Did something new happen with "Christianity"? in the 1st-century?
I.e., the earliest "Christianity" -- not later Council-of-Nicaea "Christianity"
The original question was:
Where did the Christian idea of a soul and it's eternal life in Heaven come from?
A basic problem with this question -- maybe I didn't catch it at first -- is that there is
no such thing as "the Christian idea of a soul and its eternal life in Heaven." If you study all the Christian literature, you find no such thing as
the Christian idea of a soul etc.
Rather, there are hundreds of Christian ideas about souls and Heaven and eternal life. The new emphasis rather is about
how to get to Heaven, which is "the good news" of that time, preached by Paul and others, reporting something which happened, and then because of this there is seen to be a way to gain eternal life which did not exist before. So the real "Christian idea" was not about the nature of "the soul" and "Heaven" and so on, which were accepted much as already believed, in different forms, all having some wish or perception of some afterlife.
So, I plead guilty to slightly altering the original question:
Where did the Christian idea of being saved and gaining eternal life in Heaven come from?
I don't think this changed version turns it into something silly and pointless, because actually it also solves what the original question asks. Because what is different about Christianity is not its ideas about the nature of the soul or Heaven, but its ideas about gaining eternal life, or how the soul is to be saved. --Whatever the exact nature of the soul is.
So, why is there a sudden belief in eternal life in heaven, dating from this point in time, with nothing earlier to explain it?
The best explanation is that the reports about this 1st-century resurrected one caused many to start believing this, or giving them hope for this possibility, when before there had been nothing to give them any such hope. And no one can explain why there was such a claim of a resurrected one only at this time and place and not at any other time or place over thousands of years of legend throughout many lands and cultures with their various superstitions and mythologies and religious traditions.
So maybe it's possible that something unusual really did happen here, in Galilee-Judea, in about 30 AD, which uniquely caused this new "Gospel" (euangelion) good news to sprout up and spread as a new eternal life hope such as did not exist before.
Y'think?
But sshhhhhhh, we're not supposed to say this, because it offends some people.
It's not that it offends people. It's dumb. Jesus dying and resurrected is a standard pagan story on the Middle East.
No, there are no other dying and resurrecting stories from the Middle East. You can't name one and cite a source for it. I know you can rattle off a list of names of supposed resurrected gods/heroes, but you can't quote any source for those, giving the account of it and reporting the alleged event.
It's pretty obvious to anybody accustomed to ancient literature that everything supernatural attributed to Jesus is traditional pagan stories to prove that Jesus was the son of a god.
No, not "everything" -- not the part relevant to our point, which is the Resurrection. Also the miracle healing stories are not from any traditional pagan stories. You could make a case that the virgin birth and the scene of Jesus being tempted by Satan are derived from earlier pagan ideas.
But you cannot cite any earlier pagan or Jewish sources narrating any resurrection event or miracle healings which resemble the miracle acts of Jesus. And it's these which are related to the "good news" eternal life claim which appears in the 1st century AD and cannot be explained unless something unusual happened at this time to cause this new belief in the possibility of eternal life.
Actually, you're 1 or 2% correct in your claim, if you'll make the effort to find such earlier sources, and we could debate whether they really prove your point. There's virtually nothing there. E.g., we could discuss the Asclepius cult, which you might cite.
And it's true that there is one earlier story, not pagan but Jewish, which was used by the Christian storytellers. And that is II Kings 4:42-44, which bears too much resemblance to the later Jesus fish-and-loaves miracle story. However, that is the ONLY Jesus miracle which appears to have been derived from something earlier. Other than that, there is no Jesus miracle story which can be traced back to some earlier legend. So this is the exception which makes the rule: The Jesus "supernatural" stuff was not derived from "pagan stories" or other earlier traditions. You can't give any other example than this one from II Kings.
