I'm Mexican coming from a Catholicfamily, and my grandmother used to swear Quetzalcoatl was a reincarnation of Jesus! Thanks for reminding me and making me laugh!
Her feast day is coming up! This is just speculation, but I think one technique the missionaries used was to map Jesus and the saints into preexisting indigenous gods and spirits. I live on Calle Manantial. The street gets its name from a sacred spring at the top of the street. On the feast day of San Pascual de Bailon, there is a big public fiesta with a procession of locos, Indian dancers, flatbed trucks with religious tableaus. Other cars and trucks have offerings of pan dulce and packaged foods fixed to the hoods and roofs of the vehicles. Then the bishop comes and blesses the Spring. What do you think? This sacred spring was there before the Spaniards arrived. People were living in the area (the Otomi) before Columbus, probably for millennia. Did the priests and missionaries replace a water spirit of the spring with a Catholic saint? I’ve asked around. Nobody seems to know.
That moment in "Heretic", where Hugh Grant starts talking about similarities between religious figures, instantly reminded me of Dan's videos on claims from Zeitgeist.
In my sociology of religion class at Marshall University, we had an assignment where we were tasked to debunk "Zeitgeist" based solely on the references cited. It was frighteningly easy.
I'm no trained scholar, but I've loved to read mythology from all cultures since I was a child. I have read many different collections of Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, and Indian myths, and in all of those, I have never read a life story of a god that mirrored so exactly all those points of the story of Jesus. The mythicists who are so adamant about the granular details of these stories proving that Jesus was completely fictional are just about as ridiculously obsessive as early church fathers arguing over trifling details as in the old trope of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Though I have come to deconstruct my early Baptist beliefs, I think it much more likely that there was an actual charismatic rabbi Yeshua than there was an actual Horus, Dionysus, Odin, or Mithras, just without all the supernatural mythic additions. We humans just love a good story -- look at the mythic images of the Orange MAGA deity LOL.
@@leom6343 uhh in what way is charisma somehow negatively correlated with anger? most charismatic leaders have grown followings because they spoke to some great injustice whether real or imagined
@@leom6343 and especially messianic claimants in this time were incredibly political issues, some of them attempted to literally lead violent uprisings
Many suspect suspect the Testimonium Flavianum went through the same process Dan ahs described for several other texts: a marginal note was written by a Christian as an explanatory note and then got incorporated into the text.
51:15 My personal take on the second reference to Jesus in Josephus is that at some point a scribe introduced it (in part or in full) in order to make the text spiritually important enough to preserve it. You have to remember that there was not an overabundance of papyrus/vellum in late antiquity/early medieval days, and a “pagan” antiquarian history that had no reference to Jesus might have been considered less important to preserve than a similar text that unambiguously refers to Jesus as the Christ. It might have been a scholarly version of “nope, we have no Jews in this house, herr Kapitan.” A little lie that serves a greater good.
12:01 Is anyone else looking for Dan's famous catchphrase like when the actors say the title of the movie IN the movie? Or it's just me? 😅 "...that's absolutely nothing that supports it in any way, shape or form whatsoever..."
All of the Josephus references to the particular Jesus (since the name was common enough for Josephus to mention others) of interest I have to filter through the uncomfortable reality that the copies of his work that exist are post-Eusebius. That to me will always color the way I look at Josephus, and this is the same problem we have with so many ancient references when we no longer have direct access to what they wrote but rely on later copyists who may have had their own agendas. This BTW is the same problem I have with trying to reconstruct Marcion from what the heresiologists wrote about him.
There was a Star Trek episode where they encountered Sun worshipers. At the end of the episode Uhura suggested they may be worshiping the Son, not the Sun
As a mythology enjoyer there are so many repeated and well loved tropes it's not remotely surprising at least some of them will eventually overlap from one religious figure to another, as Dan McClellan astutely pointed out. Especially in a Greco Roman culture where religions freely mixed and matched all the damn time and everyone expected such a thing.
Even though I'm on the Mythicism side of the argument, I still love hearing Mac talk about the topic. And in addition to Carrier and Price, Raphael Lataster has published peer reviewed work on the existence of a historical Jesus.
Freke and Gandy are actually the reason I got interested in this field, after leaving Christianity. I learned a lot from their books, but I have subsequently learned to check your sources rather than just trusting that they say what they're claimed to say. As such, I still have those Freke and Gandy books and they're useful for a reference (ie I recently used their books to check when the earliest reference to Acts appears in history, since they have a reference for that in the book) but it isn't a primary source in its own right, of course.
I have a nuanced take on this. I think mythicism as proposed by price and carrier asks really important questions about some of the outdated methodologies used for “historical Jesus” studies. however despite all the valid questions it raises , it doesn’t propose an alternative start to Christianity that’s simpler and thus more likely, than a real Jesus existed who got quickly and heavily mythologized.
Yeah! Skepticism is great at challenging assumptions. And that's what I think Occam's razor is really about: being skeptical of everything but the most likely
The thing that annoys me is that these questions have already been raised- over 150 years of critical scholarship and many of these ideas were brought up in the first 30 years
Lots of "religions & Cult" popped up even today, most revolve around a personality and when they die the cult fades away. Christianity would have been just another mystery cult too, just the one that was in the right place at the right time, selling a popular idea that was able to piggyback off the Roman Empire. Realistically as is often pointed out Pliny in 112 CE wrote to the emperor asking what to do with Christians whom he knew nothing about, this guy was 10years in Rome as the equivalent of the Attorney General & Police Chief, yet he had no knowledge of Christians. Yalk about first 100 years being not on the social radar. Pliny was unsure if he could legally kill Christians for their faith. He believed Christians were guilty of harmless practices and "depraved, excessive superstition".
Not me getting more excited by this Astronomy comment than the others! Just wanted to also add that binary (and tertiary) star systems are much more common than single star systems in the Universe. We continue to refine our technology and mathematical models and find lots of additional information as time progresses and it would take an entire you tube video that I would have to create to show… Thanks for the reminder. 😅
My first run in with the "Osiris and Dionysus were exactly the same as Jesus" lie was the 2005 movie "The God Who Wasn't There". Authors like Acharya S and others popularized ideas from Kersey Graves' "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors" around the same time. The latter aughts were full of this nonsense.
Lots of "religions & Cult" popped up even today, most revolve around a personality and when they die the cult fades away. Christianity would have been just another mystery cult too, just the one that was in the right place at the right time, selling a popular idea that was able to piggyback off the Roman Empire. Realistically as is often pointed out Pliny in 112 CE wrote to the emperor asking what to do with Christians whom he knew nothing about, this guy was 10years in Rome as the equivalent of the Attorney General & Police Chief, yet he had no knowledge of Christians. Yalk about first 100 years being not on the social radar. Pliny was unsure if he could legally kill Christians for their faith. He believed Christians were guilty of harmless practices and "depraved, excessive superstition"..
Zeitgeist made quite a hype in the military about 14 years ago. Even Mormonism teaches, at least to adults, that Jesus wasn’t necessarily born on Dec. 25 so I like to think I saw through that BS. The only good parts of the Zeitgeist series are the George Carlin quotes.
28:00 the turning water into wine by Dionysos comes up in the novel by Achilles Tatius. This is now to be understood as a satire of Christianity: C. Friesen, "Dionysus as Jesus: The Incongruity of a Love Feast in Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon 2.2," Harvard Theological Review 107.2 (2014): 222-240. The miracle of the filled wine jars Dan mentions comes from Pausanias, 6.26. It takes place on Jan 6, which was Dionysos' birthday, which happens to be the Feast of the Epiphany (traditionally, the day the Magi got to Bethlehem as well as, 30 years later, the day of the wine miracle at Cana). That probably isn't a coincidence, and Christians probably borrowed it for their wine miracle. That kind of thing was pretty common at Dionysos temples, more typically they would have a fountain providing free water to the community, but they had plumbing set up so for a few hours beginning at dawn on Jan 6 it would run with wine.
Yes, I'm about 100% certain Dan would affirm that fact (i.e. that they read Jesus back into the HB following his death and continued to develop these sorts of hermeneutic frameworks as time went on)
Let’s face it. Even if you did provide a source text. The people you show it too probably don’t read Greek or hieroglyphics or or so they wouldn’t know what you are showing them.
- Dan Beecher seems to be the most reasonable guy ever. But that might just be an act. - Woody Harrelson and Adam Baldwin had a baby, and they named him Daniel McClellan. (Adam Baldwin is a total POS right-wingnut/actor, btw... while Woody Harrelson is a relatively good guy/actor) Their son Dan turned out to be the "normal one" in the family. And he's only _mostly_ normal. I love the show, you guys! 👍
The fun part of this being peddle by atheist is that is a weird christian sect was the one saying all of this they would rightfully mock it and debunk it.
Odin as a pre-Christian Jesus-like figure is such a wild claim, what T_T Fairly sure the earliest sources we have on Odin (or Wuotan, in this case) is from the 1st century CE, so calling him pre-Christian is somewhat doubtful in the first place. And from what I understand, the earliest version of him was primarily a death diety and/or a diety of ritual madness.... doesn't sound particularly jesus-like. I guess the claim must have to do with when Odin makes an offering to himself by hanging himself in a tree for nine days. If you squint really hard and ignore all context, I guess a god sacrificing himself to himself can be seen as similar to the cruxifixion. But Odin does that to gain wisdom -- the ability to read runes and cast spells and such. And that story is almost certainly far younger than Christianity -- the written version we have is likely from around 900 CE. So if anything, Christianity affected Norse Mythology, not the other way around. I don't know why these people always think all pagan practices predate Christianity. Anything recognisable as Norse mythology is several hundred years younger.
