The minimal mythic Jesus that Carrier advance to go up against he minimal historic Jesus he lays out for us in Chapter 2, goes thus:

1.At the origin of Christianity, Jesus Christ was thought to be a celestial deity much like any other.

2. Like many other celestial deities, this Jesus 'communicated' with his subjects only through dreams, visions and other forms of divine inspiration (such as prophecy, past and present).

3. Like some other celestial deities, this Jesus was originally believed to have endured an ordeal of incarnation, death, burial and resurrection in a supernatural realm.

4. As for many other celestial deities, an allegorical story of this same Jesus was then composed and told within the sacred community, which placed him on earth, in history, as a divine man, with an earthly family, companions, and enemies, complete with deeds and sayings, and an earthly depiction of his ordeals.

5. Subsequent communities of worshipers believed (or at least taught) that this invented sacred story was real (and either not allegorical or only 'additionally' allegorical).

Carrier says that any of the first four premises are false, then Jesus at least began as a historical person. Any of the first four could be false without mythicism being disproved but would make it so untenable that the prior probability would be as low as to render Jesus, to some degree, historical. Moreover, both minimal theories are complementary. Proving one wrong proves the other right.

I did a search on the Greek gods and found this:

The ancient Greek gods normally took on human form and lived in a society similar to human society. They exhibited all the emotions of human beings and frequently intervened in human history. The most significant difference between the Greek gods and humans was that the gods were immortal and human beings were not.
http://www.allabouthistory.org/greek-gods.htm

Sound familiar?

As for the deities communicating to us in visions and dreams, let us not forget oracles--defined as:

a priest or priestess acting as a medium through whom advice or prophecy was sought from the gods in classical antiquity.

Apollo spoke through the oracle at Delphi, for example. Paul made himself an oracle of sorts--he saw or claimed he saw visions of Jesus who revealed things to him which he preached as his gospel.

Myths tell the same story over and over again. Jesus hidden away in Egypt to avoid the slaughter of the innocents, Moses floated down the Nile in a basket to escape a similar slaughter, Zeus hidden away saw that his father, Cronus, couldn't swallow him.

Yep, it's all Greek myth to me.

exactly, the mythological motifs are so common that the only way you could be unaware of them is to not read mythology.

and having had them pointed out the only way you could fail to see them is if you have a heavy psychological investment in one particular mythology as being true thus forcing you to have to hand wave dismiss the others so as not to be forced to admit the blinking obvious...

orthodox christians have been dumb enough to mistake mythology for fact.

they have been trapped in their own metaphors because they refuse to admit that that is what they are

symbols, poetic images.

nooooooooooo, not mah Jaysus, He's real i tells ya

Fortunately, there's nobody like that here.

DB Roy wrote:Yep, it's all Greek myth to me.

in this video Pierre Grimes shows how the gospel according to Mark is a classic greek tragedy, it follows the pattern to a T.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76D0CBXTAU0

Yes, I watched this some weeks ago when you posted it on another thread and found it quite informative.

i was hoping others would watch it as well and a heap more besides

i think i was mainly hoping Flann would watch it

I watched it this afternoon, Jesus the Christ as Greek tragedy, it seemed to fit the diagram Pierre laid out.

youkrst wrote:i was hoping others would watch it as well and a heap more besides

i think i was mainly hoping Flann would watch it

I watched it Youkrst. Not convinced really,but it's the sort of thing that looks persuasive unless you know the problems with it.

http://biblicalstudies.org.uk/pdf/q_linnemann.pdf

oh, the Q stuff, i was more interested in this aspect...

http://www.metrum.org/gosen/fromtraggospel.htm

Ever since the Enlightenment, when the gospels began to be studied in a rationalistic frame of mind as literary works within their ancient context, parallels have been drawn between the passion of Jesus and the rituals and mysteries of the dying and resurrecting gods such as Dionysus and Osiris. The death and resurrection of Osiris was enacted annually in a dramatic performance. Greek tragedy evolved from sacred plays in honor of Dionysus. Did primitive Christianity, too, begin as ritual drama?

The economy of the Gospel narratives is related to the ritual commemoration of the Passion; taking them literally we run the risk of transposing into history what are really the successive incidents of a religious drama,

so wrote Alfred Loisy, one of the most perceptive New Testament scholars of our time.[2] J. M. Robertson went even further, claiming that the story of the passion is

the bare transcript of a primitive play... always we are witnessing drama, of which the spectators needed no description, and of which the subsequent transcriber reproduces simply the action and the words...[3]