The study of religious or heroic legends and tales. One constant rule of mythology is that whatever happens amongst the gods or other mythical beings was in one sense or another a reflection of events on earth. Recorded myths and legends, perhaps preserved in literature or folklore, have an immediate interest to archaeology in trying to unravel the nature and meaning of ancient events and traditions.
Um...not quite. Let's say that certain names were attached to them to give them more credibility or at least name recognition. The Gospel of St Mark sounds a hell of a lot more imposing than The Gospel of Shlomo the Shoe Maker.
I get that all the time when someone sends around an e-mail that says " George Carlin Knows What To Do With Illegal Aliens!" and then, upon checking Snopes.com we quickly find out that George Carlin had nothing to do with the fascistic drivel being put forth in his name. Snopes will usually find some right-wing nutter who was the original author but he has no name recognition so they find a well-known liberal to put forward as the front man. Same idea with the gospels.
Minimalist -
Thus the Gospel of the Uranium Yellow Cake From Niger, yes?
hoka hey
john
"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."
Admit it, John....you kept hitting the "submit" button didn't you?
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
"Man is a marvellous curiosity. When he is at his very, very best he is sort of a low-grade nickel-plated angel; at his worst he is unspeakable, unimaginable; and first and last and all the time he is a sarcasm."
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
IF you mean that both were designed to mislead in order to advance a political end, I agree with you.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Minimalist wrote:IF you mean that both were designed to mislead in order to advance a political end, I agree with you.
The thing about Christianity, that I've been trying to show here anyway, is that it wasn't originally designed to mislead politically - that was just how it ended up. The Literalists of the second century took and ripped the heart out of something that was originally much deeper, richer and more beneficial - i.e. the Mystery initiations that were practised around the Mediterranean, the most famous in Eleusis.
At the very least, these initiations acted as a rite of passage ceremony for young males, and part of the nine-day ceremonies would involve a play about the dying and resurrecting godman. This was an allegory for their leaving behind their old lives as children and being born into a new one as a man.
There was also an initiation that took place that some think could have been induced by fermented barley, but could just as easily have been induced by them being kept in darkness for several days. It was one well used way to induce a trance-like state in those days. Mircae Eliade writes about novice shamans being kept in the darkness of caves for long periods during their training for this same reason.
So this was a much more multi-textured and deeper experience than today's Christianity which can only offer a set of rules and blind faith, and is also now a lame duck politically.
The Literalists of the second century took and ripped the heart out of something that was originally much deeper, richer and more beneficial
But it did not serve a useful political purpose and therefore no one would invest it with any kind of power.
Would you really think a military and political thug like Constantine would care about deeper and richer meanings? Constantine was cynically trying to use religion to bind together an increasingly disparate empire that was threatening to come apart at the seams.
Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed.
Yes, I absolutely agree.... we know what Constantine's motives were.
My point is, if you understand where the original idea came from, you're in a much better position to argue against it because you know its true nature.
Its true nature is not a political force. It's just what it became.
Otherwise, you are just lopping the head off a weed that carries on growing regardless. You need to pull it out by the roots.
I think what I mean - and I've been talking with Min about this elsewhere - is that archaeologists need to start working with mythologists, and mythologists need to start working with archaeologists - to solve this problem.
Archaeology alone cannot do it, because its trying to prove something wasn't there that wasn't there. So the Christians just turn round and say 'yes but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence' - Arch says it, Monk said it in this thread - I think they've all been told to say it by their apologists.
But if you can show what the story of Jesus grew from, where its roots are in mythological terms, and then add that to the archaeology evidence, you have a much more powerful argument for why there's nothing to be found in 1st century Jerusalem, thus turning a negative into a positive.
Because when people see, like I showed on my map, all these other dying and resurrecting godmen all over the same area, and then understand what they represented, they can start to see how the Jesus story could and most likely did begin life in that way ....and not as a real Jewish man who died on a cross at Calvary.
Maybe we could discuss next the symbolism of the cross in Gnosticism, as this shows its earlier meaning.
I can trace the cross back to the horse sacrifice of the Vedics c. 3,000 BC – but for the purposes of this, let’s stick with the Greek Gnostics and the Mediterranean area.
In Timaeus, Plato (350 years before Jesus was supposed to have lived) refers to the Son of God as “suspended crosswise in the universe.”
What does he mean by this?
For it to make sense, I must give a little background on the main allegorical story of the Gnostics and I need to start with Plato’s cave.
In The Republic, Plato envisages man as a being that is stuck in a cave ...this universe being the cave. His says the body is a tomb, and the tomb (the body) is stuck in a cave.
All the Gnostics mention the cave: The Pagan sage Empedocles talks about psyches falling into a cave. In The Cave of the Nymphs, Porphyry decodes the allegorical teachings found in the myths of Homer, explaining, “The cave represents the cosmos.” The Pythagoreans also described the cosmos as a cave. And Plotinus wrote:
“In the cave of Plato and the cave of Empedocles I see the cosmos ...the body is the psyche’s prison or tomb and the cosmos is its cave or cavern.”
So the study or practise of Gnosticism is described as an ‘ascent from the cave’.
In order for a being to make that ascent, according to the Gnostics, the Son of God has to spread itself across the cross that Plato refers to – the cross that divides the heavenly reality from this one – and then reach down to help pull the ascending being through it.
The being that is stuck in the cave and then undertakes this journey of the ascent is represented in the gospels by Jesus. He is born, according to Luke, in a katalemna, which is Greek for either cave or temporary shelter. His whole life after that can be read as a Gnostic allegory of a being’s ascent from the cave right down to the empty tomb (empty body) that is found after the crucifixion.
Last edited by Ishtar on Wed Aug 06, 2008 9:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
The sad thing Ish is that they do when it comes to most of history. Its only when you get to the bible that you get so much polarization. The fact that the most zealous researchers tend to be religiously motivated and unwilling to allow anything but an interpretation of evidence that confirms their belief is the biggest problem.
You sort of hit the nail on the head when you posted to FM that people involved in a particular religion are often unable to study it objectively. When the history of biblical archeology is dominated by true believers they will not listen to anything that might shake that belief
Hmmm, crosses and caves eh. I've always taken that symbolism a bit differently.
Gnosticism was always most concerned with the idea of rebirth, that secret knowledge would unlock the connection with the divine spark and trigger a connection to the perfect spiritual world created by the good god. This rebirth was an escape from the imperfect and inherently evil material world to the more perfect spiritual. The cave was symbolic of a womb, rising from the cave an allegory to birth. These caves they used often involved crawling through them in tight, close, unlit passages into a larger cave where a ritual was played out which would reveal a mystery. In a sense each time one crawled out one was reborn.
