The Pagan Christ

[Apech]

Mark,this doesn't qualify as historical evidence.I can write some scriptures right now with my own mythologies about santa clause,travel to the dessert,hide the scriptures in a cave.Then, a thousand years from now some crack head, heroin junkie will find my scriptures in the cave,translate them and start some weird santa clause religion.

 

Right ... so you are trying to say Santa doesn't exist now! No presents for you this year!

 

PS. Just for the record I think there was a historical Jesus. The reasons for the resonances with ancient teachings (e.g. Egypt) could be that he fulfilled them ... as in fulfilled the 'law'. Obviously you have to wade through the censorship of the catholic church and a lot of wishful thinking by believers to get at the truth.

[Protector]

[michael245]

Right ... so you are trying to say Santa doesn't exist now! No presents for you this year!

 

PS. Just for the record I think there was a historical Jesus. The reasons for the resonances with ancient teachings (e.g. Egypt) could be that he fulfilled them ... as in fulfilled the 'law'. Obviously you have to wade through the censorship of the catholic church and a lot of wishful thinking by believers to get at the truth.

 

 

 

And what year do you suppose Jesus's existence was?The Jews did not except Jesus as a Messiah.

 

Do you believe in the historical existence of Mithras too, who was born Dec 25,died and resurrected?

 

What about Horus?

 

Those dying and resurrecting deities pre date Jesus by far,this would mean Jesus was not a historical person.

Just the thought of little white Jesus not existing makes some christians very angry,I don't play favorites with dying and resurrecting demi-gods that were born dec 25,because I love multiculturalism.

Edited December 3, 2011 by michael245

[Apech]

And what year do you suppose Jesus's existence was?The Jews did not except Jesus as a Messiah.

 

Do you believe in the historical existence of Mithras too, who was born Dec 25,died and resurrected?

 

What about Horus?

 

Those dying and resurrecting deities pre date Jesus by far,this would mean Jesus was not a historical person.

Just the thought of little white Jesus not existing makes some christians very angry,I don't play favorites with dying and resurrecting demi-gods that were born dec 25,because I love multiculturalism.

 

Horus was not resurrected. Mithras was clearly a deity. 25 th Dec was Saturnalia i.e. a few days past the winter solstice - taken over by the church as jesus' birth date.

 

I am not a Christian by the way.

[Shizukanako]

Mark,this doesn't qualify as historical evidence.I can write some scriptures right now with my own mythologies about santa clause,travel to the dessert,hide the scriptures in a cave.Then, a thousand years from now some crack head, heroin junkie will find my scriptures in the cave,translate them and start some weird santa clause religion.

 

St Nicholas wasnt real either?

[Mark Foote]

Mark,this doesn't qualify as historical evidence.I can write some scriptures right now with my own mythologies about santa clause,travel to the dessert,hide the scriptures in a cave.Then, a thousand years from now some crack head, heroin junkie will find my scriptures in the cave,translate them and start some weird santa clause religion.

 

I didn't say there was a Jesus as reported in the Bible, I only said that there was someone who gave descriptions that are unique in the religious literature of the world, to my knowledge (which I confess is very limited!). At the same time, they have some similarities to statements in the Pali Canon and the literature of Chan and Zen, and I find them useful.

 

I took a class on right and left hemisphere stuff in the 'seventies, and the instructor spoke of Polynesians who could navigate over the horizon to the next island. When asked how they did it, they had a lot to say, but none of it made sense to the people doing the study. The conclusion was, a person can do things even though they cannot explain how they did them. Very few can actually put words to the relationships of the human experience, words that make sense, words that free another human from their own ignorance to any extent. Lots of people have managed to free themselves from their own ignorance to one extent or another, but that doesn't mean they can actually convey the means of their escape in words to another person. Most people are confused about that, I think; they assume that if someone has an amazing presence or can perform a seeming miracle, or even an amazing feat of physical coordination, balance, or endurance, most people assume when that person opens his or her mouth that what comes out must be an accurate description of how it was done.

 

There's amazing stuff on the walls of the temples of Egypt. There's amazing stuff in the Gospel of Thomas, in the Pali Canon, in the writings of the masters in India and China. Some of the voices are unique, and useful to me; the voice in the Gospel of Thomas is one of those, and I have no idea if that person is the same one described in the Bible as Jesus or not. If you strip away the miracles and anything that was written after Mark, Luke, and Matthew, maybe there was person there.

[Jetsun]

Mark,this doesn't qualify as historical evidence.I can write some scriptures right now with my own mythologies about santa clause,travel to the dessert,hide the scriptures in a cave.Then, a thousand years from now some crack head, heroin junkie will find my scriptures in the cave,translate them and start some weird santa clause religion.

