Resource for Mythicist and Response Documentation

[Secret Alias]

I wrote a shitty book that was translated into other languages. Means nothing.

[nightshadetwine]

Osiris was bodily, physically resurrected.

I've had a run-in with this Chris Hansen character before. They seem to be one of those people that dismisses any possible connection or parallel if every detail doesn't 100% match. So in order for there to be gods that die and rise/resurrect, they all have to be exactly the same. It's pretty absurd.

[MrMacSon]

I still think it would be unsafe based on any of those to make any conclusions about Rüpke's view of the historicity of Jesus. None of those challenge the historicity.

- "the historicity" is a loaded phrase. Generally/widely (ie. beyond discussion of Pantheon or of Rüpke's possible personal views).

As is the phrase "the historical Jesus" - it's over-reach, often as the result of bias; of wishful thinking.

Rüpke is correct when he refers to "the stunning absence of earlier biographical narratives of Jesus’s life" being ''not just an accident of transmission, but rather the consequence of such earlier narratives being nonexistent".

(And his use of and reference to 'narratives' is appropriate context.)

That phrase "most often ascribed to Jesus" implies a historical figure.

That bare assertion also lacks context. The fact that things are ascribed to 'Jesus' does not make 'Jesus' a historical figure.

(That's mere quote mining: something you've accused someone else of through this thread).

"In the mid- first century AD, Paul, a Jewish intellectual, associated this figure of Jesus with the idea that Jewish identity might be detached from the practice of circumcision."

Yes, all we know about ''this figure of Jesus" is through ideas associated with him or by words put in his mouth. By others.

Other statements throughout make mythicism even less likely.

More bare assertion.

How about? -

"Christianity had thus been invented historiographically by means of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles complemented by collections of letters. There was as yet no actual community." (p. 358)

[Chrissy Hansen]

I wrote a shitty book that was translated into other languages. Means nothing.

Your book didn't stir international outrage, or come into possession of almost every scholar in the Soviet Union, and easily half of all German NT scholars and theologians, resulting in hundreds of peer reviewed responses in journals and books world over.

But please, tell me how comparable your situations are. I get that you just like the idea of mythicism being fringe, but frankly, if your use of the Open Court magazine is anything to go by, your research on this issue is not warranting your position whatsoever if you literally couldn't finish reading the exact same line of text that proves your citation was misinformed.

Osiris was bodily, physically resurrected.

I've had a run-in with this Chris Hansen character before. They seem to be one of those people that dismisses any possible connection or parallel if every detail doesn't 100% match. So in order for there to be gods that die and rise/resurrect, they all have to be exactly the same. It's pretty absurd.

That has never been my position. I consider Inanna, for example, to be classically "dying-rising". I don't know who you are, and I don't particularly care. If your only move is to bad mouth me on here, then it is clear you don't actually have a rational case for your position.

My position (like that of Tryggve Mettinger) is that none of these gods should be hypostatized into a single god or mytheme, because they don't belong to the same ones.

[Chrissy Hansen]

I still think it would be unsafe based on any of those to make any conclusions about Rüpke's view of the historicity of Jesus. None of those challenge the historicity.

- "the historicity" is a loaded phrase. Generally/widely (ie. beyond discussion of Pantheon or of Rüpke's possible personal views).

As is the phrase "the historical Jesus" - it's over-reach, often as the result of bias; of wishful thinking.

Rüpke is correct when he refers to "the stunning absence of earlier biographical narratives of Jesus’s life" being ''not just an accident of transmission, but rather the consequence of such earlier narratives being nonexistent".

(And his use of and reference to 'narratives' is appropriate context.)

That phrase "most often ascribed to Jesus" implies a historical figure.

That bare assertion also lacks context. The fact that things are ascribed to 'Jesus' does not make 'Jesus' a historical figure.

(That's mere quote mining: something you've accused someone else of through this thread).

"In the mid- first century AD, Paul, a Jewish intellectual, associated this figure of Jesus with the idea that Jewish identity might be detached from the practice of circumcision."

Yes, all we know about ''this figure of Jesus" is through ideas associated with him or by words put in his mouth. By others.