While Heretic (2024) made some decent points about control and how religion is abused to perpetuate it, I rolled my eyes when Hugh Grant listed off those 16 “saviors” completely uncritically. His whole point was his guests weren’t critical enough of their beliefs 😂.
This is the first episode that I've watched that i have a lot of push back. When you start looking into the Jesus myth you see appeals to authority and no evidence. Then when you ask for the evidence they point you to the canonical gospels. Then when you read the gospels you understand that they contradict in ways that at least 3 are making up BS whole cloth. Then you realize that if 3 are why not 4? Then you realize there are noncanonical gospels that even believers think are pure fiction and you understand there was a whole Jesus fiction economy. Then you realize Josephus can't be a primary source.then Then you find out Christians were playing with the text. Then you ask if there was evidence of Jesus why would Christians play with the text? Then you fast forward to 2024 and watch Dan McClellan refute countless dishonest apologists and realize Christian apologists have probably always been dishonest. Then you read Bart Ehrman's "Case For Christ" and realize Bart has already done such a good job proving the NT is unreliable that it rings hollow when his Case for Christ hinges on the NT being reliable. Then you understand that the only reasonable position after looking at ALL the available information is that buddy is made up fiction. About Zeitgeist I watched it a long time ago and don't remember it much, but I didn't take everything said there as gospel lol. But it made me pay attention to God concepts and motifs that were in the Zeitgeist that would have been picked up by religions of the time and that the Jesus story had some parallels with other stories and inspired me to look into this stuff more closely. But I wasn't a mythicist until I read Ehrman.
The Dans talked about that when they talked about Robert Graves, who you might know as the author of I, Claudius. Graves wrote two nonfiction books, one on the Greek Myths and another one on Celtic culture/myths. He has a bit of a fixation on Greek mystery cults and secret Druid societies, if I remember correctly. I think the book on Greek myths is called simply The Greek Myths. The other book is called The White Goddess. The problem we run into with these secret cults is that they really didn’t leave behind much documentation regarding their rites, practices, and beliefs. (You’re probably aware of the first two rules of Dionysus Club.) We have mostly contemporary reports of them by outsiders.
@@MarcosElMalo2 The Dionysus parallels with Jesus are actually supported by some scholars. Scholars have also compared Jesus to Romulus, Heracles, Asclepius, and the Roman emperors. This is a common topic in scholarship but no one seems to actually read the literature.
Go door to door and tell people the good news of Harry Potter. Starting a new religion isn’t easy. The apostles wore out a lot of sandals. Say what you want about Paul, but we can’t deny he put in the work. And you have to go door to door or proselytize face to face in some other way. Otherwise you can’t hypnotize your marks.
I know the at Jesus was not a direct copy of any of the gods mentioned in the Zeitgeist movie, but the fact that Jesus does have some of these characteristics shows development over time. If you separate Jesus the man from his epiphanies, you'll realize that all of the epiphanies are copies of other myths that predate Jesus. Jesus is not a carbon copy of any God, but he's a meeting of previous myths and expectations from time of culture shift in the Levant into Europe.
Israel is located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert... Israel has a shorter spring and autumn, and longer summer and winter and that it is characterized by a huge daily temperature range.... That is because it is situated in the region where the Mediterranean climate meets the subtropical climate... Winter is the rainy season in Israel, so it rains a lot and the temperature falls off. So, people move their sheep into the sheep pen at least by October so that they can go through winter there. Therefore, it is hard to keep watching over the flock of sheep in the fields at night in midwinter, December...
Would love to hear more anthropological analyses about why people told such similar stories across time and place. What sociocultural purpose did the myth employ? Why did Mesopotamian cultures develop pantheons in the first place? Were the stories ways of explaining the origins of agrarian ways of life? Of patriarchy? Of systems of dominance? Ways that humans can survive atrocities like famine, drought, storms, and war? Why did the dying and rising deity motif take hold in their myths? The story of Inanna was written on clay tablets somewhere around 2,000 BCE, and she descended into the underworld for 3 days and 3 nights before ascending. So it seems that the dying and rising deity was a motif important to societies, perhaps a way that people found hope during dark times - the idea that death isn't the end. In my understanding, the myths, even if they are based in history, are ways to explain the collective and individual human experience, which are wildly important for navigating the anxieties, beauties, and complexities of this life. Anyone who has ever descended into their own underworld (inner world) and resurrected anew knows the power of such stories.
Yeah, somehow Dan can see influence from Mesopotamia on the Torah despite there being no direct copying but goes blind when it comes to Mediterrainean influence on Christianity. So, here we go, from a non-mythicist point of view. There was a guy. He preached. He gathered a following. He was crucified. Miraculous stories about him began circulating. These stories were influenced by miraculous stories already being told about other religiously significant figures. It all toom off from there. I added ONE thought to Dan's parsimonous take. Is it so unreasonable? Really? BTW, accent on first syllable in 'parsimony'. im started c
@hive_indicator318 Yes, there are people who day it's a direct copy but also a lot who don't. That's not how these things tend to work. But Dan's claim that only mythicists recognize significant influence on Jesus's story from the stories told of other religiously significant people in other religions is nothing less than outrageous and is weirdly inconsistent with the ease with which he recognizes Mesopotamian and broader Southwest Semitic influences on and confluences with the contents of the Torah.
Host says. "They thought it was the 25th but it was the 21st" (Dan nods his head in agreement). No. The Julian calendar, which was in use for the entire Roman world between 46BCE and *1582CE*, and held the winter solsitce ON December 25th. So they diddn't "think it was dec 25th" and got it wrong. It is in Pliny the Elder (Natural History) and other sources. At 34:22 Dan incorrectly says that this day was only "celebrated" as the Solstice but it was Dec 21st. Wrong. Do you guys even check before spewing stuff? There has been 16 centuries of the Dec 25th Winter Solstice date being observed. Only the past 5 centuries did we move it to the 21st due to the Gregorian calendar. They had a different calendar. The calculation of Jesus gestation happened in the 3rd century. The solstices were venerated long before those calculations were made. Christians celebrated his birth on Jan 6th before that, as pointed out by Clement of Alexandria who says the Basilideans started this tradition. No calculation happened for Basilides. So this defeats the argument that they originally calculated anything. And Epiphanius admits in his Panarion (51) that this date was also sacred to pagans. (He mentions the birth of Aion & Dusares and 3 cities where this tradition was held by pagans.) Also, even though I agree that these low hanging fruit arguments from Zeitgieitst are wrong, Dan has still been shown multiple times about primary sources that predate Christian observance of the birth of Jesus, for example Plutarch in "On Isis & Osiris" says that Harpocrates (Horus the Child) was "born around the winter solstice". And this was written before the gospels were widely known in 119CE. This is also way before any mention of Christians celebrating the birth of Jesus. Jan 6th, the first observed birthday of Jesus, is certainly "around" the winter solstice, which is also the same time as the Theodosia Epiphany for Dionysus (Jan 5th-11th) according to Pliny the Elder in 70CE.
I think it is not that Christianity copied, it is more that certain ideas are powerful and spread. Stories about dying and rising gods spread around the ancient world, stories about Jesus spread around the ancient world. Maybe these similarities explains why stories about Jesus spread, and not how the stories were crafted.
With regard to the water to wine story. This story shows up 60CE in the first layer of the gospel of John. This text is written Ephesus, putatively, which is a center for Dionysian cultic practice. So Dionysus is in the air. Dennis R. McDonald makes the point, they are not going to copy the source material verbatim and then cut and paste names into the story. if you did this the people would criticize your lack of narrative creativity. You take ideas that others have created in text, you pluck out an idea that you want to own, and then you write a small narrative around it., A good example of this is to compare the Lazarus material in Luke and John. In Luke it’s a Parable but in John the authors wants you to believe Jesus had the ability to restore life after a few days. We don’t know the original material for the story, but they are plucking tiny points of story and then expanding on those points. There’s also one thing Dan fails to mention here. Storytelling about gods was ubiquitous in the ancient world. I would just point out that with the Hebrew Genesis material people tend to focus on the Enuma Elis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Athrahaisis but they fail to see the abundance of story material that existed. And some of these other varied sources are evident in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is the Jews were in exile in Babylon, not the city, but the Dynasty. When we look at this each city in Babylon is going to have its own temples, its own gods and its own version of creation, flood and other stories. And I imagine if you went to a tavern and got a priest drunk, he would probably give you still another version. And as Jews were meshed in this society they began picking these tidbits. This is the same problem in Ephesus, you can’t really limit your think to what material has survived, you have to look at the variation of Dionysus material and ask the question would someone who was familiar with the Dionysus material recognize what was in the Signs gospels as a Dionysian power. When I reward the gospels back to back for the first time, the water to wine story shot up like a red flag, Jesus did not do this, it is out of his genre of character. Thus what is the author of John signaling. It’s rather obvious when you place the authorship in Ephesus . . . .they are signaling Jesus is as good as Dionysus or better . That’s the point. I wish Dan would stop pushing this obstinence.
The Zeitgeist stuff that was in the movie Heretic was the only thing I didn't like about it. Everything else was great --- the commentary on the philosophy of religion and the cognitive science of belief were incredible and I wanted to think you for helping me understand that stuff so I could appreciate that movie more.
45:37-45:58 It’s probably a conflation of the movement of Paul with the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus is not significantly better off than apollonius of tyana. i suspect just about everything we think about the historical Jesus is wrong except that he existed and was crucified upon the request of the sadducees. i happen to think the historical Jesus fits well into a milquetoast, upper class, liberal zionism represented by James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici.
Josephus arguably doesn't mention this specific Jesus, though. The single passage that does is obviously a later Christian interpolation, and I can't say it's all that convincing to see desperate attempts by modern scholars to strip out the fantastical language, just so that we can have Josephus mentioning Jesus in some form that we can take seriously.
