Judaism +Paganism = Christianity?

[Elijah John]

Judaic elements of Christianity:

-Veneration of the God of Abraham, YHVH as the Father.
-A Jewish founder, namely Jesus.
-The ethical monotheism of Judaism as taught by the founder in the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
-A very Jewish prayer, the Lord's prayer.

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

For debate, which parts of this analysis do you accept or disparage, and why? Where would you add or detract?

And was it entirely necessary to incorporate elements of Greco-Roman Paganism into Messianic Judaism in order to promote a more universal version of ethical Monotheism?

[Mithrae]

Thanks for the clarification, DI. But to blame YHVH for the human sacrifice of Jesus is unfair. Nowhere in the Hebrew Bible does YHVH sanction human sacrifice. That is Paul's baby, Paul's interpretation of the martyrdom of Jesus, and Paul's theology which somehow has been given the status of sacred Christian scripture.

- Actually in one story YHVH commands sacrifice of a son and only later offers a substitute (ie, Abraham and Isaac);
- if memory serves there is no condemnation attached the sacrifice, by God's appointed judge Jephthah, of the daughter who God caused to suffer his promise (if anything the stated commemoration of merely mourning her fate tacitly rejects condemnation of the act itself);
- and obviously Isaiah 53 (Jewish translation) suggests that
"[v4] Indeed, he bore our illnesses, and our pains-he carried them, yet we accounted him as plagued, smitten by God and oppressed. But he was pained because of our transgressions, crushed because of our iniquities; the chastisement of our welfare was upon him, and with his wound we were healed. . . .
[v10] And the Lord wished to crush him, He made him ill; if his soul makes itself restitution, he shall see children, he shall prolong his days, and God's purpose shall prosper in his hand. From the toil of his soul he would see, he would be satisfied; with his knowledge My servant would vindicate the just for many, and their iniquities he would bear."

That said, from a quick search the terms Jesus and blood do not seem to appear together anywhere in the genuine Pauline corpus (ie, only in Ephesians), and while atonement occurs once in Romans 3:25 it's followed in subsequent chapters by several other examples of distinct explanatory imagery (eg. fulfillment of the promise to Abraham (ch4), Jesus as the 'second Adam' (ch5) and baptism/Jesus' burial as an entry into new life (ch6)). From my recollections of Romans, Galatians, 1 Cor. 15 and Phil. 2 I don't particularly get the impression of a clear and distinct substitutionary atonement theology from Paul, but rather general and somewhat vague efforts to understand how Christ's death and resurrection relate to the new covenant for believers.

But these are just generalized recollections and two brief word searches. Am I missing anywhere besides Romans 3:25 where Paul distinctly suggests a 'human sacrifice' understanding of Jesus' death?

[Elijah John]

[Replying to post 21 by Mithrae]

The testing of Abraham's faith in that horrid story is not for the purpose to atone for sin. Some dispute that it was God who actually commanded that event, and instead it was Abraham's own idea of what God wanted. (Jewish authors and a Catholic priest I recall.) The larger purpose of the story was to illustrate that YHVH does not want, nor does He need human blood sacrifice.

I am not familiar with that other reference you make.

As for Paul and his theology of human sacrifice, it only follows. Paul may not have called it that, but consider: Jesus is human, his death (as interpreted by Paul) was a sacrifice for sin, ie human sacrifice. In Paul's mind, God sanctioned human sacrifice in this special case.

[alwayson]

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

The blood sacrifice stuff is straight out of the Old Testament.

God commanded Abraham to kill his son.

The Yom Kippur rituals, when the temple existed, involved sacrificing goats to eliminate sin.

Daniel 9 describes a messiah dying before the end of the world.

Isaiah 52-53 describes the cleansing of the world's sins by the death of a servant.

The LXX version of Zechariah describes Jesus as rising.

[Elijah John]

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

The blood sacrifice stuff is straight out of the Old Testament.

God commanded Abraham to kill his son.

The Yom Kippur rituals, when the temple existed, involved sacrificing goats to eliminate sin.

Daniel 9 describes a messiah dying before the end of the world.

Isaiah 52-53 describes the cleansing of the world's sins by the death of a servant.

The LXX version of Zechariah describes Jesus as rising.

Please re-read the last line of my OP portion that you quoted. Notice I said human blood sacrifice for atonement.

And "God's" command to sacrifice Isaac was only to test his faith, not to atone for sin. And the story illustrates that YHVH does not want nor does He need human blood sacrifice.

[Clownboat]

[Replying to post 14 by dio9]

Point being that paganism is simply whatever isn't the religion one supports.

Sacrificing animals to a GOD can be said to be 'paganism' unless of course the religion practicing such, says otherwise.

