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Welcome to Fantasy Island |
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All we have here is a rehash rehash of stuff Pikachu has said before: Christianity "copied" pagan ideas not so much direct (though that is what his "there were baptisms all over" sorts of comments inescapably imply) but because the ideas were in "the heads" of the Biblical writers. We've already noted the problem with this scenario, and that is that most of this "in the head" stuff Pikachu refers to is more like, "the way it had to be". In other words, it's not like we expect Jesus to have said, "Darn, I can't heal this blind man; Asclepius already did one like that." Or: "Drat, we know water is a great metaphor for cleansing, but we can't use that in our initiation rite because the followers of Bacchus already do." I mean, let's really not be silly here. The other problem is that Pikachu plays generalizing games with terminology, so that characters as varied as Osiris, Dionysus, Pythagoras, Apollonius, Mithras, Attis, Adonis all get collpased down into a vague category of "godmen". |
The only spot that needs comment is one of Pikachu's few attempts to deal with the big problem for his thesis: namely, that Christian ideas find far better antecedents in Judaism. To this all he has to say is, "may I beg that question, please?" His answer is that the ideas still came from paganism, and were laid on to a Jewish model of Messiah.
But whoops -- he shows his ignorance when he says everyone understood the messiah would be a human-person and the idea of a godman messiah, that was a Christian invention, a mixing of Judaism and Hellenism. There were actually a wide variety of expectations (see here), but please note these words of the Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner: "These earlier systems resorted to the myth of the Messiah as savior and redeemer of Israel, a supernatural figure engaged in political-historical tasks as king of the Jews, even a God-man facing the crucial historical questions of Israel's life and resolving them: the Christ as king of the world, of the ages, of death itself."
Oops. So it seems there was no need to "graft Hellenistic
Pagan ideas to their Jewish roots" -- the Jewish roots were already there, allowing Jesus to be a Jewish godman with no paganism at all; for most Jews didn't think that was silly. (What they thought was "silly" was that this god-man would humble and disgrace himself on a cross...but that's another issue.)
And that, boys and girls, is exactly why Pikachu deserves your academic contempt.
