I get the feeling that you’ll be able to find the Osiris, Horus and Isis myths anywhere you wanted if you squint hard enough, even in Norse, Mesoamerican, or Chinese mythology. The trick is not to point out a parallel (mythologies tend to have many shared themes) but to identify evidence to demonstrate a causal influence on early Christianity.
I tend to see early Christianity as one of many Greco-Roman mystery cults that take some kind of exoticism (Cybele, Serapis, Mithraism, Isis, etc.) and repackage those symbols in the same product (new: Christianity, a mystery religion with added exotic Judaism), but couldn’t tell you just how that came to pass. But, there is some evidence in semi-contemporary sources. Apuleius’ Golden Ass (which is a great read for an ancient novel, and surprisingly funny) is essentially an apologetic for the Roman mystery cult of Isis (which has virtually nothing to do with the older Egyptian religions other than the symbols they borrowed) that slags the Cybele cult along the way. Seeing the way both are treated, both the commonalities with the Jesus cult are remarkable, as is the way the apologetic is formed (it’s basically Augustine’s Confessions, but funnier, and with less pathetic self-flagellation), and the insular approach to slandering and rejecting other religions is already there as well.
I don’t see much of a need to explain the Roman religion of Christianity by seeking outside Roman sources that already hold virtually every aspect of the structure of the cult (the symbols shift, the structure remains the same). Paul spilled a lot of words in some epistles struggling to explain how the cult he invented (denying he invented it, but claiming that it was divinely revealed, naturally) wasn’t a Roman mystery religion, but the end result of his attempt just makes it look all the more likely.
Christianity is associated with solar symbolism and Jesus is the central figure…
Easter Sunday is always celebrated after the first full moon on or after the vernal (spring) equinox–always!–check out an almanac.
St. Peters Square in the Vatican is a shrine to the sun–check out the chaos star drawn on the ground inside St.Peters Square–it looks like the asterisk above the #8 on your computer keyboard. What we call our sun is a star. St. Peters Square is not shaped like a square but an oval–as in the earths elliptical orbit around the sun.
The African-Kemetic (Egyptian) monument sitting in the middle of the chaos star and oval in St. Peters Square is not Christian. The Tejen or Tekhen (called obelisk by the Greeks) is a African-Kemetic solar and religious monument, deliberately taken out of Africa and placed in the middle of St. Peters Square.
When the Catholic Church has a funeral for a pope–guess which direction and at what monument the trapezoid coffin faces.
I will be happy to help you–as soon as I finish the symbolic eating of the flesh and drinking the blood of my sacrificed god in the holy sacrament of cannibalism, i.e.communion or the Eucharist.
Well, yeah, probably an indication that such a person’s followers held the memories of such a Jewish mystic, born at around a specific time, around about a specific area who’s preaching wasn’t orthodox and who may have fallen afoul of the powers that be in the temple at the time, in a much higher esteem than anyone else around at the time.
The non-myhtical ‘facts’ that can be assumed apply to any number of such people who probably lived in the area at the time is such a banal and uninteresting argument as to be hardly worth making.
But then, proponents of this theory tend to first abandon application of the ‘mythical’ qualities or perhaps even the supposed importance of such an individual at an early stage in their theorising.
So there was probably this guy, see. And later people thought he was more important and holy than he really was.
What’s this symbolic talk? The largest sect of christianity believes it’s real magic that literally turns the cracker and purple stuff into giblets and blood. Even if the majority of adherents don’t believe that outright, it’s the official doctrine. They just don’t emphasize that part too closely. I’d guess because of all those wars during the reformation.
There were several attempts to evangelize to the Pirahã people of the Amazon. It failed because their culture is naturally skeptical and based on eye-witness accounts. They don’t keep long histories, don’t tell mythical stories, and don’t even make art outside of their clothes and tools.
When Daniel Everett tried to explain the idea of Jesus to them, it went like this:
Daniel: “So, there’s this guy called Jesus”
Pirahã Dude: “Yeah? How do you know him?”
Daniel: “I know him in my heart”
Pirahã Dude: “Sure, but like, you’ve met him right?”
Daniel: “Uh, well… No. You see he lived on earth a long time ago.”
Pirahã Dude: “Ah, so your father knew him though, right?”
Daniel: “No… He lived so long ago, nobody alive now knew him, and their fathers didn’t either.”
Pirahã Dude: “…Why the hell are you telling me about this guy? Nobody knows him, nobody you know knew him, what’s the point of talking about this guy? Sounds to me like you’re making up stories!”
Yeah but the stories we’re making up are totally about a real guy, dude!
Are those the people that have specific identifiers in their language denoting the order of ‘having seen’?
I saw with my own eyes.
I was there and heard it but couldn’t see.
I was in the area and a trusted friend told me what happened right after.
I was there and heard it from a potentially unreliable source right after it was supposed to have happened etc…
It wouldn’t surprise me if the Pirahã had that in their language. Except that, according to at least two linguists who studied them, they have the simplest grammar of all languages. For instance it has no relative clauses or grammatical recursion. It also doesn’t have any words for numbers, nor concept of discrete values greater than one.
They can reason mathematically, but they don’t count. They prefer to deal in relative terms with numbers, like “my pile of matches is bigger than yours” rather than “I have 8 matches, you have 6”.
More info:
There’s also an interesting Youtube video of Daniel Everett talking about how his experience with the Pirahã People led him to eventually abandon religion because he saw the corrupting nature of evangelism. Evangelism is all about exploiting guilt and poverty. The Pirahã People have neither.
Peter Gordon writes that the language has a very complex verb structure: "To the verb stem are appended up to 15 potential slots for morphological markers that encode aspectual notions such as whether events were witnessed, whether the speaker is certain of its occurrence, whether it is desired, whether it was proximal or distal, and so on. None of the markers encode features such as person, number, tense or gender.
Well, you would remember wrong wouldn’t you? To the Pirahã you’re a crooked-head who talks nonsense! The sensible Pirahã have straight heads that think clearly.
Simple or complex from whose point of view? A more complex morphology/verbal structure generally produces a more rigid ordering of elements, a simpler morphology/verbal structure a freer ordering of elements. Each has its own difficulties.
