The Round Table (Rational Pagans Forum)

I consider the bible to be THE definitive source for sayings for Christian Fortune Cookies and nothing else.

It has a few bits that make good reading for action/adventure and suspense, though rather more dry than most of the authors I read. To be expected really from an anthology/collaborative work as opposed to having the cohesiveness of a work by one author.

Beyond that, it is just another piece of overprinted garbage, one half of which simply perpetuates an 1800 year old lie. I fail to even consider it myth, though it may fit with the conditions.

Looking at the other end of a mythic hero's life, mythic heroes are often rejected by their gods or their followers, and they often die mysterious or unusual deaths. It's almost as if it may take something very big to bring such a hero down.

It's something like all those conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of JFK. It's as if some lone lunatic was not capable of bringing down so great a hero as JFK -- something much bigger had to be involved, a big conspiracy.

Moses lived in good health for 120 years, getting to see the Promised Land. But God would not allow him in, and he mysteriously got sick and died.

Hercules committed suicide rather than suffer the extreme pain of the poison of a cloak that someone had given him.

Romulus mysteriously disappeared in a marsh during a storm.

Jesus Christ? The Jewish leaders charged him with blasphemy. The citizens of Jerusalem turned against him, becoming a lynch mob. Peter disowned him and his disciples fled. He was not only crucified instead of stoned, but he died very fast for a young man in good health. There was a mysterious darkness, some earthquakes, and some corpses walking out of their tombs.

By contrast, even when well-documented heroes are conquered, their followers often stubbornly stick by them and only desert them when facing defeat. Their followers and admirers seldom repudiate them. Abe Lincoln did not experience Congress, the courts, and public opinion turning against him as Richard Nixon had during the Watergate scandal, Charles Darwin was not dismissed as a crackpot by his colleagues, Napoleon's and Hitler's followers deserted them only when they saw their opponents' armies closing in, etc.


Mythic heroes sometimes die on top of hills or mountains; they hardly ever die in pits or ditches or caves or other depressed or subterranean places. Who has ever heard of a mythic hero who committed suicide in the cave he was cowering in as his opponents' armies were closing in? That's pretty much how Adolf Hitler had died, committing suicide in his Berlin bunker as the Soviet Army was pushing its way into Berlin.

Yes, Moses atop Mt. Nebo, Hercules atop Mt. Oeta, Jesus Christ atop Golgotha, etc.

Abe Lincoln came close by being shot on the upper floor of a theater, but that's about it.

Sigh, I fail to see how anything you said related to anything I was talking about. Could you elaborate?

Crucifixions happened all the time - I fail to see what's so special about this one? Moreover, plenty of people die trying to trek Mt. Everest, do all these people become mythical too now?

There's something seriously wrong with the logic being employed here.

I think the point might be the altitude and the nature of the death as opposed to the commonality of it, perhaps.

The mythic heroes die in ways that are more open and, well, "heroic"...or under circumstances of their choosing?

That's what I get from it anyways.

"Rage against the machine..."

Crucifixion was a Roman punishment, not a Jewish one, and the Gospels depicted the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem as much more reluctant to condemn Jesus Christ than Pontius Pilate. So one might expect PP to let those leaders decide on which punishment they want for JC, which would likely be stoning.

Crucifixion itself may not have been especially odd, and pointing to crucifixion alone would be a weak argument. But in JC's case, there are other features that add to the oddity of his death, like dying in only a few hours.


That's pretty much it -- having a heroic sort of death.

One of the aspects of this is that the 'death' occurs in a place where many can view it, as with doing rituals (secular or sacred) on raised platforms so that many people can 'participate' to give it legitimacy for a large group. This fits with the hero being a ruler and making laws, because as a public figure, this helps to make their death also public.


And as for the archaeological analogy, I was looking to keep a context of similarity, so I switched it to just being within a single cultural context rather than bringing in outside influences. If you're looking to Christianities' development, yes, it grows out of a Jewish system, but by the time the accounts are written we're off in the Hellenic/Roman world, no? By the time we've got Saul/Paul in there swinging, we're well into the Romanized worldview, so development of the religion in that context isn't so much of a change ...

Or am I missing something?

_________________
If you can't stand the heat, don't tickle the dragon ...

Big mistake here. I meant

... and the Gospels depicted Pontius Pilate as much more reluctant to condemn Jesus Christ than the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem.

Hex, that's an interesting point about a hero's death being out in the open, in public. It's also more spectacular that way.

I was able to find some of Lord Raglan's book, The Hero, online at books.google.com, and the publicly-available parts include his assessments of various mythic heroes (pp. 175 - 185). He notes some other mythic heroes' ends:

That was because he took his medical skills a bit too far, raising someone from the dead.