I mean, there was a real "Mona Lisa" who da Vinci used as a model for his painting, but that woman is not the **Mona Lisa**, the legend that has grown and grown to impact the world today. If we met her, our brains would be need to adjust dramatically to how different she is from what we think of her as, we build that person in our minds in absence of the actual input from knowing the physical and mental person; we do the same thing with people DO know, or think we know.
December 21-22nd is the lowest height of the sun in the sky, it is equal in length from the equinoxes” Depending on the epoch, the shortest day of the year differs. This is because abuse the sun is not a point in the sky but a disk. So we have to look at it like this, the position of the sun in the week that precedes and follows the solstice the sun does not hardly move, that’s why it’s called the solstice. But the Earth is moving. It’s moving in an elliptical orbit and its distance is increasing to January 2. What this means is the angular velocity is increasing, because the angular velocity is increasing it takes longer for the earth to complete a full day. When we mesh the ellipse and the tilt of the earth we get a minima on December 25th. So Dan Beecher, they are not foolish for choosing the 25th. “Although a day for practical timekeeping purposes is always 24 hours, the actual length of a solar day, which is the time difference between two successive occasions when the Sun is at its highest in the sky, varies throughout the year. As shown in the graph below, it is at its longest, 24 hours 30 seconds, around Christmas Day and is at its shortest, 23 hours 59 minutes 38 seconds, in mid-September.” Thus if you are measuring the length of the night as an indicator of the vacancy of the sun, then Christmas Day is that day. We should note that in western traditions associate with night legends. Silent night, Santa Claus traveling the earth at night, The use of lights to ward off the night, these are all representations to ward off the season of death and the association of darkness with death.
5:07 Sorry, Dan2, but I have bad news for you. All of your minutes are minutes that you can’t get back. That’s how time works. Apparently, I’m a little bit snarky when slightly stoned. Maybe I should go have a Snickers.
The person who gave the correct version of the Christian origin story is Richard Carrier. All the other versions of mythicism are nonsense. Carrier is following Doherty, but analyzes all the texts with Doherty's hypothesis, and compares it to the historical idea. The historical idea is not as plausible.
On The Historicity of Jesus Christ: Why we have reason to doubt focuses on academic peer reviewed information. I appreciate his candor in explaining why he eliminates apologetic "scholarship" from individuals at Christian universities where their scholarship publication would affect their job status. It's a compelled confirmation bias. Derek Lambert from Mythvision Podcast and the Gnostic informant host have a separate discussion about the Zeitgeist comparison between Dionysus and Jesus Mythology pointing to the Andros Fountain which produces water, except between Jan 3 & 7 (if I am remembering dates correctly.) At that time it produces wine. If you leave the temple with the wine, it will revert to water because you've left Dionysus presence. There's apparently also some drama between Dan McClellan and the Host of Gnostic Informant Host. I'd like to understand the differences of opinion without getting into melodrama. Frankly, Rabbi Tovia Singer gives me more suspicious pause towards Christian academics & early Christian writings . He discusses chapters of scripture like Isaiah 7 and the mistranslation of "young woman" to "virgin." Zeitgeist might have some points of contention, and interesting history, but personally, for what it's worth, I think Judaism has some fair critical reasons to doubt the "Jesus as Messiah" narrative of Christianity. But hey, Matthew 27:51-53 - no contemporary writings of people being convinced by their deceased family members coming back to tell them Jesus was "The Dude" and everyone needs his dude-ism or will be damned... 🤔🤔 Rome leaves to bodies of the executed for scavengers but is willing to make an exception for Jesus followers & his body? Biblical plot holes obvious to critical thinking don't need something bad academics to over sell comparisons with other deity figures.
When it comes to Flava Bosephus, did you say that we don’t have any purported transcripts from the period of his authorship? If that is the case, aren’t the only remotely authoritative attestation, to a historical Jesus, the likely Pauline texts? Seems the door is more than ajar for mythicists. Paul wouldn’t be the only person to relate a spurious divine encounter and insinuate their self into a movement founded on someone else’s spurious divine encounter. Cough! Joseph Smith cough!
No Dan ____we_____ are not saying this association for the first time. Jeeze if I hear this one more time …… you blocked Gnostic, it really seems like you want to ignore the evidence. So let’s lay out who is making the accusation. “Dionysius bar Salibi (died 1171) was Syriac Orthodox writer and bishop, who served as metropolitan of Amid, in Upper Mesopotamia, from 1166 to 1171. He was one of the most prominent and prolific writers within the Syriac Orthodox Church during the twelfth century.” So get this into your head, this is the primary accuser. Why is he making the claim? “Finally, in about 200 C.E., a Christian teacher in Egypt makes reference to the date Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all.” “The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.”” “The earliest evidence of Christ's birth being marked on December 25 is a sentence in the Chronograph of 354. Liturgical historians generally agree that this part of the text was written in Rome in AD 336.” So why is Salibi important. Sol Invictus was a fabrication that was created in Syria, they were already familiar with the feasts dates. “Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/), Aelagabalus, Heliogabalus, (/ˌhiːliəˈɡæbələs/) or simply Elagabal (Aramaic: 𐡁𐡋𐡄𐡂𐡀𐡋 ʾĕlāhgabāl or 𐡁𐡋𐡄𐡀𐡂𐡀𐡋 ʾĕlāhaʾgabāl; Arabic: إله الجبل Ilah al-Jabal, both literally meaning "God of the Mountain") was an Arab-Roman sun god, initially venerated in Emesa (modern-day Homs), Syria. “ Thus they are the experts on festival dates and all of this stuff pops up in 218 under a Roman emperor who was the high priest of a cult. This Syriac writer is remarking that the Christians in the west adopted this date because many of them were followers of the cult, which also appears to be true, and many early Christians syncretized sol Invictus with Jesus. I mean Dan belief is a weird thing, you are free to believe what ever you want, and you can believe that some Gregorian monk took the date of the execution and back dated it 9 mos, and got December 25th. But I call this a just so explanation. But the fact of the matter is that Sol Invictus became increasingly popular in Roman culture from the date. “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, c. 204 - 13 March 222), better known by his posthumous nicknames Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/ EL-ə-GAB-ə-ləs) and Heliogabalus (/ˌhiːliə-, -lioʊ-/ HEE-lee-ə-, -lee-oh-), was Roman emperor from 218 to 222” Thus from any time between 222 and 276 the Elagabalusians could have created 25th as a festival date. The cult existed, it was not invented by a Roman emperor in 276, and you simply are conflating absence of evidence as evidence of absence. Who is curating the textual evidence after 350 BCE, Christians or people in the Sol Invictus cult? The absence of evidence may be a delete.
Bar Salibi said nothing related to your claim. That was actually something scribbled into the margins of a Bar Salibi manuscript in a later and different hand. You're not paying close enough attention. Also, the calculation argument was made explicit by Hippolytus around 210 CE. The *possibility* that someone could have come up with it between 222 and 276 is moot, since the date had already been identified a decade before.
@ yes, that is rock solid evidence “Hippolytus of Rome (/həˈpɑːlɪtəs/ hə-PAW-lit-əs, ‹See Tfd›Greek: Ἱππόλυτος; Romanized: Hippólytos, c. 170 - c. 235 AD) was a Bishop of Rome and one of the most important second-third centuries Christian theologians, whose provenance, identity and corpus remain elusive to scholars and historians. Suggested communities include Rome, Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia and other regions of the Middle East. The best historians of literature in the ancient church, including Eusebius of Caesarea and Jerome, openly confess they cannot name where Hippolytus the biblical commentator and theologian served in leadership. They had read his works but did not possess evidence of his community.”
You two don't believe what is in Josephus about Jesus either. Occam's razor is that either it is a later interpolation by Eusebius or Josephus is simply writing what he read in the gospels.
Scholarly consensus holds that there was an authentic Paul. Paul speaks of knowing the 12 apostles and James the brother of Jesus. It seems very unlikely for Paul to mean ask these characters were mythological too in his stories. Occum's Razor applies as well as we've never seen anything like this elsewhere in history.
I'm not convinced that Jesus was a historical person, and yet it seems to me that Antiquities book 20 chapter 9 is the best evidence for the existence of a physical Jesus existing in reality. It would be good to hear more about this phrase "who was called the Christ". Could this also be Christian interpolation, like book 18? If not, why not, and if so, why is the consensus so militantly defensive about a historical Jesus?
Like Dr McClellan I don't identify with mythicist either, but that's the label that gets thrust at me all the time, even though Dan's comments around the fifty five minutes mark also apply to me. I've not got a relevant PhD though, so who cares what I think?
Within the literature there are a few attestations of Jesus that match a man to a few common activities, there are essentially 4 or 5 items. The source material diverges quite quickly and point to a mid first century character. As Paul points out there are even some people running around the believe more extreme things that he does and also he has two cousins that preceded him in Christ (though we should not accept this as believing they believe he is the same kind of messiah that Paul believes in). The Q account is a christless version of Jesus. So the historic Jesus is rather worldly and attenuated. Paul’s Jesus is mostly mystical, Mark’s Jesus is largely made up, as with the parts in Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark. Luke and Matthew add their own embellishments such as the great commision, walking zombies, etc. the birth narratives may have been assed later. I would argue that John is a conflagration of Mark and other material, but that would be a kind of misrepresentation of the material Is see the text as a mystical exercise. We often have to see the text as how they functioned and it’s dangerous to read them as this is what the author thought the history was.
I Wouk pushback against Dan’s messiah exclusion. The problem is that Christians largely, even from Paul forward, are not using the Hebrew directives of what the messiah is supposed to be, they are hobnobbing Hebrew text to point at the Christian messiah text that are not messianic.
