POCM > Historical Jesus Scholarship

How to be a frustrated crybaby

Pikachu has a real big problem: According to the overwhelming consensus of modern scholarship, the pagan copycat thesis he stumps for is, well, bunk. In other words, the people who have actually done their homework on these subjects, who have studied the origial literature, the history of religions, and all the relevant data have concluded that the pagan copycat thesis he believes in is wrong. So the question arises: In the face of such informed opposition, what's a nobody like Pikachu -- who can't even spell right half the time -- supposed to do? The answer: Cry like a baby. He doesn't have much choice otherwise. Here Pikachu takes on (guffaw) summary "defenses" against the copycat thesis. We'll see how it's just the same old tactics being repeated: Equivocation, ignoring evidence, special pleading, crybaby accusations of "bias". It just never changes.


	Incredibly, Pikachu thinks that he's better informed than peer-reviewed scholars!

Credentialed academia
Pikachu is well aware that the pagan copycat thesis has been thoroughly rejected by credentialed scholarship. He even knows of an early debunker: Arthur Darby Nock's essay Early Christianity and its Hellenistic Background, (1928). It's actually not as widely quoted as Pikachu thinks it is -- critical and credentialed scholarship has long since "moved on" to far more sophisticated and detailed defenses that Pikachu obviously doesn't know about -- but it remains that the basic case is still that one can "create" similarities by various means (mostly by equivocation) and that there is no real dependence involved, beyond matters of common sense (i.e., if a god exists, you're going to pray to it, so it is absurd to say that something like prayer was "borrowed" from anyone). There's also an enormous consensus (which Pikachu also seems completely ignorant of) that if there is any "borrowing" to be discerned, the best antecedents are found not in paganism, but in Judaism. That's modern academic orthodoxy, and it is supported by countless, credentialed scholars under peer review.

So what's an ignorant little Pokemon to do? Pikachu pulls out the sure and steady excuse guaranteed to shazam the gullible: He claims BIAS! [E]veryone has an agenda, he reminds us -- that is, everyone except Pikachu and his sources; the lesson never learned by the uneducated who use this "argument" is that when you throw crap on a fan, you'd better make sure it isn't one of those types of fans that can be picked up and turned around on you. I won't make the charge of "bias" or "agenda" against my opponents -- it's just a load of diaper rash, and the inevitable resort of those who know that the facts won't cooperate with what they want to believe. It doesn't matter if Nock's essay was published in a book about Christians, by Christians, for Christians. That's just too bad for Pikachu (and as if a Hindu publisher or scholar would be interested enough anyway). Why not point out that one of Pikachu's favorite sources -- Robert Price -- is a book by an atheist, published by an atheist press, for atheists? There, did Pikachu just vanish in a puff of smoke? I thought not.

In fact, there's actually no basis for the claim Pikachu makes that throughout academia most scholars of religion are Christian believers. There's no data to support that, and even if there were, whining and moaning and screaming and kicking and crying that they have an "agenda" and start with the idea the Christian story was new, unique, discontinuous -- true is nothing but character assassination by a frustrated little hack who can't deal with the facts. Never asked is the question, "Why can't it be that they remain believers precisely because that's where the evidence points?" Why does Pikachu see the need to insult their objectivity, their scholarship, their honesty? Because he's a big fat loser of the arguments is why. And rather than just spit and cry like he does, we'll show exactly how.

To try to prove that these scholars have a bias problem, Pikachu rumbles out this quote about Pagan water purification sacraments, some (not all) of which were around before Christianity.

Butt cover

Although he in essence calls them dishonest and incompetent, Pikachu wants to reassure that he doesn't think believing academics are bad people. They're just means they are Christian believers, he says; and he refuses to say clearly that they aren't as rigorous as they imagine themselves -- even saying he has a foible or two myself. Um. Then the whole "bias" argument just went down the toilet. What's really happening is that not even Pikachu has the lack of conscience or the nerve to stand up for what his own "argument" implies.

