Why Didn't God Leave Huge Quantities of Secular Evidence For Jesus?

[joelr]

Tammuz was not a Savior from sin. What pagan god gave salvation to humanity from their sins? Is Jesus A Knock-Off Of Pagan Gods? 15 “Dying & Rising” Pagan Savior Gods Debunked | Reasons for Jesus

Who cares? Maybe the Jewish version was the only sin-forgiving savior god? Each religion was different. Still all myths.

Savior gods had these in common:

The general features most often shared by all these cults are (when we eliminate all their differences and what remains is only what they share in common):

• They are personal salvation cults (often evolved from prior agricultural cults).
• They guarantee the individual a good place in the afterlife (a concern not present in most prior forms of religion).
• They are cults you join membership with (as opposed to just being open communal religions).
• They enact a fictive kin group (members are now all brothers and sisters).
• They are joined through baptism (the use of water-contact rituals to effect an initiation).
• They are maintained through communion (regular sacred meals enacting the presence of the god).
• They involved secret teachings reserved only to members (and some only to members of certain rank).
• They used a common vocabulary to identify all these concepts and their role.
• They are syncretistic (they modify this common package of ideas with concepts distinctive of the adopting culture).
• They are mono- or henotheistic (they preach a supreme god by whom and to whom all other divinities are created and subordinate).
• They are individualistic (they relate primarily to salvation of the individual, not the community).
• And they are cosmopolitan (they intentionally cross social borders of race, culture, nation, wealth, or even gender).
  

• They are all “savior gods” (literally so-named and so-called).
• They are usually the “son” of a supreme God (or occasionally “daughter”).
• They all undergo a “passion” (a “suffering” or “struggle,” literally the same word in Greek, patheôn).
• That passion is often, but not always, a death (followed by a resurrection and triumph).
• By which “passion” (of whatever kind) they obtain victory over death.
• Which victory they then share with their followers (typically through baptism and communion).
• They also all have stories about them set in human history on earth.
• Yet so far as we can tell, none of them ever actually existed.

This is sounding even more like Christianity, isn’t it? Odd that. Just mix in the culturally distinct features of Judaism that it was syncretized with, such as messianism, apocalypticism, scripturalism, and the particularly Jewish ideas about resurrection—as well as Jewish soteriology, cosmology, and rituals, and other things peculiar to Judaism, such as an abhorrence of sexuality and an obsession with blood atonement and substitutionary sacrifice—and you literally have Christianity fully spelled out. Before it even existed.

 

[Skywalker]

Please read this. This explicitely says the Jews were heavily influenced by the Persians

It does mention heaven but not in the same way, it's where God lives, here is that mention:


"The God of the Israelites is described as ruling both Heaven and Earth (Genesis 14:19 22 24:3, Psalm 146:6).[27] Other passages, such as 1 Kings 8:27 state that even the vastness of Heaven cannot contain God's majesty.[27] A number of passages throughout the Hebrew Bible indicate that Heaven and Earth will one day come to an end (Psalm 102:26–27, Isaiah 13:5, 14:26, 24:18, 51:6, Jeremiah 4:23–28, and Zephaniah 1:2–3 and 18).[27] This view is paralleled in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, which also regarded Heaven and Earth as vulnerable and subject to dissolution.[27] However, the Hebrew Bible differs from other ancient Near Eastern cultures in that it portrays the God of Israel as independent of creation and unthreatened by its potential destruction.[27] Because most of the Hebrew Bible concerns the God of Israel's relationship with his people, most of the events described in it take place on Earth, not in Heaven.[30] The Deuteronomistic source, Deuteronomistic History, and Priestly source all portray the Temple in Jerusalem as the sole channel of communication between Earth and Heaven.[31]"


BUT THEN, 2nd temple period (PERSIAN INVASION)


