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For centuries, various scholars and religious thinkers have analyzed and critiqued the Bible, demonstrating that much of it is ancient myth, not history. Adding to the biblical criticism is an article by Jesus Seminar member Robert Price called "Of Myth and Men." In this article, Price examines the "lives" of various godmen and prophets such as Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, and says, "History does repeat itself, but not nearly as much as myth does." His arguments correspond with many found in The Christ Conspiracy, which seeks to prove that Jesus Christ is as mythical a character as are Hercules, Jupiter, Zeus and Thor. While Price's unnecessarily derisive and meanspirited critique of The Christ Conspiracy is cited frequently on the net--Price himself having made a vicious, unprofessional and unethical personal attack on the author--his comments in this article regarding biblical mythology are noteworthy, in that, again, they substantially agree with essential points raised in The Christ Conspiracy and in the voluminous follow-up book Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled.
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Of the Buddha tale, Price states:
There is...a surprisingly meagre residue once one scrapes away the historically dubious. Even the notion of the young prince abandoning affluence begins to sound like one more piece of typical stage setting when we realize the same setup occurs in the hagiography of the Jaina saint Vardhamana (usually called Mahavira, "Great Hero"), who supposedly lived a single generation earlier than the Buddha. Granted, one man might have followed in the other's footsteps, but this is not the only parallel between Buddhist and Jainist hagiography. When Siddhartha sits beneath the Bodhi Tree, he is protected from Mara's assaults by the hood canopy of the mythical Naga King, a hydralike cobra deity. And so was the Jain hero Parsva, the predecessor of Mahavira. History does repeat itself, but not nearly as much as myth does. The Jainist religion, much like Buddhism in many ways, believed in the periodic advent of a Jina or Tirthankara... in every age, 24 in all, Mahavira being the last in this cosmic cycle. It is no wonder that the same adventures should be predicated of any or all the saviors, who were essentially repetitions of one another anyway. And the same is true for Buddhism itself, since even early Theravada Buddhism, while free of the more extravagant mythology of the later Mahayana Buddhism, made Siddhartha Gautama the twenty-fifth in a series of Buddhist avatars that had not yet run its course....
...For Pure Land Buddhism, by far the most popular family of Buddhist sects, Gautama ["the" Buddha] is hardly the most important. He yields that palm to Amitabha Buddha, whose salvific labors created the Pure Land where those who call on Amitabha's name in faith can be reborn unto certain salvation....
To the average Buddhist, none of the 25 Buddhas is any more or less historical than the others. And I wonder if they are right. I wonder if Western scholars have simply imported the model of "revealed religion" with a prophetic founder into a religion ill-suited to that schema. Hinduism lacks it, and no Western critic maintains that there was somewhere back in the past a "historical Krishna" or a "historical Rama." These two names are among several avatars, or incarnations, of the god Vishnu, and all recognize them as pure myth. An earlier generation of Western scholars of Buddhism, including R. Otto Franke, did relegate Gautama Buddha to the same bin and believed Gautama Buddha to be just a collective name for earlier generations of unnamed Buddhist teachers who, being vigorous opponents of the ego, would hardly have troubled themselves to be remembered as individuals. That must be true in large measure any way you cut it, since on anyone's reading virtually none of the teachings ascribed to him in Buddhist scripture, all of it written down only some centuries after the traditional date of the Buddha, can possibly be his....
No doubt under the then-pervasive influence of Max Müller, H. Kern thought the Buddha was, like Vishnu and Samson, probably also Hercules, a mythic embodiment of the sun. Müller's theory that all myths originated as solar symbols was too ambitious, but instead of correcting its excesses, typically, scholars pronounced its deathknell and went on to alternative theories, most of them equally overreaching. This pendulum swing perhaps accounts for the conventional neglect of the possibility that there never was a historical Buddha. I suspect that the scholarly assumption that somewhere beneath the legend there must lurk a real historical founder is a modern case of Euhemerism, the belief of ancient historians that all the mythic gods had first ben historical heroes, kings, warriors, physicians, etc. And besides, if one were to admit that the gospel-like legends of the Buddha may have gathered like debris around a historically empty black hole, why would it not be feasible to raise the same question about those great founder figures of the biblical tradition itself: Moses and Jesus?...
Price then continues with a dissection of the Moses myth, outlining the fantastic claims as found in the first five books of the Old Testament, or Pentateuch. Says he:
It is surprising that one does not hear more expressions of doubt as to the historical existence of Moses, the ostensible originator of the Hebrew law. I suspect this is because such suspicions would be heard as attacks upon the Torah itself... It is reflected in the ancient custom of the rabbis who used the name Moses as synecdoche for the Torah comments "Moses says... " Indeed, Moses is essentially a narrative embodiment of the Torah....