"We know of an ablution [an ablution is a washing of the body, especially as part of a religious rite] in the ritual of Eleusis; the laurel-wreath oration of Demosthenes speaks of purificatory ablutions in the mystery of Sabazius; the cult of Attis had its taurobolium, and the mystery of Isis knew a sanctifying baptismal bath, as did the mysteries of Dionysus and of Mithras. Upon mature consideration modern scholarship has rejected the ideas that such rites exerted an influence on the baptismal doctrine of the New Testament." [Hugo Rahner, The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries, section 3, in The Mysteries; Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, edited by Joseph Campbell] Please note that last point. Rahner is a scholar of Christian tradition, but the book was edited by Joseph Campbell, who if anyone would be exceptionally sympathetic to a "borrowing" thesis. As it is, the evidence for that is so weak that Campbell resorts to a "Jungian archaetype" explanation for similarities in religion. There was no "borrowing" -- the similarities are unconscious. Coveniently unfalsifible, but at least honest with the evidence.

Pikachu snores away at this by saying, In other words, back when Christianity started, where it started, among the people who were its earliest converts, you couldn't walk down the street without tripping over a Pagan baptism; but our baptism, our Christian baptism, that's completely different and unrelated to all the other baptisms. This is the kind of stuff believing academics write down and pass around. You need to understand that as you sift through the scholarship. And that's all he says. As if just saying, "well, there were baptisms everywhere, so they must have borrowed it" answers the point. It doesn't. Scholars have rejected a "pagan borrowing" connection for several reasons. Chief among these is that a more viable antecedent is found In Judaism -- specifically, in ritual baths for new converts, and for purification, and in figures of speech found in the OT that speak of purification in connection with water. Which leads to the second reason to deny a "pagan" connection, which is that water is a universal purifier. It's a metaphor we'd expect to appear time and time again, especially in connection with freshness and rejuvenation. This is not to say that Jews and Christians would have been unaware of pagan ceremonies of this sort; what it does mean is that they would not go around thinking, "Gee, before we institite a ritual of purification and initiation, we'd better check around to make sure someone else isn't doing the same thing." It means in fact that if anything, Jews and Christians (or even pagans) would look at such rites by others and say, "Ha. We've got the real rite that fits; we're the ones who have the right to use water." Get it? If there was any borrowing at all, it would only be 1) in line with a related tradition (i.e., Judaism preceding Christianity) and/or 2) adversarial (filling the basic metaphor with one's own meaning). Scholars know that Christian (and Jewish) baptism is in no sense like any of the pagan rites when it comes to the meaning "poured" into the core action. Hence they reject any idea of ideological "borrowing" or influence.

What Pikachu picked up from the floor.
Pikachu speaks of the tight groves [sic] arguments fall in, but I have to be honest -- as a reader of scholastic literature on this subject, I find Pikachu's assessment foreign. It is misleading at best to say that Everyone agrees the facts suggest a Pagan - Christian connection -- unless "suggest" means, "It's something the ignorant might see a connection between." But here are four possible defenses Pikachu claims are out there, to say that Christianity is:

	different -- this one is indeed the one often used
	not different, but it developed separately -- this one I have never seen used by anyone
	not different, but it developed first -- this is used in some cases, as with Mithra, where the evidence is clearly too late
	Or they can ignore the pagan origins -- I have never seen this done either; maybe Pikachu is mistaking focus on one topic for exclusion of another intentionally

Another mangled example
To arrive at a conclusion of malfeasance, Pikachu offers a second century AD (ahem -- note the date!) quote from a Pagan fellow named Apuleius who offered a description of his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis.

"The keys of hell and the guarantee of salvation were in the hands of the goddess, and the initiation ceremony itself took the form of a kind of voluntary death and salvation through divine grace."
[Apuleius, Metamorphosis, Book 11, 21]

How do pagan copycatters abuse such quotes?
Like Pikachu, they look at the words and announce their uneducated conclusion. They assume that just because, i.e., the word "salvation" is used (Pikachu's allusion to a "great mass of other evidence" unspecified, notwithstanding) that there must be some "connection".

The real scholars -- not just believing ones -- have their answers, and here is how Pikachu frames it in terms of his "four defenses":

Different.

Pikachu claims to have gotten from a "professor at Yale" some explanation (though he does not quote it) that because it doesn't say "eternal rebirth,"...it's not the same. I suspect Pikachu misheard "jail" for "Yale" on that one, or that the source was so far above his head that he missed it. It's also hard to figure because the quote above does not mention "rebirth" at all.