@@Darisiabgal7573 exactly i thought this same thing as I listened, Christianity isn't even using the word correctly so does it matter that others aren't either?
@@thetruest7497 the word, christos, technically means “the rubbed one” presumably masculine, when associated with Judaism is generally means the Moshiach and implies the Davidic Messiah. This changes with Paul who essentially redefines what the Messiah is.
Carrier does not postulate that the New Testament has anything to do with any other mythical figure, but is an authentically new creation based on Jewish mythology. He identifies the source in Isiah, the figure which became Jesus, and the "cosmic sperm bank" is just a way of understanding what "seed of David" means, when it isn't applied to a historical person. It is absolutely not more parsimonious to "assume a historical person", because the role Jesus plays in Christianity is not that of a historical person, but as a personification of the Logos. This is why this field is sick, it needs to acknowledge the balance of probability on this issue correctly.
"Cosmic sperm bank" does not really convert sceptics to your new theory. Anyway mythicists need to explain James, the brother of Jesus. Was he also made up?
@@adedaporh There is no evidence that James was the biological brother of Jesus. Paul just calls him "The Brother of the Lord", and the gospel writers turn him into a brother of Jesus. James is a real person, he just had no biological kinship to anyone special. The point of the description in Carrier is to be correct, not to make good propaganda. I agree it doesn't make good propaganda. But it is absolutely correct.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 "The brother of the Lord" seems to mean literally that since James is the only one described as such in a list of followers of Jesus. So again, how do you explain James?
@@adedaporh It doesn't seem to literally mean that if you don't come at it with your biases. To my ears it just means "part of an order of monks called brothers of the lord". I have long ago stopped reading this historically. But I suggest you give it a shot, get used to it, and see how it works. After a little bit of adjustment, you will see that it works a heck of a lot better than any historical analysis.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Are you serious? Do you have any evidence of this "order of monks" in the first century? You seem to be letting your theory drive your historiography. Occam's razor would suggest that Paul simply meant a familial relationship between James and Jesus.
12th month 25th day, Jehoiachin/Jeconiah/Coniah was raised up, rags exchanged for royal robes, and placed at the head of the kings exiled.Jesus son of Jehozadak replicates this in Zechariah 3.
If you think the Tanakh is spotless. Ezekiel 2:1 He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.” Ezekiel 3:1 And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.” Ezekiel 4:1 Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it. Daniel 7:13-14 13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man,[a] coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
1. Ezekiel is called son of man 2. Daniels Son of man is plural, just like each man is plural and it doesn't say worship but to obey. 3 there is no Jesus anywhere in the Ot
@@leom6343 Zephaniah read it, and try conflate the hebrew text where the remnant of Israel is meaning Judah. Never once in the hebrew script are these the same entities.
Christmas is a mishmash of pagan traditions... Few historians disagree that many of the current Christmas traditions (decorating trees, wreaths, mistletoe, etc) can be traced back to Saturnalia/Yule... For example as someone with both Celtic and Viking ancestry (that now follows Messiah) I can tell you that an evergreen tree was 💯 used for worship of other gods... Druids, the priests of the Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreens as a symbol of everlasting life... The Vikings thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god...
Where and in what time period was decorating a tree a saturnalia/yule tradition that predated Christian practice in the area? And I'm going to need primary sources.
@hive_indicator318 Christians didn't start adopting the tree until the 16th century... While Roman documented (AD 23/24-79) how druids were using evergreens... Do you have access to the internet?... Type in the pagan origins of Christmas your welcome...
@@Damian.Williams you made the claim that pagans decorated trees before Christianity. You provide the primary sources. That's how it works. I'm not going to look for the things that don't exist. That's the claimant's job
@hive_indicator318 I know because it's my history are you American? I told you what to type into the internet history channels have a lot of resources on this you asked for a source I gave you the knowledge of how to get it... You're welcome...
@@Damian.WilliamsI know that you made the claim. I know that you haven't provided any evidence. What is the primary source that provides evidence for your claim? Like I said, I'm not going to look for something I have no reason to believe exists.
Debunk the Roman catholic not.jesus , debunk Pauline doctrine not..Jesus ,,debunk the bible. Not jesus, it takes a high IQ too know that the bible is a book. Not the word of god jesus was a spiritual leader who happened to be jewish 😂
With regard to the water to wine story. This story shows up 60CE in the first layer of the gospel of John. This text is written Ephesus, putatively, which is a center for Dionysian cultic practice. So Dionysus is in the air. Dennis R. McDonald makes the point, they are not going to copy the source material verbatim and then cut and paste names into the story. if you did this the people would criticize your lack of narrative creativity. You take ideas that others have created in text, you pluck out an idea that you want to own, and then you write a small narrative around it., A good example of this is to compare the Lazarus material in Luke and John. In Luke it’s a Parable but in John the authors wants you to believe Jesus had the ability to restore life after a few days. We don’t know the original material for the story, but they are plucking tiny points of story and then expanding on those points. There’s also one thing Dan fails to mention here. Storytelling about gods was ubiquitous in the ancient world. I would just point out that with the Hebrew Genesis material people tend to focus on the Enuma Elis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Athrahaisis but they fail to see the abundance of story material that existed. And some of these other varied sources are evident in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is the Jews were in exile in Babylon, not the city, but the Dynasty. When we look at this each city in Babylon is going to have its own temples, its own gods and its own version of creation, flood and other stories. And I imagine if you went to a tavern and got a priest drunk, he would probably give you still another version. And as Jews were meshed in this society they began picking these tidbits. This is the same problem in Ephesus, you can’t really limit your think to what material has survived, you have to look at the variation of Dionysus material and ask the question would someone who was familiar with the Dionysus material recognize what was in the Signs gospels as a Dionysian power. When I reward the gospels back to back for the first time, the water to wine story shot up like a red flag, Jesus did not do this, it is out of his genre of character. Thus what is the author of John signaling. It’s rather obvious when you place the authorship in Ephesus . . . .they are signaling Jesus is as good as Dionysus or better . That’s the point. I wish Dan would stop pushing this obstinence.
If you want your claims to have more impact, you need to be able to show primary sources for them. I haven't looked up the connection between Ephesus & either John or Dionysus. Probably not hard to show. If you read the gospel coalition, they claim Dionysus never performed any such miracle, and many Christians will just believe that in confirmation bias. Since you're claiming the positive case, burden of proof rests on you. But you're in luck, since you're correct. Pliny's Natural History. In Thirty-seven Books, Volumes 1-3 (AD 77-79) recalls how the temple of Bocchus (Roman name for Dionysus) flowed with water that tastes like wine during the "Nones of January". Some scholars hold John was written as early as 60 AD, before Pliny. But we can push the Dionysus water into wine miracle back further to Bibliotheca Historica, 3.66.3. So there's at least 2 sources for it the gospel coalition missed. One contemporary to John and another far predating John. Was this myth the inspiration for Jesus's miracle? Well, maybe. We can't know for sure. All we can demonstrate is that it's plausible.
I'm Mexican coming from a Catholicfamily, and my grandmother used to swear Quetzalcoatl was a reincarnation of Jesus! Thanks for reminding me and making me laugh!
Mormons have historically said that Quetzalcoatl was Jesus' visitation to the Americans and further proof of the Book of Mormon...
Talk about booking the wrong flight, god needs a new travel agent.
How about the Virgin of Guadalupe being Tonantzin? I like that one.
@MarcosElMalo2 I've heard of that one before, but granny never enlightened us with that kind of knowledge! Lol. Guess she didn't know!
Her feast day is coming up!
This is just speculation, but I think one technique the missionaries used was to map Jesus and the saints into preexisting indigenous gods and spirits.
I live on Calle Manantial. The street gets its name from a sacred spring at the top of the street. On the feast day of San Pascual de Bailon, there is a big public fiesta with a procession of locos, Indian dancers, flatbed trucks with religious tableaus. Other cars and trucks have offerings of pan dulce and packaged foods fixed to the hoods and roofs of the vehicles. Then the bishop comes and blesses the Spring.
What do you think? This sacred spring was there before the Spaniards arrived. People were living in the area (the Otomi) before Columbus, probably for millennia.
Did the priests and missionaries replace a water spirit of the spring with a Catholic saint? I’ve asked around. Nobody seems to know.
That moment in "Heretic", where Hugh Grant starts talking about similarities between religious figures, instantly reminded me of Dan's videos on claims from Zeitgeist.
I just wanted to say wishing you guys and everyone as well have a great week and a wonderful Thanksgiving (the American viewers).
In my sociology of religion class at Marshall University, we had an assignment where we were tasked to debunk "Zeitgeist" based solely on the references cited. It was frighteningly easy.
I'm no trained scholar, but I've loved to read mythology from all cultures since I was a child. I have read many different collections of Greek, Roman, Norse, Egyptian, and Indian myths, and in all of those, I have never read a life story of a god that mirrored so exactly all those points of the story of Jesus. The mythicists who are so adamant about the granular details of these stories proving that Jesus was completely fictional are just about as ridiculously obsessive as early church fathers arguing over trifling details as in the old trope of "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?". Though I have come to deconstruct my early Baptist beliefs, I think it much more likely that there was an actual charismatic rabbi Yeshua than there was an actual Horus, Dionysus, Odin, or Mithras, just without all the supernatural mythic additions. We humans just love a good story -- look at the mythic images of the Orange MAGA deity LOL.
Exactly!! It’s just the simplest answer. People love mythologizing their hero’s
@@PasteurizedLettuce if they are was a Jesus its not out Nt Jesus. And the Nt Jesus himself wasnt charismatic. He had anger issues.
