John Dehlin recently posted on his Facebook page regarding the (lack of) historicity of the Lamanites. We all know that Joseph Smith and his associates concocted the Book of Mormon, which has sometimes been referred to as, "Bible fan fiction." That led me to wonder, how much of the Bible is fact vs. fiction? What were good faith (if imperfect or exaggerated) efforts to retell something that really happened, based on oral history, vs. myths and other things that were entirely made up? What do you think? You can divide by the Old and New Testaments if you wish.

I realize that thousands of years ago in ancient Israel, there was not the clean divide between fact and fiction that we have nowadays.

Something else that got me to thinking about this is recent research into the Mesha Stele, or Moabite Stone. The writing on the stone recounts a Moabite war against Israel, that roughly corresponds with 2 Kings, Chapter 3. It has references to King David.

https://www.jpost.com/archaeology/article-728354

One author who is an expert on New Testament documents (most of them are fragments, apparently) is Bart D. Ehrman. Check out his books. He wanted to study the original documents of the Bible and was a devout Bible-believing Christian. His books ask the questions that need to be asked.

There are also authors who have participated in archaeological digs such as Israel Finkelstein of Tel Aviv University. He and historian Neil Asher Silberman wrote a book titled "The Bible Unearthed." It's a really good book.

There are some YouTube videos featuring these authors. There's also a good NOVA episode titled "The Bible's Buried Secrets." It was 2 hours long. You can find it on YouTube.

And there’s a BBC 3-part series of the same name. There is evidence for the existence of “The House of David” so it is likely David was a real person, although most of the stories about him are likely myths.

From the BBC “The Bible's Buried Secrets” - Ep. 1 Did King David's empire exist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhiABi6vw3A&list=PLqPo8zthbw0_0Jo7PrdQwIOkR1hdVN9Aq

Thanks for your recommendations. Bart D. Ehrman is on my literary bucket list.

Aside from some place names, what parts are factual ?

Well, that's what I'm curious about, Dave. For instance, in my post above I mention Moabite records that seem to match up with 2 Kings Chapter 3. King David appears to have been real. I would like to know what else is either real or stories based on things that really happened.

"King" David was more of a chieftain than a king. How far removed from the story can the truth be before it is something else?

I guess if the Hebrew Bible were a film it might bare the subtitle "inspired by actual events" in the latter portions.

Most of the Torah is pure fiction. As well as the conquest and Judges period.

The book The Bible Unearthed is excellent. I read it years ago and it is on my bookshelf. David, per the book and current archeology, was apparently a real person. Stories about David were written by a George Santos analog.

Eric K Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Stories about David
> were written by a George Santos analog.

Haha, Eric. I love this sentence. I'm likely going to steal it.

I would say the bible is 100% false. Think about it. Do you really believe that Noah found 2 animals of every kind and put them in a small wooden boat he constructed? Millions of different species all in one small boat?

Did Jesus really turn a well of water into wine, or did he feed thousands with a couple of fish?

I suppose it is easy to believe in magic if lots of people believe it.

I don't. I just can't anymore. I used to, now I don't.

Wikipedia has pretty good reference on this; just prepare to go down the rabbit hole when follow the refence links.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible

As LDSDiscussions and "Mormon Stories" points out, the chapters/verses that Joseph Smith copied from the bible from Isaiah weren't even thought of or written down until well after Lehi, Mulek left Jerusalem; (Only the first 1/3 of Isaiah would of even existed).

Or the book of Abraham which is based on the Old Testament creation (the Pentateuch/Torah) wasn't found/written down until 250 BCE. And their stories/history was taken from the Sumerians (Gilgamesh, Eden, etc...) https://www.timelessmyths.com/religion/sumerian-tablets-vs-bible/

The new testament is ridiculous just in the first four gospels. Check out what is supposed to be the lineage of Jesus/Joseph/Mary or why is there no history of Rome calling for taxes/census in Judea during what was supposed to be Jesus' birth date/time?

We all could go on and on about the BOM Horses, Steel, etc... but we also need to look at what was left out, Turkeys, potatoes, tomatoes, cocoa beans, none of these things were known/eaten in the "old world". It took almost a hundred years for Europeans to attempt to eat tomatoes because they were thought poisonous because of how the acid destroyed pewter and were only used decorative.

