Krishna - Historical or mythological?

[metis]

I suppose HInduism can't be so great if you are not willing to defend it. I and God get insulted all the time but we are quick to defend our beliefs and actions.

Because it's very difficult to have a serious discussion with those who don't understand even where Hinduism was and is coming from and have a closed mind because they think they already have all the answers.

 

[metis]

I believe there is no evidence that Genesis was influenced by Mesopotamian myths. However it is possible for two different entities to talk about the same events with perhaps different perspectives.

Those "myths" predated the writing of Genesis, plus some of the names of God came from that ancient tradition.

 

[joelr]

At least these majestic narratives of genesis match word by word with india. 1.four rivers from a mount are found in pushkar. 2. Pishon is pisangan. 3 hiddekel is dai. 4. Brahmas body split into male and female. Not in near east.

Can you lay out the comparisons side by side?

 

[joelr]

I believe there is no evidence that Genesis was influenced by Mesopotamian myths. However it is possible for two different entities to talk about the same events with perhaps different perspectives.

There isn't just evidence, it's conclusive.

These are all peer-reviewed PhD textbooks/monographs,

John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible 3rd ed.
“Biblical creation stories draw motifs from Mesopotamia, Much of the language and imagery of the Bible was culture specific and deeply embedded in the traditions of the Near East.
2nd ed. The Old Testament, Davies and Rogerson
“We know from the history of the composition of Gilamesh that ancient writers did adapt and re-use older stories……
It is safer to content ourselves with comparing the motifs and themes of Genesis with those of other ancient Near East texts.
In this way we acknowledge our belief that the biblical writers adapted existing stories, while we confess our ignorance about the form and content of the actual stories that the Biblical writers used.”
The Old Testament, A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, M. Coogan
“Genesis employs and alludes to mythical concepts and phrasing, but at the same time it also adapts transforms and rejected them”
God in Translation, Smith
“…the Bibles authors fashioned whatever they may have inherited of the Mesopotamian literary tradition on their own terms”
THE OT Text and Content, Matthews, Moyer
“….a great deal of material contained in the primeval epics in Genesis is borrowed and adapted from the ancient cultures of that region.”

The Formation of Genesis 1-11, Carr
“The previous discussion has made clear how this story in Genesis represents a complex juxtaposition of multiple traditions often found separately in the Mesopotamian literary world….”
The Priestly Vision of Genesis, Smith
“….storm God and cosmic enemies passed into Israelite tradition. The biblical God is not only generally similar to Baal as a storm god, but God inherited the names of Baal’s cosmic enemies, with names such as Leviathan, Sea, Death and Tanninim.”


Yale Divinity Lecture

Seams and Sources: Genesis 5-11 and the Historical-Critical Method

10:45 snake in Eden is a standard literary device seen in fables of this era

(10:25 - snake not Satan, no Satan in Hebrew Bible)


14:05 acceptance of mortality theme in Eden and Gilamesh story


25:15 Gilgamesh flood story, Sumerian flood story comparisons

26:21 - there are significant contrasts as well between the Mesopotamian flood story and it’s Israelite ADAPTATION. Israelite story is purposely rejecting certain motifs and giving the opposite or an improved version (nicer deity…)


36:20 2 flood stories in Genesis, or contradictions and doublets.

Yahweh/Elohim, rain/cosmic waters flowing,


40:05 two creation stories, very different. Genesis 1 formalized, highly structured

Genesis 2 dramatic. Genesis 1 serious writing style, Genesis 2 uses Hebrew word puns.

Genesis 1/2 use different terms for gender

Genesis 1/2 use different names, description and style for God


Both stories have distinctive styles, vocabulary, themes, placed side by side. Flood stories are interwoven.

Genesis to 2nd Kings entire historical saga is repeated again in Chronicles.

 

[joelr]

I believe there is no evidence that Genesis was influenced by Mesopotamian myths. However it is possible for two different entities to talk about the same events with perhaps different perspectives.

Article from -
Michael Zank, Professor of Religion, Jewish Studies, and Medieval Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston University

PhD in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies from Brandeis University


Enuma Elish and Genesis

Let us ask just one question about Genesis 1-11 in comparison with the Akkadian creation epic: how do human beings appear in these two stories?

To ask this question, we do not need to decide in advance whether the authors of Genesis deliberately produced a counter-narrative that took Enuma Elish as its negative foil or Vorlage. There are indications that this was so, but it may be just as well to consider Genesis as having been written by scholars who were aware of the need to produce something like Enuma Elish for the b’ney ha-golah (the exiles), something that articulated and preserved the values of Judahites and Israelites in a foreign land who were wrestling with the experiences of loss of sovereignty, deportation, displacement, and an uncertain future.