Other statements throughout make mythicism even less likely.

More bare assertion.

How about? -

"Christianity had thus been invented historiographically by means of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles complemented by collections of letters. There was as yet no actual community." (p. 358)

1) Rüpke's comments on there being no early narratives and this not being a mistake is not a comment in favor of mythicism, that just requires you to seriously project the idea on him.

2) I never said it "make[s] Jesus a historical figure" I said it implies it.

3) All we know about 99.999999999% of all historical figures is "through ideas associated with [them] or by words put in [their] mouth." I can point to the same debates about what Pythagoras said and did (which, there is no contemporary evidence or early narrative of his life either, in fact there is no significant biography until hundreds of years later).

4) The comment about Christianity is something that a historicist easily could say. In fact, I fully agree with his statement, and I am very much a historicist.

[MrMacSon]

1) Rüpke's comments on there being no early narratives and this not being a mistake is not a comment in favor of mythicism, that just requires you to seriously project the idea on him.

I'm not ''seriously' projecting 'the idea' on him. That's a misrepresentation of what I said. I merely used his statement -- ie. "his use of and reference to 'narratives' is appropriate context" -- to refer to a wider context.

-> I didn't narrow to him, I widened from him.

2) I never said it "make[s] Jesus a historical figure" I said it implies it.

You said it implies Rüpke's views.

3) All we know about 99.999999999% of all historical figures is "through ideas associated with [them] or by words put in [their] mouth."

Err, No (and there is plenty of commentary about Pythagoras being a mythical figure).

4) The comment about Christianity is something that a historicist easily could say. In fact, I fully agree with his statement, and I am very much a historicist.

Sure, but the point is that comment-statement in the context of aspects of his previous commentary, over dozen of pages (some of which I have previously quoted in posts in this thread above).

Furthermore,

• would a historicist say "There was as yet no actual community [when Marcion wrote in the 2nd century]"?

• would a historicist say -
  
  
  Marcion invented something new. In the literary environment of the Roman Empire as described, nothing was more natural than to write a Greek-language “biography” as a founding document for a new religious network. Marcion’s opponents reacted immediately with a weighty intellectual exchange of the sort that a metropolis like Rome made possible; and, as was usual in historiography, they reacted with competing versions ...
  
  Marcion’s competitors were in fact also active in Rome, and, moreover, adopted substantial parts of his model. The author of the text that most plagiarized Marcion was identified a little later, by Marcion himself, as Luke, in an edition that featured the gospel along with some of Paul’s letters. It concentrated on correcting Marcion’s fundamental break with Judaism. With their narratives of Jesus’s childhood, both Luke and Matthew demonstrate how familiar 'the biographical character of the template' was, and also 'how scant the source background was' as soon as one wanted to move beyond that template. Marcion, for his part, criticized their compositions (and that of Mark) as lying close to his own text.
  
  Writings competing with Marcion’s edition of the 140s AD, which was prefaced by his “Antitheses,” could now only continue to accumulate. AD 160 saw a counter-edition that established the core of the future New Testament. The late addition of Luke’s Acts of the Apostles rescued the philosophical core represented by Paul and took a direction that, while no longer avoiding the gray zones of Jewishness, also provided this orientation with a patron. Within the same movement, however, spokesmen such as Luke (in Acts of the Apostles) and Justin (in his Apology)—and perhaps earlier the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas—persisted with the genealogy of exclusion, insisting that the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 was a consequence of the crucifixion of the “anointed one.” [??]
  
  Rüpke, Jörg. Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion (pp. 356-357).
  
  

[Chrissy Hansen]

"I'm not ''seriously' projecting 'the idea' on him. That's a misrepresentation of what I said. I merely used his statement to refer to a wider context -

ie. "his use of and reference to 'narratives' is appropriate context"

-> I didn't narrow to him, I widened from him."

Widening from him in order to impart your reading.

"You said it implies Rüpke's views."

It does.

"Err, No (and there is plenty of commentary about Pythagoras being a mythical figure)."