Etymological stories provide folk theories for the origins of certain place names, sometimes also sanitizing former heathenish meanings in the process.... The most important is the re-explanation of Moses' own name. Originally it is an Egyptian name, meaning "son of," as in Thutmose (son of Thoth) and Ramses (son of Ra), but later Jews wanted it to be Hebrew. The closest Hebrew word available was mashah, "to draw forth," so Moses had to have been named after an event in his infancy in which he was drawn out of something , and it had to be eventual enough to commemorate by naming him for it. Hence the story of baby Moses set adrift on the Nile and drawn forth from the bulrushes by Pharaoh's daughter. The "baby set adrift" motif is quite common, e.g., in the myths of Perseus, Romulus and Remus, Sargon, etc....
Who was Moses the lawgiver, originally? . . He was, I venture, another sun god. Max Müller being out of fashion doesn't make this any less likely. The basic Moses mytheme is that of the sun (god) which emerges from the tent of concealment, the night, and bestows commandments upon a king. The sun is also the source of both death (by sunstroke) and healing. Psalm 19, as Old Testament scholars uniformly admit, comes from Akhenaten's Hymn to the Sun. It speaks of the sun's glorious emergence from his tent, then extols the glory of the commandments, as if there were some connection between the two – which, of course, there was, since the sun was the origin of the law. We also see this atop the famous stone table of Hammurabi's Code which shows the emperor receiving the law from the hand of Shamash the sun god. Moses was originally the law-giving sun, as we can still glimpse in Exodus 34:29-35, where Moses emerges from the tent of a meeting with new commandments, and with his face shining, not coincidentally, like the sun! And like Apollo, he can inflict flaming doom or heal it (Numbers 21:4-9) and even bears the caduceus like Apollo. Like many other mythical sun-characters (still reflected in Elijah, Esau, Samson, and Enoch), and other gods, too (Gad, Miriam, Jubal, Joshua), Moses must have begun as a god pure and simple, but as Hebrew religion evolved toward monotheism, the stories could only be retained by making the gods into human heroes.
That Moses and these others are personifications of the sun is also demonstrated in The Christ Conspiracy, in which it is further contended that Joshua was the Egyptian god Horus as "Iusa." In addition, the biblical hero Joshua was a Canaanite baal who was later used as a "type" in the creation of Jesus. Although Price does not subsequently make the connection between the gospel Jesus and the ubiquitous sun god, he does demonstrate that the gospel story is a mishmash of mythological motifs mixed with historical episodes of a number of individuals. Regarding Jesus, he states:
A flood of books have sought to separate myth from history in the case of Jesus, resulting in by far the greatest number of attempts to uncover the historical biography of any of the great religious founder figures....
Amid this Jesus-din, one seldom catches the strains of the Christ-myth theory long championed by skeptics and freethinkers, namely that Jesus had no more historical basis than Osiris, that the Galilean rabbi and healer of the Gospels is the result of the early Christian imagination clothing an earlier mythic Jesus in the false garb of the first-century Jewish environment....
One must ask whether all the effort spent to translate the Gospels into various possible historical contexts does not instead highlight the raw mythic character of the story as is, without all the scholarly window-dressing. As folklorist Alan Dundes has shown, the Gospel life of Jesus corresponds in most particulars to the worldwide paradigm of the Mythic Hero as delineated by Lord Raglan, Otto Ranck, Joseph Campbell, and others. Drawn from comparative studies of Indo-Aryan and Semitic hero myths, the pattern is comprised of [sic] 22 recurrent features, by Raglan's reckoning.
(1) The hero's mother is a royal virgin, while (2) his father is a king, and (3) the father is related to the mother. (4) The hero's conception is unusual or miraculous; hence (5) he is reputed to be a son of a god. (6) Evil forces attempt to kill the infant or boy hero, but (7) he is spirited away to safety and (8) reared by foster parents in a foreign land. Besides this, (9) we learn no details of his childhood until (10) he journeys to his future kingdom, where (11) he triumphs over the reigning king and (12) marries a princess, often his predecessor's daughter, and (13) becomes king himself. (14) For a while he reigns uneventfully, (15) promulgating laws. But (16) he later loses favor with his subjects or with the gods and (17) is driven from the throne and the city and (18) meets with a mysterious death, (19) often atop a hill. (20) If he has children, they do not succeed him. (21) His body is not buried, yet (22) he has one or more holy sepulchers.
How well does this description fit Jesus? Better than O.J. Simpson's glove, though the reader will already have noticed a few respects in which the match is less than exact. This, though, would be true of every single hero story, since the Mythic Hero Archetype is an abstraction drawn from all known instances....
He has no offspring (contra modern hoaxes like that which inspired Baigent and Leigh's Holy Blood, Holy Grail)....
The political coloring of the last days of Jesus seems to have been borrowed from the stories, confused together, of various popular Jewish and other revolutionary kings from the period. Mark 13:21-22 warned against such confusion, but it was already too late, as Mark's own account shows. Still another likely source was the women's mourning rituals from contemporary Mystery Religions. Here is a list of parallels and probable sources. The anointing of Jesus at Bethany... comes from Isis anointing the corpse of her husband Osiris to resurrect him, part of the mummy-resurrection mythos of Egypt. Jesus' triumphal entry and ejection of the "robber" from the temple has been derived from the welcome, during the Roman siege, of Simon bar-Giora, a messianic king, and his troops to exterminate the Zealot "robbers" who occupied the temple. Jesus' interrogation and beating before Pilate and the Jewish elders mirror those of the mad prophet Jesus ben-Ananias who, like the Christian Jesus, was condemned for predicting the fall of the city/temple....