The reality however is that, as we note, "salvation" was a general use word that referred to just about any kind of serious "help" you could imagine. It could mean a rescue from a bad military situation. Or, someone who got you out of a burning building could be your "savior". Yes, the word is still used that way today sometimes; not often, but it carries a more general meaning. Here's a passage from Demosthenes Speeches 21-30: When he realized what trouble he was in, and came to the conclusion that he would be reduced by famine, if by no other means, he made the discovery, whether by suggestion or by his own wits, that his only chance of salvation lay where there is salvation for everybody. And where is that? In your good-nature, if that is the right term, men of Athens,--or call it what you will. "Salvation" meant a way of safety of well-being. Thus it is absurd to just say, "Hey, there's the word 'salvation'. Must be a connection to Christianity." In fact, such reasoning is absurd beyond belief.

Pikachu's next example: Yes Tammuz dies and rises, but Tammuz isn't a dying and rising god because he's really a demi-God, not a fully vested, tenured god...So Jesus is completely different from Tammuz. Yes, he is. And how does Pikachu answer this? He doesn't. He just throws this out as though it's made an error by exposure. (There is even more to it, of course: See here.)

He does try to answer about Osiris, but in so doing exposes his confusion: Osiris did die and get resurrected and go to Egyptian heaven, where he judges people and gives his followers eternal life -- but his resurrection was to heaven, not to Earth, see, so it wasn't really a resurrection. Well, there wasn't. For one thing, that's more temrminological equivocation; what Osiris had was not a "resurrection" as properly defined in Jewish terms; what he underwent was something entirely different, a function of the way the bodies of the Egyptian gods worked: They never could actually be "killed" and their body parts could be exchanged like Lego blocks (see more here. This is a case of Pikachu using the word "resurrection" in an improper, popular sense to mean ANY reversal from death of any sort (a problem that plagues the book he recommends by Mettinger, by the way). It's how the neophytes of the pagan copycat crowd play their game -- in complete scholastic ignorance.

By the way: Jesus is different from Osiris. And Pikachu doesn't get it

Pikachu has a ready excuse for anything that goes wrong with his theories, and he is well to admit that he isn't smart enough to see how that reasoning works that differences work against a borrowing thesis.

His "logic" in this is (duh), well, when you apply the same reasoning to other ancient mystery religions, you get a silly answer....According to the believing scholars' difference-proves-no-borrowing rule, they didn't borrow from each other.

Well, sorry to bust Pikachu's little bubble, but overall, scholars -- "believing" or otherwise -- don't say that the mystery religions "borrowed" from each other, either. The rare exception is small -- David Ulansey for example regards Roman Mithraism as a completely innovative faith; the name of the Persian god Mithra was "borrowed," yes, but there were very good reasons for it (i.e., the appeal in Rome of Eastern religions; the founding of the cult helped by the king Mithradates). So I have no idea where the heck Pikachu gets the impression that scholars have been somehow inconsistent in this regard. Nor in fact do they say that the ancient mystery religions each came up with the idea of God all on their own. The idea of a god or gods was part of general mental "furniture" that comes from the world around us. There's no need to "borrow" that specific idea; this, and certain other aspects like eternal life, are just normal, logical outgrowths of human spirituality. However, there are even greater tests that need to be passed to prove borrowing -- see here for how the scholars really do their work -- it's far more stringent than Pikachu's, "duuuh, they used the same word" technique!

And what about Judaism? Oddly enough, one of Pikachu's almost non-existent references to Judaism crop up here, and he just recites a litany of, "Judaism is different from this in Christianity" -- obviously unaware that they are more the same than they are different. He says, The Christian three-headed God is different from Judaism's one-headed God, but sorry -- the foundation for the Trinity lies in Jewish thinking He says, Christian salvation is different from Jewish salvation. Not quite -- "salvation" in both cases meant salvation from personal sin. Christian baptism is different from Jewish baptism. The Christian Eucharist is different from Judaism's Eucharist -- does Judaism even have baptism and a Eucharist? What profound ignorance this shows! Pikachu has never even heard of Judaism's ritual cleansings and baths (like those at Qumran) and has never heard of their sacred meals (Passover seders, and meals at other festivals). And he wants us to believe what he says about "pagan" borrowing by Christianity?! (Contradictorily, he has elsewhere shown that he knows of ritual baths at Qumran!)