 

Could you really write scripture as powerful as the Bible? many people have tried and nearly all of them fail, the Gospels are written from a higher knowledge than your average author can understand. I don't believe in the general Christian view of things rather I agree with the Fourth Way perspective that scripture like the Gospels are written by the "conscious circle of humanity" as means to draw people towered esoteric knowledge and teachings, so I doubt the average person could write anything of that power without initiation and long training in spiritual disciplines.

[John Zen]

Historical analysis shows that Jesus' life as it is told in the gospels is actually the story of Horus from ancient Egypt. The stories and myths all originate in ancient civilization. Paganism evolved from these myths of gods, angels, and other divine actors, and was a popular European religion before the Roman Church hijacked the myths and assigned them to Jesus.

 

I think that people tend to look for spiritual or esoteric meanings in these myths, but in reality the ancient Egyptian myths were ways for the initiated to track the Earth's Great Year, or the 26,000-year Astronomical Cycle of our Galaxy. The names and myths were symbols for telling the story of the Astronomical cycles. There was Written Tradition (Horace, Seth, etc.) which was interpreted as religion by those who were not initiated, and then there was the Oral Tradition (Astronomical History) which was connected to those symbols and passed on from initiate to initiate.

 

I'm not sure exactly what Jesus taught. I believe it was just a message of Love, and a message of cultural and societal reform against the materialistic way of life. It is possible that there were esoteric meanings which are censored from the canonical gospels by the Organized Church, but we can not be certain one way or another about this.

 

What I am sure of is that Jesus' life is far too similar to that of Horus and other Sun-Gods for it to be a coincidence. I have read some of Gene Kieffer's "The Secret Teachings", which shows the connections between Christian Gospel and Egyptian Mythology, and also connections between Egyptian Mythology and Astronomy. So I am convinced that the Organized Church hijacked Paganism, inserting Jesus into it's mythology, as a way of subverting Jesus' message of cultural and societal change and taking advantage of an already popular naturalistic religion.

Edited December 4, 2011 by John Zen

[Aetherous]

Horace?

[John Zen]

Horace?

 

Good catch, my mistake

[Mark Foote]

Could you really write scripture as powerful as the Bible? many people have tried and nearly all of them fail, the Gospels are written from a higher knowledge than your average author can understand. I don't believe in the general Christian view of things rather I agree with the Fourth Way perspective that scripture like the Gospels are written by the "conscious circle of humanity" as means to draw people towered esoteric knowledge and teachings, so I doubt the average person could write anything of that power without initiation and long training in spiritual disciplines.

This is interesting to me, this debate right here. We live in an age of information. Part of the information is the lore of Western science, part is the lore of the Eastern and Native American wisdom traditions. We are not limited to experts, we are not limited to evangalists, but we can hope to make sense of it all.

 

I struggle with this. I have learned to sit the lotus, and in the Japanese Soto tradition, just sitting is the practice (but traditionally in the lotus). The Soto tradition goes so far as to say, when a person is just sitting, the function of enlightenment is there. I first learned that sometimes just sitting gets up and walks around, which was a surprise, and then I started trying to write about it. I am still writing about it. I write primarily for myself, but along the way I have come to believe that we can develop a vocabulary to describe the relationships involved in just sitting that Westerners can adopt. I'm not saying that the experience of just sitting can be transmitted in words, only that the experience can be described in such a way that a person who was truly interested in just sitting and had reached a point where they felt just sitting was necessary in their life could make use of the words.

 

Gautama the Buddha claimed that the miracle was teaching, was passing along the insight and the practice, that was the profoundest of all miracles. I had to study anatomy and kinesthesiology to learn to sit the lotus, but of course that wasn't enough; I also had to develop a way to describe the relationships in just sitting that would enable me to accept my own experience.

 

What I find is that I'm no show horse, and I have no miracle to perform apart from being where I am. There's currently a thread on the full lotus on Tao Bums, and there are some great descriptions from Drew Hempel of miraculous supernatural phenomena he's observed in the presence of Chunyi Lin. There is some of my best writing there, too. I am more fascinated with his observations of ghosts and energy apparitions than with my writing; my writing is only necessary to me, and his observations are the stuff of wonder that tell us there is another world beyond the one we know through the 5 senses. Does anyone want to learn the lotus, does anyone look to just sit and to share the relationships involved in that experience with others?