I made screen captures of all those pages, and I've thought of OCRing them, but putting them online is a potential copyright violation, so I have not done so.

I've done the OCRing, with two open-source OCRers (GOCR and Tesseract) and a commercial one (ReadIris 7.0, included with my scanner). I found the open-source ones easiest to automate, since one can run them off the command line -- and call them with Python os.system() (like the standard C library's system()). Now I have to correct the OCRing.

That aside, Lord Raglan's profile tells us that the hero is not succeeded by whichever children he had had, if any. This is an interesting oddity, because it is contrary to the widely-accepted principle of hereditary succession. Would such a thing be a way of fitting someone purely legendary into existing accounts of ancestries? This would then explain why some hero is not the legendary ancestor of some royal family.

I don't think either of those are accurate.

And so with Caesar when he was stabbed to death on the foot of the Curia. Or Crassus died in battle by the Parthians pouring hot gold down his throat. Or Cicero whose head and hands were placed on spikes in the forum. Or Lincoln. Or Kennedy. Or...you get the picture.


Some of the gospels were still very much ingrained in Jewish thought, and anyone who ever even heard of the New Perspective on Paul wouldn't ever make such a statement about the author. The gospels are about as far apart from each other as modern "remakes" of older movies are from each other. Like Patton. Patton was a real general, depicted in a movie, thus "fiction" by genre. This is essentially Mark. If we remade Patton, and added some supernatural stuff to it, you essentially get what Luke or Matthew is. In another couple of decades, if the French decide to remake Patton, and add more imagination to the story, you get John. But you cannot take the French remake of the remade version of Patton and call the original Gen. Patton "mythical hero" because the French version depicts him as so.

James the Brother of the Lord is seen by many as Jesus' successor.

Hey, The God Petrich, would you want to put your incredible skillz to work and do up King David (of Bathsheba fame, dad of Solomon) on the Profile?

I've heard he should be pretty low, which is 'proof' he's historic, and I'm curious...

I'll help if you need details...

_________________
Chloride and Sodium: Two terribly dangerous substances that taste great together!

Thanx for the offer, but biblegateway.com and Wikipedia should do just fine. In the Bible, it's 1 Samuel 16 to 1 Kings 2.

1. The hero's mother is a royal virgin;
She's not mentioned in the Bible, though the Talmud identifies her as Nizbeth daughter of Adael: 0

2. His father is a king, and
Jesse son of Obed is an undistinguished commoner: 0

3. Often a near relative of his mother, but
4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god.
6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather, to kill him, but
7. He is spirited away, and
8. Reared by forest parents in a far country.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, but
No hint of any of that: 0

10. On reaching manhood he returns to goes to his future kingdom.
He was always in his kingdom: 0

11. After a victory over the king, and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast,
Goliath: 1

King Saul had chosen him to lead his armies, David leads his armies against the Philistines in several battles, and Saul gets jealous and plots to kill him.

12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor, and
He marries several women: Michal, Ahinoam, Abigail, Maachah, Haggith, Abital, Eglah and Bathsheba. Michal is a daughter of Saul: 1

13. Becomes king.
After Saul commits suicide to avoid getting captured, David gets appointed king by the men of Judah: 1

14. For a time he reigns uneventfully, and
He has a long fight with Saul's son Ish-bosheth and his followers, and after defeating them, he conquers the Jebusite fortress Jebus (Jerusalem), making it his capital. He leads several more conquests, he brings the Ark of the Covenant into Jerusalem, and he has a sex scandal involving Bathsheba. He then suppresses some rebellions and suffers through God's dislike of statistics, among other things: 0

15. Prescribes laws, but
Nothing notable: 0

I doubt that being a singer-songwriter would count.

16. Later loses favor with the gods and/or his subjects, and
In his old age, his son Adonijah declares himself king: 1/2

17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which
Bathsheba and Nathan convince David to make his son Solomon king instead. David even gives final instructions to Solomon: 1/2

18. He meets a mysterious death,
19. Often at the top of a hill.
No sign of either: 0

20. His children, if any, do not succeed him.
Solomon: 0

21. His body is not buried, but nevertheless
He is indeed buried: 0

22. He has one or more holy sepulchres
None mentioned: 0

King David's Lord Raglan score: 4

Wicked cool, The God Petrich.

That's what I thought, and what was implied. Hex was thinking that he did make laws and because he had to flee the city at a point, that also counted.

As I said, I've seen it argued recently (I'm currently doing an indepth study on the man) that since he doesn't follow the traditional 'hero' system, he's probably historic.

Thank you

_________________
Chloride and Sodium: Two terribly dangerous substances that taste great together!