At the same time, there is probably fiction in the Gospel accounts, in addition to fact, as there is in most or all the ancient writings. And also there are elements borrowed from earlier pagan and Jewish tradition. And maybe you could argue that the Gospel accounts contain a higher percentage of fiction than most other written accounts of the time. But that fiction element would not include the healing miracles and the Resurrection, which show no indication of being fictional, other than the simple dogma that such "supernatural" events are impossible
ipso facto and so must be ruled out, regardless of the evidence.
A true scientific skeptical approach does not impose the requirement that all miracle claims must be ruled out
a priori without consideration of the evidence. Rather, science and skepticism only requires doubting, as well as a higher quantity of evidence in the case of miracle claims. Which extra evidence we do have in the case of the Jesus healing miracles and resurrection.
In paganism anybody who did anything extraordinary is explained by them being partly by divine parentage.
That would include anyone who really did do something extraordinary. So, if Jesus did in fact perform something extraordinary, like the miracle acts depicted in the accounts, then some would explain it as due to divine parentage.
On the other hand, if he did nothing extraordinary at all, then probably he would not even have made it into the historical record. Nor would Alexander the Great or Socrates or any other noteworthy figure of history. They all did something extraordinary, or they would have been forgotten. So, why is he in the historical record at all? Didn't he have to do something unusual in order to get reported in written accounts? What did he do that made him noteworthy enough to get this recognition?
The story of Jesus is bog standard on the pagan tradition.
If so, we should have some similar pagan legend we know from written sources of the time of the alleged events, rather than only from literature appearing centuries or thousands of years later, which is all we have.
All the pagan myth traditions are legends which emerged over many centuries, or even thousands of years. While the Jesus legend appeared in about 20 years, first in Paul's epistles, reporting that he was crucified and then raised back to life. Then other accounts reported the same during the period up to 100 AD. So the "story of Jesus" developed during a period of 20-70 years after his death, during which we have at least 5 written sources, for which by comparison there is nothing similar in any of the pagan traditions, which are all products of many centuries of mythologizing and legend-building.
If all of these tens of thousands similar Jesus figures didn't make a shift in our beliefs then its silly to think Jesus would do it based on that alone.
If these "similar Jesus figures" really did exist, someone would finally cite one example and quote from the ancient sources of the time which report on them. That no one ever does this is strong evidence that there isn't even one "similar" figure, let alone thousands. If there is another, someone will present him/her and quote from those ancient sources, instead of continuing to falsely claim that they exist, and falsely giving the laundry list of their names, without giving the ancient source for a single one and quoting the part which tells us about their miracle deeds.
Just quoting your favorite modern Jesus-debunker guru is not evidence for the ancient miracle-worker legends. If those legends are not in the ancient literature, your modern guru cannot invent them just to satisfy your demand for it because you need to believe there were other rival Jesus legends.
Theologically the cult of Isis is pretty much a carbon copy of Christianity and predates it by 300 years.
It contains no miracle-worker or resurrection tales.
You could just as easily claim that Christopher Columbus is a "carbon copy" of Odysseus. You might draw analogies here or there. E.g., maybe Christian baptism became something like an initiation rite similar to those of the Isis cult.
But there is nothing in the cult of Isis claiming someone died and was raised back to life, which can explain why the first Christ cults promoted a new hope for eternal life such as didn't exist before the first century AD. There is virtually no reference to "eternal life" in the earlier literature, outside of one reference in the Book of Enoch. And all references to the afterlife are totally pessimistic, emphasizing how difficult or impossible it is to attain to "Heaven" rather than perishing in Hell or in darkness. It's only in Paul's epistles where suddenly there is a kind of magic key to eternal life, which suddenly becomes a free "gift" instead of something difficult to attain through suffering and merit.
There needs to be an explanation why the prospect of eternal life suddenly changed into something optimistic. Where are there writings from the Isis cult preaching any new optimism about the possibility of eternal life, such as we see in the 1st-century NT writings?
I came across this:
https://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Projects/Reln91/Gender/isis.htm Finally, Osiris's promise of eternal life (through his sacrifice) for his followers has clear parallels to early Christian understandings of Christ.