 

I love Tao Bums, because there are others immersed in describing the same relationships and in relating the descriptions of other cultures of those relationships, and I think we can all benefit from that. I know I'm writing for myself, but sometimes I wonder if other people take the opportunity we have to describe these relationships in Western terms that everyone can understand as seriously as I do? That reminds me of Shunryu Suzuki's famous one-liner, "life is much too important to take seriously."

[Apech]

Historical analysis shows that Jesus' life as it is told in the gospels is actually the story of Horus from ancient Egypt. The stories and myths all originate in ancient civilization. Paganism evolved from these myths of gods, angels, and other divine actors, and was a popular European religion before the Roman Church hijacked the myths and assigned them to Jesus.

 

.... <snip>

 

There is no story from Ancient Egypt which involves Horus and is comparable with Jesus. Perhaps if you would like to list the events or actions which you think are the same and I will be able to demonstrate that they are not. Or perhaps you can show where you got this idea from ... and which 'historical analysis' you mean.

[John Zen]

There is no story from Ancient Egypt which involves Horus and is comparable with Jesus. Perhaps if you would like to list the events or actions which you think are the same and I will be able to demonstrate that they are not. Or perhaps you can show where you got this idea from ... and which 'historical analysis' you mean.

 

Of course I don't have access to ancient Egyptian documents or manuscripts which might detail the life of Horus. All I can do is read from several sources and believe what I think sounds the most plausible.

 

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070907194328AAd6rQc This link is a starter, there are several links which follow from it. I am also reading "The Secret Teachings" by Gene Kieffer, which summarizes Gerald Massey's work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Massey#Claimed_parallels_between_Horus_and_Jesus

[Apech]

Of course I don't have access to ancient Egyptian documents or manuscripts which might detail the life of Horus. All I can do is read from several sources and believe what I think sounds the most plausible.

 

http://answers.yahoo...07194328AAd6rQc This link is a starter, there are several links which follow from it. I am also reading "The Secret Teachings" by Gene Kieffer, which summarizes Gerald Massey's work. http://en.wikipedia....Horus_and_Jesus

 

OK I don't mean this in an aggressive way but I have studied Ancient Egypt for several decades and I do have access to many source texts (many of which are easily available in translation if you google) and I can say that this idea of Horus=Christ is completely bogus. For instance from your first link ...

 

After doing some research it has come to my attention that Jesus is almost exactly like the Egyptian God Horus. Both were born of a virgin on Dec 25th and visited by 3 Kings. Both were baptized by a "Baptist" who was beheaded. Started to preach at the age of 30 and had 12 diciples. Both were Crucified and buried; then resurrected. Why do you think the bible took this story for Jesus?

 

There is no tradition that Isis (the mother of Horus) was a virgin. There is no link between the birth of Horus and 25th December and there were no three kings. Horus was not baptised and if anyone was beheaded it was his mother Isis who was beheaded by Horus who replaced her head by a that of a cow. Horus was not crucified .... and he did not resurrect.

 

The work of Gerald Massey has been completely discredited ... and only lives on in the minds of those who like to post nonsense on the internet.

 

The only real cultural link between Horus and Christ is that there is a similarity between the statues of Isis and the child horus and the representations of Mary and the baby Jesus ... so it is entirely possible that the Christian artists used the iconography of Ancient Egypt.

 

Horus (Hr ... ) means either 'he who is distant' or 'he who is above' and this refers to his original nature as a sky god. Later he was thought of as the son of Osiris and his main role int hat respect was to fight Osiris' brother Set (who had murdered him) for the throne of Egypt ... the battle lasted eighty years and Horus was eventually victorious .... the Egyptian kings saw them selves as incarnations of Horus. In childhood the baby Horus was injured by a scorpion bite and was cured by Isis and Serqet (the scorpion goddess). During the fight with Set his eye was injured and had to be later restored by Thoth the god of wisdom and healing. It is these events which is probably what Massey thought of as resurrection but if anyone was brought back from the dead it was Osiris his father and not Horus.

 

Many Egyptologists are desperate to find links in Ancient Egypt to the Bible and Judeo-Chrstian thought ... but they are not there .... the Egyptian religion was quite different.

[John Zen]

OK I don't mean this in an aggressive way but I have studied Ancient Egypt for several decades and I do have access to many source texts (many of which are easily available in translation if you google) and I can say that this idea of Horus=Christ is completely bogus. For instance from your first link ...

 

 

 

There is no tradition that Isis (the mother of Horus) was a virgin. There is no link between the birth of Horus and 25th December and there were no three kings. Horus was not baptised and if anyone was beheaded it was his mother Isis who was beheaded by Horus who replaced her head by a that of a cow. Horus was not crucified .... and he did not resurrect.

