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Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 4:16 pm
by ant
For example, Christianity practiced such 'blocking' by burning all pagan texts, demolishing pagan institutions, building and art, and outlawing critical ideas as heresy and blasphemy. Murdock suggests that a primary motive for this conduct was to conceal the truth of Christian origins in myth.
First of all, I'll admit that I have not read the book, but I genuinely intend on putting it on my list of must reads.
Having said that, what evidence (archeological/historical) is there related to the above claim?
What is the counter-evidence?
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Fri Aug 26, 2011 7:38 pm
by AlSylvester
Have you heard of the Gnostic Gospels? Perhaps you should read them. They were buried I am sure because they contain information as to how religion? was understood by some in the past. Jesus actually was tied to the ancient religion. How could you begin a new religion, Christianity, if people knew it was a copy of the past? Myself I have studied alchemy now for many years, the alchemists did everything by metaphor or allegory. Why? To protect themselves from being burned at the steak or worse! Murdock is exactly right!
Al
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 9:33 am
by johnson1010
Myth making is rampant in human culture.
When you look at a guy like David Crocket, then you look at the MYTH of Davy Crocket, how can anybody be confused as to the process of building a god out of a historical figure?
Davy didn't take that particualr swerve, but he might have.
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 7:54 pm
by Robert Tulip
johnson1010 wrote:Myth making is rampant in human culture.
When you look at a guy like David Crocket, then you look at the MYTH of Davy Crocket, how can anybody be confused as to the process of building a god out of a historical figure?
Davy didn't take that particualr swerve, but he might have.
The question here though, is whether Jesus Christ was elaborated from a historical individual like Davy Crockett, or perhaps was entirely invented, as it seems is likely with another legendary American hero,
Paul Bunyan. So we do see a confusion in the process of building a god. Apollo and Jupiter were obviously cosmic in origin, with the historical stories added to personify them. Christianity claims that Jesus was grounded in history, whereas the evidence suggests it is more likely that he came from the sky like the Greek Gods.
Wikipedia wrote:historians hold that Paul Bunyan, and specifically the idea of Bunyan as a giant lumberjack with a giant blue ox sidekick, was created in the 20th century for an advertising campaign
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sat Aug 27, 2011 8:01 pm
by Robert Tulip
AlSylvester wrote:Have you heard of the Gnostic Gospels? Perhaps you should read them. They were buried I am sure because they contain information as to how religion? was understood by some in the past. Jesus actually was tied to the ancient religion. How could you begin a new religion, Christianity, if people knew it was a copy of the past? Myself I have studied alchemy now for many years, the alchemists did everything by metaphor or allegory. Why? To protect themselves from being burned at the steak or worse! Murdock is exactly right!
Al
Good point Al, but burned at the steak is an interesting Freudian slip.
Here is source material on why these texts were buried, when heresy was made a criminal offence and all heretical texts were sought to be burnt.
http://www.earthnewsnetwork.com.au/Documents/nhl.pdf
Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity. The Nag Hammadi texts, and others like them, which circulated at the beginning of the Christian era, were denounced as heresy by orthodox Christians in the middle of the second century. We have long known that many early followers of Christ were condemned by other Christians as heretics, but nearly all we knew about them came from what their opponents wrote attacking them. Bishop
Irenaeus, who supervised the church in Lyons, c. 180, wrote five volumes, entitled The Destruction and Overthrow of Falsely So-called Knowledge, which begin with his promise to set forth the views of those who are now teaching heresy . . . to show how absurd and inconsistent with the truth are their statements . . . I do this so that . . . you may urge all those with whom you are connected to avoid such an abyss of madness and of blasphemy against Christ. He denounces as especially "full of blasphemy" a famous gospel called the Gospel of Truth. Is Irenaeus referring to the same Gospel of Truth discovered at Nag Hammadi' Quispel and his collaborators, who first published the Gospel of Truth, argued that he is; one of their critics maintains that the opening line (which begins "The gospel of truth") is not a title. But Irenaeus
does use the same source as at least one of the texts discovered at Nag Hammadi--the Apocryphon (Secret Book) of John--as ammunition for his own attack on such "heresy." Fifty years later Hippolytus, a teacher in Rome, wrote another massive Refutation of All Heresies to "expose and refute the wicked blasphemy of the heretics."