Link to a talk by Bart Ehrman on the topic of contradictions in the New Testament gospels:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AymnA526j9U&t=3076s

Some places and people may be factual, may have existed. I would suspect they represent a small percentage of the book, while the the fantastic fables, lore, and stories represent the larger percentage and give the book it's heft, are clearly as believable as Marvel or DC movies. In a thousand years will they too be someone's canon?

All this lore was a great vehicle for Cecile B. DeMille. Fun.
But as application for our lives? Useless and obviously not factual unless you are a Daybell needing to sacrifice your children and use Isaac to boost your momentum.

We know for sure Lot's Wife did not turn to salt as she is still with us today. Just another fun Israelite story since they didn't have TV.

I really don't care which buildings may have existed or who was settled where. Nor do the Bible wielding christians using it as a control tactic for their own purposes.

I have read that the last two books in the Catholic Old Testament, Macabes 1 and 2 (they're not in Protestant Bibles) are probably the most historically accurate of the Bible's tomes--and that's probably not saying much.

We do know that Jews did live in Egypt during Pharoah Ramses III's reign and that many left for some reason during that reign (we don't know why or who actually was their leader). Certainly most of the stories about Moses, Joshua, and judges afterward are fiction.

David may have been a real person, but there is no evidence that I've ever read that the Jewish state was ever a great power even in the world of their day. (In fact, some of my high school history texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s say that the Israelites were little more than a band of wandering shepherds who created these myths about themselves and their history to illustrate their importance in the world of that era.)

The New Testament isn't much better. There is outside evidence that both of the King Herods (the second one is mentioned in Acts) as well as Pontius Pilate actually existed, but there is still no definite evidence that Jesus Christ ever existed as either a single man or as a group of people. Interestingly, we can show that Paul existed as well as (I think) Peter, but there are legitimate questions now about who actually wrote both Acts and the Gospels because the people they were credited to, if they ever existed at all, were long dead by the time the books were actually written.

With all of that, I'd say that maybe somewhere between 3 and 5% of the Bible is factually accurate. And I think (though I have no knowledge of this) that this percentage is in line with other religious texts such as the Quoran.

blindguy Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have read that the last two books in the
> Catholic Old Testament, Macabes 1 and 2 (they're
> not in Protestant Bibles) are probably the most
> historically accurate of the Bible's tomes--and
> that's probably not saying much.

Yes, Maccabees 1 & 2 are more history than rest of the OT and fairly reliable. Kings and Samuel also include some good historical material, although not as much as Maccabees.


-------------------
> We do know that Jews did live in Egypt during
> Pharoah Ramses III's reign and that many left for
> some reason during that reign (we don't know why
> or who actually was their leader).

That's not right, blindguy. The earliest attestations of the Hebrews, including prominently Judah, are around 1,000 BCE. In other words, the Hebrews did not exist when the Exodus supposedly occurred let alone when Joseph and his brothers "went down into Egypt."

I don't think you can document anything else. Please point me to such publications if you have them.


-------------------
> David may have been a real person, but there is no
> evidence that I've ever read that the Jewish state
> was ever a great power even in the world of their
> day.

True, and David is among the earliest plausible leaders of that shepherd-cum-dirt-farmer realm, dating around 1,000 BCE. That's also when the earliest chapters of the Bible--a few of the psalms written in very early Hebrew--were composed.


-----------------
> (In fact, some of my high school history
> texts from the late 1970s and early 1980s say that
> the Israelites were little more than a band of
> wandering shepherds who created these myths about
> themselves and their history to illustrate their
> importance in the world of that era.)

They weren't really "wandering shepherds." They were dirt-farming Canaanites who herded some sheep. The "wandering" myth comes from the confusion of several different creation stories--the Adam and Eve Creation, which was a form of a Canaanite myth evidenced in documents and in sculpture; most importantly regarding the passages you cite, the Abrahamic origins of wandering shepherds in the desert under a patriarch whose existence is speculative; the mountain farmer/shepherd world of Jacob and Esau, which is closest to the truth because that's what the economy of Canaan was; and the Out of Egypt tale for which there is no archeological or documentary evidence. Some of these are like the myth that Paris was formed by refugees from the Trojan Wars.