That is not the consensus of classicists... at best that is the mythicism if classical philosophy, like those who would have Socrates not exist.

"Sure, but the point is that comment-statement in the context of aspects of his previous commentary, over dozen of pages (some of which I have previously quoted in posts in this thread above).

Furthermore,
would a historicist say "There was as yet no actual community [when Marcion wrote in the 2nd century]"?
would a historicist say"

I'd argue both of those things are plausible as a historicist.

And none of those statements are anti-historical Jesus in any way. Again, all of that is compatible. Willem Christiaan van Manen believed all of the New Testament was forged (all of it), and from the Second Century. He still thought Paul and Jesus existed. Like, seriously, this isn't incompatible with historicity at all, none of it.

[Chrissy Hansen]

I'm reaching out to Rüpke, so I'm putting this conversation on hold until I get confirmation from the person himself. I don't care to play games of "who is interpreting vague statements best" when the author is stilling living and can be contacted.

[nightshadetwine]

That has never been my position. I consider Inanna, for example, to be classically "dying-rising". I don't know who you are, and I don't particularly care. If your only move is to bad mouth me on here, then it is clear you don't actually have a rational case for your position.

My position (like that of Tryggve Mettinger) is that none of these gods should be hypostatized into a single god or mytheme, because they don't belong to the same ones.

I don't mean to bad mouth you and apologize for coming off rude.

The 'dying and rising god' mytheme is a specific category that includes more details than just a deity overcoming death. So since all of the deities don't meet this criteria people dismiss the 'dying and rising god' category. This is fine with me. BUT, that doesn't mean that there weren't deities that die and return to life or overcome death in some way and offer the same to their followers. This is exactly the case for Dionysus, Osiris, and Jesus. All three overcome death and because of this, their followers hope to also overcome death. The overcoming of death or 'resurrections' aren't exactly the same but the concept is exactly the same.

There's a whole lot more parallels between these three deities than just resurrection and salvation though.

Following Osiris(Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Smith:

However, there was one important difference between these gods and Osiris. Unlike them, he had triumphed over death, and the ability to do likewise could be conferred upon his followers. The colophon of Pyramid Text Spell 561B states that whoever worships Osiris will live forever, showing that already at this date those who devoted themselves to the god might expect to share in his resurrection...

But the crucial significance of Osiris for them lay in what he personally had done and undergone. His life, death, and resurrection were perceived to be particularly momentous in relation to their own fates, and thus they figure more prominently in the textual record than do accounts of the exploits of other divinities. Moreover, because so much importance was invested in the fact that these were events actually experienced by a real individual, and not merely abstractions, personal detail was essential in recounting them.

In the ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts the resurrected deceased/king is ritually identified with Osiris(just like baptized Christians ritually identify with Jesus).

The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts(SBL Press; Second edition, 2015), James P. Allen:

144 RECITATION.OPENING THE SKY’S DOOR. Ho, Teti! Your head has been tied to your bones for you, your bones have been tied to your head for you. The sky’s door has been opened for you...

Stand up! Raise yourself like Osiris!...

333 RECITATION. You, father [Osiris] Pepi! The sky’s door has been opened to you, the door of the (sky’s) arcs has been pulled open to you...

So, (Osiris), [you shall go] to the sky and become Paths-Parter...

152 RECITATION. Isis, this Osiris here is your brother, whom you have made revive and live: he will live and this Unis will live, he will not die and this Unis will not die, he will not perish and this Unis will not perish...

526 RECITATION. Raise yourself, clear away your dust, remove the shroud on your face. Loosen your ties...

The Search for God in Ancient Egypt(Cornell University Press, 2001), Jan Assmann:

Quite similarly, at a very early date, Egyptian texts began to celebrate the resurrection of the king, who has emerged from his tomb and ascended to the sky, as a theophany.

Jan Assmann, "Resurrection in Ancient Egypt", Ted Peters, Robert John Russell, Michael Welker (Hg.), Resurrection.
Theological and Scientific Assessments, Grand Rapids, Mich. 2002, S. 124-135 (2002):

This is the meaning of resurrection in the Old Kingdom. It is the exclusive privilege of the pharaoh. Resurrection is a proper term for this idea because the dead king is constantly summoned to “rise.” “Raise yourself” is the typical address to the deceased, and it means not only to get up but to ascend to heaven.

Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE-CE 200(Oxford University Press, 2017), Casey Deryl Elledge:

Alongside Zoroastrianism and Canaanite myth, Egypt also provided a very ancient precedent for an optimistic belief that the dead lived on in an embodied, corporeal existence. If Baal's "resurrection" is a more contested issue, that of Osiris can hardly be denied. The revivification of Osiris, even to the extent of the corporeal refashioning of his bones (cf. Ezek. 37:1-14), is well attested long before and during the time when resurrection was emerging in Judaism.

During the Greco-Roman era, Osiris becomes syncretized with Dionysus and is often said to be the same god as Osiris by Greeks and Romans.

"Baptism and initiation in the cult of Isis and Sarapis" by Brook Pearson, in Baptism, the New Testament and the Church: Historical and Contemporary Studies in Honour of R.E.O. White, edited by Stanley E. Porter, Anthony R. Cross:

In ancient times, the Osiris myth was the basis for what are perhaps the first mysteries- the lawful succession of the pharaohs, their burial and eventual union with Osiris in the afterlife. This 'mystery' eventually became something in which not only kings but other Egyptians could partake, and, in time, spread across the known world, along with the worship of Isis and Sarapis. For our purposes here, both of these elements separately and in combination suggest that the Isis initiate did indeed go through a process of identification with the god Osiris, and that this fact would have been the assumption behind the entire initiation process. In the first place, the ancient form of the Isis-Osiris mysteries clearly has the kings, and later normal people, identifying with the god Osiris in the hope of unification with him in the afterlife (and even, possibly, in his resurrection). This is indisputable. We have no reason to think that the worship of Isis and Osiris (Sarapis), as it spread throughout the Graeco-Roman world, changed it's essential myth in any great way. The initiate of the first century would surely have partaken in the mysteries akin to those practised throughout the history of the Isiac cult. This is where the identification of Osiris and Dionysus becomes most important...This would suggest that the myths that we know about Osiris and Isis were indeed aetiological myths for the Isis cult...The most striking texts are those which equate the central Orphic myth with the story of Osiris: Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 364E-365B, 'the tales concerning the Titans and the rites celebrated by night [i.e. the Orphic orgies] agree with the accounts of the dismemberment of Osiris and his revivication and regenesis'(LCL); and Diodorus Siculus 1.25.6-7, "Isis discovered the drug [or 'charm/spell'] of immortality, by means of which she not only raised from the dead her son Horus, who had been the object of plots on the part of the Titans and had been found dead under the water, giving him his soul, but also made him to receive of immortality." The collocation of death, water and resurrection in this last passage makes an extremely strong case for the cultic connection of these elements...

Corresponding Sense: Paul, Dialectic, and Gadamer(BRILL, 2001), Brook W. R. Pearson:

Are Hellenistic mystery religion initiatory rites parallel to Paul's interpretation of baptism in Rom. 6:1-11? And, how and why might they be parallel? Following some of Wagner's critics, my assessment is that the evidence does indeed suggest that Paul's interpretation of baptism in Rom. 6:1-11 is parallel to elements in the mystery religions, especially the Isis cult, which was located in many different Hellenistic centres throughout the Greco-Roman world. In my opinion, the most important element of this similarity is the language of identification utilized by Paul of the individual Christian's 'sharing' (Rom. 6:5) in the activities of Jesus by participation in a ritual reenactment of Christ's death. As we shall see, the language used in Romans 6 to describe this participation, in addition to the similarities of Paul's equation of baptism and death with the similar equation in the Osiris myth, clearly evokes a connection with Rom. 1:23, and stands in developed contrast to typical Jewish use of similar language...

The language of identification and imitation in this passage is not reminiscent of Jewish ideas—Jews were not called to participate in ritual so as to identify with the actions of Yahweh, nor to imitate their God, but rather to follow his Law. Other cults of the Ancient Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds, however, contain many different levels of such identificatory phenomena...

