Jayson wrote:If you take Antigonus and rewrite Zoroaster's biographical legend into a Hebrew setting, then you consequently would have something remarkably close to Matthew.
There are references to Zoroaster in early Christian literature
eg.
the Clementine Homilies 9.4–5
1st century Pliny the Elder names Zoroaster as the inventor of magic (Natural History 30.2.3).
a Pliny (the Elder or the Younger?) refers to many works of Zoroaster, suggesting a formidable pseudepigraphic corpus once existed at the Library of Alexandria
a complete Coptic tractate titled Zostrianos discovered in the Nag Hammadi library in 1945. A three-line cryptogram in the colophones following the 131-page treatise identify the work as "words of truth of Zostrianos. God of Truth [logos]. Words of Zoroaster".
It's interesting that Zoroaster is credited with the initial concept of monotheism, b/c there is increasing thought & discussion that a lot of Jewish theology was written when a large Jewish group was exiled in Babylon around the the same time Zoroaster can to prominence, relatively nearby.
MrMacSon wrote:It's interesting that Zoroaster is credited with the initial concept of monotheism, b/c there is increasing thought & discussion that a lot of Jewish theology was written when a large Jewish group was exiled in Babylon around the the same time Zoroaster can to prominence, relatively nearby.
Yes, it seems Judaic theology was more fluid than has previously been asserted, with the Ketuvim being finalised/canonized in the 2nd C AD/CE1.
1 Coogan, Michael D. A Brief Introduction to the Old Testament - the Hebrew Bible in its Context. Oxford University Press. 2009; p. 5.
add: there is evidence that the Ketuvim was starting to take shape as early as 132 BCE -
Henshaw, T. The Writings: The third division of the Old Testament canon. George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1963, pp. 16–17
Oh absolutely!
In fact, one of my favorite things about the Hebrew peoples is that, to my knowledge, they are literally the only surviving and so vividly known culture from which we can make observations of what it looked like for peoples to transition from a collective into a State as well as provide a glimpse of the struggles involved in creating a distinct cultural identity and maintaining that over time.
Everything from their writing to their theology, even their politics, are witnesses to us today of an amazing and outstanding course of infusion and creation. We have more ability to watch this peoples be created, grow and effectively be demolished as a separate State than we do any other from the Bronze & Iron ages.
It's from the Roman historians. They described Caesar's funeral and mentioned a tropaeum with wax effigy. Some sources are mentioned on section C of this blog post, for example:
It's true there's a Shakespeare play, but I don't know if the tropaeum with wax effigy is mentioned there.
It's also mentioned on the page you linked to:
When the crowd were in this state, and near to violence, someone raised above the bier a wax effigy of Caesar - the body itself, lying on its back on the bier, not being visible. The effigy was turned in every direction, by a mechanical device, and twenty-three wounds could be seen, savagely inflicted on every part of the body and on the face.
... He then stood close to the bier as though he were on stage, bending over it and straightening up again, and first of all chanted praise to Caesar as a heavenly deity, raising his hands in witness of Caesar's divine birth and at the same tune rapidly reciting his campaigns and battles and victories ..
[and]
... Somewhere in the lament Caesar himself was supposed to mention by name those of his enemies he had helped, and referring to his murderers said as if in wonder, "To think that I actually saved the lives of these men who were to kill me"
You seek stories, but you should be looking at emplotment.
Jesus' story is a tragedy of sorts, that is, the hero was thwarted in his aim to be the Messianic king by his tragic flaw of being divine.
Then again, it is also a comedy, in which the hero's aims are thwarted by misfortune ("the chief priests and the people just don't understand me") but in the midst of the chaos good comes of it, and he ends up saving all mankind.