All four of the "creation accounts" were blended together in the era of King Josiah, when the scribes and priests composed their original history/doctrine around 550 BCE. This was when they "discovered" the Book of Deuteronomy and codified their official mythology.


--------------
> The New Testament isn't much better.

Yep. The myths aren't as cool either. No talking snakes and asses, no global flood, no genocides, no pillars of salt, no sun stuck in the sky, no plagues of hemorrhoids, no angels fornicating with humans, no men missing ribs. . .


---------------
The Hebrews were Cannanites. They spoke the same language, worshiped the same gods, and heard the same stories about a creation in a garden paradise, distant superpowers like Egypt and Babylon, the Hittites and the Persians. and an ancient man named Abraham.

The Hebrew elite separated out of the Canaanite milieu about 1,000 BCE, favoring certain myths and deeply frustrated by their dirt-farmer relatives and the insistence on worshiping agriculture gods like Asherah. But the Hebrew state didn't emerge until the ruling class of priests and scribes returned from Babylon in the 6th century BCE.

Lot's wife wrote in part:

"That's not right, blindguy. The earliest attestations of the Hebrews, including prominently Judah, are around 1,000 BCE. In other words, the Hebrews did not exist when the Exodus supposedly occurred let alone when Joseph and his brothers "went down into Egypt."

I don't think you can document anything else. Please point me to such publications if you have them."

My assertion had initially come from an answer to a letter I read from a Christian site over a decade ago. I was unable to find that, but I did find the following sites, which appear to confirm what both you and I have said.

First, here is the take from Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus

Note that the Wikipedia entry suggests two schools of thought regarding the historicity of the exodus, one of which you have laid down quite well. While noting the second thought (which was the idea I was getting at), Wikipedia does point out that there is no actual historical evidence to prove it, even though there is some evidence that there were Semites living in the country before what is thought to be the creation of the Jewish people.

The second document I found is also quite interesting. It is a commentary in the Jerusalem Post by a (I believe) Jewish professor of archeology on whether the Exodus actually took place.

https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-700876

The professor does note that there is no historical evidence that an actual exodus took place, but he does argue that, ancient Egyptian mythology, like the Jewish mythology that created much of the Old Testament, does tell of an exodus of Semites from Egypt.

In either case, it is *very* unlikely that the exodus from Egypt, if it occurred, happened in the way and manner explained by the second book of the Bible.

Thank you for the information and the discussion. I'll address your points in three sections.

First, the archaeology of the Exodus. If you work from the Bible and the Torah, the number of Israelites who left Egypt was just over 600,000 men, with families raising the total to between a very low estimate of 1.5 million people to a more common view of three million people, compared to a total number of Egyptians at the time was 3-4 million.

If 1.5 million people left a nation of four million, the Egyptian economy would have collapsed. Frankly the same thing would have happened if 600,000 people who were particularly important to the manual-labor part of the Egyptian economy fled. Egypt would have collapsed and probably conquered and occupied by one of the great civilizations of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. But there is in the archaeological and the literary records no evidence of either a significant decrease in Egypt's economy or its overall population. Nor is there archaeological evidence of 600,000 to three million people suddenly appearing in Canaan forty years later. We can therefore conclude that nothing of the sort happened.

Second, your point that there were Semitic peoples who left Egypt sometime in the second millennium BCE seems almost inevitable given that huge regions of North Africa, the Sinai Peninsula, the Levant, and Mesopotamia were populated almost exclusively by speakers of Semitic languages who routinely sent trade missions to Egypt for lengthy sojourns. As Richard Packham has told us, the Egyptian language was also closely related--the neighboring subcategory of Afro-Asiatic--to Semitic tongues, bespeaking significant common ancestry and deep commercial and other ties. I dare say that there were large groups of Semites moving into and out of Egypt throughout the second and first millennia BCE--including the Phoenicians and Ethiopian groups.

The bottom line is that the Hebrew language evolved out of the larger Canaanite family of Semitic languages sometime in the late second millennium BCE. That evolution was slow, graduated and partial, indicating that it occurred in Canaan and not during a long period of separation like the Egyptian Captivity.

