Re: Christ in Egypt: The Mythicist Position
Posted: Tue Aug 30, 2016 9:05 am
I certainly don't claim to be an expert in Egyptology or it's religions and myths and am reliant on professional scholars and Egyptologists in relation to these claims.Robert Tulip wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Contemporary scholars of Egyptology know nothing of these claimed parallels of Massey's and neither he nor you provide the primary sources for all the claims. Born of a virgin in a cave Dec 25th etc. So the onus is on you to prove the claims of these alleged parallels of Jesus life with Horus, by referencing the primary sources they are found in.
Isis was considered a perpetual virgin. There is ancient material that associates the birth of Horus with the December solstice.
They don't agree with Massey and Murdock on their claims but refute them. You are entitled to rely on Massey if you want to.
Isis may have been "considered" a perpetual virgin but it should be clear that the Horus conception is undoubtedly sexual and by definition is not a virginal conception and birth.
Mary was not a perpetual virgin and this was a later development in Catholicism which developed the cult of Mary and shows real signs of pagan influences.
The Christian primary sources are the old and new testaments where we find that Jesus had brothers and sisters and that Mary was married to Joseph.
It's preposterous and false to claim she was a perpetual virgin.
In line with this cultic teaching they then insisted that in the gospels accounts his brothers and sisters were really cousins. But the Greek word that is used is adelphoi for brothers. Adelphos means a brother according to Strong's and other Greek dictionaries.
http://biblehub.com/text/matthew/13-55.htm
Incidentally one of Jesus' brothers is named James, but Carrier thinks he can just dismiss this too by categorizing the gospels as myths.
Curiously, according to Carrier the gospel of Luke is of the genre of "myth",but according to him, the sequel Acts by the same author suddenly changes to the genre of "historical fiction"!
Murdock talks about artifacts but this can be confusing since we have to determine whether they are pre-or post Christian for starters.
The Luxor temple engraving is a matter of interpretation and even Carrier who advocates the pagan copycat thesis, along with Egyptian scholars again disagree with Murdock's interpretation.
And the Catholic co-opting of the pagan festival in making December 25th Jesus "birthday" is entirely unwarranted from the gospels accounts themselves, which give no date for this.
If the gospel writers really were promoting pagan ideas shouldn't they have put his birthday on Dec 25th?
So there are conspiracies in academia against mythicists by N.T. scholars, classical historians,and Egyptologists!Robert Tulip wrote:The blindness to this simple material by Christian believers is truly astonishing, illustrating how they refuse to see any evidence that destroys their assumptions.
The big difficulty here is that Egyptology is a guild (rather like Christian theology) to which entry requires conformity. There are vast problems in Egyptology such as how the pyramids were built and the status of magic. Interest in ideas such as those of Massey is regarded with great hostility by the Egyptology guild, which is why Acharya, like Massey, has been so comprehensively shunned by academia.
First of all N.T. scholars are not all Christian conservatives but include many agnostics and atheists like Ehrman. The very contentions between the Conservative and Liberal scholars on issues like the dating of the gospels and Acts, should be enough to tell you that.Robert Tulip wrote:It is not about the intrinsic merit of the ideas, but rather the cultural politics that associates them with taboo areas, especially in this case the heretical Docetic critique of Christian dogma. There is a serious lack of follow up, other than by Acharya, to Massey’s pioneering research on the comparative religious question of the relationship between Egyptian myth and Christianity.
It's frankly absurd to say that Egyptologists, Classical historians and liberal N.T. scholars are the slightest bit concerned about defending against Docetism.
While no expert, I find the arguments of the scholars in these fields more persuasive than those of the mythicists like Gerald Massey, who is outdated, apart from his not sourcing his claims in any credible way.