IDENTITY CRISIS

WHO AM I?

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Traits, characteristics, and life stories of different pagan gods, Gods that proceeded and match Jesus' persona. Jesus is no more than a conglomeration of the pagan gods, no more than a carbon copy of the pagan gods he evolved from.

• A Pagan FAQ and God Q and A

• Polytheism in Genesis: Baal and Ashtoreth vs. Yahweh

• Mithra

• Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story

• WAS THERE NO HISTORICAL JESUS? http://pages.ca.inter.net/~oblio/jesus.html

  also see http://vanallens.com/exchristian/2002_08_25_archive.php

   

  Gerald Massey

• The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ

• Greek Mythology and the God Apollo

• Chronology of Jesus' Life...it doesn't make sense

• PAGAN ORIGINS OF THE CHRIST MYTH: www.medmalexperts.com/POCM/index_FLASH.html

• JESUS TABLES: table of similarities between Jesus and others

• SPECIFIC SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE LIVES OF JESUS AND KRISHNA

• Rebuttal to Campus Crusaders for Christ "JESUS: Fact or Fiction?"

• THE GOD MOVIE : www.thegodmovie.com/clip-Trailer.php

On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ DVD
$20.00
TITLE: Carrier vs. Licona: On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ DVD
DATE: (April 19, 2004)
VENUE: UCLA (Los Angeles, California, USA)

The Veritas Forum presents "On the Resurrection of Jesus Christ," a debate between Richard C. Carrier, atheist, historian, and editor emeritus of the Secular Web, and Michael Licona, a Christian scholar.
Recorded at UCLA on April 19, 2004, before a crowd of half a thousand, Carrier defends his latest theories of how Christianity began with slide shows and new evidence from the Bible, arguing that visions began a belief in a kind of spiritual resurrection, and the empty tomb was a later legend. Christian author Mike Licona argues against him, drawing on the arguments of his mentor, Gary Habermas.

The debate was skillfully moderated by Dr. S. Scott Bartchy, Professor of History at UCLA and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion, who has written detailed studies on the letters of Paul, which became a central issue in the debate, allowing him to ask skillful questions of both sides. The scholarly level of the debate impressed Bartchy, who remarks that it was one of the best he'd attended. This DVD is well produced, with good audio and multiple camera angles edited together along with numerous slides employed by both Carrier and Licona. Altogether, as Bartchy concluded, it makes for "an excellent evening!"

[Order]

Here are a few Jesus issues to think about from Mickey Z. : 

*If your god sent his son to earth to save it, and there’s life on other planets, did he send the same son to those other planets or does he have other kids?
*By the way, why did he pick Galilee in the first place? This choice made the spread of Christianity a rather laborious project, wouldn’t you say? And why did he wait so long? Did your god not care about the generations that came before Jesus? Then, when Jesus supposedly came back from the grave, he still didn’t announce it far and wide. Hey, if your god is so omnipotent, why did he hatch such a hare-brained scheme to begin with?

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Chronology of Jesus' Life

Geneology of Jesus Christ, According to the Gospels http://atheism.about.com/library/FAQs/christian/blchron_xian_jesus.htm

The genealogy of Jesus is described in 2 places in the gospels - once in Matthew and once in Luke. The genealogy in Luke has 15 more names than the one in Matthew, and 25 of the names differ.

They both agree, however, that Joseph is the father of Jesus - an agreement, if Jesus is supposed to be the Son of God, which is rather odd. If the writers were trying to show that Jesus was a flesh and blood descendant of David why didn't they trace the genealogy through Mary? After all, she is the biological mother of Jesus, and Joseph was only supposed to be the father by adoption.

These could not be two complimentary geneologies showing the paternal and maternal geneological lines of Jesus - they are two speculations written by who knows who decades after the events are said to have occurred. Two differing ancestral lines cannot claim the same two sets of ancestors as their own.

Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith... 1 Timothy 1:4

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Pagan virgin mothers:

Alcmene, mother of Hercules who gave birth on December 25^th
Athena, dawn goddess
Chimalman, mother of Kukulcan
Chinese mother of Foe (Buddha)
Coatlicue, mother of Huitzilopochtli
Cybele, "Queen of Heaven and Mother of God"
Devaki, mother of Krishna
Hera, mother of Zeus's children
Hertha, Teutonic goddess
Isis, who gave birth to Horus on December 25^th
Juno, mother of Mars/Ares
Maya, mother of Buddha
Mother of Lao-kiun, "Chinese philosopher and teacher, born in 604 B.C."
Nana, mother of Attis
Neith, mother of Osiris, who was "worshipped as the Holy Virgin, the Great Mother, yet an Immaculate Virgin."
Nutria, mother of an Etruscan Son of God
Ostara, the German goddess.
Rohini, mother of Indian "son of God"
Semele, mother of Dionysus/Bacchus, who was born on December 25^th
Shin-Moo, Chinese Holy Mother
Siamese mother of Somonocodom (Buddha)
Sochiquetzal, mother of Quetzalcoatl

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Polytheism in Genesis: Baal and Ashtoreth vs. Yahweh

Sol Abrams

Genesis 1:26-27 says, "And God said, `Let us make man in our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea....' And God created man in his own image in the image of God created he him, male and female he created them."