Third, I don't find Jerusalem Post article persuasive. The author is an expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls, not Hebrew archaeology. His article is full of qualifiers like "if it is true that. . ." and "some have suggested." Some of his assertions, like the proposition that the Hyksos who ruled Egypt for a century were Israelities, are long out of fashion. Nor are Josephus or Herodotus helpful insofar as they were repeating stories they heard from others going back centuries if not a full millennium. Perhaps the most qualified source on the matter is Finkelstein, who is cited as saying there is evidence for neither the presence of a signiicant Israeli population in Egypt nor for the Exodus itself in the Egyptian records, which are extensive.

And even if we take his hypothesis that the Hebrews slowly infiltrated into Canaan around 1300 BCE seriously, how exactly do we reconcile that with the Exodus account of at least a million refugees entering Canaan and eliminating the native peoples through serial genocides? And how do we explain the fact that the Hebrew language shows every sign of evolving out of Canaanite slowly and smoothly over several hundreds of years before the earliest Psalms were composed around 1,000 BCE? Surely that couldn't have happened in Egypt.

I think it's fair to say that there is no archaeological or contemporary documentary evidence for the Exodus or for Israelites in Egypt. Some traders, perhaps with a semi-permanent presence? Sure. But nothing more. And as for the notion that a people wouldn't claim descent from slaves, the example of Paris as the namesake of the city again comes to mind. In that instance the people living in what would become Gaul and then France claimed descent from a political and military loser whose followers immigrated to western Europe after having been expelled from their burning homes by the Greeks. What mattered was claiming a prestigious lineage, not necessarily a triumphant prestigious lineage.

If you catch the person you love,
telling lies to you about what they do,
what does it matter how much truth
is in all his/her other words to you?

Well, you've obviously practiced that argument a time or two.

Did she buy it?

I shan't take the low road here in this scholarly discussion.

I was just trying to point out that after catching the bible in one or more lies/mistruths, why do people continue taking it out to dinner and buying it nice gifts?

Is it simply that they feel there are no other worthy suitors for their reverence, esteem, and lust?

So it didn't work.

Wisdom that. What a metaphor!

You have distilled the Bible to it's purest. Meaning it's like moonshine that can turn you blind or make you make bad decisions.

How much impurity does something need before you admit the tainting has infected ALL. Debating what parts might be factual is only a distraction to keep the lie going.

Thank you, D&D.  Make her a leave big tip for the barkeep!!

the Title page & publisher might be accurate...

Yes. Haha. Exactly.

And, in our old family Bible I know the page numbers were very accurate and in proper sequence. The edges of the paper were genuine fake gold. And the leather binding was real leather.

So our old family Bible is now appropriately passed down to the eldest as he is yet another example of a beautiful cover framing Heaven Knows What on the inside.

The setting is real, but the stories and characters are fictional, have different names, or composites of different people.

Here's another example: Troy.

People from what is now Greece and people from what is now Turkey fought each other for control of the Hellespont and western Anatolia at the end of the second millennium BCE.

Beyond that, we don't know much else.

We do know there was a warlord named Piyama Radu (Priam?), a king of Wilusa (Wilion / Illion / Illium — Troy?) named Alaksandu (Alexander / Paris?) who fought people from the west called the Ahhiyawa (Achaeans — Greeks?).

Metaphorically factual the Bible is. All. But most have no idea how to actually "read" the Holy Book.

"To be a master of metaphor," Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, "is the greatest thing by far. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius."

So, Brothers and Sisters, what does this tell us about those who take the Bible literally? The Bible thumpers.



For instance, Jesus did "walk on water". Just that nobody came up with the term "surfing" for many more centuries. And, that it wasn't about Magic, but about rising above an ocean of ignorance.

The plagues of Frogs? Of locusts? That was just nature and then some prophet smart enough to take credit for it. This story is a lesson in taking advantage of opportunities and making them your own. Even George Santos got this, apparently!

Lazarus? Just a heavy sleeper. Wife and kids couldn't even wake him when the went heavy R.E.M. Jesus finally got him up and said--as a joke--- "Wow I've, raised the dead!" Jesus was crazy funny.

And Lot's Wife. She didn't turn to salt. She just became a salty old broad, who, like the Three Nephites is still with us today to make us salty too.


The Bible all read very different in the original Hebrew before every body else and their agendas got their grubby hands on it. It was just the funny version of Aesop's Tales. Worked best quoted by George Carlin.

