Paganism's "Good Dreams"/ Dying & Rising Gods

[Josh]

10/05:

Brent,

I did some review on what I was trying to communicate about pagan mythology and it's distinction (or lack of distinction) between spiritual metaphor and actual, concrete history. I was saying that Judaism was pretty much alone in asserting that their God had actually entered into real space-time history, whereas the stories of pagan Gods (in particular the Roman pantheon) weren't really meant to be taken as things that had actually occured in history.

But I need to take a step back here. Although I think that claim is largely valid (I would love to hear exceptions that you are aware of), the writer I was using as my source (NT Wright, acclaimed Cambridge/ Oxford New Testament Scholar), was actually talking primarily about what Pagan Mythology meant when describing Dying and Rising Gods.

Here's a quote (my comments added) that might generate some discussion:

"Did any worshipper in these cults [not in a perjurative sense, but in describing pagan priestly systems] from Egypt to Norway,at any time in antiquity, think that actual human beings, having died, actually cam back to life? Of course not. These multifarious and sophisticated cults enacted the god's death and resurrection as a metaphor, whose concrete referent was the cycle of seed-time and harvest, of human reproduction and fertility... Nobody actually expected the mummies to get up, walk about and resume noraml living; nobody in that world would have wanted such a thing, either."

That the Hebrew notion of resurrection is without parallel in ancient mythology is the subject of his 800 page volume, "The Resurrection of the Son of God".

Comments? Questions? Rebuttals? Yes,... buts?

[garner]

10/5:

Not anexception, but a quick note.

Nimrod and Simeramis...where the virgin birth was counterfeited and reincarnation was stated as Nimrod being ressurected (Tammuz). I encourage people to use any of the above names on google and do a bit of research, what they will see is that ALL religions go back to Babylon.

www.geocities.com/nephilimnot/tammuz.html

www.digitex.net/koinonia/bible/nimrod.htm

Also, there was ONE king in Egypt that believed in ONE God, and not many gods, though I cannot recall his name right now. I know he existed though...cuz community college told me he did

[Josh]

10/05:

That was Akhenaten, father of Tutankahmen. He had Egypt worship only the sun god, Aten.

I remember a book you let me read about Nimrod, et al. I'll try and see how that fits into the picture, though I suspect the legends developed over time long after the historical people had become legendary, thus increasing the odds that those claims were taken more metaphorically.

[Josh]

10/05:

I have to say, dirvergent claims about Nimrod and Semiramus are a dime a dozen. As the following two Wikipedia articles make clear:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimrod_%28king%29

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiramis

Though I despair of ever pinning down anything super solid about the identities of these mytho-historical characters, I must say that 'reincarnated' would be a more accurate term for what happens with Nimrod/ Tammuz.

Mythologies like these are often used, as seems implicit in one of your sites, as ways to debunk the claims of the NT (I know that's not your position, of course). But the idea goes something like, "see, these ideas were floating around for a long time and the New Testament writers just borrowed them and incorporated them into their own mythology".

But this is b.s.. For instance, one of the websites is insinuating that the idea of a 'crucified' god was coopted by the NT. Despite my extreme skepicism of a such a claim (which is not well substantiated there), a story about a crucifixion 1000 yrs. before Christ somehow influencing the NT only makes sense if it could be shown that the NT writers "invented" the story of Jesus. But this is ludicrous. He actually was crucified. His disciples were claiming his virgin birth within at least 30 yrs of his death-- in the living memory of Jesus' generation. His disciples pointed to an event in real history, his resurrection, just a few years prior (20 in print, arguably immediately after). Mythological ideas don't cause historical events to happen, but it does work the other way.

Now, it seems that you think all of these elements in ancient pagan mythology that bear some similarity to Christian ideas are the counterfeiting work of Satan. But I'm more with Chesterton and Lewis that these were originally "good dreams" or "whispers of truth" from God-- foreshadowings if you like, that were eventually corrupted. We should not be surprised to see the foreshadowing of Christian truth spread throughout the world. I would recommend reading the book "Eternity in the Hearts" which we studied as a group a few months back-- which covers this topic pretty thoroughly.

For what it's worth...

[Josh]

10/05:

Check out this passage, taken from the book "Miracles", by CS Lewis, from “the Grand Miracle” Chapter. It totally relates to some of our discussion. The last sentence sums up the whole thing, but Lewis' detailed descriptions here are excellent:

"Death and rebirth..., in this descent and re-ascent everyone will recognize.... a thing written all over the world [in almost all world cultures]. The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God.... from this point of view the Christian doctrine makes itself so quickly at home amid the deepest apprehensions of reality which we have from other [pagan] sources... For there have, of course, been many religions in which that annual drama [death and rebirth in nature] was almost admittedly the central theme, and the deity--Adonis, Osiris, or another—almost undisguisedly a personification of the corn, a “corn king” who died and rose again each year. Is not Christ simply another “corn king”?

Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. From a certain point of view Christ is “the same sort of thing” as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate in a year which can... be dated). And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind, why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of men who simply don’t know how close they are to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say that they repressed it because they are Jews [wanting to avoid any hint of paganism], that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a “dying God” which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whom, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ideas that belong to the “dying God” was [most] foreign?

I myself who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all ‘agog’ for the Death and Re-birth pattern and anxious to meet a ‘corn-king’ was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. One moment particularly stood out. A “dying God” – the only dying God who might possibly be historical—hold bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, “This is my body.” Surely here,... the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the crops must be made. But it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it was there for the disciples [writers of the accounts]... The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religions was present."

[Josh]

10/05:

I'm noticing as I'm studying in prep for our discussions about Catholicism, that Catholic thinkers are much more in tune with the line of thinking proposed here about the relationship between pagan mythology and Christianity. I think we will have a change to discuss some of these things in the next few weeks.