Opinion of this meme

[Kingpoleon]

   Satsuma makes a good point about "Abrahamic". It is a term with anthropological value and one that I see bandied about in secular society, but when I became religious one of the things that struck me was how little value classical Christian thought assigns to someone being Jewish or Muslim, and so forth. If you were to ask me whether Christianity is more similar to Islam or Buddhism, I would answer the question based on the theology, cosmology, and phronema of these systems. That Christianity and Islam both credit Abraham as a major forebear is essentially irrelevant in the calculus.

The Abrahamic religions not only share a common regard for the Tanakh, they also largely developed in a millennium and a half of dialogue between Aristotelianism and Platonism. They thus have not only a “genetic” commonality, but also Lamarckian adapted features.

[Kingpoleon]

I am somewhat suspicious of the liberal “Christianity” from which sentiments like this often spring, in part due to its overreaction to the exclusivist Christianity which began its own errors with Augustine. To many progressive Christians, ecumenism represents an attempt to syncretize perfectly fascinating systems like Platonism or ancient Egyptian religion with Christianity to the destruction of the church.

[Kingpoleon]

The exclusivist Augustine would hate progressives trying to syncretise Christianity with Platonism.

While I am glad someone grasped half the jest, it is fairly important to recognize that Augustine is in some sense responsible for treating Christianity as a system of closed propositions actively hostile to the majority’s tradition of universal reconciliation.

*(The other half is a jest about Richard Carrier.)

I love to go to my mainline church in suburban America and worship Sobek, the great crocodile-God of ancient Egyptian legend. We often offer up mummified crocodile eggs to Him the Pointed of Teeth. Plus the donuts after the service are pretty good.

I was speaking of two phenomena; the first, a bizarre sympathy to New Age religions as well as Buddhism, and the second, a denial of Christian doctrine about the Virgin Birth, the deity of Christ, the reality of hell, the resurrection, etc.

[Kingpoleon]

What do New Age-y/Esoteric Christians have in common with the Ancient Egyptian religion?

Very little. That was a reference to some rather horrible NT “scholarship” I’ve begun to read by Carrier and others.

[Kingpoleon]

Has this anything to do with Atenist priests moving to Palestine?

He has plenty of videos online, but in some of his earlier work he suggests that Horus was born of a virgin who was visited by an angel, had twelve disciples, sent out seventy-two disciples, was crucified, and rose to life three days later, and that these stories predated Christ by a thousand years. In reality, they date some thousand and eight hundred years after Christ, to a bizarre group of historians.

[Kingpoleon]

Oh that, well I always thought that was a bit of a stretch, but there are some common motifs from Sumerian and Ancient Egyptian religion that are present in the Bible, but the Horus=Jesus theory is pretty wrong.

Robert Price, otherwise a rather horrible scholar, is fairly decent at outlining the sort of Jungian comparative analysis of the New Testament and presenting why, in fact, the Gospel writers only clearly show relating the story to the OT and not, say, to mystery Greco-Roman religions or Homeric epics. He is utterly wrong about the implications of this, FTR.

[Kingpoleon]

I have no idea what he has written about in terms of Jungian archetypes nor to any attempts at linking Biblical writings to Greek stories and religious practices.

May you give us a bit more detail or perhaps give us some book titles for further review.

Really? In my experience, most atheists are at least vaguely familiar with Price and Carrier. Anyway, the book where Price really explains his theory wrt the OT is actually one of those “multiple views” series called The Historical Jesus: Five Views.

The two things that I remember in particular were the 40 days in the wilderness as the Exodus, the 12 disciples as the 12 tribes, and the 70 disciples with the Table of Nations.

[Kingpoleon]

The allusion is more than both falling down: e.g. both Elpenor and Eutychus are only picked up the next day by their comrades, which is kind of inexplicable in the Acts narrative. There are linguistic parallels, notably the use of the same word for roof that is found nowhere else in Luke-Acts (and only one other place in the entire NT).  Elpenor is called "unlucky" in the Odyssey, the name Eutychus means "lucky". And where does the author of Acts place the story? While Paul is visiting the city of Troy.

Elpenor was a famous character in ancient literature and his story was also reworked by among others Plato in the Republic, and Clement of Alexandria references him by name (don't be drunk like Elpenor was). Any educated Greek reader, having been drilled on Homer since they were a child, would have immediately grasped the allusion and its moral: the pagan afterlife is death, the gospel of Paul is life.

There are likely other Homeric allusions in the New Testament but the above is the one I'm most familiar with.

MacDonald is sort of the epitome of the bad scholarship which often comes out of Claremont and, to a lesser degree, Harvard and Yale. The idea that the Gospels are closer to Homeric epics than, say, to Plutarch’s Parallel Lives is just demonstrably false to anyone who has ever read the two. Luke is clearly familiar with the normal historiographical practice of his day, of the sort we find in Plutarch and Tacitus and, in a more biased history, Cicero. His careful and rigorous documentation of fact after fact comes often at the expense of prettier if false narratives, although he does have a few ideas of concealment in common with Matthew and Mark.