The fable of Christ is a rebranded ripoff of an Ancient Roman Sun God, Mithra, who they ripped off from the Persian Zarathustrians, whose birthday was celebrated in the Roman Empire on December 25th, long before the Meridian of time. The Persians rebranded an Egyptian Sun God, Ra. The Jews rebranded the Egyptian Gods as one monotheist God, El. Christian God is just as valid as any of those other Gods.

Wait a second--where does this come from?

Mithra was not a Roman deity. And where do you get the idea that the Persians stole their sun god from Egypt? The truth is that the sun god is an ancient Indo-European deity who shows up in almost all Indo-European pantheons. The Indo-European sun god is attested in in the earliest Indian and Iranian religious texts and owes nothing to Egypt.

In fact, the Roman name for their sun god was "Sol," and it shows up in cognates in India, Germanic tongues, Lithuanian, Etruscan, and others. What that means is that the Romans always had their sun god and their name for that god. They did not import it or the concept from Iran or from Egypt, and they assuredly did not abandon Sol for Mithra.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/21/2023 06:47PM by Lot's Wife.

Hey, it doesn't take an Einstein to...

Oh, wait...

Yes it does!!

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-29644591

The irony is that the swastika is more European in origin than most people realise. Archaeological finds have long demonstrated that the swastika is a very old symbol, but ancient examples are by no means limited to India. It was used by the Ancient Greeks, Celts, and Anglo-Saxons and some of the oldest examples have been found in Eastern Europe, from the Baltic to the Balkans.

Among the museum's most highly prized treasures is a small ivory figurine of a female bird. Made from the tusk of a mammoth, it was found in 1908 at the Palaeolithic settlement of Mezin near the Russian border.

On the torso of the bird is engraved an intricate meander pattern of joined up swastikas. It's the oldest identified swastika pattern in the world and has been radio carbon-dated to an astonishing 15,000 years ago. The bird was found with a number of phallic objects which supports the idea that the swastika pattern was used as a fertility symbol.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika

According to Joseph Campbell, the earliest known swastika is from 10,000 BCE – part of "an intricate meander pattern of joined-up swastikas" found on a late paleolithic figurine of a bird, carved from mammoth ivory, found in Mezine, Ukraine. It has been suggested that this swastika may be a stylised picture of a stork in flight.[66] As the carving was found near phallic objects, this may also support the idea that the pattern was a fertility symbol.[67]

In the mountains of Iran, there are swastikas or spinning wheels inscribed on stone walls, which are estimated to be more than 7,000 years old. One instance is in Khorashad, Birjand, on the holy wall Lakh Mazar.[68][69]

Mirror-image swastikas (clockwise and counter-clockwise) have been found on ceramic pottery in the Devetashka cave, Bulgaria, dated to 6,000 BCE.[70]

Some of the earliest archaeological evidence of the swastika in the Indian subcontinent can be dated to 3,000 BCE.[71] The investigators put forth the hypothesis that the swastika moved westward from the Indian subcontinent to Finland, Scandinavia, the Scottish Highlands and other parts of Europe.[72][better source needed] In England, neolithic or Bronze Age stone carvings of the symbol have been found on Ilkley Moor, such as the Swastika Stone.

Swastikas have also been found on pottery in archaeological digs in Africa, in the area of Kush and on pottery at the Jebel Barkal temples,[73] in Iron Age designs of the northern Caucasus (Koban culture), and in Neolithic China in the Majiabang[74] and Majiayao[75] cultures.

Other Iron Age attestations of the swastika can be associated with Indo-European cultures such as the Illyrians,[76] Indo-Iranians, Celts, Greeks, Germanic peoples and Slavs. In Sintashta culture's "Country of Towns", ancient Indo-European settlements in southern Russia, it has been found a great concentration of some of the oldest swastika patterns.[59]

The swastika is also seen in Egypt during the Coptic period. Textile number T.231-1923 held at the V&A Museum in London includes small swastikas in its design. This piece was found at Qau-el-Kebir, near Asyut, and is dated between 300 and 600 CE.[77]

The Tierwirbel (the German for "animal whorl" or "whirl of animals"[78]) is a characteristic motif in Bronze Age Central Asia, the Eurasian Steppe, and later also in Iron Age Scythian and European (Baltic[79] and Germanic) culture, showing rotational symmetric arrangement of an animal motif, often four birds' heads. Even wider diffusion of this "Asiatic" theme has been proposed, to the Pacific and even North America (especially Moundville).[80]


The Shaffer Hotel in Mountainair, NM
https://www.flickr.com/photos/courthouselover/4015937116



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2023 01:07PM by anybody.

