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| Jesus had a mortal mother and a divine father -- Pagan Gods did that first |
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![]() Was Christianity new? Was Christianity unique? It's talk about virgin birth; or rather about the divine-father-mortal-mother birth. |
Why? The ancients faith was greater than ours. They didn't believe in sissy spiritual Gods. Their Gods were real -- real physical beings who lived in the physical universe we live in. Where did the Gods live? Up there. |
In
the ancient world divinity was up-there, literally
up there in the heavens. If you found divinity on Earth,
you figured it had to have physically moved from there to here
-- God coming down on a cloud, say, or Zeus having sex with a mortal
woman (the point not the rowdiness of the God but the transmission
of His divinity), or a divine lightning bolt, with Apis
in it, zapping a cow and making it, when you read Herodotus [3.28],
Fully God and Fully Cow. Silly
myth, till you see it's also our myth. |
Now
this Apis, or Epaphus, is the calf of a cow which is never afterwards
able to bear young. The Egyptians say that fire
comes down from heaven upon the cow, which thereupon conceives Apis. The
calf which is so called has the following marks:- He is black, with a
square spot of white upon his forehead, and on his back the figure of
an eagle; the hairs in his tail are double, and there is a beetle upon
his tongue. |
| That
Here are a few examples of ancient Gods, emperors and wise men with divine fathers and mortal mothers: |
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Alexander
the Great (Kind of reminds you of Herodotus and Apis, huh? Funny, you never hear believing scholars bloviate on how the stories of Apis' and Alexander's births developed independently. I wonder why that is.)
Maybe. There was also this story about Al's mom and a divine snake. >>
Plutarch even goes on to give a third version of Alexander's divine parantage -- I won't bother you with that one. You're welcome. |
[2] ... It is said that his father Philip fell in love with Olympias, Alexander's mother, at the time when they were both initiated into the mysteries at Samothrace.. . . On the night before the marriage was consummated, the bride dreamed that there was a crash of thunder, that her womb was struck by a thunderbolt, and that there followed a blinding flash from which a great sheet of flame blazed up and spread far and wide before it finally died away. . . .[The soothsayer] Aristander of Telmessus . . . declared that the woman must be pregnant. . . At another time a serpent was seen stretched out at Olympias' side as she slept, and it was this more than anything else, we are told, which weakened Philip's passion and cooled his affection for her, so that from that time on he seldom came to sleep with her. The reason for this may either have been that he was afraid she would cast some evil spell or charm upon him or else that he recoiled from her embrace because he believed that she was the consort of some higher being. |
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The point of all
this was clear to the ancients -- |
[3]
... According to Eratosthenes, Olympias, when she sent
Alexander on his way to lead his great expedition to the East, confided
to him and to him alone the secret of his conception and urged
him to show himself worthy of his divine
parentage. . . |
| In the ancient world, great men were often understood to be born of mortal women and divine fathers. Sheesh. I mean, really. Have you ever noticed how stupid other people's myths are? Untill you notice this is our myth too. |
| In the ancient world, great men were often understood to be born of mortal women and divine fathers. Sheesh. I mean, really. Have you ever noticed how stupid other people's myths are? Untill you notice this is our myth too. |
The first Roman emperor Augustus (62 BC - 14 AD), was the son of the God Apollo, conceived by a holy-snake.
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When
Atia had come in the middle of the night to the solemn service of Apollo,
she had her litter set down in the temple and fell asleep, while the rest
of the matrons also slept. On a sudden a serpent
glided up to her and shortly went away. When she awoke, she purified
herself, as if after the embraces of her husband, and at once there
appeared on her body a mark in colours like a serpent, and she could never
get rid of it; so that presently she ceased ever to go to the public baths.
In the tenth month after that
Augustus was born and was therefore
regarded as the son of Apollo.
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| In the ancient world, great men were often understood to be born of mortal women and divine fathers. Sheesh. I mean, really. Have you ever noticed how stupid other people's myths are? Untill you notice this is our myth too. |
Publius Cornelius Scipio 'Africanus', The Elder (236 - 184 BC)
"From the sun rising above the marshes of Maeotia Epitaph of Scipio Africanus - Q. Ennius |
It is recorded that the mother of Scipio
Africanus, the elder, had the same
experience as Olympias, Philip
the Great's wife and Alexander the
Great's mother,... his mother had long been believed sterile
and that Publius Scipio, her husband, had despaired of having children.
Then, while her husband was away and she was sleeping on her own, a huge
snake was seen beside her, in
her room and in her bed; when
those who saw this snake shouted out in terror, it vanished and could
not be found. Scipio consulted the harupices about this and they held
a sacrifice and gave a response that children would be born. Not long
after the sighting of the snake, the woman began to show all signs of
being pregnant; in the tenth month,
she gave birth to this Publius Africanus, the man who defeated
Hannibal and the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War. But it is much
more because of his achievements than because of that prodigy that he
also <i.e., as well as Alexander> is thought to be a
man of godlike quality. |
| In the ancient world, great men were often understood to be born of mortal women and divine fathers. Sheesh. I mean, really. Have you ever noticed how stupid other people's myths are? Untill you notice this is our myth too. |
The godman Dionysus was the Son of Zeus and the mortal Semele.
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I
am Dionysos, the son of Zeus, And Semele,
daughter of Cadmus was joined with him [Zeus] in love and bore him a splendid
son, joyous Dionysus,--a
mortal woman an immortal son. And now they both are gods. |
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| A similarity the early Christians recognized, and explained away as "demonic imitation" -- copied by the earlier Pagans from the later Christians, magically, backwards in time | The
devils, accordingly, when they heard these prophetic
words, said that Bacchus was
the son of Jupiter...and they taught that, having been torn in
pieces, He ascended into heaven. |
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still working on this page
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| What the early Christians throught |
The second century Church Father Origen says of the Jesus' virgin birth, He lists a number of Pagan Gods born of virgins: Danae, Melanippe, Auge and Antiope. The stories about these Gods are "ancient," says Origin, but unlike the story of Jesus' virgin birth, only fables. [Origin, Against Celsus 1, 37] |
"We [Christians] are not the only persons who have recourse to miraculous narratives of this kind." [Origin, Against Celsus 1, 37] |
The second century Christian Justin Martyr says of Jesus, |
"He was born of a virgin, accept this in common with what you believe of Perseus." [Justin Martyr, First Apology, 22] |
| Why did these virgin born Gods come before Jesus? Justin knew the answer -- devils. | "The devils...craftily feigned that Minerva was the daughter of Jupiter not by sexual union." [Justin Martyr, First Apology, 64] |
POCM is about history, not ethics. Jesus' miraculous conception was not new and unique -- that's important for the historical truth, or not, of gospel claims. Other people take the point farther, and ask: "Can we morally say: "Ours is history, yours is a lie"? Here's how Mrs. Crossan's little boy Johnny puts it: |
Augustus came from a miraculous conception by the divine and human conjunction of [the God] Apollo and [his mother] Atia. How does the historian respond to that story? Are there any who take it literally?... That divergence raises an ethical problem for me. Either all such divine conceptions, from Alexander to Augusts and from the Christ to the Buddha, should be accepted literally and miraculously or all of them should be accepted metaphorically and theologically. It is not morally acceptable to say...our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is a lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one's own story. [John Crosssan, The Birth of Christianity, 1998, pg 28 - 29.] |
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still working on this page
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