@@leom6343 uhh in what way is charisma somehow negatively correlated with anger? most charismatic leaders have grown followings because they spoke to some great injustice whether real or imagined
@@leom6343 and especially messianic claimants in this time were incredibly political issues, some of them attempted to literally lead violent uprisings
Dionysus 😂
Many suspect suspect the Testimonium Flavianum went through the same process Dan ahs described for several other texts: a marginal note was written by a Christian as an explanatory note and then got incorporated into the text.
51:15 My personal take on the second reference to Jesus in Josephus is that at some point a scribe introduced it (in part or in full) in order to make the text spiritually important enough to preserve it. You have to remember that there was not an overabundance of papyrus/vellum in late antiquity/early medieval days, and a “pagan” antiquarian history that had no reference to Jesus might have been considered less important to preserve than a similar text that unambiguously refers to Jesus as the Christ.
It might have been a scholarly version of “nope, we have no Jews in this house, herr Kapitan.” A little lie that serves a greater good.
12:01 Is anyone else looking for Dan's famous catchphrase like when the actors say the title of the movie IN the movie? Or it's just me? 😅 "...that's absolutely nothing that supports it in any way, shape or form whatsoever..."
All of the Josephus references to the particular Jesus (since the name was common enough for Josephus to mention others) of interest I have to filter through the uncomfortable reality that the copies of his work that exist are post-Eusebius. That to me will always color the way I look at Josephus, and this is the same problem we have with so many ancient references when we no longer have direct access to what they wrote but rely on later copyists who may have had their own agendas. This BTW is the same problem I have with trying to reconstruct Marcion from what the heresiologists wrote about him.
There was a Star Trek episode where they encountered Sun worshipers. At the end of the episode Uhura suggested they may be worshiping the Son, not the Sun
...this may have been STAR TREK's Xmas Episode..?
@@neclark08yes please let us know which episode?
As a mythology enjoyer there are so many repeated and well loved tropes it's not remotely surprising at least some of them will eventually overlap from one religious figure to another, as Dan McClellan astutely pointed out.
Especially in a Greco Roman culture where religions freely mixed and matched all the damn time and everyone expected such a thing.
Getting my BA in the mid 70s, had a prof who presented a lot of this to us. Used an old book titled, I believe: Man and His (or Their) Gods.
Even though I'm on the Mythicism side of the argument, I still love hearing Mac talk about the topic. And in addition to Carrier and Price, Raphael Lataster has published peer reviewed work on the existence of a historical Jesus.
Freke and Gandy are actually the reason I got interested in this field, after leaving Christianity. I learned a lot from their books, but I have subsequently learned to check your sources rather than just trusting that they say what they're claimed to say.
As such, I still have those Freke and Gandy books and they're useful for a reference (ie I recently used their books to check when the earliest reference to Acts appears in history, since they have a reference for that in the book) but it isn't a primary source in its own right, of course.
Important word to note : “primary text” … I understand why this is important to scholars at this time. It’s unfortunate that it is
I have a nuanced take on this. I think mythicism as proposed by price and carrier asks really important questions about some of the outdated methodologies used for “historical Jesus” studies. however despite all the valid questions it raises , it doesn’t propose an alternative start to Christianity that’s simpler and thus more likely, than a real Jesus existed who got quickly and heavily mythologized.
Yeah! Skepticism is great at challenging assumptions. And that's what I think Occam's razor is really about: being skeptical of everything but the most likely
The thing that annoys me is that these questions have already been raised- over 150 years of critical scholarship and many of these ideas were brought up in the first 30 years
Lots of "religions & Cult" popped up even today, most revolve around a personality and when they die the cult fades away.
Christianity would have been just another mystery cult too, just the one that was in the right place at the right time, selling a popular idea that was able to piggyback off the Roman Empire.
Realistically as is often pointed out Pliny in 112 CE wrote to the emperor asking what to do with Christians whom he knew nothing about, this guy was 10years in Rome as the equivalent of the Attorney General & Police Chief, yet he had no knowledge of Christians. Yalk about first 100 years being not on the social radar.
Pliny was unsure if he could legally kill Christians for their faith. He believed Christians were guilty of harmless practices and "depraved, excessive superstition".
Right about the 38:00 mark...so cheeky, Dan. 🤗
Thank you.
Oh goody. Is this going to give Neal at Mythvision Light -- I mean, Gnostic informant -- a chance to take another shot at you? 😁🤣
Dan can you explain dandara, with the zodiac on the ceiling if that can a thousand yrs later? Isn't this Egyptian?
Aaannnnnd followed!
Could you tell us if Mary was narried when she received Gabriel archangel? Thanks a lot
FYI: the similar saviors claim gets briefly repeated in "Heretic"
Ok, but there are some stars that either orbit one another or one is in the other’s orbit. They’re called binary stars. Sirius is one of them.
Not me getting more excited by this Astronomy comment than the others! Just wanted to also add that binary (and tertiary) star systems are much more common than single star systems in the Universe. We continue to refine our technology and mathematical models and find lots of additional information as time progresses and it would take an entire you tube video that I would have to create to show… Thanks for the reminder. 😅
My first run in with the "Osiris and Dionysus were exactly the same as Jesus" lie was the 2005 movie "The God Who Wasn't There". Authors like Acharya S and others popularized ideas from Kersey Graves' "The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors" around the same time. The latter aughts were full of this nonsense.
Surprised that Dr. Bob Price got a mention here.
“No one knows if Jesus Christ existed, and if he did, NOTHING is known about him!”
“ Why I Am A Christian”.Bertrand Russell.1928
I think you were going for "why I am NOT a Christian"
Lots of "religions & Cult" popped up even today, most revolve around a personality and when they die the cult fades away.
Christianity would have been just another mystery cult too, just the one that was in the right place at the right time, selling a popular idea that was able to piggyback off the Roman Empire.
Realistically as is often pointed out Pliny in 112 CE wrote to the emperor asking what to do with Christians whom he knew nothing about, this guy was 10years in Rome as the equivalent of the Attorney General & Police Chief, yet he had no knowledge of Christians. Yalk about first 100 years being not on the social radar.
Pliny was unsure if he could legally kill Christians for their faith. He believed Christians were guilty of harmless practices and "depraved, excessive superstition"..
Stargate nerds loving the first segment
There was no Drecember 25 until the Julian calender !!
Zeitgeist made quite a hype in the military about 14 years ago. Even Mormonism teaches, at least to adults, that Jesus wasn’t necessarily born on Dec. 25 so I like to think I saw through that BS. The only good parts of the Zeitgeist series are the George Carlin quotes.
I mean, are you sure all this conclusion jumping - that all gods point directly to Jesus - that it isn’t Graham Hancock entering the chat?
28:00 the turning water into wine by Dionysos comes up in the novel by Achilles Tatius. This is now to be understood as a satire of Christianity: C. Friesen, "Dionysus as Jesus: The Incongruity of a Love Feast in Achilles Tatius's Leucippe and Clitophon 2.2," Harvard Theological Review 107.2 (2014): 222-240.
The miracle of the filled wine jars Dan mentions comes from Pausanias, 6.26. It takes place on Jan 6, which was Dionysos' birthday, which happens to be the Feast of the Epiphany (traditionally, the day the Magi got to Bethlehem as well as, 30 years later, the day of the wine miracle at Cana). That probably isn't a coincidence, and Christians probably borrowed it for their wine miracle. That kind of thing was pretty common at Dionysos temples, more typically they would have a fountain providing free water to the community, but they had plumbing set up so for a few hours beginning at dawn on Jan 6 it would run with wine.
There is a similar discussion in “The God Who Wasn't There.” Of course that film has numerous problems.
Don't Christians squeeze jesus into the old testament
Yes, I'm about 100% certain Dan would affirm that fact (i.e. that they read Jesus back into the HB following his death and continued to develop these sorts of hermeneutic frameworks as time went on)
They do, and he’s made several videos about this.
Let’s face it. Even if you did provide a source text. The people you show it too probably don’t read Greek or hieroglyphics or or so they wouldn’t know what you are showing them.
- Dan Beecher seems to be the most reasonable guy ever. But that might just be an act.
- Woody Harrelson and Adam Baldwin had a baby, and they named him Daniel McClellan.
(Adam Baldwin is a total POS right-wingnut/actor, btw... while Woody Harrelson is a relatively good guy/actor) Their son Dan turned out to be the "normal one" in the family. And he's only _mostly_ normal. I love the show, you guys! 👍
The fun part of this being peddle by atheist is that is a weird christian sect was the one saying all of this they would rightfully mock it and debunk it.
Odin as a pre-Christian Jesus-like figure is such a wild claim, what T_T Fairly sure the earliest sources we have on Odin (or Wuotan, in this case) is from the 1st century CE, so calling him pre-Christian is somewhat doubtful in the first place. And from what I understand, the earliest version of him was primarily a death diety and/or a diety of ritual madness.... doesn't sound particularly jesus-like.
I guess the claim must have to do with when Odin makes an offering to himself by hanging himself in a tree for nine days. If you squint really hard and ignore all context, I guess a god sacrificing himself to himself can be seen as similar to the cruxifixion. But Odin does that to gain wisdom -- the ability to read runes and cast spells and such. And that story is almost certainly far younger than Christianity -- the written version we have is likely from around 900 CE. So if anything, Christianity affected Norse Mythology, not the other way around.
I don't know why these people always think all pagan practices predate Christianity. Anything recognisable as Norse mythology is several hundred years younger.
While Heretic (2024) made some decent points about control and how religion is abused to perpetuate it, I rolled my eyes when Hugh Grant listed off those 16 “saviors” completely uncritically. His whole point was his guests weren’t critical enough of their beliefs 😂.
