Your idea is that the Jewish worship was formed in the Hellenistic period. This is not true according to the Bible. The forms of worship were written 1000 years before at the time of Moses.
There is no evidence any of that is true. All religions write stories that go back to the beginning of everything, Judaism is no different.
Abraham is considered a literary character as is Moses.
Early Judaism can be shown to be polytheism, around 1000-600 B.C. The Bible is a version of the religion elites thought it should be.
But I never said Jewish worship was formed in the Hellenistic period? That is a gross misunderstanding.
During the 2nd Temple Period when encountering the Persians we see Persian myths slowly creep in and Hellenism never makes it into the OT because it wasn't until the Greeks conquer Judea 332 - 110 B.C, then Greek ideas (Hellenism) flow into Judaism which become the now dead Hellenistic Judaism and then Christianity. The clip you were responding to said the NT was Hellenistic. Not the old Jewish stuff?
I gave the evidence already that the gospel themes etc can be found in the OT, in writings that existed a long time before the Hellenistic or Persian period.
You can believe that or not but speculation that the Pentateuch and other parts of the OT were written under the influence of Persia or Greece is no more than speculation based squarely on the idea that supernatural writings are unlikely because you and other skeptics don't believe that sort of stuff.
That is completely wrong.
There are many references. A good basic overview is -
2:26 One big influence, Persians, conquer Judea 539-332 B.C.
2:50 Persian religion, Zoroastrianism had ideas Judaism did not have but picked up.
- War of good God vs Evil God/light vs dark/ God vs Satan
- Bad people burn in hell, good people wait in heaven
- A river of fire will flow over the universe burning everything up (even hell itself)
- A new better world created in it’s place
- All good people will be resurrected by God to live in that new world happily ever after
More specific lectures from Yale Divinity can show Dr Collins the expert in Persian influence and the actual examples in scripture are available.
The Greek influence is the NT.
From the same video the basics are explained here:
5:26 Mystery cults, come from Greek religions. Every culture that was conquered by Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Thracians, all took the Mystery cult theology and added it to their local religion and came up with the Mystery religions.
6:06 Basic Mystery cult, common features:
- Individuals “initiated” into the mysteries, ritually and by teaching sworn secrets about the universe. Something about the cosmos one needed to be saved, secrets. Many secrets are now lost.
- purpose was to gain salvation in the afterlife
- all use baptism and communion(communal meals)
- fictive kinship “brotherhood”
9:00 - Trends in Hellenistic religion
- Petra Pakkanen, Interpreting Early Hellenistic Religion (1996)
- Four big trends in religion in the centuries leading up to Christianity
- Christianity conforms to all four
9:16 Four Trends
- Syncretism: combining a foreign cult deity with Hellenistic elements. Christianity is a Jewish mystery religion.
- Henotheism: transforming / reinterpreting polytheism into monotheism. Judaism introduced monolatric concepts.
- Individualism: agricultural salvation cults retooled as personal salvation cults. Salvation of community changed into personal individual salvation in afterlife. All original agricultural salvation cults were retooled by the time Christianity arose.
- Cosmopolitianism: all races, cultures, classes admitted as equals, with fictive kinship (members are all brothers) you now “join” a religion rather than being born into it
12:34 Savior deities, dying/rising, pre-Christian, Osiris, Adonis, Romulus, Zalmoxis, Inanna (oldest 1700 B.C., female deity resurrected in 3 days)
13:32 Worship of Inanna was continued in Tyre during the origin of Christianity (Tyre is mentioned in Bible). Highly unlikely it’s a coincidence that a Jewish sect decided to build their own version of a dying/rising deity using the Jewish concepts of angels instead of Gods.
15:37 bad scholarship on internet, Horus not a dying/rising God. Mithras is also not. Mithras does undergo a passion, no death.
18:30 All Mystery religions have personal savior deities
- All saviors
- all son/daughter, never the supreme God (including Mithriasm)
- all undergo a passion (struggle) patheon
- all obtain victory over death which they share with followers
- all have stories set on earth
- none actually existed
- Is Jesus the exception and based on a real Jewish teacher or is it all made up?
21:00
Pagan /Jewish element, Judea-Pagan Syncretism
Pagan - Savior son of God
Jewish - Messianic resurrection cult
Pagan - Undergoes ordeal by which he obtains victory over death
Jewish - based on blood atonement theology (substitutionary sacrifice)
Pagan - which he shares with those initiated into his cult for individual salvation
Jewish - adapting Passover and Yom Kippur
Pagan - in a universal brotherhood
Jewish - first by circumsision, then without
Pagan - through a baptismal invitation and communal meal
Jewish - through a baptismal invitation and communal meal
23:36 was difficult to convert to Judaism, Paul made innovations to make it easier. Original Torah observant sect of Christianity became smaller and smaller and disappears around 5th century. Islam may be re-emergence of a lost version of this original Christian sect. Halal is basically Kosher.
25:54 “But Christianity is different”, that is how syncretism works.
27:00 mysteries
Elusinian Mysteries = Mycenaean + Hellenistic
Bacchic Mysteries = Phoenician + Hellenistic
Mysteries of Attis and Cybele = Phrygian + Hellenistic
Mysteries of Baal = Anatolian + Hellenistic
Mysteries of Mithras = Persian + Hellenistic
Mysteries of Isis and Osiris = Egyptian + Hellenistic
Christian Mysteries = Jewish + Hellenistic
28:00 Christian Pesher (combining disparate passages in scripture that reveals “hidden messages”)
29:15 examples of Pesher logic taken from Old Testament and used for Jesus
32:00 Baptism, Christian version is different from Jewish/John the Baptist version of baptism. Differences are the same in all mystery religions.
- symbolic sharing of saviors ordeal
- to be born again (Osiris cult)
- united into brotherhood
- to be saved in afterlife
- cleaned of sin (Bacchus, Osiris, Mithras)
- baptism for dead (Paul mentions this 1 Cor, 15: 29)
37:05 Eucharist in Mystery religions
- become one with savior
- to be united in brotherhood
- saved in afterlife
- Lords Supper
- Rememberence, flesh/blood/death, 1 Cor 11:24-26
Christian Lords Supper is distinct in Jewish ways
Then examples of proof that the NTt is using mystery terminology.
You keep ignoring these specific examples and using vague generalities that don't fit at all, as if you are just programmed to say the same thing over and over without explaining why any of this is wrong??
The Pentateuch is not Persian, not Greek, has no heaven, baptism, eucharist, communion or ANY of the things listed above??? You are talking nonsense?