Ancient Beginning Of The Virgin Birth Myth

From about 80 A.D. to the present time, most Christian faith groups have taught that Yeshua of Nazareth (Jesus Christ) was conceived and born by his mother Mary, while she was still a virgin. They believe that this happened by the action of the holy spirit, without an act of sexual intercourse. However, the Virgin Birth story was not new when the Messiah was born. Mythology is full of such stories. An Egyptian Virgin Birth story, told about 2,000 years before the Messiah, had many details identical with those found in the Gospel accounts.

Talk About Plagiarism....the Jews would have been convicted and the jury would have never left the courtroom.

Horus

The Legend of Horus is one of the most ancient myths in Egypt, and it was central to the ancient Egyptian state religion. He was worshipped three thousand years before Jesus and his worship lasted into the common era. The followers of Horus invaded Egypt in pre-dynastic history (before 3000 B.C.E.).

He is often shown as an infant cradled by his mother Isis. He avenged his father’s murder, and became recognized as the God of civil order and justice.

Both were conceived of a virgin.

1.Both were the “only begotten son” of a god (either Osiris or Yahweh)

2.Horus’s mother was Meri, Jesus’s mother was Mary.

3.Horus’s foster father was called Jo-Seph, and Jesus’s foster father was Joseph.

4.Both foster fathers were of royal descent.

5.Both were born in a cave (although sometimes Jesus is said to have been born in a stable).

6.Both had their coming announced to their mother by an angel.

7.Horus; birth was heralded by the star Sirius (the morning star). Jesus had his birth heralded by a star in the East (the sun rises in the East).

8.Ancient Egyptians celebrated the birth of Horus on December 21 (the Winter Solstice). Modern Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25...an edict from Constantine in the fourth century

9.Both births were announced by angels.

10.Both had shepherds witnessing the birth.

11.Horus was visited at birth by “three solar deities” and Jesus was visited by “three wise men”.

12.After the birth of Horus, Herut tried to have Horus murdered. After the birth of Jesus, Herod tried to have Jesus murdered.

13.To hide from Herut, the god That tells Isis, “Come, thou goddess Isis, hide thyself with thy child.” To hide from Herod, an angel tells Joseph to “arise and take the young child and his mother and flee into Egypt.”

14.When Horus came of age, he had a special ritual where hsi eye was restored. When Jesus (and other Jews) come of age, they have a special ritual called a Bar Mitzvah.

15.Both Horus and Jesus were 12 at this coming-of-age ritual.

16.Neither have any official recorded life histories between the ages of 12 and 30.

17.Horus was baptized in the river Eridanus. Jesus was baptized in the river Jordan.

18.Both were baptized at age 30.

19.Horus was baptized by Anup the Baptizer. Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist.

20.Both Anup and John were later beheaded.

21.Horus was taken from the desert of Amenta up a high mountain to be tempted by his arch-rival Set. Jesus was taken from the desert in Palestine up a high mountain to be tempted by his arch-rival Satan.

22.Both Horus and Jesus successfully resist this temptation.

23.Both have 12 disciples.

24.Both walked on water, cast out demons, healed the sick, and restored sight to the blind.

25.Horus “stilled the sea by his power.” Jesus commanded the sea to be still by saying, “Peace, be still.”

26.Horus raised his dead father (Osiris) from the grave. Jesus raised Lazarus from the grave. (Note the similarity in names when you say them out loud. Further, Osiris was also known as Asar, which is El-Asar in Hebrew, which is El-Asarus in Latin.)

27.Osiris was raised in the town of Anu. Lazarus was raised in Bethanu (literally, “house of Anu”).

28.Both gods delivered a Sermon on the Mount.

29.Both were crucified.


30.Both were crucified next to two thieves.

31.Both were buried in a tomb.

32.Horus was sent to Hell and resurrected in 3 days. Jesus was sent to Hell and came back “three days” later (although Friday night to Sunday morning is hardly three days).

33.Both had their resurrection announced by women.

34.Both are supposed to return for a 1000-year reign.

35.Horus is known as KRST, the anointed one. Jesus was known as the Christ (which means “anointed one”).

36.Both Jesus and Horus have been called the good shepherd, the lamb of God, the bread of life, the son of man, the Word, the fisher, and the winnower.

37.Both are associated with the zodiac sign of Pisces (the fish).

38.Both are associated with the symbols of the fish, the beetle, the vine, and the shepherd’s crook.

39.Horus was born in Anu (“the place of bread”) and Jesus was born in Bethlehem (“the house of bread”).