This is the first episode that I've watched that i have a lot of push back. When you start looking into the Jesus myth you see appeals to authority and no evidence. Then when you ask for the evidence they point you to the canonical gospels. Then when you read the gospels you understand that they contradict in ways that at least 3 are making up BS whole cloth. Then you realize that if 3 are why not 4? Then you realize there are noncanonical gospels that even believers think are pure fiction and you understand there was a whole Jesus fiction economy. Then you realize Josephus can't be a primary source.then Then you find out Christians were playing with the text. Then you ask if there was evidence of Jesus why would Christians play with the text? Then you fast forward to 2024 and watch Dan McClellan refute countless dishonest apologists and realize Christian apologists have probably always been dishonest. Then you read Bart Ehrman's "Case For Christ" and realize Bart has already done such a good job proving the NT is unreliable that it rings hollow when his Case for Christ hinges on the NT being reliable.
Then you understand that the only reasonable position after looking at ALL the available information is that buddy is made up fiction.
About Zeitgeist I watched it a long time ago and don't remember it much, but I didn't take everything said there as gospel lol. But it made me pay attention to God concepts and motifs that were in the Zeitgeist that would have been picked up by religions of the time and that the Jesus story had some parallels with other stories and inspired me to look into this stuff more closely. But I wasn't a mythicist until I read Ehrman.
They always neglect the only one with a lot of matches in some myths and customs predating Jesus: Dionysus.
What are the overlaps and what are the primary sources for those claims?
The Dans talked about that when they talked about Robert Graves, who you might know as the author of I, Claudius. Graves wrote two nonfiction books, one on the Greek Myths and another one on Celtic culture/myths. He has a bit of a fixation on Greek mystery cults and secret Druid societies, if I remember correctly.
I think the book on Greek myths is called simply The Greek Myths. The other book is called The White Goddess.
The problem we run into with these secret cults is that they really didn’t leave behind much documentation regarding their rites, practices, and beliefs. (You’re probably aware of the first two rules of Dionysus Club.) We have mostly contemporary reports of them by outsiders.
Did you just not watch the video or…?
@@MarcosElMalo2 The Dionysus parallels with Jesus are actually supported by some scholars. Scholars have also compared Jesus to Romulus, Heracles, Asclepius, and the Roman emperors. This is a common topic in scholarship but no one seems to actually read the literature.
Appolonius was the basis for Jesus!
No such person, no such phone!
In a related note, you should all go to see the horror movie Heretic if you like horror movies.
Dude tried to squeeze his abstract into that title.
45:00 Jesus' brother Bob? A no-body relative, of the Son of God...
Arrogant Worms reference. :D
Maybe we can get Harry Potter born on December 25 of a Virgin and start a new religion.
Go door to door and tell people the good news of Harry Potter.
Starting a new religion isn’t easy. The apostles wore out a lot of sandals. Say what you want about Paul, but we can’t deny he put in the work.
And you have to go door to door or proselytize face to face in some other way. Otherwise you can’t hypnotize your marks.
Unfortunately, that would contradict the Harry Potter scriptures. His birthday was reportedly July 31, 1980
@ Details, details. We just forge a birth certificate. After all they got away with putting forgeries in the New Testament.
I know the at Jesus was not a direct copy of any of the gods mentioned in the Zeitgeist movie, but the fact that Jesus does have some of these characteristics shows development over time. If you separate Jesus the man from his epiphanies, you'll realize that all of the epiphanies are copies of other myths that predate Jesus. Jesus is not a carbon copy of any God, but he's a meeting of previous myths and expectations from time of culture shift in the Levant into Europe.
The @Jesus? 😅
Well, duh. Much of his story was written to specifically reflect old stories, particularly Jewish ones
Israel is located between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert... Israel has a shorter spring and autumn, and longer summer and winter and that it is characterized by a huge daily temperature range.... That is because it is situated in the region where the Mediterranean climate meets the subtropical climate...
Winter is the rainy season in Israel, so it rains a lot and the temperature falls off. So, people move their sheep into the sheep pen at least by October so that they can go through winter there. Therefore, it is hard to keep watching over the flock of sheep in the fields at night in midwinter, December...
Would love to hear more anthropological analyses about why people told such similar stories across time and place. What sociocultural purpose did the myth employ? Why did Mesopotamian cultures develop pantheons in the first place? Were the stories ways of explaining the origins of agrarian ways of life? Of patriarchy? Of systems of dominance? Ways that humans can survive atrocities like famine, drought, storms, and war? Why did the dying and rising deity motif take hold in their myths? The story of Inanna was written on clay tablets somewhere around 2,000 BCE, and she descended into the underworld for 3 days and 3 nights before ascending. So it seems that the dying and rising deity was a motif important to societies, perhaps a way that people found hope during dark times - the idea that death isn't the end. In my understanding, the myths, even if they are based in history, are ways to explain the collective and individual human experience, which are wildly important for navigating the anxieties, beauties, and complexities of this life. Anyone who has ever descended into their own underworld (inner world) and resurrected anew knows the power of such stories.
The podcast 'The Ancient Tradition' makes the claim that the commonalities in the world's mythologies is because they all stem from one original myth.
Have you heard of Orpheus?
In short, humans invent religion.
I don't think people say it's a direct copy. But influence is definitely there.
Yeah, somehow Dan can see influence from Mesopotamia on the Torah despite there being no direct copying but goes blind when it comes to Mediterrainean influence on Christianity.
So, here we go, from a non-mythicist point of view. There was a guy. He preached. He gathered a following. He was crucified. Miraculous stories about him began circulating. These stories were influenced by miraculous stories already being told about other religiously significant figures. It all toom off from there.
I added ONE thought to Dan's parsimonous take. Is it so unreasonable? Really?
BTW, accent on first syllable in 'parsimony'.
im started c
There's absolutely people who say that. Some are in the comments to this video
@hive_indicator318 Yes, there are people who day it's a direct copy but also a lot who don't. That's not how these things tend to work. But Dan's claim that only mythicists recognize significant influence on Jesus's story from the stories told of other religiously significant people in other religions is nothing less than outrageous and is weirdly inconsistent with the ease with which he recognizes Mesopotamian and broader Southwest Semitic influences on and confluences with the contents of the Torah.
@johnrichardson7629 don't forget egypt
Host says. "They thought it was the 25th but it was the 21st" (Dan nods his head in agreement). No. The Julian calendar, which was in use for the entire Roman world between 46BCE and *1582CE*, and held the winter solsitce ON December 25th. So they diddn't "think it was dec 25th" and got it wrong. It is in Pliny the Elder (Natural History) and other sources.
At 34:22 Dan incorrectly says that this day was only "celebrated" as the Solstice but it was Dec 21st. Wrong. Do you guys even check before spewing stuff?
There has been 16 centuries of the Dec 25th Winter Solstice date being observed. Only the past 5 centuries did we move it to the 21st due to the Gregorian calendar. They had a different calendar.
The calculation of Jesus gestation happened in the 3rd century. The solstices were venerated long before those calculations were made. Christians celebrated his birth on Jan 6th before that, as pointed out by Clement of Alexandria who says the Basilideans started this tradition. No calculation happened for Basilides. So this defeats the argument that they originally calculated anything. And Epiphanius admits in his Panarion (51) that this date was also sacred to pagans. (He mentions the birth of Aion & Dusares and 3 cities where this tradition was held by pagans.)
Also, even though I agree that these low hanging fruit arguments from Zeitgieitst are wrong, Dan has still been shown multiple times about primary sources that predate Christian observance of the birth of Jesus, for example Plutarch in "On Isis & Osiris" says that Harpocrates (Horus the Child) was "born around the winter solstice". And this was written before the gospels were widely known in 119CE. This is also way before any mention of Christians celebrating the birth of Jesus. Jan 6th, the first observed birthday of Jesus, is certainly "around" the winter solstice, which is also the same time as the Theodosia Epiphany for Dionysus (Jan 5th-11th) according to Pliny the Elder in 70CE.
Neil has a degree in Ancient Near Eastern Religions from Oxford,
a PhD and 2 Masters from ...oh wait... NM
Derek and Neil give a lot of sources for the coonection to Dionysus. th-cam.com/video/nyhW4Tlo8N8/w-d-xo.htmlsi=X_U737pzQ2qCEc_i
I think it is not that Christianity copied, it is more that certain ideas are powerful and spread. Stories about dying and rising gods spread around the ancient world, stories about Jesus spread around the ancient world. Maybe these similarities explains why stories about Jesus spread, and not how the stories were crafted.
With regard to the water to wine story. This story shows up 60CE in the first layer of the gospel of John. This text is written Ephesus, putatively, which is a center for Dionysian cultic practice. So Dionysus is in the air.
Dennis R. McDonald makes the point, they are not going to copy the source material verbatim and then cut and paste names into the story. if you did this the people would criticize your lack of narrative creativity. You take ideas that others have created in text, you pluck out an idea that you want to own, and then you write a small narrative around it.,
A good example of this is to compare the Lazarus material in Luke and John. In Luke it’s a Parable but in John the authors wants you to believe Jesus had the ability to restore life after a few days. We don’t know the original material for the story, but they are plucking tiny points of story and then expanding on those points.
There’s also one thing Dan fails to mention here. Storytelling about gods was ubiquitous in the ancient world. I would just point out that with the Hebrew Genesis material people tend to focus on the Enuma Elis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Athrahaisis but they fail to see the abundance of story material that existed. And some of these other varied sources are evident in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is the Jews were in exile in Babylon, not the city, but the Dynasty.
When we look at this each city in Babylon is going to have its own temples, its own gods and its own version of creation, flood and other stories. And I imagine if you went to a tavern and got a priest drunk, he would probably give you still another version. And as Jews were meshed in this society they began picking these tidbits.