"During the period of the Second Temple (c. 515 BC – 70 AD), the Hebrew people lived under the rule of first the Persian Achaemenid Empire, then the Greek kingdoms of the Diadochi, and finally the Roman Empire.[32] Their culture was profoundly influenced by those of the peoples who ruled them.[32] Consequently, their views on existence after death were profoundly shaped by the ideas of the Persians, Greeks, and Romans.[33][34] The idea of the immortality of the soul is derived from Greek philosophy[34] and the idea of the resurrection of the dead is derived from Persian cosmology.[34] By the early first century AD, these two seemingly incompatible ideas were often conflated by Hebrew thinkers.[34] The Hebrews also inherited from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans the idea that the human soul originates in the divine realm and seeks to return there.[32] The idea that a human soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is merely a temporary abode in which the soul is tested to prove its worthiness became increasingly popular during the Hellenistic period (323 – 31 BC).[29] Gradually, some Hebrews began to adopt the idea of Heaven as the eternal home of the righteous dead.["

Correlation doesn't equal causation. The belief of heaven existing among the Greeks and Hebrews adopting it doesn't mean they adopted it from the Greeks, or if any of them did, that those beliefs weren't already consistent with the Bible. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth. That is different from Greek beliefs about Heaven.

 

[Skywalker]

Tacitus mentioned the cult and a story from the gospels


...To get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Chrestians[43] by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judæa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

— Tacitus' Annals 15.44, see Tacitus on Christ

Christus is a reference to Jesus.

 

[joelr]

The Christian concept of heaven being in Psalm 23:6 is a logical inference and a good possibility.



The Hebrew Bible mentions Abraham being a friend of God.

Yes for the 10th time heaven is where god dwells in the OT.

After the Persian occupation these were borrowed:

The after they copied the Persians: - immortality of the soul, resurrection of the dead, human soul originates in the divine realm and seeks to return there, The idea that a human soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is merely a temporary abode in which the soul is tested to prove its worthiness
they were not part of Judaism before

 

[joelr]

There are similarities between the code of Hammurabi and the Ten Commandments because of universal moral principles about respecting oneself and others.

exactly. No gods needed. People made them up. Same with the 10 commandments.

 

[joelr]

Christus is a reference to Jesus.

yes he clearly was vagely familiar with the gospel story. Who cares?

 

[Skywalker]

Demigod - " the offspring of a god and a mortal,"

The synoptic problem shows the other gospels used Mark as a source. We already went over this. It's just Mark and he's writing myths.

Jesus was God in the flesh. Jesus wasn't the offspring of God and Mary. Hercules was an offspring of a god and a mortal.

 

[Skywalker]

exactly. No gods needed. People made them up. Same with the 10 commandments.

Those universal moral principles that exist in other faiths all come from God and we don't need Hinduism to know about them.

 

[Batya]

The after they copied the Persians: - immortality of the soul, resurrection of the dead, human soul originates in the divine realm and seeks to return there, The idea that a human soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is merely a temporary abode in which the soul is tested to prove its worthiness


do you get it now?

Those things didn't need to be borrowed, they were already in the bible. Although, the heaven thing, nowhere in the bible does not teach anything like that. It says there will be a new heavens and a new earth, and the new Jerusalem will come down to earth, so we started out on the earth, and we will stay on the earth.
There area many pictures/ figures of resurrection in the bible. YHWH breathed into Adam, who then became a living soul, He gives us our soul, nothing borrowed about that.

 

[Skywalker]

yes he clearly was vagely familiar with the gospel story. Who cares?

It's an example that shows that the Roman historian Tacitus mentioned Jesus.

 

[joelr]

Hell is mentioned in Daniel 12: 2 and Proverbs.



Rob Bell: Populating Hell | Good Fight Ministries

Nope, still not the hell taught in the NT taken from Zoroastrianism.


Daniel 12:2 Does Not Teach Eternal Torment
Few passages from the Old Testament are cited as evidence that hell is a place of eternal torment. Given the Old Testament’s emphasis on death and destruction, this shouldn’t surprise us. If I believed that the unsaved live forever in torment, I wouldn’t run to passages about the wicked withering and dying like grass,2 or that call for them to melt away like slugs,3 or that describe them being burned to ashes and left without root or branch at the final judgment (like Malachi 4:1-3 does) either. But one passage stands out as an exception. One passage is a commonly cited as proof of eternal torment. That passage is Daniel 12:2:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt (NASB).

Basically, this passage speaks of the resurrection of both the saved and the unsaved. But aside from the fact that this does not speak of inherent immortality, it doesn’t say anything about eternal conscious existence for the damned, period.