40.“The infant Horus was carried out of Egypt to escape the wrath of Typhon. The infant Jesus was carried into Egypt to escape the wrath of Herod. Concerning the infant Jesus, the New Testament states the following prophecy: ‘Out of Egypt have I called my son.’”

41.Both were transfigured on the mount.

42.The catacombs of Rome have pictures of the infant Horus being held by his mother, not unlike the modern-day images of “Madonna and Child.”

43.Noted English author C. W. King says that both Isis and Mary are called “Immaculate”.

44.Horus says: “Osiris, I am your son, come to glorify your soul, and to give you even more power.” And Jesus says: “Now is the Son of Man glorified and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will glorify the Son in himself, and will glorify him at once.”

45.Horus was identified with the Tau (cross).

http://fooey.net/stuff/Horus-Jesus-Parallels.cfm

 

Bacchus was too....and he had the magic power to...



turn water into wine.

 

ALL religions borrow from earlier myths and legends and from the religions of their neighbors.

 

Just because there are similarities in mythological stories doesn't mean they're the same. The OP is misleading.

In order to truly prove that Christianity is plagarism you'd have to go back in time and see if the writers of the Bible and show that the writers actually knew of these stories in some way such as having the books in their library.

And you'll find that often it's a miraculous birth, not actually a virgin birth, with deity intervention.

So I think the claims in the OP and other claims of Plagiarism are misleading.

 

Jews borrowed freely from Sumer and the Ugarit as well as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Its really not a big deal. Christians borrowed from the Jews and Muslims borrowed from both.

 

Darth Vader was born of a virgin birth too, you know.

 

LOL. Darth Vader the new messiah, that's quite a stretch.

 

When it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....

And they burned everything they could get their hands on if it contradicted or competed with their dogma or could be construed as evidence of their dishonesty.

 

Very good, but brick not hit back (so said Jean Claude Van Dam's martial arts opponent). What's the next stop on your search for Truth?

 

It is not a big deal indeed. In fact many Christian theologians see the virgin birth as legend and still are fine with what it stands for in the apostles creed:

" Introducing his section on Christ’s Birth in the Spirit, Moltmann explains it this way: “In this section we shall not talk about Jesus’ virgin birth, as dogmatic tradition has done. We shall talk about the birth of Jesus Christ from the Holy Spirit; for what we are dealing with here is not a question of gynaecology; it is a theme of Christian pneumetology.”

He continues…

In the New Testament, Christ’s ‘virgin birth’ is related only by Luke and Matthew. It was unknown, or considered unimportant, in wide areas of early Christian belief (the Pauline and Johannine sectors, for example). But from the third century onwards it became a firm component of the Christian creeds and theological christologies. There is no special theological teaching about Mary in the New Testament, and no acknowledgment of her as ‘mother of the Christ’. But when the christological conflicts began, mariology started to expand and to take on ever more elaborate frosm in the ancient church. At no other point is the difference between the doctrine of the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches and that of the New Testament as great as in the veneration of Mary, theological mariology, and the marian dogmas. As this gap widened, the distance between the church’s theology and Christianity’s Jewish tradition grew with it. What does the Madonna and the Child Jesus in her arms – ‘the Goddess and her hero’ – have to do with the Jewish mother Miriam and her independent, self-willed son Jesus, who dissociated himself from her? Are the roots of the church’s veneration of Mary and its mariology to be sought, not in Jewish Bethlehem, but in Ephesus, with its Diana cult?
The third-century Roman baptismal creed runs: ‘…born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary…’ In the Nicene creed the birth is linked with the incarnation…. ‘incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary’. In the Apostles Creed we read… ‘conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary’ Are these confessional statements in accordance with the New Testament witness? Can they be shown to be a theologically necessary component of christology? Does this credal formula still have anything to say to us today? Is what it says today the same as what it once said?
The virgin birth is not one of the pillars that sustains the New Testament faith in Christ. The confession of faith in Jesus, the Son of God, the Lord, is independent of the virign birth, and is not based on it. As we know, the faith of the New Testament has its foundation in the testimony to Christ’s resurrection. It is only in Luke and Matthew that any link is forged with the nativity story. Moreover, we find the confession of faith in Christ in Christian traditions which know nothing of the virgin birth, or do not mention it. This indisputable fact alone allows us to draw the theological conclusion that the virgin birth does not provide the justification for confessing Christ. If there is a link at all, then the matter is reversed: the mariology does not sustain the christology; the christology sustains the mariology. It is for Christ’s sake that his mother Mary is remembered and venerated….
…
In the literary sense, the stories about the announcement of the virgin birth are legends. They are deliberately told in such a way that no mention is made of either witnesses or historical traditions. We are not told from whom the narrator heard the story. Neither Joseph nor Mary is named guarantor. This distinguishes these stories so sharply from the testimonies of the men and women who witnessed the Easter apperances of the risen Christ, that it is impossible to talk about comparable miracles at the beginning of Christ’s life-history and at its end. But it will be permissible for us to assume that the nativity stories are secondary, retroactive projections of the experiences of the Easter witnesses with the risen Christ who is present in the Spirit; for they transfer to the pre-natal beginnings of Christ precisely that which has become manifest in the risen One who is present in the Spirit. In this way the narrators follow the logic that future and origin must correspond. If Christ has ascended into heaven, then he must have come down from heaven; and if he is present in the Spirit of God, who is the giver of life (I Cor. 15.45), then he must have come into life from this divine Spirit.
Because these narrators make no distinction between history and legend in the modern sense, but intend to relate a ‘gospel’, no objection can be made to the modern designation ‘legend’ for the stories about Christ’s nativity. At that time the inherent truth of the nativity stories had to be expressed in the form of aetiological myth. The truth is to be found precisely in this mythical story about Christ’s origin, not in the biological facts. It is therefore factually inappropriate to call the virgin birth historical, let alone ‘biological’; and the modern positivist characterizations of this kind do anything but preserve the intention and truth of the story. In actual fact they destroy it. The narrators’ aim is not to report a gynecological miracle. Their aim is to confess Jesus as the messianic Son of God and to point at the very beginning of his life to the divine origin of his person.
The Way of Jesus Christ, p. 79-82"