Counterpoint being; we can make a better understanding of God together with the understandings of other religions. There is no one completely true religion. All are painted with cultural conditioning. Each religion needs to transcend its cultural conditioning, because God does not exist in the mind of Man , Man exists in the mind of God.

I'm curious. What evidence do you have to show that the bold above has any credibility?

Also, if back in the day all cultures on earth had a claim for what made up the composition of the sun, are you suggesting that muddling all the differing opinions together would actually get us closer to accuracy, or is this special pleading and only works for the gods?

[Clownboat]

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

The blood sacrifice stuff is straight out of the Old Testament.

God commanded Abraham to kill his son.

The Yom Kippur rituals, when the temple existed, involved sacrificing goats to eliminate sin.

Daniel 9 describes a messiah dying before the end of the world.

Isaiah 52-53 describes the cleansing of the world's sins by the death of a servant.

The LXX version of Zechariah describes Jesus as rising.

Please re-read the last line of my OP portion that you quoted. Notice I said human blood sacrifice for atonement.

And "God's" command to sacrifice Isaac was only to test his faith, not to atone for sin. And the story illustrates that YHVH does not want nor does He need human blood sacrifice.

I question the bold.
Leviticus 17:11King James Version (KJV)

11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

Thoughts?

[Elijah John]

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

The blood sacrifice stuff is straight out of the Old Testament.

God commanded Abraham to kill his son.

The Yom Kippur rituals, when the temple existed, involved sacrificing goats to eliminate sin.

Daniel 9 describes a messiah dying before the end of the world.

Isaiah 52-53 describes the cleansing of the world's sins by the death of a servant.

The LXX version of Zechariah describes Jesus as rising.

Please re-read the last line of my OP portion that you quoted. Notice I said human blood sacrifice for atonement.

And "God's" command to sacrifice Isaac was only to test his faith, not to atone for sin. And the story illustrates that YHVH does not want nor does He need human blood sacrifice.

I question the bold.
Leviticus 17:11King James Version (KJV)

11 For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

Thoughts?

I am not arguing here, (on this particular thread) that God never wanted blood sacrifice of any kind, (though I do not believe He ever did) but only that there is no evidence that He wanted human sacrifice. Nothing from the Hebrew Bible anyway. And Jesus was a human, so if his death is an "atonement" that amounts to human sacrifice.

[dio9]

[Replying to post 14 by dio9]

Point being that paganism is simply whatever isn't the religion one supports.

Sacrificing animals to a GOD can be said to be 'paganism' unless of course the religion practicing such, says otherwise.

Counterpoint being; we can make a better understanding of God together with the understandings of other religions. There is no one completely true religion. All are painted with cultural conditioning. Each religion needs to transcend its cultural conditioning, because God does not exist in the mind of Man , Man exists in the mind of God.

I'm curious. What evidence do you have to show that the bold above has any credibility?

Also, if back in the day all cultures on earth had a claim for what made up the composition of the sun, are you suggesting that muddling all the differing opinions together would actually get us closer to accuracy, or is this special pleading and only works for the gods?

evidence ? credibility are you kidding? you want me to prove goldfish swim in the ocean without knowing it. About muddling, we are doing the best we can. Have you heard the tale of the blind men and the elephant? there is only one elephant.

[Mithrae]

[Replying to post 21 by Mithrae]

The testing of Abraham's faith in that horrid story is not for the purpose to atone for sin. Some dispute that it was God who actually commanded that event, and instead it was Abraham's own idea of what God wanted. (Jewish authors and a Catholic priest I recall.) The larger purpose of the story was to illustrate that YHVH does not want, nor does He need human blood sacrifice.

I am not familiar with that other reference you make.

As for Paul and his theology of human sacrifice, it only follows. Paul may not have called it that, but consider: Jesus is human, his death (as interpreted by Paul) was a sacrifice for sin, ie human sacrifice. In Paul's mind, God sanctioned human sacrifice in this special case.

Jephthah's sacrifice of his only begotten daughter can be found in Judges 11:30ff. He promised to sacrifice whatever he first saw coming out of his home when he returned. God presumably could have ensured that it was a sheep or something - just as he provided a substitute for the sacrifice of Isaac which he'd commanded - but in Jephthah's case the human sacrifice was actually carried out, and there is not a word of condemnation in the story.

Where else does Paul say that Jesus' death was a sacrifice for sin? I can find only two verses, both in Romans (3:25 and 8:3) from the following word searches through his letters (excluding the pastorals and Ephesians):
Jesus blood
Christ blood
Atonement
Sacrifice
Offering

Only two times to the Romans, out of all his letters. Well fair enough, but he even more frequently describes himself and other believers as sacrifices and offerings (Rom. 12:1, Rom. 15:6, Phil. 2:17, Phil. 4:18), and in the case of Jesus he tries to make an association with Passover and Firstfruits (1 Cor. 5:17, 1 Cor. 15:20) as well as Yom Kippur. He also uses numerous other examples of explanatory imagery as I've noted; Jesus as fulfilment of the promise to Abraham (Rom. 4 and Galatians 3-4), Jesus as the second Adam (Rom. 5 and 1 Cor. 15), baptism/'buried with Christ' as a passage into new life (Rom. 6) and so on.