I am not questioning the eternal duration of the contempt for the wicked, nor do I disagree with the following:

“Grammatically, there is no difference here between the length of time mentioned for life and that for punishment; rather, there is simply eternal life and eternal death.”4

But while both the life and contempt are eternal in duration, that does not mean that both groups of people consciously exist for eternity.

Daniel 12:2 Does Not Teach Eternal Torment | Rethinking Hell

 

[Skywalker]

No all the pagan religions had a savior. Carriers essay details several who were before Jesus. People were baptized into th ecult and the savior resurrected and got them eternal life.

Nothing is detracted from Christianity because they are all fictional stories.

Tammuz coming back to life had nothing to do with him being a Savior who died to save us from our sins and also that we could come before God without the separation of sin. Is Jesus A Knock-Off Of Pagan Gods? 15 “Dying & Rising” Pagan Savior Gods Debunked | Reasons for Jesus

Tammuz was also called a “healer” (as a profession), and regarded as a savior, but as Langdon notes (25) those who referred to Tammuz by these names “have not those spiritual doctrines which these words convey in Christian doctrine” in mind, but use the words “in the sense that all life depended upon his sacrifice and especially upon his return from hell.”

This means physical, not spiritual life: Tammuz healed medically, but as Langdon reminds us, “[e]very deity, male or female, possessed this power,” so Tammuz is not unusual in this regard. Tammuz saved, but not from sin: He saved from starvation and physical death. He was never looked upon as one to rescue from eternal damnation.

There is a death and return to life of Tammuz, though to call it a “resurrection” (as even Langdon does) is to remove all meaning from the word. Smith (26) notes that the means of Tammuz’ return to life is unknown, but adds that the description points to his “participation in a ritual in which the dead were invoked and then temporarily manifested.” The Tammuz cult was centered in Tammuz’ marriage to Inanna, and it was her lamenting of his early death that women imitated (as in Ezekiel). Tammuz’ death was usually ascribed, though, to raiders from the nether world that attacked him and took his sheep. Thereafter he was mourned by his mother, sister, and widow. (27)

 

[joelr]

Correlation doesn't equal causation. The belief of heaven existing among the Greeks and Hebrews adopting it doesn't mean they adopted it from the Greeks, or if any of them did, that those beliefs weren't already consistent with the Bible. Jesus said the meek shall inherit the earth. That is different from Greek beliefs about Heaven.

I do not care what Jesus said. I gave a list of new concepts added to Judaism after the Persion period. Again, believe what you want?
Scholarship is in agreement that the myths were borrowed. Correlation doesn't always equal causation. But it looks almost definite that these stories were shaped by other cultures.

 

[Skywalker]

Nope, still not the hell taught in the NT taken from Zoroastrianism.


Daniel 12:2 Does Not Teach Eternal Torment
Few passages from the Old Testament are cited as evidence that hell is a place of eternal torment. Given the Old Testament’s emphasis on death and destruction, this shouldn’t surprise us. If I believed that the unsaved live forever in torment, I wouldn’t run to passages about the wicked withering and dying like grass,2 or that call for them to melt away like slugs,3 or that describe them being burned to ashes and left without root or branch at the final judgment (like Malachi 4:1-3 does) either. But one passage stands out as an exception. One passage is a commonly cited as proof of eternal torment. That passage is Daniel 12:2:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but the others to disgrace and everlasting contempt (NASB).

Basically, this passage speaks of the resurrection of both the saved and the unsaved. But aside from the fact that this does not speak of inherent immortality, it doesn’t say anything about eternal conscious existence for the damned, period.

I am not questioning the eternal duration of the contempt for the wicked, nor do I disagree with the following:

“Grammatically, there is no difference here between the length of time mentioned for life and that for punishment; rather, there is simply eternal life and eternal death.”4

But while both the life and contempt are eternal in duration, that does not mean that both groups of people consciously exist for eternity.

Daniel 12:2 Does Not Teach Eternal Torment | Rethinking Hell

If heaven is eternal then hell is eternal. Rob Bell: Populating Hell | Good Fight Ministries

Rob Bell wants us to believe that the words translated “eternal,” in relation to Hell’s duration, like the noun ‘aion’ and the adjective ‘aionios’, only mean ‘age’. The truth is that the words ‘aion’ and ‘aionios’ can refer to an age or, ‘all eternity’.