This campaign against heresy involved an involuntary admission of its persuasive power; yet the bishops prevailed. By the time of the Emperor Constantine's conversion, when Christianity became an officially approved religion in the fourth century, Christian bishops, previously victimized by the police, now commanded them. Possession of books denounced as heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and destroyed. But in Upper Egypt, someone; possibly a monk from a nearby monastery of St. Pachomius, took the banned books and hid them from destruction--in the jar where they remained buried for almost 1,600 years.
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 8:33 am
by DWill
Well, this is not exactly the right thread on which to post this, but pardon me, I can't locate the idea of Robert's I wanted to talk about. I believe he said that the impetus for the Jesus story could be the trauma felt by Jews after the destruction of the Second Temple. Although I'm sure there was trauma, the creation of Jesus would appear to be very much a minority response. Why would just a tiny sect of Jews respond that way to the catastrophe? It makes more sense to me to view all the Gospel writings as basically gentile in perspective and origin, which would remove the temple destruction as a crucial event. This would also explain the always puzzling narrative point of view in the Gospels, with the narrators frequently denouncing "the Jews" as though they are other than the group to which the narrator belongs. There is, of course, traditional support for gentile authorship, at least in the case of the eponymous author of Luke, who is held to have been a Greek physician. But I would speculate that all of the authors could be gentile, even Mark, who is often called the most "Jewish."
There would certainly have been a power struggle between the newer religion and the older. Perhaps the newer religion begins as a rival strand of Judaism, who adopted or created the figure of Jesus, but who could not get the establishment to go along with their belief in him as the Messiah. Whether or not any of the history in the Gospels is real, it could come to be received as real by the gentile authors, who had joined up with the rival sect. My bet is still that the Gospel authors saw themselves as engaged in a battle with the Jews and that they believed they had historical truth on their side. They faithfully report this purported history, in the sense that they include inconvenient or embarrassing details about Jesus which they would have omitted if they were fictionalizing. They are far from disinterested observers overall, of course, as they take pans to pin the death of Jesus on the Jews. They could be currying favor with the Romans, who, in any scenario likely to have been historical, could be expected to have been less hands-off than the Romans in the Gospels.
For this version to have validity, it isn't necessary for Jesus to have been historical. But it does to me seem likely that there was a historical prompt of some sort, perhaps in the Jesus reported by the Talmud to have been crucified around 100 BCE.
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 9:18 am
by tat tvam asi
Dwill wrote: But I would speculate that all of the authors could be gentile, even Mark, who is often called the most "Jewish."
And that ties into the Therapeutan brotherhood network and all Dwill. You really should read through the chapter on the Alexandrian Roots of Christianity with it's discussion of the Syrian and Antioch connections with your above statements in mind. The Thread and link to a preview of the chapter which can be found here:
http://www.booktalk.org/christ-in-egypt ... 11106.html
It's possible that the writers of the gospels - which appear into the literary record in the second century - could have believed that they were writing about history by the time they set out to write their gospels. But one would also have to wonder how in that time period anyone could miss the astrotheology of the gospel stories at the same time. If these writers were taking initiated mystery drama material that they had come across, but the writers themselves not being initiates of the ancient mysteries, then it's possible that they could have taken the stories as literal history and then wrote about them from the perspective of thinking that it was all historical. Many of the pagan gods who were completely astrotheological were at times written about as if they were historical. Jesus isn't alone in that sense. Tacitus is guilty of writing that way about pagan Gods who were obviously not historical. And that's either from him being completely ignorant himself or simply writing in such a way so as to be understood by the general masses who thought about their God-Men as real historical figures from the past. Even the most blatantly fictional God-Men had some percentage of the population who could only manage to think of them in historical / literal terms. So it's a complicated question really...