Price goes on to make interesting parallels between the various fictional events of the gospel tale and those found within histories such as Josephus. The triumphal entrance into the City of Peace is also found in Egyptian mythology concerning the sun god Horus's twin-cum-adversary, Set, the night sky, whence comes "Satan." Set's totem animal was the ass, which he rides into the City. As Gerald Massey says, "...the ass-headed god is portrayed as the bearer of the sun.... In the Greek shape of the mythos, Hephaistos ascends to the heavens, or to heaven, at the instigation of Dionysus, and is depicted as returning thither riding on an ass." Set was also the biblical Seth, son of Adam or Atum, and progenitor of the Hebrew people.
Price further delineates some of the mythical motifs found in the gospels:
As the Gospels have Mary Magdalene and her companions seek the body of Jesus only to find it gone, so do Isis, her sister Nephthys, and their maidens seek the slain Osiris, hoping to anoint him. The incognito appearance of the risen Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaus bears a striking resemblance to a much older and well-known story in which Asclepius appears unrecognized to a woman suppliant heading back home disappointed--only to gain the hoped-for miracle after all. Again, in Luke 24 and John 30 Jesus appears to his astonished disciples, who have given him up for dead, showing them his solid flesh for proof that he has not died to reappear as a ghost but has miraculously escaped Pilate's wrath--just as Apollonius of Tyana appears to his dumbfounded disciples, extending his hands to convince them he has escaped Domitian's evil intentions. After Apollonius's final ascension, one of his disciples remains stubbornly unconvinced until Apollonius appears in a special epiphany just for him--precisely as Jesus does for doubting Thomas in John 20:24-29....
Is it, after all this, possible that beneath and behind the stained-glass curtain of Christian legend stands the dim figure of a historical founder of Christianity? Yes, it is possible, perhaps just a tad more likely than that there was a historical Moses.... But it becomes almost arbitrary to think so. For after one removes everything that is more readily accounted for as simple hero-mythology or borrowing from other contemporary sources, what is left?
With the increasing sophistication of biblical criticism have come the daring few who have applied the new standards to the religion of Islam and its purported founder. Although Price does not go so far as others who have suggested (with good reason) that Mohammed/Muhammad is likewise not a historical figure, he does demonstrate that, like the Bible, the Koran is a conglomeration of texts written over a period of decades or centuries, some prior to the founding of Islam and the era of Mohammed. He notes:
For a long time scholars have considered Islamic origins as basically unproblematic. It seemed fairly straightforward: the founder was a figure of relatively recent history, amply documented, and many of his own writings and sayings survived. True, there had been a frenzy of fabrication, but early Muslim scholars themselves had seen this early on and moved to weed out spurious hadith (traditions of the founder's sayings and deeds). What was left seemed ample enough, as did the text of the Koran, the revelation of Allah to Muhammad. Even if one could not confess with Muslims a belief in the divine inspiration (actually, dictation) of the Koran, one still agreed the text preserved the preachments of Muhammad. The most recent generation of students of Islam, however, have broken with this consensus. Gunter Luling is joined by many in his opinion that Western scholars of Islam and the Koran had simply accepted the official party line of Muslim jurists and theologians regarding the sources for Muhammad and early Islamic history.... In fact, Western Islamicists had done everything but accept the Koran as the revealed Word of God. In retrospect one wonders why they balked at this last step!...
The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own....
[T]his means that all we thought we knew of the Prophet Muhammad is really a mass of fictive legal precedents meant to anchor this or that Islamic practice once Muhammad had been recast as an Arab Moses. And the question of the origin of the Koran is no longer "from Allah?" or "from Muhammad?" but rather "from Muhammad?" or "from countless unnamed Hagarene jurists?"... And it becomes equally evident that the line between the Koran and the hadith must be erased, for both alike are now seen to be repositories of sayings fictively attributed to the Prophet and transmitted by word of mouth before being codified in canonical written form.
Indeed, rather than being a long dictation from God to an essentially illiterate man, it appears quite clear that the Koran was constructed in the same manner as the Bible, using texts already in existence that were redacted and combined with newer texts written to sew the whole thing together.
In the end, the various religions of the world must rely on miracles and myths in order to "prove" that there is an omnipotent "God" somewhere "out there." Without the miracles and myths, there is no God, at least not one who is very interesting or supernatural. And without a God, there can be no priesthood. Without a God and a priesthood, numerous people would be without an occupation, and countless treasures would have been stolen or destroyed for naught. As Pope Leo X is alleged to have said, "What profit has not that fable of Christ brought us."
© 2006 Acharya S
© 2006 Acharya S