Coupled with this and other texts, the archaeological evidence would seem to support the idea that one of the central elements of the Isis/Sarapis cult was not only the baptism of its initiates, but the periodic re-enactment of the central aetiological myth of the Isiac religion—the drowning of Osiris in the Nile. As discussed below, in Appendix B (especially pp. 319-324), there is also strong evidence to suggest that the identification of the Isiac worshiper (at both initiation and later) with the characters of this central aetiological myth was indeed an important part of Isiac worship and self-understanding. In short, if we are to accept the extant textual and archaeological evidence as representational to and evocative of at least the popular mind (and in Plutarch's case, probably the mind of an initiate to at least one of the mysteries, if not those of Isis and Osiris/Sarapis), then it would seem that there are several elements which, when taken together, would then offer a full parallel with Paul's formulation in Rom. 6:1-11: cultic initiatory baptism that was seen as a relative identity with the god, and that, in physically representing the act of resurrection, pre-figured a future resurrection.

Tracing Orpheus: Studies of Orphic Fragments(De Gruyter; 2011), Albert Henrichs:

According to Philodemus, the god's "third birth" occured when Rhea put him together again after he had been killed and dismembered by the Titans... In a later section of Piet. that deals with divine wounds and deformations, the reference to Dionysos' dismemberment by the Titans is repeated almost verbatim, without mention of rebirth (N 1088 XI 14-21; HV II 9 = OF 59 II):

'Some (report) that Dionysos too [came back to life] after his dismemberment by the Titans when his limbs were reassembled and his wounds [healed] by Rhea.'

...The dismemberment of Dionysos and the reassembling of his limbs correspond to the fate of Osiris as described by Greek sources. The reconstitution of the divine body in particular has been taken as a sign of Egyptianizing influence on the Zagreus myth in the early Ptolemaic period...

As has been pointed out by Alberto Bernabe and others, the revived Dionysos who died and came back to life again was regarded as a divine role model for the Dionysac initiates and their expectations of a happy afterlife.

[Chrissy Hansen]

"BUT, that doesn't mean that there weren't deities that die and return to life or overcome death in some way and offer the same to their followers."

I never denied this. I denied there was any single mytheme. I argue that these were culturally distinct, because what it means to die and then to return to life are culturally distinct concepts.

So, for instance, while Chinese pagans in the ancient times may have had a "sky god", that does not mean that this "sky god" is related or in any way related to a Norse or Semitic "sky god." These are all culturally specific, because the meaning, details, rituals, and ultimate qualities of what it is to be a "sky god" is culturally specific.

This similarly applies to narrative. While a narrative, as with Ba'al may have the god "die" and "rise", the problem is not so much what it says. It objectively says he did those things (contra J. C. de Moor and J. Z. Smith). The problem is, what does that actually mean. Does it mean he was culturally conceptualized as a dying-rising god, or is there a meaning deeper than that which actually makes him not such a deity? I think that Wyatt, Suriano, and Smith show with their research that he isn't a dying-rising god (and especially in light of Al-Jallad's findings).

And yes, Osiris was believed to be bodily reconstituted. There is no rejecting that. But is that body alive the same way a human person is? No. It is alive in the afterlife, it is alive but represented as a green mummy, it is alive AND dead. As Frankfort pointed out, Osiris was paradoxical as both a living and dead deity simultaneously.

My contentions with the dying-rising god are far more technical than parallels. Parallelism is, in reality, an exceedingly weak system to use epistemologically, because there are numerous alternatives that it cannot actually decide between (polygenesis or reliance, if reliant in what direction, etc). It only works when we can demonstrate a genetic relationship, i.e. Osiris and Dionysos works because we can actually show where ancient authors conflated them.

So while there were definitely deities believed to have died and rose again (though they were rare), what that meant is culturally specific, so hypostatizing them into a single type (dying-rising gods) is a dangerous endeavor. This is specifically what figures like Mettinger warned us against. They don't fit a single ideal type because these are culturally specific phenomena, not instances of the same phenomena.