Both Attis and Jesus de-ethnecized by... ...the Gnostics!

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Giuseppe
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Both Attis and Jesus de-ethnecized by... ...the Gnostics!

Post by Giuseppe »

Paul's Jewish identity, Acts tells us, was already being called into question by the early second century. In that same century, Paul's god underwent a similar identity crisis. The ethnicity of the high god shifted: God the Father lost his Jewish identity too.
Though some pagans continued to identify the high god as the god of the Jews, educated ex-pagan Christian theologians increasingly thought otherwise. In the work of Valentinus (fl. 130s), of Marcion (fl. 140s), and of Justin Martyr (fl. 150s), we can trace the process whereby God the father of Christ became no longer Jewish. The point of orientation shared by all three thinkers - a point fundamental to the theology of Middle Platonism - was that the highest god was radically trascendent and changeless, and that another, lower god, a demiurgos, organized the material cosmos.
(Paula Fredriksen, Paul: The Pagan's Apostle, 2017)
In the Nassene story, Primal Man has a son known as Perfect Man and the Son of Man. He is a microcosmic verson of Primal Man, containing within himself the noetic, psychic, and earthly currents of the primal river. Eventually he incarnates as Jesus, born of Mary, but first he serves as the template for the creation of Adam, the first human being, molded out of earthly clay by the fiery solar god Esaldaeus, and the other lords of Chaos.
...
Because Perfect Man strayed sexually, the Naassenes recognized his reflection in the Greek god Attis, famous because he was the husband of the great mother goddsess Cybele. There are many versions of his story, but they all indicate that Attis, handsome to a fault, had an affair that broke Cybele's heart. Her wrath brought down his lover and Attis went mad, driven to castrate himself out of grief and guilt (Ovid, Fasti 4.222).
(April D. DeConick, The gnostic new age, p. 217, my bold)


It is not so surprising the common fate of both Attis and Jesus.

Surely I don't doubt about the Phrygian origins of the Attis Myth, not more than I doubt about the Jewish origins of the Christ Myth.

Only, note how the allegorizers of these local deities were just these cosmopolitan de-ethnecizers: always them, the Gnostics.

Hence the simple probability a priori that the Earliest Gospel post-70, being an allegory, was produced by Gnostic Gentile Christians, has to be more high than the probability a priori that the Earliest Gospel was written by Judeo-Christians or Gentile Judaizers. Totally beyond, again, the pre-70 Jewish origin of the Christ Myth.
Nihil enim in speciem fallacius est quam prava religio. -Liv. xxxix. 16.
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