This is the same problem in Ephesus, you can’t really limit your think to what material has survived, you have to look at the variation of Dionysus material and ask the question would someone who was familiar with the Dionysus material recognize what was in the Signs gospels as a Dionysian power. When I reward the gospels back to back for the first time, the water to wine story shot up like a red flag, Jesus did not do this, it is out of his genre of character. Thus what is the author of John signaling.
It’s rather obvious when you place the authorship in Ephesus . . . .they are signaling Jesus is as good as Dionysus or better . That’s the point.
I wish Dan would stop pushing this obstinence.
The Zeitgeist stuff that was in the movie Heretic was the only thing I didn't like about it. Everything else was great --- the commentary on the philosophy of religion and the cognitive science of belief were incredible and I wanted to think you for helping me understand that stuff so I could appreciate that movie more.
would love to see dan talk about carrier's "on the historicity of jesus"
45:37-45:58 It’s probably a conflation of the movement of Paul with the historical Jesus. The historical Jesus is not significantly better off than apollonius of tyana. i suspect just about everything we think about the historical Jesus is wrong except that he existed and was crucified upon the request of the sadducees. i happen to think the historical Jesus fits well into a milquetoast, upper class, liberal zionism represented by James Tabor and Simcha Jacobovici.
Josephus arguably doesn't mention this specific Jesus, though. The single passage that does is obviously a later Christian interpolation, and I can't say it's all that convincing to see desperate attempts by modern scholars to strip out the fantastical language, just so that we can have Josephus mentioning Jesus in some form that we can take seriously.
I mean, there was a real "Mona Lisa" who da Vinci used as a model for his painting, but that woman is not the **Mona Lisa**, the legend that has grown and grown to impact the world today. If we met her, our brains would be need to adjust dramatically to how different she is from what we think of her as, we build that person in our minds in absence of the actual input from knowing the physical and mental person; we do the same thing with people DO know, or think we know.
December 21-22nd is the lowest height of the sun in the sky, it is equal in length from the equinoxes”
Depending on the epoch, the shortest day of the year differs. This is because abuse the sun is not a point in the sky but a disk.
So we have to look at it like this, the position of the sun in the week that precedes and follows the solstice the sun does not hardly move, that’s why it’s called the solstice. But the Earth is moving. It’s moving in an elliptical orbit and its distance is increasing to January 2. What this means is the angular velocity is increasing, because the angular velocity is increasing it takes longer for the earth to complete a full day. When we mesh the ellipse and the tilt of the earth we get a minima on December 25th.
So Dan Beecher, they are not foolish for choosing the 25th.
“Although a day for practical timekeeping purposes is always 24 hours, the actual length of a solar day, which is the time difference between two successive occasions when the Sun is at its highest in the sky, varies throughout the year. As shown in the graph below, it is at its longest, 24 hours 30 seconds, around Christmas Day and is at its shortest, 23 hours 59 minutes 38 seconds, in mid-September.”
Thus if you are measuring the length of the night as an indicator of the vacancy of the sun, then Christmas Day is that day. We should note that in western traditions associate with night legends. Silent night, Santa Claus traveling the earth at night,
The use of lights to ward off the night, these are all representations to ward off the season of death and the association of darkness with death.
Who's that new girl?
It's Jess.
Good show but to me there's nothing original about christianity
5:07 Sorry, Dan2, but I have bad news for you. All of your minutes are minutes that you can’t get back. That’s how time works.
Apparently, I’m a little bit snarky when slightly stoned. Maybe I should go have a Snickers.
What about Pliny the Younger or Tacitus?
Dude doesn't know anything about Horus or the star in the east but somehow has a valid opinion.
The person who gave the correct version of the Christian origin story is Richard Carrier. All the other versions of mythicism are nonsense. Carrier is following Doherty, but analyzes all the texts with Doherty's hypothesis, and compares it to the historical idea. The historical idea is not as plausible.
On The Historicity of Jesus Christ: Why we have reason to doubt focuses on academic peer reviewed information. I appreciate his candor in explaining why he eliminates apologetic "scholarship" from individuals at Christian universities where their scholarship publication would affect their job status. It's a compelled confirmation bias.
Derek Lambert from Mythvision Podcast and the Gnostic informant host have a separate discussion about the Zeitgeist comparison between Dionysus and Jesus Mythology pointing to the Andros Fountain which produces water, except between Jan 3 & 7 (if I am remembering dates correctly.) At that time it produces wine. If you leave the temple with the wine, it will revert to water because you've left Dionysus presence.
There's apparently also some drama between Dan McClellan and the Host of Gnostic Informant Host. I'd like to understand the differences of opinion without getting into melodrama. Frankly, Rabbi Tovia Singer gives me more suspicious pause towards Christian academics & early Christian writings . He discusses chapters of scripture like Isaiah 7 and the mistranslation of "young woman" to "virgin."
Zeitgeist might have some points of contention, and interesting history, but personally, for what it's worth, I think Judaism has some fair critical reasons to doubt the "Jesus as Messiah" narrative of Christianity. But hey, Matthew 27:51-53 - no contemporary writings of people being convinced by their deceased family members coming back to tell them Jesus was "The Dude" and everyone needs his dude-ism or will be damned... 🤔🤔
Rome leaves to bodies of the executed for scavengers but is willing to make an exception for Jesus followers & his body? Biblical plot holes obvious to critical thinking don't need something bad academics to over sell comparisons with other deity figures.
When it comes to Flava Bosephus, did you say that we don’t have any purported transcripts from the period of his authorship? If that is the case, aren’t the only remotely authoritative attestation, to a historical Jesus, the likely Pauline texts? Seems the door is more than ajar for mythicists. Paul wouldn’t be the only person to relate a spurious divine encounter and insinuate their self into a movement founded on someone else’s spurious divine encounter. Cough! Joseph Smith cough!
No Dan ____we_____ are not saying this association for the first time. Jeeze if I hear this one more time …… you blocked Gnostic, it really seems like you want to ignore the evidence. So let’s lay out who is making the accusation.
“Dionysius bar Salibi (died 1171) was Syriac Orthodox writer and bishop, who served as metropolitan of Amid, in Upper Mesopotamia, from 1166 to 1171. He was one of the most prominent and prolific writers within the Syriac Orthodox Church during the twelfth century.” So get this into your head, this is the primary accuser.
Why is he making the claim?
“Finally, in about 200 C.E., a Christian teacher in Egypt makes reference to the date Jesus was born. According to Clement of Alexandria, several different days had been proposed by various Christian groups. Surprising as it may seem, Clement doesn’t mention December 25 at all.”
“The earliest mention of December 25 as Jesus’ birthday comes from a mid-fourth-century Roman almanac that lists the death dates of various Christian bishops and martyrs. The first date listed, December 25, is marked: natus Christus in Betleem Judeae: “Christ was born in Bethlehem of Judea.””
“The earliest evidence of Christ's birth being marked on December 25 is a sentence in the Chronograph of 354. Liturgical historians generally agree that this part of the text was written in Rome in AD 336.”
So why is Salibi important. Sol Invictus was a fabrication that was created in Syria, they were already familiar with the feasts dates. “Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/), Aelagabalus, Heliogabalus, (/ˌhiːliəˈɡæbələs/) or simply Elagabal (Aramaic: 𐡁𐡋𐡄𐡂𐡀𐡋 ʾĕlāhgabāl or 𐡁𐡋𐡄𐡀𐡂𐡀𐡋 ʾĕlāhaʾgabāl; Arabic: إله الجبل Ilah al-Jabal, both literally meaning "God of the Mountain") was an Arab-Roman sun god, initially venerated in Emesa (modern-day Homs), Syria. “
Thus they are the experts on festival dates and all of this stuff pops up in 218 under a Roman emperor who was the high priest of a cult.
This Syriac writer is remarking that the Christians in the west adopted this date because many of them were followers of the cult, which also appears to be true, and many early Christians syncretized sol Invictus with Jesus.
I mean Dan belief is a weird thing, you are free to believe what ever you want, and you can believe that some Gregorian monk took the date of the execution and back dated it 9 mos, and got December 25th. But I call this a just so explanation.
But the fact of the matter is that Sol Invictus became increasingly popular in Roman culture from the date. “Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, c. 204 - 13 March 222), better known by his posthumous nicknames Elagabalus (/ˌɛləˈɡæbələs/ EL-ə-GAB-ə-ləs) and Heliogabalus (/ˌhiːliə-, -lioʊ-/ HEE-lee-ə-, -lee-oh-), was Roman emperor from 218 to 222”
Thus from any time between 222 and 276 the Elagabalusians could have created 25th as a festival date. The cult existed, it was not invented by a Roman emperor in 276, and you simply are conflating absence of evidence as evidence of absence.
Who is curating the textual evidence after 350 BCE, Christians or people in the Sol Invictus cult?
The absence of evidence may be a delete.
Bar Salibi said nothing related to your claim. That was actually something scribbled into the margins of a Bar Salibi manuscript in a later and different hand. You're not paying close enough attention. Also, the calculation argument was made explicit by Hippolytus around 210 CE. The *possibility* that someone could have come up with it between 222 and 276 is moot, since the date had already been identified a decade before.
@ yes, that is rock solid evidence
“Hippolytus of Rome (/həˈpɑːlɪtəs/ hə-PAW-lit-əs, ‹See Tfd›Greek: Ἱππόλυτος; Romanized: Hippólytos, c. 170 - c. 235 AD) was a Bishop of Rome and one of the most important second-third centuries Christian theologians, whose provenance, identity and corpus remain elusive to scholars and historians. Suggested communities include Rome, Palestine, Egypt, Anatolia and other regions of the Middle East. The best historians of literature in the ancient church, including Eusebius of Caesarea and Jerome, openly confess they cannot name where Hippolytus the biblical commentator and theologian served in leadership. They had read his works but did not possess evidence of his community.”
