Yes it is that time of year. Easter eggs,Peter rabbit,etc. Is it Pagan?
Yes. But the NT is also Pagan so it works.
Iesus Deus by PhD M. David Litwa - new work from good scholar on origins of Christianity in Greco-Roman religion
The topic of this study is how early Christians imagined, constructed, and promoted Jesus as a deity in their literature from the first to the third centuries CE. My line of inquiry focuses on how Greco-Roman conceptions of divinity informed this construction. It is my contention that early Christians creatively applied to Jesus traits of divinity that were prevalent and commonly recognized in ancient Mediterranean culture. Historically speaking, I will refer to the Christian application of such traits to Jesus as the “deification” of Jesus Christ.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The “Deification” of Jesus Christ
Chapter 1: “Not through Semen, Surely”: Luke and Plutarch on Divine Birth
Chapter 2: “From Where Was this Child Born?”: Divine Children and the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas
Chapter 3: “
Deus est iuvare”: Miracles, Morals, and Euergetism in Origen’s
Contra Celsum
Chapter 4: “And he was Metamorphosed”: Transfiguration as Epiphany
Chapter 5: “We Worship One who Rose from His Tomb”: Resurrection and Deification
Chapter 6: “The Name Above Every Name”: Jesus and Greco-Roman Theonymy
Adela Yarbro Collins: “This book is of interest to a wide readership. It will help historical critics understand what “divinity” meant in the ancient world. It will also help theologians understand the origins of Christology. I recommend it to students, scholars, and any reader curious about Jesus.”
Stanley Stowers: “M. David Litwa’s Iesus Deus marks a major breakthrough in scholarship on early Christianity. The book manages to overcome the scholarly apologetic segregation of early Christian beliefs about Jesus Christ from Greek and Roman dominated Mediterranean culture and to demonstrate the fit of these beliefs in that Hellenistic context. A great deal of writing about the ‘purely Jewish’ Christ crumbles with this book.”
David Aune: “In
Iesus Deus, M. David Litwa surveys six of the more significant ways in which early Christians from the first through the third centuries CE drew on common reservoir of ancient Mediterranean conceptions of deity as models for expressing the ultimate significance of Jesus, namely his divine origin and deity. These six themes include divine conception (focusing on Luke 1), punitive protection of honor (Jesus as the
enfant terrible of the
Infancy Gospel of Thomas), superhuman moral benefaction (Origen’s argumentation in the
Contra Celsum), epiphanic or theophanic manifestation (the Gospel transfiguration narratives), corporeal immortalization (the Gospel resurrection accounts), and the reception of a proper divine name (Phil 2:9-11 in the light of Roman imperial practice). This is an extraordinarily well-written, nuanced, convincingly argued and methodologically sophisticated comparative study which breaks new ground in understanding a centrally important aspect of the formation of early Christology. The author rightly criticizes the continued tendency to bifurcate “Judaism” and “Hellenism,” and in his use of comparative method rejects superficial conceptions of “borrowing” by appealing to the shared existence of an “embedded Hellenization” that pervaded ancient Mediterranean cultures. The author makes use of an impressive array of primary and secondary sources over which he has enviable control. This book gets four stars and should be required reading for all serious students of early Christian thought.”