The famous silent movie-era cowboy star William S. Hart, who had great respect for Native Americans, had swastikas as part of a walkway at his Newhall, CA ranch; during WWII someone asked why he still had them and he responded that they were around long before the nazi's stole them.

anybody, what you didn't do was tell us why the Swastika is relevant.

The answer is that in Eurasia the symbol is a representation of the sun god, who wheels through the sky like a chariot. It appears in many different contexts, from the Swastika to the Greek Key design and the Cross, which shows up in sun worshiping cultures as the Swastika without its four "feet."

The consensus is that the Swastika was either Indo-European from the Yamnaya period or was absorbed from a neighboring group in what was likely Ukraine at such an early date that it spread with the migrations. It is also possible that it is "Jungian" in the sense of a basic human image that appears spontaneously, which would shed light on non-Indo-European cultures like those of the Americas.

But it owes its Euroasian ubiquity to the Indo-Europeans, whose sun god followed them everywhere. Chinese scholars think that the Swastika entered China at an early date from Central Asia, which makes sense because the steppe was by the second millennium BCE swarming with Iranian peoples (Zoroastrianism arose not in Persia proper but in Iranian Central Asia) and because there were speakers of Indo-European languages, the Tocharians and their ancestors, in Xinjiang, the largely Muslim province in today's northwestern China.

The heyday of the Swastika came with Buddhism, which spread the icon throughout South, Southwest, and East Asia. The two meanings of the symbol were 1) the sun, and 2) reincarnation, for the sun dies and is reborn daily and annually. The latter was more important for Buddhists than the solar imagery, but the association with rebirth/reincarnation is also evident archaeologically in the early Bronze Age cultures of Eastern Europe. So the association was implicit in the Swastika from the beginning, as it were.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2023 04:48PM by Lot's Wife.

Neolithic Solar Chariot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trundholm_sun_chariot

The Trundholm sun chariot (Danish: Solvognen), is a Nordic Bronze Age artifact discovered in Denmark. It is a representation of the sun chariot, a bronze statue of a horse and a large bronze disk, which are placed on a device with spoked wheels.

The sculpture was discovered with no accompanying objects in 1902 in a peat bog on the Trundholm moor in Odsherred in the northwestern part of Zealand, (approximately 55°55′N 11°37′E). It is now in the collection of the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen.[1] It is prominently featured on the 1000-krone banknote of the 2009 series.[2]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/22/2023 06:35PM by anybody.

I think most people have no idea. It's a good point, so it should be underscored!

Yes, I did not know.

Too bad it was co-opted. I have a great aversion to it.

Was not aware of the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon etc connection.

Something else for me to look up and check out and hopefully remember.

Hitler liked the idea of invading hordes of ethnically superior people, so he fastened onto the Aryans and their symbols and sought to associate them with Germany.

The word "Aryan" or "Arya" is the name that the Indo-European peoples of Iran and India used to describe themselves; both peoples, who shared a pantheon, said that it meant their original homeland in the step. Both "India" and "Iran" derive from "Aryan." Similar terms, like the "Ire" in Ireland, also seem suspiciously Indo-European and some linguists make that connection explicit. Rather than ethnic superiority, these peoples achieved their monumental successes from the technological marriage of horse-riding, mounted warfare, and wagons, which allowed them to spread so widely.

The Nazi appropriation of the term was unfortunate because it cast a shadow over one of the most important peoples and migrations of all time. Today 46% of the global population speaks Indo-European languages as their first language. Yet the term "Aryan" fell from favor after its association with the Nazis and has not yet fully escaped that taint.

I confess that, like you, I was disturbed when as a young clump of sodium chloride I first started noticing Swastikas in Buddhist temples. It's difficult to separate the real iconography from the Nazi perversion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swastika,_Ontario

The town was named after the Swastika Gold Mine staked in the autumn of 1907 and incorporated on January 6, 1908.

