We are not alone!
So last night I wound up talking with a buddy. He said to me:
You know, e-k, I used to teach catechism to the kids in our church and one day the priest was talking to me and said, "You know a lot of this stuff probably didn't happen; the whole resurrection thing and the virgin birth was adapted from Egyptian myths about the cult of Isis to make Christianity more palatable." So I said, "Boy, this is amazing! We should tell the kids!" and the priest said "Shh! Are you crazy? You can't tell this to the kids!"
posted by e-kvetcher at 12:50 PM
11 Comments:
Tell it to the kids? Chosvaysholom!
Fascinating story. Noble lie?
Never mind the kids. You can't even tell it to the adults!
The thing which I disapprove of the most about the Catholic religion is it's emphasis on the miracles and the other mysterious aspects. I however recognize the importance of such things, i.e. the importance of the impossible being possible.
That aside, I don't think there is any shortage of "New Theologians" these days. Fortunately the Catholic church has a centralized authority to decide on those things.
And besides, if the virgin birth was 'lifted' from anywhere, it was from the Isaiah 7:14, and not from the Isis cult/religion (directly).
How do you know Isaiah didn't lift it from Isis? Anyway, that passage is generally mistranslated; "almah" doesn't mean "virgin," it means "young woman." Had they meant to say virgin, they would have used the word "betula," bc, you know, that's the word that means "virgin."
Ha, Miri, do you really want to get trapped in the almah-debate? Obviously it does not matter for Christianity where the Judaism might have lifted it from. Christians probably lifted it from the Jews as opposed to from the Egyptians themselves. Therefore they weren't stealing material from others but rather just reusing old material. That is all that matters.
And as for the almah debate itself, it seems the deadest of dead horses. From wikipedia we can gather firstly, the word that the Christians took from Isaiah wasn't almah, but a Greek (mis?-)translation of the word almah, which means virgin, secondly, there is no word for a virgin in the ancient semitic languages, and that although this word strictly does not mean a virgin, it does imply it by association, as young girls who were still with their parents, i.e. unmarried, were not going around losing their virginities left and right. I remind you of Deuteronomy 22:13-21 to prove this point.
I repeat though, it has no significance what the original word was, or whether the ancient Jewish stole it from the Egyptians. As far as the Christians are concerned, this was just a reuse of an old Jewish motif.
Ahn. And apologies for sounding arrogant, heh.
Actually, Sophist, just to set the record straight, my friend is not Catholic, but Episcopalian (i.e Anglican).
Of course, that's essentially the same thing as Catholic.
my friend is not Catholic, but Episcopalian (i.e Anglican).
Of course, that's essentially the same thing as Catholic.
High Church Anglican is essentially the same.
Low Church Anglican, however, is nuts.
The Anglicans are considered a Catholic faith, along with the Orthodox and some other, weirder branches of Christianity.
Methodists, while "technically" Anglican in origin, along with various insane American derivatives, are considered to belong to the loony branch of Christianity - if one accepts three streams as follows: Catholic, Protestant, stark-raving mad.
You already know about my ancestors having inhabited the borderland between shtrenge protestantim and stark raving mad.....
BOTH, I am not a baki b'Anglicanism; I humbly defer to you.
I did see in Wikipedia that the Church sees itself as a via media between Catholicism and Protestantism, or as Robin Williams put it "Catholic lite - same rituals, half the guilt"
This is essentially the shocking "secret" of Doug Rushkoff's Nothing Sacred. Marduk=Mordekhai, Ishtar=Esther, etc. He claims the Jewish establishment tried to shut him down. I thought it was a big yawn.
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