The word man in this text includes male and female . This is confirmed by the word them whose antecedent is man. So he and his in this sense are both male and female. In fact, the word him is superfluous, and we could omit the superfluity by stating the passage like this: "In the image of God, he created them male and female." This means that male and female were created in the image of God. In other words, man [male and female or mankind] was created in the image of God.

Since man [male and female] was created in the image of God, it logically follows that this god was both male and female. The word our implies more than one, so, in effect, what we have is a god-pair consisting of a male god and a female god.

Chapter one of Genesis is from the Elohist source that used Elohim [gods plural] in referring to "God." Originally, the male god was Baal, and the female god was his consort Ashtoreth. Orthodox clergymen will argue that the us and our in the creation passage are simply examples of the "royal we" used by emperors, but this rationalization is false. The book of Genesis was written before the "royal we" originated. It began with the first Roman emperor, Augustus, and included the emperor and his loyal civil administrators. Afterwards, it was sometimes used in pagan religious ceremonies in the pre-Christian Roman Empire, which at that time was polytheistic.

In Genesis 3:22 , there is further evidence of polytheism as the Hebrew gods are depicted as saying, "Behold the man has become as one of us to know good and evil, and now lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat and live forever...." Here again the orthodox clergy will claim that the us is really the LORD God and the angels that were with him, but this cannot be for a number of reasons. First, there is no mention of angels in Genesis until Chapter 19 , but even if these angels did exist, they would have been acting upon orders of the god-pair of 1:26-27 . So the us here was again referring to that god-pair. To further show that the our and us in these Genesis passages referred to the god-pair of early Hebrew polytheism, we have only to review the history of the ideological clashes between the proponents of Baal and those of Yahweh that went on in the Caananite-Israelite lands from the time of the judges until the fall of Judah and the Babylonian captivity.

During these times, Baal and his consort Ashtoreth were worshiped by many Israelites both in Samaria (Israel) and Judah even after the captivity, mainly by those who remained in the conquered lands. Yahwists like Ezra finally purged the Israelites (by then known as Jews) of all Baal residuals and even forced them to give up their Baalish wives and families (see Ezra 9-10 ). Ezra's purging of Baal appeared to be complete. It was his wish to erase Baal completely from the Israelite past; however, the residuals in Genesis 1 and 3 continue to remind us not only of Israel's polytheistic past but of the Canaanite origins of Judaism.

Using archaeological evidence on one hand and biblical between-the-line implications on the other, the following conclusions support the premises stated above:

(1) Most of the Israelites at the time of the exodus (about 1250 B.C.) were already located in the Canaanite area, which, incidentally, was at that time a part of Greater Egypt. A relatively small number, probably only one tribe (Levi), were in Egypt. Exodus 1:15 , for example, says that only two midwives were needed to attend the births of Hebrew children. Furthermore, the Israelites needed divine help to defeat a small seminomadic tribe (Ex. 17:8-13 ) in contradiction to the later editor's estimate of an army of 600,000 men (12:37 ) besides children (and women?).

(2) This relatively small group of Israelites from the outside (Egypt proper) formed some type of symbiotic relationship with the much larger inside group (which consisted of Israelites and Canaanites, the so-called mixed multitude) to form the "12 tribes" (when they were not fighting each other).

(3) The outside group was the Yahwist cult, the inside group the Baal cult. The struggle between the two groups went on for well over 500 years.

(4) Apparently it was not until the reign of Josiah that the Yahwist group was able to achieve dominance. The "lost book" of Deuteronomy was discovered in the house of the LORD (2 Kings 22:8 ), and the Passover was reinstituted after a lapse of 500 years (if indeed it even existed before then). The golden calf (symbol of the Kings of Israel) from the reign of Jeroboam was suppressed (2 Kings 23:15 ).

(5) Biblical scholars agree on how the Pentateuch was put together. The sources were (E) Elohist, (J) Yahwist, (P) Priestly, (D) Deuteronomist, and (R) Redactor. The last two were written to dovetail with the first two, and the writers tried to do two things: (1) eliminate all contradictions, and (2) eliminate all vestiges of the Israelite primitive past of pagan polytheisism.