 

The work of Gerald Massey has been completely discredited ... and only lives on in the minds of those who like to post nonsense on the internet.

 

The only real cultural link between Horus and Christ is that there is a similarity between the statues of Isis and the child horus and the representations of Mary and the baby Jesus ... so it is entirely possible that the Christian artists used the iconography of Ancient Egypt.

 

Horus (Hr ... ) means either 'he who is distant' or 'he who is above' and this refers to his original nature as a sky god. Later he was thought of as the son of Osiris and his main role int hat respect was to fight Osiris' brother Set (who had murdered him) for the throne of Egypt ... the battle lasted eighty years and Horus was eventually victorious .... the Egyptian kings saw them selves as incarnations of Horus. In childhood the baby Horus was injured by a scorpion bite and was cured by Isis and Serqet (the scorpion goddess). During the fight with Set his eye was injured and had to be later restored by Thoth the god of wisdom and healing. It is these events which is probably what Massey thought of as resurrection but if anyone was brought back from the dead it was Osiris his father and not Horus.

 

Many Egyptologists are desperate to find links in Ancient Egypt to the Bible and Judeo-Chrstian thought ... but they are not there .... the Egyptian religion was quite different.

 

I concede to you. Of course, I won't blindly accept everything that I read on the internet, it is just that Massey's assertions seemed right, so I had believed it for a while. So I accept that it's probable you are right.

 

What do you make of the assertion that Jesus' life was based on Pagan myth?

[michael245]

Could you really write scripture as powerful as the Bible? many people have tried and nearly all of them fail, the Gospels are written from a higher knowledge than your average author can understand. I don't believe in the general Christian view of things rather I agree with the Fourth Way perspective that scripture like the Gospels are written by the "conscious circle of humanity" as means to draw people towered esoteric knowledge and teachings, so I doubt the average person could write anything of that power without initiation and long training in spiritual disciplines.

 

 

I came to THE TAO BUMS to learn more about taoism and buddhaism,I did not come here to learn about the bible and its so called superiority,as you just claimed it.Most christians do not go to church anymore in the west,It's DYING and it will never RESURRECT again.

 

This is the last time I comment on this evangelic thread.

[Apech]

I concede to you. Of course, I won't blindly accept everything that I read on the internet, it is just that Massey's assertions seemed right, so I had believed it for a while. So I accept that it's probable you are right.

 

What do you make of the assertion that Jesus' life was based on Pagan myth?

 

I think that just as most churches are built on old pagan sites so too the jesus story has incorporated a lot of pagan myths. For instance his 'birthdate' of 25th december is the old Roman festival of Saturnalia ... Saturn being the 'Lord of Misrule'. Whether or not this means that there was no historical Jesus is not the same thing of course.

 

It is true that if you look at a lot of Jewish and Christian mysticism then you can trace roots back to the older cultures of Egypt and Sumeria. For instance Genesis is a watered down version of the Heliopolitan creation myth ... I think the Tree of Life from Kabbalah shows some Egyptian influence as does western alchemy and hermeticism generally. So there is a lot of stuff in the mix ... also the theology of people like Thomas Aquinas and St. Anslem is largely rehashed Greek Platonism or Neo-Platonism ... so the idea that Christianity is all new and unique is completely wrong.

 

I cannot offer any evidence but my feeling/intuition is that there was a historical Jesus ... what he was actually like is of course shrouded in the huge edifice of the Church(s) and all the baggage of 2000 years of history.

[Jetsun]

I came to THE TAO BUMS to learn more about taoism and buddhaism,I did not come here to learn about the bible and its so called superiority,as you just claimed it.Most christians do not go to church anymore in the west,It's DYING and it will never RESURRECT again.

 

This is the last time I comment on this evangelic thread.

 

Ok just so you are aware this is the general discussion forum not the Taoism part and I am not a Christian, I have only been to Church once in my life and I already said I don't agree with the Christian view of the Bible but it seems obvious to me that it is a book written in a different way with different power than your average book, which is why it has the power to make so many people do so many terrible and amazing things in their lives. There are many other books written with the same intent as the Bible from different religious backgrounds and cultures but they are written by conscious individuals not your general authors who put most of the books in the bookstores each year.

[Birch]

Ok just so you are aware this is the general discussion forum not the Taoism part and I am not a Christian, I have only been to Church once in my life and I already said I don't agree with the Christian view of the Bible but it seems obvious to me that it is a book written in a different way with different power than your average book, which is why it has the power to make so many people do so many terrible and amazing things in their lives. There are many other books written with the same intent as the Bible from different religious backgrounds and cultures but they are written by conscious individuals not your general authors who put most of the books in the bookstores each year.