It looks like A) Paul was trying to find significance in Jesus' death in a variety of different ways and B) he often wrote in terms of symbolism and metaphor, including in relation to sacrifice. So emphasizing those two verses above all else doesn't seem to be warranted.

The sacrifice/substitutionary atonement theology became one of the more common Christian doctrines, but I'm not sure it's fair to say that it was "Paul's baby": That doctrine certainly can be extracted from a couple of verses in Paul's letters, but it's also entirely possible to extract it from Isaiah 53 and the story of Abraham and Isaac. So it's as much the "Tanakh's baby" as it is Paul's. Which is to say, arguably not much at all.


Edit: I've posted this in your other thread too, as it might be more appropriate there

[Tired of the Nonsense]

Judaic elements of Christianity:

-Veneration of the God of Abraham, YHVH as the Father.
-A Jewish founder, namely Jesus.
-The ethical monotheism of Judaism as taught by the founder in the Golden Rule and the Sermon on the Mount.
-A very Jewish prayer, the Lord's prayer.

Elements of Paganism

-The idea of an Incarnate God
- The dying and rising God.
-The Virgin Birth story
- Atonement by the blood of human sacrifice.

For debate, which parts of this analysis do you accept or disparage, and why? Where would you add or detract?

And was it entirely necessary to incorporate elements of Greco-Roman Paganism into Messianic Judaism in order to promote a more universal version of ethical Monotheism?

Historian Will Durant commented on this very subject.

"Christianity did not destroy paganism; it adopted it. The Greek mind, dying, came to a transmigrated life in the theology and liturgy of the church; the Greek language having reigned for centuries over philosophy, became the vehicle of Christian literature and ritual;the Greek mysteries passed down into the impressive mystery of the mass. Other pagan cultures contributed to the syncretist result. From Egypt came the ideas of a divine trinity, the last judgement and a personal immortality of reward and punishment; from Egypt the adoration of the mother and child, and the mystic philosophy that made Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, and obscured the Christian creed; there too, Christian monasticism would find it's exemplars and it's source. From Phrygia came the worship of the Great Mother; from Syria the Resurrection drama of Adonis; from Thrace, perhaps, the cult of Dionysus, the dying and saving god. From Persia came millenarianism, the Darkness and the Light; already in the Fourth Gospel Christ is the `Light shining in the darkness and the darkness has never put it out.' The Mithraic ritual so closely resembled the eucharistic sacrifice of the Mass that Christian fathers charged the Devil with inventing these similarities to mislead frail minds. Christianity was the last great creation of the pagan world." (The Story of Civilization vol.3, "Caesar and Christ" by Will Durant, p.595).

Author John Mackinnon Robertson (1856 – 1933) wrote: "Like Christ,and like Adonis and Attis, Osiris and Dionysus also suffer and die to rise again. To become one with them is the mystical passion of their worshippers. They are all alike in that their mysteries give them immortality. From Mithraism Christ takes the symbolic keys of heaven and hell and assumes the function of the virgin-born Saoshaynt, the destroyer of the evil one. Like Mithra, Merodach,the Egyptian Khousu, he is a mediator; like Khousu, Horus and Merodach he is one of a trinity, like Horus he is joined with the Logos; and like Merodach he is associated with a holy spirit, one of whose symbol is fire. In fundamentals, Christianity is but paganism reshaped."(Pagan Christs, Robertson pp.52-53)

Wikipedia
Paganism
Paganism is a term first used in the fourth century by early Christianity for populations of the Roman Empire who practiced polytheism, either because they were increasingly rural and provincial relative to the Christian population or because they were not milites Christi (soldiers of Christ). Alternate terms in Christian texts for the same group were "hellene" and "gentile".

"Pagan" and "paganism" were pejorative terms for the same polytheistic group, implying its inferiority. "Paganism" has broadly connoted the "religion of the peasantry", and for much of its history was a derogatory term. Both during and after the Middle Ages, "paganism" was a pejorative term that was applied to any non-Abrahamic or unfamiliar religion, and the term presumed a belief in false god(s).

While most pagan religions express a worldview that is pantheistic, polytheistic or animistic, there are some monotheistic pagans.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paganism

Ultimately, a pagan is anyone who believes in some other religion. So in application, it's rather a matter one's point of view.