In the Olivet discourse, after revealing that He will separate the righteous from the wicked like a shepherd separates sheep from the goats (Matthew 25:31-45), Jesus states that the wicked “shall go away into eternal [aionios] punishment: but the righteous into eternal[aionios] life.” (Matthew 25:46, ASV)

Jesus employed the exact adjective ‘aionios’ to describe the duration of Hell as He did for Heaven. If Hell is merely temporal, then so is Heaven! Would Bell claim that believers will only enjoy temporal life in Heaven and then cease to exist or go to Hell? I think not! Thus, if we acknowledge that Jesus was using ‘aionios’ to describe the eternal duration of life that the righteous will experience, it is an inescapable conclusion that He used ‘aionios’ to describe the eternal duration of the punishment of the wicked.

 

[Skywalker]

I do not care what Jesus said. I gave a list of new concepts added to Judaism after the Persion period. Again, believe what you want?
Scholarship is in agreement that the myths were borrowed. Correlation doesn't always equal causation. But it looks almost definite that these stories were shaped by other cultures.

The belief of heaven existed in the Jewish Scripture in Psalm 23:6 before the Persian period. There is no evidence that references to heaven in the Old Testament were shaped by other cultures.

 

[joelr]

Tammuz coming back to life had nothing to do with him being a Savior who died to save us from our sins and also that we could come before God without the separation of sin. Is Jesus A Knock-Off Of Pagan Gods? 15 “Dying & Rising” Pagan Savior Gods Debunked | Reasons for Jesus

Right except as I 've said like 45 times each savior god does slightly different things. Sin removing may have been some of the pagan versions, or not. It's a dying/rising demigod who is a savior. Back then salvation meant live forever. You are getting nowhere with this?

 

[Skywalker]

Hohly crud.
Dying for sins was a Jewish spin. Dying on a cross is just one way a savior god can die. Quetzalcoatl isn't even mentioned in Carrier's article? You just debunked nothing?
I cannot believe I have to say this again.
It's a demigod who goes through a passion, dies and is resurrected and gets members into the afterlife. That is the basic model. It's different in each myth.
It's already been established that Jesus is just another dying/rising savior and was not the first in that region.


"No. The only plausible reason for why some Jews ever came up with a Jewish dying-and-rising savior god in precisely that region and era, is that everyone else had; it was so popular and influential, so fashionable and effective, it was inevitable the idea would seep into some Jewish consciousness, and erupt onto the scene of “inspired” revolutionizing of a perceived-to-be-corrupted faith. They Judaized it, of course. Jesus is as different from Osiris as Osiris is from Dionysus or Inanna or Romulus or Zalmoxis. The differences are the Jewish tweaks. Just as the Persian Zoroastrian system of messianism, apocalypticism, worldwide resurrection, an evil Satan at war with God, and a future heaven and hell effecting justice as eternal fates for all, was Judaized when they were imported into Judaism. None of those ideas existed in Judaism before that (and you won’t find them in any part of the Old Testament written before the Persian conquest). No one claimed they were “corrupting” Judaism with those pagan ideas (even though in fact they were). They simply claimed these new ideas were all Jewish. Ordained and communicated by God, through inspired scripture and revelation. The Christians, did exactly the same thing."

Osiris didn't go through a passion and die for our sins. His resurrection was a zombi-fication.

 

[joelr]

The belief of heaven existed in the Jewish Scripture in Psalm 23:6 before the Persian period. There is no evidence that references to heaven in the Old Testament were shaped by other cultures.

right, except for:

During the period of the Second Temple (c. 515 BC – 70 AD), the Hebrew people lived under the rule of first the Persian Achaemenid Empire, then the Greek kingdoms of the Diadochi, and finally the Roman Empire.[32] Their culture was profoundly influenced by those of the peoples who ruled them.[32] Consequently, their views on existence after death were profoundly shaped by the ideas of the Persians, Greeks, and Romans.[33][34] The idea of the immortality of the soul is derived from Greek philosophy[34] and the idea of the resurrection of the dead is derived from Persian cosmology.[34] By the early first century AD, these two seemingly incompatible ideas were often conflated by Hebrew thinkers.[34] The Hebrews also inherited from the Persians, Greeks, and Romans the idea that the human soul originates in the divine realm and seeks to return there.[32] The idea that a human soul belongs in Heaven and that Earth is merely a temporary abode in which the soul is tested to prove its worthiness became increasingly popular during the Hellenistic period (323 – 31 BC).[29] Gradually, some Hebrews began to adopt the idea of Heaven as the eternal home of the righteous dead.[29]


you cannot win.

