It makes sense there would be mentions of a messiah rising again in three days before Jesus, especially among the Jews, because it wasn't a new idea at all. There's dying and resurrected gods in mythology all over the world, like Egyptian and African. Sacrifice, redemption and resurrection are universal themes, and three is a significant number in many cultures, and there's a ton of pre-Christ resurrection stories.
The Old Testament prophecies elude to it, so it's not surprising that Hebrews before Christ would put it all together in a Messiah story. Jesus even mentions "the sign of Jonah" and spent a lot of his time with the disciples talking about the prophecies and saying that he would rebuild the temple in three days and all that.
Remember how the Romans were worried that someone would fake a resurrection so they put a stone in front of the tomb? They even knew that the Jews talked about a Messiah that would rise from the dead.
I'm sure those people who wrote on a stone hoped for a Messiah and hoped this guy would be it, but there's hardly a big enough picture from that stone to shake up the New Testament.
CS Lewis had a lot to say about that sort of thing...somewhere in God on the Dock. Myth Became Fact comes to mind? His view was that all the mythology and legend that humans saw in Creation became real in Christ. God inspired a preview, of sorts, in mythology and prophecy, and then it actually happened historically in Christ, under Pilot, in Jerusalem, etc. etc..
(That's why I get so irritated when people say that Aslan in Narnia represents Jesus...how dare they accuse Lewis of writing such a sloppy allegory when he just took another take of the dying god myth! But that's my geek-rant for the day :)
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Date: 2008-07-07 06:45 pm (UTC)The Old Testament prophecies elude to it, so it's not surprising that Hebrews before Christ would put it all together in a Messiah story. Jesus even mentions "the sign of Jonah" and spent a lot of his time with the disciples talking about the prophecies and saying that he would rebuild the temple in three days and all that.
Remember how the Romans were worried that someone would fake a resurrection so they put a stone in front of the tomb? They even knew that the Jews talked about a Messiah that would rise from the dead.
I'm sure those people who wrote on a stone hoped for a Messiah and hoped this guy would be it, but there's hardly a big enough picture from that stone to shake up the New Testament.
CS Lewis had a lot to say about that sort of thing...somewhere in God on the Dock. Myth Became Fact comes to mind? His view was that all the mythology and legend that humans saw in Creation became real in Christ. God inspired a preview, of sorts, in mythology and prophecy, and then it actually happened historically in Christ, under Pilot, in Jerusalem, etc. etc..
(That's why I get so irritated when people say that Aslan in Narnia represents Jesus...how dare they accuse Lewis of writing such a sloppy allegory when he just took another take of the dying god myth! But that's my geek-rant for the day :)