An impartial, objective, historian's view of religion, does look to a religion's past, to identify its ancestry. *The Evolution of Jesus* is a series of 10 TH-cam videos, made for children of all ages with enquiring minds. The acknowledged ancestor of the New Testament (written between c.90 AD and 2000 AD) is the Old Testament, which is a copy of 7 books of the Jewish Torah (written c.550 BC). NT also has unacknowledged literary and oral ancestors, such as the myths of the Roman/Persian sun god Mithra, who walked on water and healed the sick, and was born on Christmas day, hundreds of years before the Christian story was written. The literary ancestors of the Torah are the written religions of Babylon and Egypt. The god of Israel, YHWH, is a warrior god who rides the storm clouds, wreaking vengeance (eg plagues of locusts) on the enemies of Israel. YHWH is a rewrite of the Canaanite god of power _El_, who is a conflation of the Persian sun god _Ahura-Mazda_ and the Babylonian bull god of the Moon called _Sin_. The origin of the concept of Holy Trinity is interesting; it has an antecedent in Irish Christianity, in the triple-spiral symbolism in Newgrange (which is why the 3-leafed shamrock is Ireland's national symbol). Every child has a mother and a father; and it is likely that there was a time when Irish sun-worshippers believed, like ancient Egyptians, that the Moon was the mother of the Sun, who dies each year at Christmas and is born again, just like Jesus. Both Newgrange and Ancient Egyptian beliefs predate Christianity by at least 1,000 years.... But even more interesting than that, is where the ancient Egyptian beliefs themselves came from - and the answer to that one has to be divined by logic and arithmetic, because there was no writing 37,000 years ago when the world's oldest-known written number was carved on a bone in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland, southern Africa.
An impartial, objective, historian's view of religion, does look to a religion's past, to identify its ancestry. *The Evolution of Jesus* is a series of 10 TH-cam videos, made for children of all ages with enquiring minds.
The acknowledged ancestor of the New Testament (written between c.90 AD and 2000 AD) is the Old Testament, which is a copy of 7 books of the Jewish Torah (written c.550 BC).
NT also has unacknowledged literary and oral ancestors, such as the myths of the Roman/Persian sun god Mithra, who walked on water and healed the sick, and was born on Christmas day, hundreds of years before the Christian story was written.
The literary ancestors of the Torah are the written religions of Babylon and Egypt. The god of Israel, YHWH, is a warrior god who rides the storm clouds, wreaking vengeance (eg plagues of locusts) on the enemies of Israel. YHWH is a rewrite of the Canaanite god of power _El_, who is a conflation of the Persian sun god _Ahura-Mazda_ and the Babylonian bull god of the Moon called _Sin_.
The origin of the concept of Holy Trinity is interesting; it has an antecedent in Irish Christianity, in the triple-spiral symbolism in Newgrange (which is why the 3-leafed shamrock is Ireland's national symbol). Every child has a mother and a father; and it is likely that there was a time when Irish sun-worshippers believed, like ancient Egyptians, that the Moon was the mother of the Sun, who dies each year at Christmas and is born again, just like Jesus.
Both Newgrange and Ancient Egyptian beliefs predate Christianity by at least 1,000 years....
But even more interesting than that, is where the ancient Egyptian beliefs themselves came from - and the answer to that one has to be divined by logic and arithmetic, because there was no writing 37,000 years ago when the world's oldest-known written number was carved on a bone in the Lebombo mountains of Swaziland, southern Africa.