Mchasewalker writes: Of course, you've stunningly missed the point, but why am I not surprised? You've persistently demonstrated your doctrinarian obduracy and bias in this forum. So, I wouldn't expect you to behave any differently when confronted with scholarship that challenges your own particularly parochial one. (Wikipedia? Puhlee any ze! How pathetic.)
Wikipedia is notorious for its vulnerability to fundamentalist meddling and misinformation. Sadly, its founder Jimmy Wales has stated he is not so much interested in fact as he is in what can be supported with citations. We all know that the 2,000-year-old effort to rewrite, revise, reinterpret, and in some instances actually forge the Christian record has left us infinite volumes of dubious Christian "citations" posing as history and alleged eye-witness accounts.
As Francis Beare writes:
"Everything that has been recorded of the Jesus of history was recorded for us by men to whom he was Christ the Lord, and we cannot expunge their faith from the records without making the records themselves virtually worthless. There is no Jesus known to history except him who is depicted by his followers as the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour to the World.: (1962, p. 19).
The references I've cited along with their sources are the contributions of scholars of Semitic mythology, religious mythology, and both Biblical and extra-Biblical Babylonian roots of ancient Judaism; including the Iron Age emergence of Yahweh as supreme above the pantheon of other Jewish polytheistic godheads (Elohim, El Shaddai, Adonai, Theos Hypsistos, Lord Sabaoth, Lord Sabazios, Zeus Sabazios, etc.)
I used the tetragrammaton YHVH as it is the Hebrew version of Yahweh and Jehovah sans the vowels. Hebrew does not use vowels. It is also a Jewish tradition to not speak or write G-d's name in full. Thus you will find the substitute JAH in various Christian translations as well. It should be noted that this is why Jamaican Rastas use the term JAH in their Reggae lyrics and devotions as the Anglican Bible they were legally restricted to read used only that specific abbreviation.
In the point of view of mythological experts such as Otto Rank, Edouard Meyer, Wilhelm de Wett, Stephen Langdon, Joseph Campbell, Jane Ellen Harriman, and many, many others, Yahweh is a latter-day Jewish deity and Iron Age contemporary of Thor, Zeus, and Jove.
Thor is celebrated in the Eddas for his epic cosmological battle with the Midgard serpent, and it is believed that their existential struggle will eventually bring about Ragnarok, the end of creation. Thor is also an excellent example of the emerging Iron age deity with the marvelous addition of his devastating iron hammer weapon known as Mjölnir.
As far as Zeus is concerned the archeological record reveals that Zeus in his serpent form played an important role in The Eleusinian Mysteries and is depicted as a serpent in the excavation of ancient votives dating back to the Sixth century BCE.
Similarly, the Roman iteration of Zeus as Jupiter and his folk exchanges with serpents was a favorite recurrent tale from various oral traditions from the 6th century BCE and finally recorded in Aesop's fables.
The account of Yahweh fashioning the universe from the slain carcasses of earlier serpent gods and goddesses is supported by various mentions in the Tanakh and in many, many syncretic mythologies of that period. If the gods or goddesses are not slain outright then they are typically villainized as demons such as the seducer figure in Eden, or even with the serpent-headed Medusa of Greek mythology.)
The New gods and heroes of the Iron Age slew the old serpent gods and demons of the Bronze Age as a testament of their supremacy above all other gods and tribes. Yahweh is no exception.
The fact that this story is different in detail from the account described in Genesis is because it was purposefully revised and adapted to obscure its Semitic Babylonian origins. (Probably by the Babylonian Rabbi Ezra Ca. 395 BCE). Likewise with the 2 versions of Creation in Genesis, the Garden of Eden, the creation of Adam and Eve, Noah and the flood, and even the invention of Moses who was a composite of actual historical Semitic figures of Sargon of Akkad and Hammurabi, the Law giver.
The Babylonian capture, enslavement, and subsequent exile of the Jews from Babylon was switched to Egypt ( again, probably by Ezra the Scribe) to appease his Persian sponsors and conquerors, and also because it was a core belief of early Judaism that nothing holy or good could ever arise out of Babylon. Most historians and archaeologists today agree that there is no evidence whatsoever to confirm that the Exodus from Egypt ever occurred. Whereas the Babylonian capture and subsequent exile is an established historical fact.
Future ideations of Yahweh progressed through early Jewish monotheism under the Persian rule of Artaxerxes (who personally proclaimed Rabbi Ezra's compilation of the Jewish history to be "The Book of the Law of the Jewish people."
The Seleucid ruler Antiochus believed the Jews could easily be converted to worship Zeus over Yahweh. It was in this firm belief Antiochus went so far as to erect a statue of Zeus in the Second temple which became known as the abomination of desolation.
And while this eventually lead to the Jewish revolt and overthrow of the Greeks by the Romans, Hellenized Judaism would spread rapidly through the Levant and evolve into what would become Early Christianity.
As far as Jewish concepts of resurrection goes, T’chiyat hameitim, is a core doctrine of Jewish theology. Jewish mythology and OT stories occasionally refers to prophets and others who were resurrected from death, or lifted directly into eternity after bypassing death altogether.
As for Jesus, it is a historical fact that dying and rising gods were not just ubiquitous throughout the Levant in the 1st and 2nd Centuries CE (if not for hundreds of years prior) they were an essential ritual belief and practice for dozens of contemporary Mystery schools, religions, and baptismal cults of that period. Dying from one's old self and becoming "born again" was the ritual purpose of baptism and most mystery school religions. ( See The Relationship between Hellenistic Mystery Religions and Early Christianity: A Case Study using Baptism and Eucharist by Jennifer Uzzell
Plutarch described at length in his Disciplina Etrusca just how many rising and dying gods and heroes were popular and common literary motifs around the time assigned to Jesus:
"Romulus, Quirinus, the Greek fables of Aristeas the Proconnesian, and Cleomides the Astypalaean; for they say Aristeas died in a fuller's workshop, and his friends coming to look for him, found his body vanished; and that some presently after, coming from abroad, said they met him traveling toward Croton. They say, too, the body of Alcema, as they were carrying her to her grave, vanished, and a stone was found lying on the bier. And many such improbabilities do your fabulous writers relate—“
Other Sources: Joseph Campbell Gods and Heroes of the Levant pp 95-97
Wilhelm M.L. de Wette Beitrage zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament Translated by
Theodore Parker
Eduard Meyer Geschichte des Altertums Vol 2 Part 2 pp 188-190
Myths of Babylonia and Assyria, by Donald A. MacKenzie. W.O.E Oesterly and Theodore H. Robinson, An Introduction to the Books of the Old Testament, W.W. Tarn, etc.
Also Reinvestigating the Antediluvian Sumerian King List – by R. K. Harrison The Sumerian King List – by Thorkild Jacobsen (The Oriental Institute of the University of California).
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