At any rate, Pikachu's charge of inconsistency is groundless, because this "differences prove no borrowing" rule is NOT applied the way he claims. He can't get the answer he wants, so he makes up one for his opponents!

Not different, but it developed separately.

Since as noted I have never seen this one actually used by scholars, and Pikachu gives no example, I'll skip this part. But here's some choice wisdom Pikachu quotes, but doesn't comment on. It says exactly what I said -- not what Pikachu thinks it does (he misses the "daily life" part).

"The use of identical and similar words, gestures, rites in the Christian and the Hellenistic cults does not imply derivation of one from the other...The [Pagan] mystagogue kisses the altar and the Christian priest does likewise; both set their right foot first across the threshold of the sanctuary; in both the mysteries and the early Christian ritual of baptism, the novice is given milk and honey; but these are not "influences" of the mysteries on Christianity; they are simply usages that the various cults drew quite independently from daily life." [Hugo Rahner, The Christian Mystery and the Pagan Mysteries, in The Mysteries; Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks]

Not different, but it developed first	This is actually valid in many cases -- Mithra, Attis, and yes, since he dates to the second century, possibly even Apuleius, though not necessarily. Pikachu's answer to this is to point to a couple of deities that no one disputes were before Jesus (Isis, Baal), which isn't an answer at all for those that didn't in terms of what we're talking about (Mithra, Attis).
Ignore it.	As I said, I have not seen this done either; Pikachu claims it is the most popular "defense" but the reality is that he's using paranoia to decide that scholars with other concerns are somehow avoiding the issue when they don't satisfy his little cravings for gossip and outdated, disproven theories.

Facts? What facts?

Pikachu adds one more "defense" and in this one, he embarrasses himself so broadly that if I were him, I'd go hide under a bed. He accuses scholars of simply denying facts; but in so doing -- in the example I am able to check (having worked on this one) he bungles uproariously. Here's indeed what Plutarch -- in the second century, mind you, not just "way back yonder" as Pikachu slyly puts it -- wrote about Adonis >>

"As a memorial of his [Adonis'] suffering [i.e. his death] each year, they beat their breasts, mourn and... sacrifice to Adonis as if to a dead person, but then, on the next day, they proclaim that he lives and send him into the air" [Plutarch, Isis and Osiris]

What is described here is probably apotheosis (certainly no indication it is Jewish resurrection), but fixated on the simplistic "dead then alive" equation, Pikachu has a grumble against someone.

He notes the scholar Mark Smith -- whom he denigrates as a "hot shot...NY University" (in fact, he has credentials and publication credits that would make Pikachu's poor head spin) as saying:

"the passage is hardly clear," and anyway other "rituals accentuate Adonis's death, there is no hint of rebirth." [Mark Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, 2001, page 116]

Frustrated by not being able to get an agreement from such a prestigious source, Pikachu grouses, Well, it's only not clear if you want it to be not clear. I do beg pardon. It is unclear, because it is in no sense clear in what way Adonis lives again. It probably is apotheosis, given the time and place; but it just isn't specified. What Pikachu doesn't grasp is that there was more than one way for a deity to be "reborn". Since the means is not specified, the passage is indeed "unclear" from our future perspective. And crying and stamping your feet, Pikachu, will not change that.

A moment with a moron

In an attempt to supplant Don Rickles, Pikachu ends up illustrating his gross ignorance. He offers a joke about a Phoenician phrase, bym qbr 'lm and cracks, does it occur to you, as it does to me, that maybe the Phoenicians died out because, with a language like that they all choked to death? What occurs to me is that Pikachu is a gross ignoramus. Phoenician script, like Hebrew script, didn't use vowels; they would be vocalized, but not written. I wonder if this mistake is behind something else Pikachu says....

And, Pikachu notes a "G Knoppers" as saying that an Etruscan inscription at Pyrgi [KAI 277] does not say "the day of the burial of the god" but the day of the burial of "a recently deceased person." Given Pikachu's ignorance to the right, I wonder if Knoppers was suggesting that the vowels to be inserted meant that the word should not be for "god". Probably worth looking into.

When it comes to Pikachu, scholarship is a foreign language. He's better off reading Alice in Wonderland; it's on his level.

By the way, he's NOT biased!

Pikachu notes once again that "a lot of the Unique Christ people are believing Christians," just in case you're not convinced by his objective brilliance.