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 11:41 am
by AlSylvester
" If these writers were taking initiated mystery drama material that they had come across, but the writers themselves not being initiates of the ancient mysteries, then it's possible that they could have taken the stories as literal history and then wrote about them from the perspective of thinking that it was all historical."
As you write and comment about it today for the same reason. Jesus, said in the Gnostics several places, "Jesus learned the Magic of Egypt.". You know of hundreds in our past, many very famous persons that also knew this magic." The Magic is the Secret mysteries mentioned in many places by Archarya in her book. It was talked about, also in her book, by Philosophers, but also, in a secretive maner! Because this secretive Mysterie is still not known by todays scholars, it is "Still" talked about in that maner (not understood or known). The past and if Jesus was a myth cannot be answerd correctly until it is known! Sir Issac Newton was an alchemists and spoke with allegory and metaphor about this Mysterie! Should we call him a Myth? The question I have and that needs to be answered, "Would the myth makers talk about this mystery truthfully when they knew, (also in Archarys book), that to do so meant death"? It stated in the Gnostics that Jesus was put to death because he did! Why would a Myth be put to death? I can already hear the answer, "He had to be to satisfy the mythology of Osiris." Then there is another question that needs to be answered, "What was the so called myth of Osiris based on? Sir W. Budge said that, "It had to be based on something"! Was Mr. Budge wrong also? The question of if Jesus was a real person depends on that answer.
Al
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Sun Aug 28, 2011 8:33 pm
by tat tvam asi
Al, you're being an idiot.
Sir Issac Newton was an alchemists and spoke with allegory and metaphor about this Mysterie! Should we call him a Myth?
Am I to take this seriously or what? Sir Issac Newton is a well documented historical figure noted and acknowledged by many contemporary sources during his life time. Jesus, in complete opposition, has nothing even remotely close to that. If he did, there would be no such thing as mythicism, obviously. But because there's no documention from any contemporary source, there exists a skeptical position towards the Christ mythology.
"Would the myth makers talk about this mystery truthfully when they knew, (also in Archarys book), that to do so meant death"?
More idiocy. The story is presented as historical to cloak the meaning of the myth. The initiated could see it, the general public could not. And taking Jesus as historical is a large part of that cloaking the meaning from the masses. Hence, as long as you're looking at the meaning as historical you yourself remain duped by the work of the writers...
It stated in the Gnostics that Jesus was put to death because he did! Why would a Myth be put to death? I can already hear the answer, "He had to be to satisfy the mythology of Osiris." Then there is another question that needs to be answered, "What was the so called myth of Osiris based on? Sir W. Budge said that, "It had to be based on something"! Was Mr. Budge wrong also? The question of if Jesus was a real person depends on that answer.
So you threw an idiocy cherry on top of it all. A myth symbolizing the annual cycle of the sun and organic life has to involve a death and resurrection motif, or else it wouldn't represent these two natural cycles at all and hence the myth would be meaningless without the inclusion. Yes, the question of Jesus as a real person does depend on that answer, troll bag. And at the end of the day you have nothing valid to add to the ongoing burden of proof for an historical gospel Jesus...
Re: Christ in Egypt: A Philosophical Deconstruction of Christianity
Posted: Mon Aug 29, 2011 5:50 am
by Robert Tulip
Tat, I agree with you that Al is off track with his imagination of Christ as a magical alchemist, but it really is not productive for you to respond so aggressively. His trolling seems to be quite harmless on the surface, presenting another faith-based view that can be rebutted by reason, in order to show how the mythicist view is rational. Even if Al gets it wrong, it is better to respond with logic than with abuse. Other people view astrotheology as just as fanciful and fringe as alchemy. Making hostile comments may not encourage people to listen to positive comments you make. It is frustrating to see Al's lack of understanding of Murdock's work, and I don't think he will convince anyone of his unique fantasy, but I remain of the view that politeness and courtesy and reason are the only way to encourage respect and dialogue and learning. Flame wars don't help anyone. At least Al is interested in how Christianity links to Egypt.