also refute the bible
3.) a lot of people dont believe in the bible as well
so by your logic the bible is also false
and to answer your second question, i feel like there are way too many parallels from other religions, which makes me feel like archarya s's theory is true
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Thank you for posting your opinion but since you are new you probably dont know our guidelines. This is the Christianity sub forum and we ask that you be respectful of our faith.
 
RabbiO said:
For most diaspora Jews Greek would have been the common every day language spoken by them in contrast to the Aramaic spoken, with some regional dialect differences, in Judea and the surrounding area. Contrary to what some believe, Hebrew remained a spoken language by a limited group of people in limited circumstances. That said, in specifying Jesus in the way you have done in your post it would either have been in Hebrew or Greek, not a mixture of the two.
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Thank you. I think I remember now what I was thinking, but my brain was scrambled.
 
mystic_friend said:
1.) the bible was also written 2000 years ago and the writer is also dead
2.) a lot of people also refute the bible
3.) a lot of people dont believe in the bible as well
so by your logic the bible is also false
and to answer your second question, i feel like there are way too many parallels from other religions, which makes me feel like archarya s's theory is true
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You have misconstrued what I wrote. I did not say that Archarya S’ theories were wrong. I simply stated that her positions were not widely accepted and were disputed and/or refuted and as such, since you were presenting her those positions spelled out in her book as proof of a position, I wanted clarification as to why you found her position convincing.
 
Longfellow said:
Actually, maybe all that I really want to say is that *if* some diaspora Jews believed in a figure something like an archangel that one or more of them saw in visions, thinking that he was the promised king but also Hellenized, even without knowing anything about the teacher from Galilee, it would be quite natural to call him Lord Savior Anointed. Then when those Jews and the followers of the teacher from Galilee found each other, it would be natural for them to think that the figure in the visions was the teacher from Galilee.
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The problem for you in this is its clearly hard enough to prove the existence of Jesus, but now you're suggesting the existence of another figure, which seems to be compounding the difficulty ... you'd gave to provide some reference that the figure or a school with that figure at its head actually existed?

What teachings from that figure were compounded with Jesus's teaching?
 
Thomas said:
The problem for you in this is its clearly hard enough to prove the existence of Jesus, but now you're suggesting the existence of another figure, which seems to be compounding the difficulty ... you'd gave to provide some reference that the figure or a school with that figure at its head actually existed?

What teachings from that figure were compounded with Jesus's teaching?
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I'm not trying to prove the existence of either one. My point is that even if Carrier's mythicism were true, it would not be an argument against historicity.

As a friend of my said, it might be possible that the first Christians believed in a Jesus who never walked the earth, but it fails the test of having actually happened that way. :D
 
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As I said here or somewhere else, I've been browsing through the book "On the Historicity of Jesus," by Richard Carrier. I got interested in it because I thought that I saw some logical fallacies in what people were saying that it said, and I wanted to see if it actually said that. I was planning to document the fallacies, but it's starting to look like more work than I want to put into it. I'll just describe what I think I'm seeing. It says that it's using a formula that's been proven mathematically, to calculate a probability for the existence of Jesus. The method it's using starts with an estimate of the probability of something happening, which I'll call "event x," then it considers some things that have actually happened, and uses estimates of how likely those would be if event x happened, along with the first estimate of its probability, to calculate a new estimate. Rinse, repeat.

One fallacy I see, as I said before, is that the formula has only been proven for numbers from a probability space as that is defined in probability theory, and the book doesn't define that space. Another is that it compares two hypotheses, which it calls "minimal historicity" and "minimal mythicism," and says that the way it's using the formula won't work if they can both be true, or both be false, then it gives examples of how they actually can both be false! It says that the probability of those is too small to make any difference, but it is well known that a small difference in inputs to a formula can result in a large difference in the result. Another fallacy is more complicated to explain, and I don't want to take the time for it now.
 
mystic_friend said:
In her book titled The Christ Conspiracy, the author who writes under the pseudonym “Acharya S.” outlines how the tale of Jesus Christ has many parallels with much older religious tales.
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Thomas said:
@mystic_friend –

I'm afraid @RabbiO is quite right, from what I gather this book is largely founded on a series of factually erroneous arguments.

There's an extensive review of the book here.
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Yes, I ran across the works of Acharya S, also known as DM Murdock, early on when I was first really reading up on world religions including Christian history.
If I remember, she was a trained scholar or at least had some advanced education in the classics, but did not have employment in academia and functioned as an independent scholar, without peer review or tenure to worry about. So her work was filled with opinions and errors and poor citations and the like.
 
I'm fantasizing a first encounter between some believers in the man from Galilee and some Diaspora believers in a savior king that they know only from scriptures, visions and his work in their lives.

Galilee: You speak of "Lord Savior King." You've heard of Him already?"
Diaspora: Heard of Him? We know him, personally, from the scriptures, our visions, and his work in our lives. That's happening in the homeland as well?
Galilee (To companion, disappointed): "Oh, so not the true one."
Diaspora (frowning) True one? What do you mean?
Galilee: Have you not heard of the teacher from Galilee?
Diaspora: Teacher from Galilee? Teacher from Galilee? You're saying that there's a --
(all three pause, pondering)
Diaspora: Could it be ...?
Galillee: Could it be ...?
 
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