So yes, there is an interpretation that Osiris promised eternal life to his followers. But this is nothing but a modern interpretation of the ancient cult. Where in any of the ancient literature, prior to Christianity, do we see any such promise? All the language about promising eternal life and about a "resurrection" of Osiris or Horus, etc., is nothing but modern Christian interpolations put back into the ancient pagan legends, not really in any original pagan source literature. There is nothing in the ancient sources about Isis or Osiris or Horus which reports any "resurrection" of anyone or any promise of eternal life to the followers of the cult. Other than, later, some threats of damnation and the possibility of earning some kind of salvation, for a tiny few heroes who struggle hard enough and perform enough meritorious deeds to earn their special place with the gods in eternal bliss.
So you could use the Egyptian sources as evidence that "salvation by works" was borrowed from earlier tradition, by some Christians like James. It's true that salvation by merit, by performing diligently the ancient rites, obeying the Law, etc., was a theme borrowed from earlier paganism and Judaism. But none of that can explain the 1st-century belief, unprecedented, that eternal life is offered as a free gift to believers, from someone whose deeds demonstrated unique life-giving power such as we see in the miracle healing acts and in the Resurrection, all originating from the 1st-century only, not appearing in the earlier legends. You can claim falsely that they appear earlier, but you cannot quote from any earlier source for this.
We could discuss the Asclepius cult, if you think Christianity may have borrowed from that, for ideas about miracle healing or salvation or eternal life.
Was extremely popular at the time of Jesus life. Not only that, but the story of Jesus has similarities with the story of Osiris. A prominent figure in the Cult of Isis.
No, Osiris was killed and did not resurrect back to life.
Leaving aside that there is no serious evidence for the Osiris-Isis-Horus story -- like we have serious evidence for Jesus in the 1st century -- the Osiris story is not about a resurrection of a dead person back to life. There is no "resurrection" word used in any ancient literature describing Osiris -- that's just a word used by later Christians drawing analogies to the ancient legend which was not about a resurrection. The story is that Osiris' body pieces were brought back together so that Isis could "have sex" with him somehow, get impregnated and then spawn Horus.
If they really existed, it's reasonable to believe that the king or pharaoh Osiris was killed, and his wife Isis had a child and claimed the offspring was from Osiris who somehow impregnated her before giving up the ghost, which might be a miracle of sorts, and so the son Horus succeeds Osiris. And worshipers of Osiris are glad to have his heir Horus to rule them, so they think of Horus as the new Osiris.
But this obviously is not what "resurrection" means in the 1st-century Christian writings.
It is not a "resurrection" to simply have your seed passed on to an offspring. You could say any human is a "resurrected" version of their parent(s). That is not what the Jesus resurrection is, obviously. Nothing about the Jesus resurrection has anything to do with his parent having died and spawned him through having sex just before dying.
It is ludicrous and nutty to suggest that anyone is a resurrected version of their parent, just as Jesus resurrected. No, the Jesus resurrection is about someone who died and then came back to life a few days later -- the same person returning as he had been before, possibly changed in some way, but not his offspring being born as an infant and a new and different person than the parent who had died. If that was all Jesus did, then his resurrection was nothing unusual at all. Because EVERYONE is an offspring of their parent.
You first have to get serious. It is not serious to say that the Jesus resurrection is nothing different than what happens to everyone who is born, who is the resurrection of their parent. That's all Horus was. He was the OFFSPRING of Osiris, not the RESURRECTION of him.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_Isis
Not only do I not think that. I think it's silly and lazy Christian exceptionalism.
But this is only your knee-jerk impulse, for which you have no evidence.
You've offered no earlier example of anyone who reportedly performed miracle acts or resurrected, virtually nothing in any of the legends, fictional or otherwise, and obviously nothing from any evidence, such as written accounts from the time, such as we have evidence, i.e., written sources reporting Jesus doing miracle healings and resurrecting from death.