Posted: Feb 26, 2010 11:24 pm
Apollonius wrote:I wasn't. I don't know exactly where gospel writers got information to weave into their made-up stories. There were probably plenty for them to pick from.
Fine. But I've yet to have anyone who argues this is what happened explain to me why devout Jews would construct their story from non-Jewish pagan myths. This simply doesn't make sense. It's like someone in the future proposing that the Taliban were heavily influenced by Deepak Chopra and the New Age books of Shirley McLaine simply because they were around in the same time as the Taliban.
The actual origins of most of the clearly non-historical stuff in the gospels can be found in Jewish traditions, not pagan ones. Given everyone involved were Jews, this should be no surprise. To try to find supposed pagan parallels is a pointless wild goose chase.
It seems the people trying to prove it came from this myth or that don't really know either. They just knew the kinds of stories people would be likely to believe.
Devout Jews weren't likely to believe these kinds of stories at all. And, as Jerome's post above shows, most of the elements in these stories that are claimed as likely influences never existed anyway. This whole "Pagan Christs" is massive cluster of failure.