The story about the tower of Babel alone indicates that those authors served a community impressed by, as well as skeptical of, Babylonian achievements. Exposed to a far more populous and powerful civilization, the future “Jews” found the language to diminish what was before their eyes and put it in its place in ways that still ring profound and true today.

How did they do it? What is it in the language of Genesis 1-11 that achieves these results? These results could not have been achieved had the authors of Genesis been entirely ignorant or completely silent on Babylonian matters. Only by responding in their own idiom to the ancient and well-known Akkadian creation myth and, in the flood story, also to elements of Gilgamesh, were they able to create a story of creation that was to substitute for that of their more powerful Babylonian hosts. In the long term, the creation of Genesis rather than the ancient Akkadian epic served as the touchstone of civilizations that inherited the Bible and disseminated it across the globe.

The ancient myths that prompted the authors of Genesis to write as they did never vanished completely. One might even say that it was Genesis itself, with its subtle allusions to alternate ways of conceiving of the beginning, which prepared the ground for the eventual retrieval of its intertextual other.

Just as we now know, thanks to the archaeological and epigraphic retrieval of Ancient Near Eastern texts and traditions, that Genesis did not appear in splendid isolation but was shaped out of its preconditions and from within particular contexts, we can also observe that Genesis did not act in splendid isolation when it advanced to the status of the foundational story of other communities, even nations and empires, who read those ancient Israelite and Judahite texts in new situations and with new eyes, for they also read these texts with their old eyes.

It seems to me that these later readers of Genesis, themselves steeped in Babylonian, Egyptian, Syriac, Greek, and Roman traditions approached the text from contexts and with connotations that resembled those represented in Enuma Elish. They did not object, on principle, to the notion that the world was “full of gods,” as the Stoics taught, or that worlds came and went and were prone to destruction and regeneration. Theirs was a much more colorful universe than what we might imagine if we approach the Bible with the mental asceticism and puritan austerity of Calvinists. The ancient readers were hardly iconoclasts. Theirs was a world of divine beings, messengers, powers ruling the air, and a Supreme Being ruling all. That Supreme Being, the God hidden to the eyes of men, was not residing in splendid isolation but surrounded by a court and happy in that he had a son created in his likeness who was obedient to the point of sacrificing his own happiness to please his father. In other words, theirs was the world of Enuma Elish, or one very much like it.

So let us ask ourselves that one question. What is the role of the human being in Enuma Elish and what is the role of the human being in Genesis 1-11?

When it comes to the answer to this question, the difference between these texts could not be more pronounced. That difference would be meaningless if the texts could not be compared, if these texts had no relation to one another, if there was no “intertextuality” that linked them just enough to see where they align and where they depart from one another.

To answer briefly, while in Enuma Elish the creation of human beings is an afterthought and their purpose is to serve as an accouterment to the lifestyle of the gods, the creation of Genesis puts human beings in the place of the gods. It is not by accident when the Psalmist muses, “You made him only slightly less than God” (Psalm 8:5).

Genesis 1 barely conceals the existence of the divine retinue, of lesser gods and angels, but it reduces them to spectators and a silent chorus. (See Gen 1:26) Only later, in rabbinic midrash are the spectators and silent chorus given words that are unabashedly[1] assumed to have been spoken before the creation of the human being.[2] Like the Christians, the Jews of late antiquity imagined God as part of a pleroma, a fullness rather than an emptiness.

So the difference of Genesis is not that there are no lesser gods or divine beings but that it is almost completely silent about them. This includes a barely acknowledged silence, a may-he-who-has-ears-to-hear-get-the-hint of something barely remembered, or rather well remembered but now barely alluded to, namely, the great combat myth that was indelibly linked with the reputation of Marduk, god of cities, that is meant to be ignored, though not entirely forgotten. This, too, later readers remembered well. Not only those mindful of the vanquished saltwater chaos dragon, that monstrous goddess Tiamat slain in the beginning to save the gods and from whose carcass the habitable world was created, but others, too, who believed that YHWH Elohim slew Rahab and captured the Leviathan whose flesh will be the feast of the righteous at the end of days. (Rahab: see Job 9:13 and Job 26:12, Ps 89:10, Isa 59:9; Leviathan: see Job 3:8, 41:1.12, Psalm 74:14, 104:26, Isa 27:1) These lively images of primordial threat to existence contained by heroic divine intervention returned in stories about the battles of Christ and the saints against Satan and his lot.