Richard Elliott Friedman noted in Who Wrote the Bible? that after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 587 B. C., some Jews fled to Egypt and formed a colony at Elephantine at the first cataract of the Nile (p. 153). They built a temple there, which was clearly against the law of centralization in Deuteronomy. The extraordinary thing about the Elephantine temple, however, was that this group of expatriated Jews worshiped Yahweh and two other gods, one male and one female. This god-pair apparently was Baal and Ashtoreth. The Yahwist Jews living elsewhere were not happy with this development, for when the Elephantine temple was destroyed in the 5th century, B.C.E., they would not help to rebuild it (p. 154).

The scholarly piecing together of information from archaeological discoveries and overlooked textual implications of a polytheistic past indicate that the editors failed in both endeavors listed above. As a result, we know today that monotheism came to Judaism not by divine revelation but by a process of theistic evolution.

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Mithra

Mithrasism was the worship of the Iranian Sun God Mithra who was  born of a virgin on the winter Solstice, December 25th. Sound familiar. Mithrasism was a blend of Presian Dualism and Chaldean Stellarism. His worshippers were shepherds and herds men. How many? Twelve, just like Jesus' 12 Disciples. They observed the Sabbath and partook in the ritual of the Eucharist ( eating wafers with a cross on it).  Mithra's resurrection was at the vernal equinox...Easter. His followers celebrated his crucifixion earlier than 600 BC. His crucifixion was said to take away the worlds sins and his pain and suffering and subsequent rising from the dead was seen as salvation.

More on Mithrasism next month...

There are many more pagan gods that also walked like a duck and talked like a duck named Jesus.

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A Pagan FAQ and God Q and A

Q:  Wise men followed a Star To the Birth of which Gods?

A: Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus

Q: Star foretold which God's birth?

A: Adonis (Tammuz), Jesus

Q: Which Gods were of Immaculate conception and born out of virgins?

A: Buddha, Osiris, Horus, Adonis, Jesus

Q: Which Gods were born on the winter Solstice?

A: Mithra, Jesus

Q: Which Gods were born in a cave or stable and placed in a crib?

A: Horus, Krishna, Mithra, Jesus

Q: Which Gods had a massacre of the innocents as a reaction to their impending birth?

A: Buddha, Krishna, Jesus

Q: Which Gods were seen as resurrection saviors?

A: Horus, Attis, Jesus

Q: Which Gods were saviors and also resurrected on the vernal equinox?

A: Mithra, Adonis, Osiris, Jesus

Q: Who is the constant in this Q and A?

A: Jesus because he is a conglomeration of pagan gods that proceeded him.

The story of Jesus is one of forgery and an attempt by early Christians to escape persecution by asking everyone to abandon the pagan gods for a new super-god composed of them all in Jesus. It was a bargain: buy one...get the rest free. Eventually it caught on.

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Verdict on the first century:  "Apart from Thallus, no certain reference is made to Christianity in any extant non-Christian Gentile
writing of the first century."  (F. F. Bruce, Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester,
in The New Testament Documents:   Are They Reliable?, fifth ed.  (Ann Arbor:  Eerdmans, 1960), p. 114)

Verdict on the second through twentieth centuries:   These writers, who lived at the time that Jesus supposedly lived, left a library
of Jewish and Pagan literature, in which not one mention of Jesus or of his apostles or his disciples appears:  Arrian, Plutarch,
Apollonius, Hermogones, Appian, Damis, Aulus Gellius, Appion of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Petronius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Silius
Italicus, Phlegon, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, Seneca, Dion Pruseus, Martial, Lucanus, Statius, Phaedrus, Florus Lucius,
Columella, Lysias, Theon of Myrna, Pliny the Elder, Paterculus, Persius, Justus of Tiberius, Epictetus, Ptolemy, Valerius Maximus,
Quintius Curtius, Valerius Flaccus, and Pomponius Mela.  McDowell cites Otto Betz, author of  What Do We Know About Jesus? 
(1968) as concluding that "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus" (p. 9).  Betz is either disingenuous
or unaware of the work of Charles F. Dupuis, Robert Taylor, David F. Strauss, Kersey Graves, John M. Robertson, Thomas Whittaker,
Robert Arthur Drews, Peter C. A. Jensen, William B. Smith, L. Gordon Rylands, P. L. Couchoud, and John E. Remsburg.

The ten sources cited are McDowell's only evidences outside the gospels for the existence of Jesus as an historical person. 
Except one, and here he planted the seeds of his own destruction, because it is the key to how the cult of Christianity was
constructed:

Creation of Christianity:  At the same time this popular street story of Jesus, son of Joseph Pandira or Panthera, was spreading
in Rome in the first century BCE, the cult of Mithra was introduced into the Roman empire and attracted the military and mercantile
classes.  This cultural influx of a Persian religion meshed with ancient Hebrew traditions to form what became the cult of Christianity. 
Anyone who doubts that the popular story of the Jewish Jesus was written into the worship of Mithra to become Christianity should look
at Mithraic worship point by point.  (See the link above for a summary by David of that religion).

