For the Biblical scholars on my list

[velvetpage]

Gabriel's Revelation suggests that the idea of a messiah dying and being resurrected after three days was already an established concept at the time of Christ, a part of the apocalyptic writings in the tradition of Daniel. An interesting article.

Comments

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Interesting! What to make of it, I'm not sure. That last bit, about how New Testament scholars previously assumed that some ideas like this must have been inserted into the Scriptural text by authors after the time of Jesus, reminds me that there's an awful lot we don't know.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Wow. The Google links at the side of this comment are mind-boggling. I don't think I'll go to any of them.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Ack, I have no idea what links are there because I have a paid account, so I don't see ads. What are they?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I get comments in my gmail, so I'm seeing the ads put there by gmail. It scans emails for key words and targets specific ads that have similar key words. So the ads I was seeing were mostly apocalyptic prophecy websites sponsored by the kinds of Christians I actively dislike. Ew.

[kisekileia.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. Yuck.

[asqmh.livejournal.com]

It was. Much of Christianity is found in other traditions. To me, that doesn't lessen its validity at all. God uses and has always used the world in which we live and the things with which we are familiar in order to communicate with his creation. That's my understanding, at least.

This, to me, is the same as saying baptism, sacrifice, communal meals or cleanliness rituals or a flood narrative or a creation story or an End of Times eschatology were pre-established. Well, yeah, they were. That's kind of a given. But in my theology, they were taken, shaped and repurposed, given "fuller" meaning in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[mortonfox.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday!

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

[me-as-mom.livejournal.com]

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 :)

[foomf.livejournal.com]

It was also an element in the Zoroastrian derived religion of Mithras the Incarnate Sun.

Which is why the Magi, Zoroastrian priests, are such an interesting inclusion.