Again, the creation of Genesis contains all this but barely hints to it. Instead it trains its spotlight on the human being. All other questions are rendered irrelevant: where was God’s wind before it hovered over the deep/tehom? Why and for what purpose did he fashion what he spoke into being? Why, in his majestic cohortative soliloquy, does He create human beings “in our likeness”? Did not Ea fashion Marduk after his likeness? Isn’t Christ the true likeness of God, the one who is even called by his name, a veritable “son of the sun” or, as in the Orthodox creed, “light from light?”

In Genesis, sonship or slightly-lesser-than-Godship, is conferred on human beings. In Enuma Elish, on the other hand, humans are created from the blood of Kingu, an evil figure, and hence their eternal enslavement to the gods is more than skin-deep. It is a condition that cannot be shed. It is their fate to serve the gods.

The story that the Babylonians read and reenact every fall during the season of the New Year is about divine kingship, the kingship of Marduk and the kingship and priesthood of few, their right to rule over the many: humans are meant to feed the gods. Without the gods and their protection, diligently mediated by the priest-king, they had nothing to eat themselves. The eternal merit of the gods rests on their providing the conditions of life, while life remains under the fragile protection of the gods. Stop feeding the gods and see what happens. Change their rites and you will fail. Disturb their temples and deprive them of their proper sacrifices and you will perish.

It is no accident that Babylonian Jewry, and Jews ever since, recall creation and divine kingship in the fall, the season when the world was created. Like the Babylonian New Year, Jewish festivities are drawn out from the first of the month of Tishrey (the names of the Jewish months are Babylonian) to the tenth of the month, the solemn day of atonement, followed by eight days of seasonal festivities recalling the Israelites’ sojourn in the desert. While there is no overt reference to Babylonian religion, the manner in which Jews recall creation and associate it with divine enthronement echoes the sequence of events in Enuma Elish. Creation and divine enthronement are meaningfully associated only if creation involves an assertion of supreme power over non-creation, chaos, perdition. As in Enuma Elish, though not so obviously in Genesis. Not if one reads it with the diminished range of overtones that were still audible to those in whose ears rang those other tunes.

 

[Bharat Jhunjhunwala]

I suppose HInduism can't be so great if you are not willing to defend it.

Do post yr questions again. Cannot find them

 

[Aupmanyav]

How can you know for certain?

Myths are not history, and the two locales are far from each other. The two representations also are completely different - that of a prince of Dwarika who went to his teacher Sandeepani in Ujjain to study and the other making him a cow-herder in a village close to Mathura.

 

[Aupmanyav]

When was Vishnu the supreme personality to develop in Brahman, and when did Krishna enter into Brahman as the supreme personality of Godhead and the eighth manifestation of Vishnu?

My belief, Advaita, does not accept either Vishnu or Krishna. I believe, Vishnu, a minor Vedic God, who happened to acquire importance by assimilating many different regional Gods as his avataras. This happened during the Aryan/Indigenous assimilation which happened in the Second millennium BCE.
Note: This is my personal view and very different from the main-line Hindu belief.

 

[SalixIncendium]

I suppose HInduism can't be so great if you are not willing to defend it. I and God get insulted all the time but we are quick to defend our beliefs and actions.

Hindus don’t feel a need to defend their views.

The fact that you do may say a great deal about your beliefs and actions.

 

[Jainarayan]

I suppose HInduism can't be so great if you are not willing to defend it. I and God get insulted all the time but we are quick to defend our beliefs and actions.

It doesn't need to be defended or proven as so many "Christians" are wont to do, trying to prove the validity of the Bible and existence of their God, denigrating others' beliefs. You need to defend your beliefs and actions. That says to me you don't have very great conviction. We take ours on faith and beliefs, we don't need to defend, justify, validate or otherwise prove anything to anyone. I don't care what you think of Hinduism, I won't stand for being insulted and denigrated, something which is clearly against the forums rules, and you skate just on the edge of. That's the difference between us ... Hindus respect others' beliefs, no matter how obnoxious and offensive those religions' followers can be. To be frank, I am sick of your slams against Hinduism. To further be frank, yes, you have pissed me off ... again.

 

[Jainarayan]

Those "myths" predated the writing of Genesis, plus some of the names of God came from that ancient tradition.