Jesus acquired a biography in the so-called gospels just as Paul Bunyan would if four Americans separately tried to write down all
of his history and wonder-working activities, in order to consolidate that aspect of American culture.

Final verdict:  There is no historical evidence whatever that the Jesus of Christianity was an historical person.

                                                                                    --David L. Kent

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Scholars and historians who have concluded that Jesus Christ is nonhistorical:

For a contemporary view, see Frank R. Zindler, "Did Jesus Exist?" vol. 36, no. 3 (1998), American Atheist; same author, "How
Jesus Got a Life" vol. 34, no. 6 (1992), American Atheist

                                                                                                              --David L. Kent

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Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story

Richard Carrier

Table of Contents

www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/resurrection/index.shtml

Foreword (read this first) [ 6K ]

Introduction [ 7K ]

•     "Why I Don't Buy the Resurrection Story" [ 71K ]

This is a much shorter, significantly different paper on the same topic that I have read to the public. It is well worth reading first or even in lieu of the rest of this essay, and it contains material and argument that adds to, rather than repeating, the sections above and below.

Section 1. The Event is not Proportionate to the Theory [ 9K ] (introduces this section's argument)

• 1a. Even Granting the Existence of the Supernatural, This First Point Holds: The Event is Not Proportionate to the Theory [ 6K ]
• 1b. No Miracles Today Implies None Then [ 9K ]
• 1c. A Message for All Would be Sent to All, and No Infallible Being would Entrust Fallible Minions as Couriers [ 8K ]

Section 2. The Evidence Casts Suspicion on the Event being a True Resurrection [ 7K ] (introduces this section's argument)

• 2a. A Cumulative Case Can be Made that Jesus did not Really Die [ 10K ]
• 2b. What Are the Odds that he Could Have Survived? [ 6K ]
• 2c. What Are the Odds of Trickery? [ 9K ] (includes brief digression on my reliance on NT texts)
• 2d. A Digression on Witnesses Being Willing to Die [ 13K ]
• 2e. How Do We Know He was Dead? [ 14K ] (also includes more argument for the possibility of a brief survival)
• 2e1. How Could He Get Out of the Tomb? [ 8K ]
• 2f. What Are the Odds That Jesus Was Speared? [ 10K ]
• 2g. Was the Tomb Guarded? [ 11K ]
• 2h. If the Tomb had Guards, What are the Odds of Evading Them? [ 11K ]
• 2i. What Do I Conclude From All of This? [ 8K ]
• 2j. How Do We Account for the Rise of Christianity? [ 22K ]

Section 3. The New Testament Casts Suspicion on Jesus Actually Appearing After Death [ 4K ] (introduces this section's argument)

• 3a. Paul's Vision [ 12K ]
• 3b. Was There an Early Tradition of Physical Appearances? [ 8K ]
• 3c. What About the "Hundreds" of Eye Witnesses? [ 5K ]
• 3d. Could the Original Gospel Have Been of a Spiritual Rather Than a Physical Resurrection? [ 8K ]
• 3e. What Do 'Pneumatikos' and 'Psychikos' Mean? [ 11K ]
• 3f. Does an Empty Tomb Entail a Physical Resurrection? [ 14K ]
• 3g. Appearances in Matthew and the Late Addition to Mark [ 6K ]
• 3h. Appearances in Luke [ 5K ]
• 3i. Appearances in John [ 11K ]
• 3j. What Good are "Anonymous" Eye-Witnesses Anyway? [ 5K ]
• 3k. Was Luke a Learned Man? Would That Even Matter? [ 13K ]
• 3l. Concluding Remarks in Support of the Unreliability of the Gospels [ 8K ]

Section 4. Addenda to This Essay [ 3K ]

• 4a. The Two Lamest Arguments Ever Made [ 7K ]
• 4b. "Lord, Liar, or Lunatic?" [ 12K ]
• 4c. The Fact of Changed Lives[ 5K ]

Note on Mark:

All references to Mark should have in mind the new contextual discoveries made by Dennis MacDonald in his book The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (2000), which cast even greater doubt than ever before on the historicity of the Markan Gospel story, and thus on all other Gospels (for details, see my review of his book). Since John comes last, appears to invent the story of Thomas, and begins with a mystical discourse on theology that has no place in a history, he is the furthest from the facts. And since the others borrow heavily from Mark (and a collection of sayings currently called Q, but possibly related to the Gospel of Thomas), without any sign of realizing what he was inventing, it is clear that these Evangelists had no better sources than Mark (since if they did, they would have refuted him or left out his inventions). They trusted Mark far more than was appropriate for any objective historian. And yet Mark's yarn, which had for him an important and ingenious didactic meaning, may well be the inadvertent origin of the very physical resurrection belief itself.

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