It's interesting that you'd say the power lies in the book. I hadn't looked at it that way. I'd seen it as people using the book to imply power (do US courts still make people swear on it? Are they allowed to swear on something else that represents something to them instead?) Aside from the probablity that most people have not read most of it...yes why does it have such status? I think it's crazy personally but I wouldn't go around saying that everywhere.

[Immortal4life]

Immortal,I'm not going to answer your christian minded questions.I provided the evidence.I'm quite surprised that I'm getting burned at the stakes on a tao forum.

 

I did not mean to make you feel like you are being burned at the stake, or being evangelized to.

 

I wasn't even saying you are wrong.

 

I was just wondering about your logic. The logic behind you believing in an historical Lao Tzu, but not an historical Jesus, remains unclear to me.

[Protector]

The book is so powerful that it's sometimes used to study magic

[Jetsun]

It's interesting that you'd say the power lies in the book. I hadn't looked at it that way. I'd seen it as people using the book to imply power (do US courts still make people swear on it? Are they allowed to swear on something else that represents something to them instead?) Aside from the probablity that most people have not read most of it...yes why does it have such status? I think it's crazy personally but I wouldn't go around saying that everywhere.

 

When I say power I don't mean that there is some sort holy or demonic force behind it, rather I mean that many of the scriptures are intentionally written to tap into some of your deepest longings and emotions and the archetypal forces of your mind and this can only be done by someone who really knows and understands who they are, not by the average man. I agree it is crazy though just how much influence it has had, just thinking how it has inspired people to do insane things like go on missionary missions to deep jungle areas where they are just as likely to get killed as they are to convert someone makes my mind boggle why people would do such things.

[Birch]

When I say power I don't mean that there is some sort holy or demonic force behind it, rather I mean that many of the scriptures are intentionally written to tap into some of your deepest longings and emotions and the archetypal forces of your mind and this can only be done by someone who really knows and understands who they are, not by the average man. I agree it is crazy though just how much influence it has had, just thinking how it has inspired people to do insane things like go on missionary missions to deep jungle areas where they are just as likely to get killed as they are to convert someone makes my mind boggle why people would do such things.

 

Well, me neither (attribution of demonic or holy power) but it doesn't always seem to bring out the best in people so I dunno. I don't think it's the only book that does that either. I've read some Coran which seemed heavier into the social sciences and study on human "nature" than the little of the Bible I could stand reading (forever associated with chilly churches, moralizing, condescending, lack of fun, quite nice coloured windows, bad singing).

 

There was a fun website that asserted that the Bible had evidence of space-ships and ultra sophisticated weapons (like some people say about the Vedas). Holy nuclear power plant!

[Mark Foote]

Well, me neither (attribution of demonic or holy power) but it doesn't always seem to bring out the best in people so I dunno. I don't think it's the only book that does that either. I've read some Coran which seemed heavier into the social sciences and study on human "nature" than the little of the Bible I could stand reading (forever associated with chilly churches, moralizing, condescending, lack of fun, quite nice coloured windows, bad singing).

 

There was a fun website that asserted that the Bible had evidence of space-ships and ultra sophisticated weapons (like some people say about the Vedas). Holy nuclear power plant!

 

I read Sargent's "Battle for the Mind" when I was in 6th grade, I think, and it really set me off. The assertion Sargent made was that the kinds of things that happen in Christian conversions and voodoo ceremonies are basically similar to what happened in North Korean brainwashing of soldiers during the Korean war. He said, it's not that a person gradually adopts a different belief structure; instead, it's a sudden experience, brought on by stress and usually a lack of food and sleep. Illness as a stressor helps induce the conversion.

Suddenly one day, the person being brain-washed or converted falls down and gets up believing everything they've been told would relieve their situation.

 

Now I read on Wikipedia that Sargent was a big advocate of shock treatment for mental illness, and of surgeries. He was apparently a bit heavy-handed advocating for his beliefs in medicine, and they are no longer widely accepted. I don't know about his beliefs on brain-washing.

 

Still, I think it sheds some light on the persistence of religious cults, if Sargent was right. Individuals with charisma and charm have been able to lead children from good families astray for millenea. One of the most attractive things about Taoism and Chinese Ch'an is the emphasis on low-profile empowerment, the notion that it's better not to stand out from the community at large.

 

I guess that presumes one has a community not to stand out from, ha ha!