Not to mention my belief that the Jesus birth and childhood stories, and some his teachings are suspiciously similar and parallel to those of Krishna, found in the Srimad Bhagavatam Canto X (Book 10), at least several centuries before the Jesus stories:

1. An incarnation of God who takes birth to restore justice and righteousness.
2. Both are of royal descent. One becomes king of an earthly kingdom, one is considered an otherworldly king.
3. One born in a dungeon/prison; one born in a stable/cave or some other lowly place. Both children's births are announced by celestial beings,
4. A mad and jealous king fears a prophecy of a king to overthrow him (Kamsa, Herod). Tries to kill said God-child. Mad and jealous kings order the death of all male infants and toddlers.
5. Krishna and Jesus: father is warned about the danger to the child, child is secreted away by his father in fear of the mad king.
7. An extensive discourse given to disciples: the Sermon on the Mount; an extensive discourse given to a disciple: the Bhagavad Gita.
8. Incarnation of God transfoms/transfigures into a divine form, this transfiguration given to disciples; a vishvaroopa (lit. "all forms"), the divine, universal form, given to a disciple. In both events, the subject is recognized by the disciple(s) to be God.

The list can go on. Of course there are differences, given the time span of their stories: Krishna's mother was not a virgin, she had other children. The manners of their deaths are quite different: one executed as an enemy of the state, the other dies by being accidentally shot with a hunter's arrow. One has an elder brother and a sister with whom he is very close, the other is not reported to have any siblings.

There are a couple of possible explanations:
1. God can and does "reinvent the wheel" to accomplish the same task at different times and places in history. That is, it is the same story tailored for the audience. I think this is the likely explanation.
2. There is no divinity or divine plan, they are just stories, myths that made the rounds in southern and western Asia through centuries.

So in my opinion and belief, very little about Christianity and its stories, Old Testament and New Testament stories are original.

 

[metis]

Not to mention my belief that the Jesus birth and childhood stories, and some his teachings are suspiciously similar and parallel to those of Krishna, found in the Srimad Bhagavatam Canto X (Book 10), at least several centuries before the Jesus stories:

1. An incarnation of God who takes birth to restore justice and righteousness.
2. Both are of royal descent. One becomes king of an earthly kingdom, one is considered an otherworldly king.
3. One born in a dungeon/prison; one born in a stable/cave or some other lowly place. Both children's births are announced by celestial beings,
4. A mad and jealous king fears a prophecy of a king to overthrow him (Kamsa, Herod). Tries to kill said God-child. Mad and jealous kings order the death of all male infants and toddlers.
5. Krishna and Jesus: father is warned about the danger to the child, child is secreted away by his father in fear of the mad king.
7. An extensive discourse given to disciples: the Sermon on the Mount; an extensive discourse given to a disciple: the Bhagavad Gita.
8. Incarnation of God transfoms/transfigures into a divine form, this transfiguration given to disciples; a vishvaroopa (lit. "all forms"), the divine, universal form, given to a disciple. In both events, the subject is recognized by the disciple(s) to be God.

The list can go on. Of course there are differences, given the time span of their stories: Krishna's mother was not a virgin, she had other children. The manners of their deaths are quite different: one executed as an enemy of the state, the other dies by being accidentally shot with a hunter's arrow. One has an elder brother and a sister with whom he is very close, the other is not reported to have any siblings.

There are a couple of possible explanations:
1. God can and does "reinvent the wheel" to accomplish the same task at different times and places in history. That is, it is the same story tailored for the audience. I think this is the likely explanation.
2. There is no divinity or divine plan, they are just stories, myths that made the rounds in southern and western Asia through centuries.

So in my opinion and belief, very little about Christianity and its stories, Old Testament and New Testament stories are original.

That's interesting but not surprising as these myths* often are found in a pattern. Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell's works on this, especially "The Power of Myth"?

*myth: as you're probably aware of, "myth" does not mean nor imply falsehood.

 

[Jainarayan]

That's interesting but not surprising as these myths* often are found in a pattern. Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell's works on this, especially "The Power of Myth"?

*myth: as you're probably aware of, "myth" does not mean nor imply falsehood.

Yes, I have a copy. But I'm ashamed to say I haven't read it yet. I used to watch the PBS series of interviews with Bill Moyers. Campbell was fascinating to listen to. Incidentally, I wish there was another word instead of "myth". I don't like the connotations of fairy tales.

 

[Bharat Jhunjhunwala]

Myths are not history, and the two locales are far from each other. The two representations also are completely different - that of a prince of Dwarika who went to his teacher Sandeepani in Ujjain to study and the other making him a cow-herder in a village close to Mathura.

Why are they different?

 

[Aupmanyav]

At what age boys were sent to school? What was the age of Krishna when he killed Kamsa?
Was he still herding cows before he killed Kamsa or was he attending Sandeepani school in Ujjain?