neilgodfrey wrote:From James Constantine Hanges,
Paul, Founder of Churches, p. 455
We saw that with respect to method, the vigorous push-back against the search for continuities practiced by the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule at the end of the last century redefined the comparative enterprise by using comparison specifically to identify differences that could be deployed to protect the essential the uniqueness of Christianity. [Kummel, New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems, 206-25]
. . . . . . . .
But what we can now see, especially with the aid of contemporary culture studies, is that despite the methodological "red-herring" known as, "parallelomania," thrown into the arena by apologists, the fundamental theoretical proposition of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule was, despite certain missteps, true to its target - religions cannot be isolated from the historical, social, and environmental forces that shape all cultural forms; religions, including Christianity, belong to and are always shaped by history.
Noting here that “last century” refers to the nineteenth century, this is an immensely valuable critique of the false argument from Richard Carrier that anything valuable from the nineteenth century in study of religion will have been incorporated in more recent work. Much good older work has been swept under the carpet and forgotten by dismissive arguments which often have unconscious apologetic or careerist assumptions.
Against the Carrier line, we can explore examples such as the Pan-Babylonian school as presenting a valuable analysis of the cosmic dimension in mythology, with parallels analysed comparatively, such as between the flood stories. The shallow critique of such work by influential scholars such as Neugebauer was enough to create an apologetic straw man to defend Christian historicism against rational critique. As well, the excessive speculation within theosophy made it easy for apologists to hint that all analysis of parallels is akin to witchcraft, tarring comparative religious analysis with the brush of magical hermetic thinking. This dogmatic stratagem of rejection by bluster had powerful roots in the relatively recent phenomena of the witch-craze and the Inquisition, and led to broad ignorance of how hermetic thinking is in fact at the root of scientific method.
Perhaps one of the greatest analysts of comparative religion in the nineteenth century was Gerald Massey. His application of the method proposed by Hanges in this insightful quote from Neil Godfrey, exploring how “religions cannot be isolated from the historical, social, and environmental forces that shape all cultural forms”, led Massey to a comprehensive and largely compelling analysis of how Christian myth evolved from Egyptian myth.
For example, the close parallel Massey described between the trope Osiris-Horus-Isis-Nephthys and the trope Lazarus-Jesus-Mary-Martha is one of many that are at the basis of Tom Harpur’s analysis in
The Pagan Christ, AB Kuhn’s
Who Is This King of Glory?, and the works of Acharya S. This whole valuable comparative area of study languishes in obscurity because of the corrupt power of the church, which trades on mythical assumptions imbibed in Sunday School and internalised across the vestiges of Christendom, including with unconscious influence on pervasive academic beliefs.
If you think about it from first principles, the influence of the large ancient adjacent cultures on Jewish and Christian ideology must have been massive. Civilisations from Egypt, Babylon and India provided major evolutionary memetic precedents, providing many of the cultural forms that were adapted for Biblical purposes. The blanket denial of these influences was part of the heresiology of Christendom, which presents a deep cultural pathology. Identifying and articulating the nature of religious pathology is a key ethical objective arising from the observation that Jesus Christ is a fictional character in a political myth. A psychological diagnosis is needed of the roots of cultural pathology in denial of parallels, in order to provide any healing prognosis.
The simple obvious scientific principle of the expectation of cultural parallels between adjacent long standing societies is rejected out of hand by those who use the racist assumption of classical modern imperialism, described by Bernal in his great book
Black Athena. This false widespread racist assumption is that ancient Judeo-Greek culture can in fact be isolated from the historical, social and environmental forces that shaped it. This false belief in an isolated privileged western set of traditions is sustained by dogmatic apologetic insistence on textual authority and inerrancy.
Inerrantism is not a legitimate intellectual method, but rather in fact is a deeply racist and alienated ideology, based on an unprincipled isolation of selected traditions from their context to serve political motives of asserting cultural superiority. Inerrantism, privileging tradition above evidence, deserves to be exposed and rejected from all rational discourse as an irrational and misguided influence on scholarship.