http://moltmanniac.com/moltmann-on-the-historicity-of-the-virgin-birth/

 

Unless it's a platipus.

It's pretty much faultyr easoning to assert that just because something follows the same pattern as another it must be the same thing.

Otherwise we can say the same thing about appels and oranges because they're simila to each other, so are cowboy boots and tennis shoes.

so of course, these objects must be the same.

 

if you line up 20 pairs of shoes - all different - then select one and declare it an umbrella .....

 

It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is for some to cling to their faith simply by discarding all logic and reason... just so they can continue to cling to their particular brand of MYTHOLOGY.

Could it all be a simple coincidence? ... sure only a fool would claim that not possible. And in the same respect only a fool would claim that something that waddles, quacks, and swims can't possibly be a Duck!

 

you can also stand on your head naked and whistle Dixie every time someone sneezes, but that doesn't mean you should.

seriously, how many ways you folk have to twist yourself into impossible knots to just get through a day ....

 

That is hilarious!

Check out the apostles' libraries, huh? Hell, there aren't even any original copies of the Gospels, much less any evidence of who the actual authors might have been. That said, it is well known that the scribes of that time were familiar with these stories. The mystery religions used the same myths. The lineage of religious myth is not really so difficult to follow. Of course, if you demand going back in a time machine as the only acceptable "proof", then I don't see anyone proving any plagiarism anytime soon!

 

Unmarried mothers used to claim being assaulted by demons or other night dwelling supernatural creatures to explain their pregnancies. Mary just came up with a better story.

 

even the Muslim religion believes Jesus was born a virgin birth by their God, they do not believe Jesus was Crucified though, they believe God replaced him with another before that

http://www.islam-guide.com/ch3-10.htm

...

 

So why would people knowingly die for this 'lie'? You know, ancient Greeks believed life spontaneously arose from nothing, maybe that is where Darwin got his ideas. These fantasy crackpot ideas with no evidence are Dan Brown stuff. I mean, at least come up with a writing or something from an early Pope saying, "Today we're going to invent this idea...." or something.

On miracles in general, IF God exists, they are no big deal, and I am not responsible for explaining God's ways and methods.
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There aren't any original copies of any other ancient documents either, but the Bible is the best supported in terms of short time gap and number of copies that we have.

Wrong, the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or those who interviewed eyewitnesses.

 

How should I know what motivates the insane among us? People knowingly die for all sorts of nonsensical reasons. Does that imply that they should be considered role models?

 

So you just dismiss the testimonies as of insane people, all with the same delusions?

Give me one example. People will die for something they believe to be true, but they will never die for something they know to be false. Would you?

 

No. Would you?

 

Kinda strange to me that the Jews wrote the old testament and don't believe in Jesus or the new testament.

 

Lots of soldiers die in wars they know are false.

 

Like all the wars in the middle east. I've talked to dozens of veterans of both wars in Iraq, one of them my granddaughter's husband and they're living in denial. Not a one of them will admit that oil had anything to do with it when oil had everything to do with it.

 

No, and neither would the Apostles.

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Voluntarily?