Egyptologists would disagree a little bit with you
Wasn't Sol Invictus supposedly born on December 25?
Religion for Breakfast has a video on this
Also, they answered this question in this video! Ffs
You two don't believe what is in Josephus about Jesus either. Occam's razor is that either it is a later interpolation by Eusebius or Josephus is simply writing what he read in the gospels.
Scholarly consensus holds that there was an authentic Paul. Paul speaks of knowing the 12 apostles and James the brother of Jesus. It seems very unlikely for Paul to mean ask these characters were mythological too in his stories. Occum's Razor applies as well as we've never seen anything like this elsewhere in history.
I'm not convinced that Jesus was a historical person, and yet it seems to me that Antiquities book 20 chapter 9 is the best evidence for the existence of a physical Jesus existing in reality.
It would be good to hear more about this phrase "who was called the Christ". Could this also be Christian interpolation, like book 18? If not, why not, and if so, why is the consensus so militantly defensive about a historical Jesus?
Like Dr McClellan I don't identify with mythicist either, but that's the label that gets thrust at me all the time, even though Dan's comments around the fifty five minutes mark also apply to me.
I've not got a relevant PhD though, so who cares what I think?
Within the literature there are a few attestations of Jesus that match a man to a few common activities, there are essentially 4 or 5 items. The source material diverges quite quickly and point to a mid first century character. As Paul points out there are even some people running around the believe more extreme things that he does and also he has two cousins that preceded him in Christ (though we should not accept this as believing they believe he is the same kind of messiah that Paul believes in). The Q account is a christless version of Jesus.
So the historic Jesus is rather worldly and attenuated. Paul’s Jesus is mostly mystical, Mark’s Jesus is largely made up, as with the parts in Matthew and Luke borrowed from Mark. Luke and Matthew add their own embellishments such as the great commision, walking zombies, etc. the birth narratives may have been assed later.
I would argue that John is a conflagration of Mark and other material, but that would be a kind of misrepresentation of the material Is see the text as a mystical exercise. We often have to see the text as how they functioned and it’s dangerous to read them as this is what the author thought the history was.
I Wouk pushback against Dan’s messiah exclusion.
The problem is that Christians largely, even from Paul forward, are not using the Hebrew directives of what the messiah is supposed to be, they are hobnobbing Hebrew text to point at the Christian messiah text that are not messianic.
@@Darisiabgal7573 exactly i thought this same thing as I listened, Christianity isn't even using the word correctly so does it matter that others aren't either?
@@thetruest7497 the word, christos, technically means “the rubbed one” presumably masculine, when associated with Judaism is generally means the Moshiach and implies the Davidic Messiah. This changes with Paul who essentially redefines what the Messiah is.
Carrier does not postulate that the New Testament has anything to do with any other mythical figure, but is an authentically new creation based on Jewish mythology. He identifies the source in Isiah, the figure which became Jesus, and the "cosmic sperm bank" is just a way of understanding what "seed of David" means, when it isn't applied to a historical person. It is absolutely not more parsimonious to "assume a historical person", because the role Jesus plays in Christianity is not that of a historical person, but as a personification of the Logos. This is why this field is sick, it needs to acknowledge the balance of probability on this issue correctly.
"Cosmic sperm bank" does not really convert sceptics to your new theory. Anyway mythicists need to explain James, the brother of Jesus. Was he also made up?
@@adedaporh There is no evidence that James was the biological brother of Jesus. Paul just calls him "The Brother of the Lord", and the gospel writers turn him into a brother of Jesus. James is a real person, he just had no biological kinship to anyone special. The point of the description in Carrier is to be correct, not to make good propaganda. I agree it doesn't make good propaganda. But it is absolutely correct.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 "The brother of the Lord" seems to mean literally that since James is the only one described as such in a list of followers of Jesus. So again, how do you explain James?
@@adedaporh It doesn't seem to literally mean that if you don't come at it with your biases. To my ears it just means "part of an order of monks called brothers of the lord". I have long ago stopped reading this historically. But I suggest you give it a shot, get used to it, and see how it works. After a little bit of adjustment, you will see that it works a heck of a lot better than any historical analysis.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 Are you serious? Do you have any evidence of this "order of monks" in the first century?
You seem to be letting your theory drive your historiography. Occam's razor would suggest that Paul simply meant a familial relationship between James and Jesus.
12th month 25th day, Jehoiachin/Jeconiah/Coniah was raised up, rags exchanged for royal robes, and placed at the head of the kings exiled.Jesus son of Jehozadak replicates this in Zechariah 3.
If you think the Tanakh is spotless.
Ezekiel 2:1
He said to me, “Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you.”
Ezekiel 3:1
And he said to me, “Son of man, eat what is before you, eat this scroll; then go and speak to the people of Israel.”
Ezekiel 4:1
Now, son of man, take a block of clay, put it in front of you and draw the city of Jerusalem on it.
Daniel 7:13-14
13 “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man,[a] coming with the clouds of heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. 14 He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all nations and peoples of every language worshiped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed.
1. Ezekiel is called son of man
2. Daniels Son of man is plural, just like each man is plural and it doesn't say worship but to obey.
3 there is no Jesus anywhere in the Ot
@@leom6343 Zephaniah read it, and try conflate the hebrew text where the remnant of Israel is meaning Judah. Never once in the hebrew script are these the same entities.
Christmas is a mishmash of pagan traditions...
Few historians disagree that many of the current Christmas traditions (decorating trees, wreaths, mistletoe, etc) can be traced back to Saturnalia/Yule...
For example as someone with both Celtic and Viking ancestry (that now follows Messiah) I can tell you that an evergreen tree was 💯 used for worship of other gods...
Druids, the priests of the Celts, also decorated their temples with evergreens as a symbol of everlasting life...
The Vikings thought that evergreens were the special plant of the sun god...
Where and in what time period was decorating a tree a saturnalia/yule tradition that predated Christian practice in the area? And I'm going to need primary sources.
@hive_indicator318 Christians didn't start adopting the tree until the 16th century... While Roman documented (AD 23/24-79) how druids were using evergreens... Do you have access to the internet?... Type in the pagan origins of Christmas your welcome...
@@Damian.Williams you made the claim that pagans decorated trees before Christianity. You provide the primary sources. That's how it works. I'm not going to look for the things that don't exist. That's the claimant's job
@hive_indicator318 I know because it's my history are you American? I told you what to type into the internet history channels have a lot of resources on this you asked for a source I gave you the knowledge of how to get it... You're welcome...
@@Damian.WilliamsI know that you made the claim. I know that you haven't provided any evidence. What is the primary source that provides evidence for your claim? Like I said, I'm not going to look for something I have no reason to believe exists.
Debunk the Roman catholic not.jesus , debunk Pauline doctrine not..Jesus ,,debunk the bible. Not jesus, it takes a high IQ too know that the bible is a book. Not the word of god jesus was a spiritual leader who happened to be jewish 😂
With regard to the water to wine story. This story shows up 60CE in the first layer of the gospel of John. This text is written Ephesus, putatively, which is a center for Dionysian cultic practice. So Dionysus is in the air.
Dennis R. McDonald makes the point, they are not going to copy the source material verbatim and then cut and paste names into the story. if you did this the people would criticize your lack of narrative creativity. You take ideas that others have created in text, you pluck out an idea that you want to own, and then you write a small narrative around it.,
A good example of this is to compare the Lazarus material in Luke and John. In Luke it’s a Parable but in John the authors wants you to believe Jesus had the ability to restore life after a few days. We don’t know the original material for the story, but they are plucking tiny points of story and then expanding on those points.
There’s also one thing Dan fails to mention here. Storytelling about gods was ubiquitous in the ancient world. I would just point out that with the Hebrew Genesis material people tend to focus on the Enuma Elis, the Epic of Gilgamesh and Athrahaisis but they fail to see the abundance of story material that existed. And some of these other varied sources are evident in the Hebrew Bible. The problem is the Jews were in exile in Babylon, not the city, but the Dynasty.
When we look at this each city in Babylon is going to have its own temples, its own gods and its own version of creation, flood and other stories. And I imagine if you went to a tavern and got a priest drunk, he would probably give you still another version. And as Jews were meshed in this society they began picking these tidbits.
This is the same problem in Ephesus, you can’t really limit your think to what material has survived, you have to look at the variation of Dionysus material and ask the question would someone who was familiar with the Dionysus material recognize what was in the Signs gospels as a Dionysian power. When I reward the gospels back to back for the first time, the water to wine story shot up like a red flag, Jesus did not do this, it is out of his genre of character. Thus what is the author of John signaling.
It’s rather obvious when you place the authorship in Ephesus . . . .they are signaling Jesus is as good as Dionysus or better . That’s the point.
I wish Dan would stop pushing this obstinence.
If you want your claims to have more impact, you need to be able to show primary sources for them. I haven't looked up the connection between Ephesus & either John or Dionysus. Probably not hard to show. If you read the gospel coalition, they claim Dionysus never performed any such miracle, and many Christians will just believe that in confirmation bias. Since you're claiming the positive case, burden of proof rests on you. But you're in luck, since you're correct.
Pliny's Natural History. In Thirty-seven Books, Volumes 1-3 (AD 77-79) recalls how the temple of Bocchus (Roman name for Dionysus) flowed with water that tastes like wine during the "Nones of January". Some scholars hold John was written as early as 60 AD, before Pliny. But we can push the Dionysus water into wine miracle back further to Bibliotheca Historica, 3.66.3. So there's at least 2 sources for it the gospel coalition missed. One contemporary to John and another far predating John.
Was this myth the inspiration for Jesus's miracle? Well, maybe. We can't know for sure. All we can demonstrate is that it's plausible.