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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I’m not impressed by these sorts of coincidences. If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

A hero character who loves the poor isn’t that uncommon, in fact Buddha fits this fairly well too. Buddha is a prince who essentially renounced his throne to become a religious aesetic. He had disciples, was a traveling preacher, and so on. So you can put this “character” onto both Jesus and Buddha and if memory serves Krishna as well.

As to the specific events, they only fit if you take very vague descriptions of the events themselves. Jesus was Baptized in the Jordan, he wasn’t crossing as a conqueror. Jesus didn’t just say “don’t be scared,” he calmed the storm. The Sanhedrin had mostly theological disputes with Jesus, and not that he was looking to establish a kingdom or something.

The other part is that Jesus is very interested (mostly in Mathew, though he teaches the Law in other places) in Judaism itself. The Shema quote (this is the most important credal statement in Judaism— Hear Oh Israel, the Lord year God, the Lord is One), concerns over Jewish temple sacrifices, and the Jewish Sabbath are things that just don’t fit. Roman’s were polytheistic and their sacrifices were not identical to Jewish sacrifices, and Romans don’t keep any sort of Sabbath. It simply doesn’t make sense to insert Jewish ideas into the mouth of a character invented to absorb the imperial cult.

My God, we're overlooking the most obvious piece of evidence literally staring us in the face!

JC!

JC - Julius Caesar/Jesus Christ.

They told us what they were doing right from the start!

If you take any events that look similar between two famous figures, you can make just about any myth into a retelling of another.

Try it.

Someone already did. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Kennedy_coincidences_urban_legend

Here you go.

Did you never hear of folktale classification? This is breaking down story elements into what we'd now call tropes which are commonly shared by different stories from different places. It's how Jung gets his notion of the Collective Unconscious and the Archetypes:

A quantitative study, published by folklorist Sara Graça da Silva and anthropologist Jamshid J. Tehrani in 2016, tried to evaluate the time of emergence for the "Tales of Magic" (ATU 300–ATU 749), based on a phylogenetic model. They found four of them to belong to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) stratum of magic tales:

ATU 328 The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure (= Jack and the Beanstalk and Thirteen)

ATU 330 The Smith and the Devil (KHM 81a)

ATU 402 The Animal Bride (= The Three Feathers, KHM 63 and The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat, KHM 106)

ATU 554 The Grateful Animals (= The White Snake, KHM 17 and The Queen Bee, KHM 62)

There's an entire cottage industry from the 19th century of dismissing Christianity as just another Middle Eastern mystery cult (the dying and resurrected saviour motif from Osiris to Dionysius), as well as the valiant attempts of Frazer and others to reduce all mythology ultimately to the Solar Myth and fertilty myths. Comparative religion is the field for "hey DAE the resemblances between X and Y?"

Frazer based his thesis on the pre-Roman priest-king Rex Nemorensis at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor. The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend of rebirth was central to almost all of the world's mythologies.

...Girard's "grievances" against The Golden Bough were numerous, particularly concerning Frazer's assertion that Christianity was merely a perpetuation of primitive myth-ritualism and that the New Testament Gospels were "just further myths of the death and resurrection of the king who embodies the god of vegetation."

We also get 19th ethnographers trying to classify 'primitive' beliefs according to that sort of schema, and the euhemerists culminating in the philogist Max Müller and his famous phrase that "mythology is a disease of language":

He saw the gods of the Rig-Veda as active forces of nature, only partly personified as imagined supernatural persons. From this claim Müller derived his theory that mythology is "a disease of language". By this he meant that myth transforms concepts into beings and stories. In Müller's view, "gods" began as words constructed to express abstract ideas, but were transformed into imagined personalities. Thus the Indo-European father-god appears under various names: Zeus, Jupiter, Dyaus Pita. For Müller all these names can be traced to the word "Dyaus", which he understood to imply "shining" or "radiance". This leads to the terms "deva", "deus", "theos" as generic terms for a god, and to the names "Zeus" and "Jupiter" (derived from deus-pater). In this way a metaphor becomes personified and ossified. This aspect of Müller's thinking was later explored similarly by Nietzsche.

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