James and William Dusty staked the claims alongside Otto Lake for the Tavistock Mining Partnership. The gold mine and town were named after the Sanskrit good-luck symbol Swastika.[3][4] The Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway had an engineers' camp nearby as they had to construct two railway bridges as they advanced northwards. The first usage of the name Swastika occurred in their 1907 Annual Report to indicate a water tank was located at the site to meet the needs of the steam trains that opened up northern Ontario.[5]

Prospectors and miners flocked to the area and after viewing the find at the Swastika Gold Mine they advanced even further throughout the surrounding region. In 1909 the Lucky Cross Mine adjacent to the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway tracks began producing gold. A Mr. Morrisson started a farm and lodging alongside the tracks as early as 1907 and from there the community developed.[5]

During World War II, the provincial government removed the Swastika sign and replaced it with a sign renaming the town "Winston." The residents removed the Winston sign[7] and replaced it with a Swastika sign with the message, "To hell with Hitler, we came up with our name first.”[8]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithraism_in_comparison_with_other_belief_systems

“Most scholars date Mithraism as existing prior to Christianity. Persian scholar and art historian, Abolala Soudavar [de], cites notable Greek thinker, Plutarch, whose writing represents the earliest account on this issue.[12] In the year 67 BCE, pirates who had more than a thousand sails and had captured more than four hundred cities

"offered strange rites of their own at Mount Olympus, and celebrated there, certain secret rites, among which those of Mithras continue to the present time, having been first instituted by them ..." — Plutarch[12]
Soudavar submits that Plutarch pins Mithraic worship in Rome long before the birth of Christ, and it is therefore improbable that Christian traditions informed Mithraic, but rather the opposite.“

Okay, that's progress.

Gone is any suggestion that the Persians took their sun god from Egypt. Gone too is any reference to a connection between Mithra and "the Jews."

Let's go farther. Your source cites 67 BCE as the earliest time at which the Romans had documented exposure to Mithra--and then Mithra was the god of foreign invaders whose rituals and beliefs were at that time "strange," meaning previously unseen and unfamiliar. It is unreasonable to assert that a "foreign" and "strange" cult would in several decades become so overwhelming that it influenced the emerging Christian cult. Indeed, Mithra became a serious Roman faith in between the 1st and 4th centuries of the Common Era, meaning that it was not likely to have inspired Christianity.

(Indeed, the Wikipedia source--Soudavar--for your assertion of an influence over Christianity isn't even footnoted. The editors could not find where he said what is attributed to him.)

For any such sun-god influence on Judaism--which I think is likely--the precursor was the much earlier and more widespread Indo-European sun god whom the Romans and the Greeks and the Celts and the Germanic peoples and the Iranians and the Indians brought with them from the Eurasian steppe, meaning the Yamnaya and related cultures. In the Roman context, that meant Sol in his two different guises, for what happened was that Mithra--literally the Iranian identity of the Roman Sol--was married into the Sol tradition.

anybody's post explains that although I think she buried the lede.

Lemme see... All the Old Testament stories are just fiction, or at best, greatly embellished semi-facts. Like, the Jews have always talked of winning this war or that to explain why their prowess in wars made them such a regional force. But that was merely success in trade and relations, which allowed them to multiply in numbers. But the war stories are better reading. Similarly, the New Testament is essentially total fiction, because there was no Jesus, let alone a Christ. It's a book worth knowing and reading because so many people use comments and quotations from it, and it's really good to be culturally literate. But Christmas is awesome, I have to admit.

Joseph Smith was a storyteller first and foremost. His stories are an amalgamation of 19th century restorationist memes along with philosophies pulled from whatever religious writings he had access to. My point is that the BoM is the work of one guy. Maybe two if you include Rigdon as a contributor.

The Bible, though designed by committee, was vetted far more than that. To compare holy books to works of art, the BoM is a kindergartener's crayon drawing. That doesn't mean they are all like that. The Torah is a masterpiece. The Bible is a miracle. There is no comparison to the BoM.

Mormonism is a scam started by money diggers. They are still essentially money diggers. Hating religion because of Mormons makes as much sense as hating women (or men) because you were married to a horrible person.