 

[Skywalker]

Hohly crud.
Dying for sins was a Jewish spin. Dying on a cross is just one way a savior god can die. Quetzalcoatl isn't even mentioned in Carrier's article? You just debunked nothing?
I cannot believe I have to say this again.
It's a demigod who goes through a passion, dies and is resurrected and gets members into the afterlife. That is the basic model. It's different in each myth.
It's already been established that Jesus is just another dying/rising savior and was not the first in that region.


"No. The only plausible reason for why some Jews ever came up with a Jewish dying-and-rising savior god in precisely that region and era, is that everyone else had; it was so popular and influential, so fashionable and effective, it was inevitable the idea would seep into some Jewish consciousness, and erupt onto the scene of “inspired” revolutionizing of a perceived-to-be-corrupted faith. They Judaized it, of course. Jesus is as different from Osiris as Osiris is from Dionysus or Inanna or Romulus or Zalmoxis. The differences are the Jewish tweaks. Just as the Persian Zoroastrian system of messianism, apocalypticism, worldwide resurrection, an evil Satan at war with God, and a future heaven and hell effecting justice as eternal fates for all, was Judaized when they were imported into Judaism. None of those ideas existed in Judaism before that (and you won’t find them in any part of the Old Testament written before the Persian conquest). No one claimed they were “corrupting” Judaism with those pagan ideas (even though in fact they were). They simply claimed these new ideas were all Jewish. Ordained and communicated by God, through inspired scripture and revelation. The Christians, did exactly the same thing."

Truth and lies are mixed. Even without the Bible people know that one day we will have to answer to God. You don't need myths of Osiris to know that. Osiris - Wikipedia

Osiris was the judge of the dead and the underworld, and the agency that granted all life, including sprouting vegetation and the fertile flooding of the Nile River.

 

[joelr]

Osiris didn't go through a passion and die for our sins. His resurrection was a zombi-fication.

nope: that's what you get for trusting amateur non-scholarship apologetics


"And indeed, carved on the walls of the pyramids centuries before Christianity began were the declarations of the goddess Isis (or Horus, or their agents), “I have come to thee…that I may revivify thee, that I may assemble for thee thy bones, that I may collect for thee thy flesh, that I may assemble for thee thy dismembered limbs…raise thyself up, king, [as for] Osiris; thou livest!” (Pyramid Texts 1684a-1685a and 1700, = Utterance 606; cf. Utterance 670); “Raise thyself up; shake off thy dust; remove the dirt which is on thy face; loose thy bandages!” (Pyramid Texts 1363a-b, = Utterance 553); “[As for] Osiris, collect thy bones; arrange thy limbs; shake off thy dust; untie thy bandages; the tomb is open for thee; the double doors of the coffin are undone for thee; the double doors of heaven are open for thee…thy soul is in thy body…raise thyself up!” (Pyramid Texts 207b-209a and 2010b-2011a, = Utterance 676). That sure sounds like a physical resurrection of Osiris’s body to me. (As even confirmed by the most recent translation of James P. Allen, cf. pp. 190, 224-25, 272. The spells he clarifies are sung to and about the resident Pharaoh, but in the role of Osiris, receiving the same resurrection as Osiris, e.g. “there has been done for me what was done for my father Osiris on the day of tying bones together, of making functional the feet,” “do for him that which you did for his brother Osiris on the day,” etc.)"

 

[joelr]

Truth and lies are mixed. Even without the Bible people know that one day we will have to answer to God. You don't need myths of Osiris to know that. Osiris - Wikipedia

well people who believe a fictional myth about a god believe that. In reality there is no such god and no such judgment. Because the evidence is zero.