Today, unless a person grows up in a Christian community the idea of a dying God whose body is eaten by worshipers seems bizarre. And it should. Such an idea is at odds with virtually any modern system of thought. Two millennia ago, however, that was not the case.

As many of us know, there was a direct connection between Jesus 2.0 and the mystery cults of the Near East and the Mediterranean. Jesus 1.0 didn't have it, but when the early Fathers tacked the resurrection story onto the end of Mark, making Jesus a dead and reborn God, the nascent religion became a lot easier to market. But why was that the case? What was so attractive about a dead god?

The reason for the transformation was the popularity of the mystery cults, which arose and persisted with agricultural civilization. For farmers, what really mattered was human and animal reproduction, the rise and fall of the sun and the moon, the annual cycle of the death and rebirth of the fields. Reproduction was associated primarily with females, and the chief god was almost always the Goddess, whose annual consort either died or was killed at the end of the year and replaced in the spring by the resurrected/reincarnated god or by a new royal consort. The reason the YHWH cult and early Christianity were so preoccupied with suppressing human sacrifice--Molech, Ba'al, Asherah, etc--was the near impossibility of rooting out the Goddess and her fertility rituals, which for many centuries and perhaps millennia had dominated the region.

Well, yesterday I was reading a book on the roots of Hinduism* (and came upon a passage which succinctly explains the Eucharist and why Christianity 2.0 was so readily accepted by the peoples of the Levant and the Mediterranean. Describing "the sacrificial drama enacted on the greatest festival of the year, the 'sacred marriage' of the Goddess. . . at the new year," the book states that:

"The drama ended with the death of the bridegroom, which was ritually lamented. This and related rituals elsewhere in West Asia developed into secret mysteries, in which participants killed human victims [vicariously representing the god], ate the flesh, and drank the blood." In short, the Eucharist.

Peasant farmers had no patience for the esoteric Greek and Roman pantheons nor for intellectual philosophies propounded by the educated elite. What they wanted was something like their ancestral faiths, something that emphasized periodic birth and rebirth in all its sanguinary and passionate immediacy. Christianity spread like wildfire throughout the Near East and Mediterranean Europe largely because it embraced the most emotive aspects of widespread popular religions.

Rome capitalized on that movement. By the time of Constantine the empire was experiencing a crisis of popular legitimacy, so it embraced the most promising of the mystery cults--which says a lot about Constantine's cynical realism but also about what the commoners of the day valued.

*Asoko Parpola, "The Roots of Hinduism," (Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2015), p. 308.

"Peasant farmers had no patience for the esoteric Greek and Roman pantheons nor for intellectual philosophies" ...

christianity loves the uneducated.

The context matters. Murderous cults arise all the time and the vast majority of them go away very quickly.

In this case, though, the pattern has lasted several millennia. It is the meaning of the rituals, the context, that differentiates this stuff from 99% of human group violence.

True -- and "christians" are no different.

The irony of them thinking that some how they are "better" because they only ritually eat their god...

I agree that from an outside perspective, it seems like a completely bizarre ritual. It's funny how you can't see it when you are fully indoctrinated.

That's the key.

To people alive today, the story of Christ--"processed Jesus," if you will--seems miraculous. So a lot of people are willing to believe it, to see it as an instance of pristine divine intervention.

By contrast, Joseph Smith's religion is only two hundred years old and we are sufficiently familiar with the culture and its records to spot the scam. If one really wants to understand Christianity, or any religion, it is essential to learn the historical and cultural context.'

In a world of dying-and-reborn gods, Christianity was not pristine. It was, in fact, an marginal evolutionary step beyond the current belief systems.

Lot's Wife wrote in part:

"To people alive today, the story of Christ--"processed Jesus," if you will--seems miraculous. So a lot of people are willing to believe it, to see it as an instance of pristine divine intervention."

It should be noted here that in most cases, children are taught the stories of Jesus 2.0 before they ever learn about the sciences and the scientific method. In fact, the Jesus story is so drilled in to them (us) that it is a wonder that so many of us find a way out of it. Yet many of us do just that, in no small part because the churches whose doctrines we were taught to believe as being facts just can't live up to the standards they set for their patrons.

When Europeans invaded the 'new world' many of the cultures they encountered only accepted Christianity at the point of a sword because they believed that their gods were so much stronger than a god who would allow his son to be tortured and killed and his followers were expected to eat his flesh and drink his blood.

Conversely, some Native American tribes reportedly expected a white god to appear and lead them on to great things. Apparently that belief facilitated the European conquests in at least some cultures.

In all of these instances the power of the new religion depends on whether it fits the existing society.

Luther gave you the first readable Bible.

..did the same with the cup of wine after supper and said, “This cup seals the new covenant with my blood. Drink it—and whenever you drink this, do it to remember me.” Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are retelling the story, proclaiming our Lord's death until he returns
1 Cor 11:25

There were several "readable Bibles" before Luther's. In the first several centuries the book was translated into Syriac, Ethiopian, Koine Greek, and other popular languages. So you are probably describing Western Europe.

Yet in the late 14th century the Wycliffe Bible was published in English. So really, the only people for whom Luther's Bible was the "first readable" one were those Germans who were literate in their own language but not in any others, which would have been a very small number indeed.

