You genuinely think there is evidence Romulus was deified close to his purported lifetime?
I'm not sure why that matters? Romulus dies and a cult following began. He was associated with a common Roman God. But his story is one of a human, leading wars, organizing cities and so on.
What does a life time have to do with this?
Do you know the time frame of the mystery religions and all other savior demigods?
The main religions, influenced by Hellenism, syncretically mixed with their own local customs -
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
He supposedly lived around 750BC and his myth isn’t documented until the 4th C BC.
I'm going by Plutarch. There were local stories about Romulus immediately after his death.
You can’t make up a mythical founder of a city in real time as the city has real origins that are known by those who lived at that time.
That didn't happen with Jesus? Why would it need to happen with Romulus? Jesus would have died 30 AD. Paul was writing in 50 AD.
The Gospels were finished in 110 AD. The first canon is unknown. 2nd century is a mess. 3rd century adopts a canon.
Here is the 2nd century:
These various interpretations were called
heresies by the leaders of the
proto-orthodox church, but many were very popular and had large followings. Part of the unifying trend in proto-orthodoxy was an increasingly harsh
anti-Judaism and rejection of
Judaizers. Some of the major movements were:
- Gnosticism – second to fourth centuries – reliance on revealed knowledge from an unknowable God, a distinct divinity from the Demiurge who created and oversees the material world. The Gnostics claimed to have received secret teachings (gnosis) from Jesus via other apostles which were not publicly known, or in the case of Valentinius from Paul the Apostle. Gnosticism is predicated on the existence of such hidden knowledge, but brief references to private teachings of Jesus have also survived in the canonic scripture (Mark 4:11) as did warning by the Christ that there would be false prophets or false teachers. Irenaeus' opponents also claimed that the wellsprings of divine inspiration were not dried up, which is the doctrine of continuing revelation.[citation needed]
- Marcionism – second century – the God of Jesus was a different God from the God of the Old Testament.
- Montanism – second century – a pentecostal movement initiated by Montanus and his female disciples, featuring prophetic continuing revelations from the Holy Spirit.
- Adoptionism – second century – Jesus was not born the Son of God, but was adopted at his baptism, resurrection or ascension.
- Docetism – second to third century – Jesus was pure spirit and his physical form an illusion.
- Sabellianism – third century – the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three modes of the one God and not the three separate persons of the Trinity.
- Arianism – third to fourth century – Jesus, while not merely mortal, was not eternally divine and was of some lesser status than God the Father.[note 1]
In the middle of the second century, the Christian communities of Rome, for example, were divided between followers of Marcion, Montanism, and the gnostic teachings of Valentinus.
“Remember when Romulus founded our city 20 years ago?”
“Yes of course, but I always find it strange as I lived here 30 years ago and my dad before that and his dad before him but he is a god so maybe I just misremembered living here before that.”
In 1AD a lifetime was 38 years. So in 110 some people can say "do you remember Jesus 80 years ago?
Anyone living in Jesus's time was dead. Now we have 1/2 Gnostics who believe he was only a spirit, or some such bizarre Eastern version.
Who knows what the 40 gospels claimed?
In 318 AD we have a unified canon. How many people remember the Jesus days at this point?
No wonder you are so easily impressed by Carrier making up some subjective odds
You haven't demonstrated any made up anything. 3 to 1 is based on available evidence. Your point here has fallen flat dead.
You just spouted some obvious nonsense about Romulus whose myth emerged centuries after his purported life.
Looks like the stories continued directly after his supposed death and ascension. What source are you using?
Why would evidence that even a single mythical gI’d has emerged in near real time be relevant to differentiating whether he is likely a deified man or a mythical god given we know many deified men appeared in real time?
Come on, you can work that one out for yourself surely…
Why do you keep saying "real time"? Jesus supposedly died in 30 AD. 20 years later Paul knows of no crucifixion, no family, no ministry, no disciples, no followers, fishermen, no sermons, nothing. HE knows a vision of an already risen Jesus in a different ghost body.
Knows of NO Gospel story.
Then 40 years later we finally get a highly mythical tale at least set on Earth. Real time? But we also get 50% Gnostic, bizarre, highly Eastern versions with a Demiurge, Jesus and the OT God being Different and all sorts of strange tales.
The modern canon is not accepted until the 3rd century. Hundreds of years later.
Oxford Annotated Bible - by
Pheme Perkins Michael D. Coogan
states (p. 1744)
"Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (
Lk. 1.4;
Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.
Unfortunately, much of the general public is not familiar with scholarly resources like the one quoted above; instead, Christian apologists often put out a lot of material, such as
The Case For Christ, targeted toward lay audiences, who are not familiar with scholarly methods, in order to argue that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus’ disciples or their attendants
. The mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity’s central figure—Jesus Christ—to confirm the faith of their communities.
As scholarly sources like the
Oxford Annotated Bible note, the Gospels are not historical works (even if they contain some historical kernels).
The traditional authors of the canonical Gospels—Matthew the tax collector, Mark the attendant of Peter, Luke the attendant of Paul, and John the son of Zebedee—are doubted among the majority of mainstream New Testament scholars. The public is often not familiar, however, with the complex reasons and methodology that scholars use to reach well-supported conclusions about critical issues, such as assessing the authorial traditions for ancient texts."
real time? No.
“Even if there is no evidence for my claim then it’s because the evil church destroyed it all so that just proves my point all the better”.
You have some fantasy idea about how powerful the early church was and the extent to which it had the ability to eradicate ideas over vast geographical areas including those outside of the Roman Empire.
There would be no writings of the early Jesus outside of the Roman Empire. The "fantasy idea" is not about the early church. It's about the Roman Catholic church who went back and destroyed all temples from all pagan religions and also destroyed all material not in line with their canon.
We found a Dead Sea Scroll 1/2 finished, a book of sayings from a philosopher was being copied into a gospel as if Jesus said them. It was hidden quickly, half finished, as if in a serious hurry. Because if found it would mean death.
If you don't understand the power of the church you need some history lessons.
There was no early church. It was Gnostic groups and Bishops arguing against each other during the entire 2nd century. It wasn't until Constantine needed something to unify Rome and decided to use Christianity which had some churches set up and his mother was a Christian.
It's thought each of the popular churches used one of the 4 Gospels and they combined them best they could at the 1st council of Nicea in 318 AD.