Jagd wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 11:36 am
mlinssen wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 7:12 pm
I'm looking for initiation rites though, such as we find in Acts - yet none of them in the gospels. Where is the bond? Where is the buying in, where is the declaration. Where is the signed contract, where is the hazing, the celebrating of having become Chr?stian
There's none of it, the gospels are just a distant story about some dude who did some stuff. Somewhere.
Why would people know only the gospel narratives? There's nothing in it for them - but that's off-topic perhaps, the OP doesn't inquire about all that. And I know from experience that all you need to do to become a Christian is having Christian parents, as those will simply compel you into doing that
I think the baptisms in the gospels give a hint that they were
massively important to becoming a Christian as an initiation ritual. The eucharist is probably extremely old too (its absence in John could be because one of the authors of that Gospel was getting so carried away with the farewell discourse that he just forgot it, or it was snipped out during all the crazy edits that have happened to that text). Celsus mentions Christ creating great banquets out of nowhere, there's the wedding at Cana, the multiple stories of feeding the multitudes, the lord's supper, the blood and wine bleeding out of Christ, and the vine and bread discourses in John. These hint toward the typical agricultural/fertility focus of mystery religions, with the baptismal initiation and ritualistic eating/drinking being no different from other ancient mystery religions. The significance between this and the Isis mysteries are no joke, and following your discovery of male-female pairs of names, I wouldn't be surprised if Christ's forename was meant to be a masculine version of Isis (although I know you point to a different Egyptian god/name).
So I think that was mostly what these earliest Christians were up to, and much of the gospels' narratives focus on these practices in one way or another (everything otherwise are miracles, teachings, and everything to do with the passion/resurrection, which itself is based on the dying-and-rising motif common in mystery religions, reframed later on to parallel the Yom Kippur sacrifice)
mlinssen wrote: ↑Sat Feb 19, 2022 7:12 pm
By the way, it would seem there weren't even gospel narratives before the 3rd CE. I'm reading Christi Thora at the moment and have a hunch of what Vinzent is going to write next - this is going to be a very exciting decade
Extremely excited to hear more about this. The more I read into the texts, the later in history they appear to emerge,
especially in final form. Many scholars seem to discount how much these texts must have changed over time, believing that they emerged in full-form at their convenient ranges of dates, like Athena emerging as an adult out from Zeus.
I'd agree to most of that Jagd, yet I'm missing all that in the 4 gospels - John the Baptist is a mere nuisance in Mark, gets 6 verses and then is exited so the Elijah in him can fulfil his utterly silent role in the transfiguration.
Yes, the world was full of Isis and that cult lasted many centuries.
I'm just second guessing with Iusaas, he/she is the helping hand in Atum's creation myth and there is similarity between the name and IS - but I'm not even convinced myself.
We mustn't forget that there are two sides to the coin: whatever Thomas had in mind, and what the people made out of it - look at Thomas and the NT and I won't have to say anything more.
Yes, everything in life then was about food, feeding, harvest. Every god must have purpose, it must be useful, and the Jesus of the canonicals is entirely useless to everyday life, he has no benefit to any of it. Strip him of his eschatology and his Christology and an utterly uneventful person remains.
Yet the feeding, yes. The magic that is demonstrated, the walking on water and calming of the storm that demonstrates control over the elements: a true god is depicted there, a useful god, a god of nature, growth, harvest - but still I miss the initiation rites whereas Philip just doesn't stop ging on about baptism, precisely as initiation rite.
The feeble attempts by Matthew (who copied his ramblings into Luke as well) to turn John B into a lecturer like the prophets of the Tanakh are embarrassing, yet we see in Acts that they finally try to elaborate on baptism, as contradictory results as that renders. The reluctance of John the gospel writer to baptise Jesus is absolutely justified and he elevates John B to make clear who of the two in fact is Elijah: Jesus. Unsure that would go along with a warm fuzzy role for John B as a ritual initiator - or perhaps that got struck, I'd have to read Audlin some more
Yeah, it seems that the stories got fixated with the Canon, and 4th/5th CE is the earliest date for that. I'm slowly advancing through Vinzent, but the next topic will be about *Ev, and how Thomas connects to that - or rather, vice versa.
Let me put it this way: Marcion and Thomas agree against Luke on quite a few occasions, in the exact same way where the Synoptics display major agreement yet minor disagreements