The more important fact, however, is that Luther's publishing a translation of the Bible into a vernacular language in the 1520s did little to help the millions of Christians who had lived in the previous 1,500 years. And even if the people in Jesus's day had heard (the vast majority could not read) someone recite an accurate translation, that does not mean they would have put away all their cultural beliefs and embraced the bible that you think is correct.

Cultural traditions are a lot more durable than esoteric teachings like "we eat our God but not really."



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2024 01:51AM by Lot's Wife.

Oh, come on. Anybody who is anybody in seminary knows that blood only developed because of the Fall of Adam which brought mortality into the world. Prior to that, and for resurrected beings, they didn’t/don’t have blood, but some sort of clear go-juice.

The reason Mormons use water instead of wine is because they are the only ones who know Jeebus doesn’t have blood.

In the name of Alvin R Dyer, amen.

Lot's Wife Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Today, unless a person grows up in a Christian
> community the idea of a dying God whose body is
> eaten by worshipers seems bizarre. And it should.

Mormons don't believe in transubstantiation. Perhaps you didn't get the memo?

Mostly Harmless Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Lot's Wife Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Today, unless a person grows up in a Christian
> > community the idea of a dying God whose body is
> > eaten by worshipers seems bizarre. And it
> should.
>
> Mormons don't believe in transubstantiation.
> Perhaps you didn't get the memo?

They aren't Trinitarian either. Jesus is in the Godhead but not the Trinity.

I think you've mistaken this board for Recovery from Catholicism.

You have to admit that even if it's purely symbolic, it's still weird.

summer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> You have to admit that even if it's purely
> symbolic, it's still weird.

The ceremony is a symbol of altruism and survival. The food and drink represent the basic components that we need to live. My suspicion is that it was originally supposed to be a proper meal. Nowadays only a handful of churches do it that way, but that social aspect is lost on most people including Mormons. It is supposed to be the "attitude of gratitude", i.e. we're thankful to God and the universe for looking after us, and in turn we look after each other.

Most societies try and embue themselves with some kind of meaning. I think our current one has failed to do that post-religion. We still maintain some myths. Look at all that sickly stuff we are supposed to watch/listen to at Christmas time. We've kept the indulgence side without the gratitude.

> They aren't Trinitarian either. Jesus is in the
> Godhead but not the Trinity.


Show me where I said Mormons are Trinitarian.


---------------
You're always making up straw men so you have something to challenge.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2024 04:47PM by Lot's Wife.

> Mormons don't believe in transubstantiation.

Show me where I said they did.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/01/2024 04:46PM by Lot's Wife.

    
  

You should be blossoming like a rose by now, my swarthy friend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1lmVvk9P7w&list=PLkttcYeV50xuqAO5bQd4P4wZ5_k-i-XDl&index=2


What's sad is that they dubbed in White people's voices!!

I was impressed by the cover art.

It was like I was looking in a mirror, and the female Lamanite was a ghost!

And the landscape in the background. Who would have thought there were recording studios in Monument Valley?

I remember reading somewhere the partaking of the flesh and blood could be related to the god Osiris who ended up cut into pieces and scattered across the land.

"Osiris is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion," according to some Google know-it-all.

So, somehow maybe we can kind of link the god's body nourishing the land to grow the grain. Eating a grain cracker symbolizes eating the God and that symbolizes all the god provides.

Or not.

> I remember reading somewhere the partaking of the
> flesh and blood could be related to the god Osiris
> who ended up cut into pieces and scattered across
> the land.

As usual, you intuit the bigger picture.

I am not sure about Egyptian Osiris, but in the third and second millennium BCE there were a cluster of religious motifs and practices shared from Mesopotamia through Elam and Aratta to Harappa (which was the pre-Indo-Aryan culture of the Indus Valley). One of those motifs was the birth of the cosmos through the killing of the creator god and the severance of the various parts of his body. Those members were then spread through the heavens and earth, and from them grew the features of the celestial and mundane worlds.

In Harappan India the creator god was Prajapitra. According to the Rig Veda (which was written by the later Indo-Aryans and sometimes garbled the earlier Harappan myths) Prajapitra had sex with his daughter and was consequently executed, his body used to seed the cosmos. Every new year that creation was memorialized through the sacrifice of a man and the scattering of his body parts and blood around the various communities' lands.

After the intrusion of the Indo-Aryans, who were marginally less bloodthirsty, most parts of India started using the cow (Harappan) or the horse (Indo-Aryan) instead of an actual human. But parts of the subcontinent, particularly the Dravidian south, continued the annual human sacrifice until it was suppressed by the British in the early 19th century.

That much is well documented. I am tempted to see possible additional parallels in early Hebrew religion as well. We know, after all, that Mesopotamian mythology was one of the most important sources for the biblical Genesis. Did echoes from Mesopotamia play a role in the story of the woman who was raped and whose father chopped up her body and sent the pieces to all parts of Israel in order to rally the tribes into unified action? Did the tale of Lot having sex with his daughters to engender a nation of his descendants reflect the older story of divine incest?

If real, the parallels would help make sense of biblical episodes that are otherwise incomprehensible.