Monthly Archives: May 2015
Was Orpheus the Original Jesus?
Dr. Robert Eisler in Revue d’assriologie et d’archéologie orientale 1905, p 57; Orpheus the Fisher (London: J.M. Watkins, 1921) Plate X describes this as an Orphic Sacramental Bowl. The central figure is indeed female, but the 16 surrounding stations around her, beginning with the first station and proceeding clockwise depicts Orpheus the Fisher with his fishing pole with the line wrapped around it. He holds a mesh bag in the other hand.
The bowl is representative of a widespread and popular Orpheus-Christos Cult throughout the Greco Roman empire ( rivaling Mithraism) with unique religious, artistic, and literary influences of the West.
Joseph Campbell traces the mystic fisherman motif back to a Babylonian seal known as ‘The Warden of the Fish’ (2nd millennium B.C.E) Many believe this is evidence of the early origins of Christianity predating Jesus by centuries, where Orpheus, “The Good Shepherd and Harrower of Hell” was the model for what would become Jesus many centuries later. ( see The History of Hell, by Alice K. Turner p. 24 Harcourt Brace and Company 1993)
“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers
Orphic Sacramental Bowl; Buzau, Romania. 3rd or 4th Centuries
Mad Max Fury Road: Political Manifesto or Religious Metaphor
Through its surrealistic landscapes, bizarre archetypal characters, and edge of your seat, non-stop action and stunts, it is possible to completely miss the more central and salient theme to Mad Max Fury Road, and that is, religion.
George Miller, as with his cinematic counterpart, George Lucas, has been one of the more profoundly creative interpreters of the principles of mythology as established by Joseph Campbell in his many scholarly books on the subject.
Miller, a self-proclaimed enthusiast of Campbell, has often acknowledged his deep creative debt to the late cultural anthropologist, and has proven this time and again in his entire corpus of work. Perhaps, it is this deeper understanding of myth, religion, and evolutionary psychology that distinguishes Miller (a former physician) from his contemporaries, and more specifically, the Marvel pantheon.
Fury Road is not so much dystopian science fiction, political rhetoric, or anti-Marvel, as it is metaphorical for another kind of revolution: the mythical journey through the underworld to achieve emancipation, not from world-dominating tyranny, but from our personal prisons of belief.
The Screenwriter’s Jesus: A Roadmap to the Future of Myth and Movies
“Even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn’t one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every “historical Jesus” is a Christ of faith, of somebody’s faith. So the “historical Jesus” of modern scholarship is no less a fiction. Dr. Robert M. Price Jesus: Fact or Fiction
Unless you’ve been tucked away in a confessional these pasts few years, it is impossible to have missed the Jesus historicity debate raging through Western academia and the Internet. For all the handwringing and vitriol, it could lead to one of the most impactful upheavals of the information age. [1]
While there are those who wonder why it matters: biblical scholars, historians, mythologists, and theologians have jumped into the fray for a full on Manichaean donnybrook.
Leading the charge against a conservative consensus of historists who, “claim the prestige of the university while following the rules of the seminary”, is a growing guild of academic upstarts, including: Dr. Peter Boghossian, Dr. Richard Carrier, David Fitzgerald, Sam Harris, Raphael Lataster, Dr. John W. Loftus, Dr. Matthew S. McCormick, Mark Paulkovich, Dr. Robert Price, and Dr. Valerie Tarico.[2]
To the lay audience, much of the exegesis will sound like Tolkien geeks parsing over passages of The Lord of the Rings, arguing for, or against, the existence of Hobbits. Upon further investigation, one will find a stimulating debate that is likely to knock the nimbus off the two thousand year old body and church of Jesus Christ.
No longer content to argue messiahhood or divinity, these scholarly skeptics are waging unholy war on whether the person Jesus ever walked the earth; let alone on water.
Applying Bayes’ Theorem of historical probability, Dr. Richard Carrier, the author of On The Historicity of Jesus, rates the chance of a blood and flesh Jesus as low as six percent. [3] So, if you’re betting on the risen Christ vouchsafing your voyage to Valhalla you may want to rethink your odds.
As legions of horrified Christians rise to forefend their beloved savior from the graveyard of the gods, and understandably so, the evidence is so compelling, we have to consider whether this is a belief system in its death throes. [4]
Ironically, from the storyteller’s point of view, Jesus is much more valuable to us as myth than as the messiah of faith, or star-crossed rabbi of dubious history.
Once recognized as a marvelous creation of humankind’s irrepressible imagination, Jesus may be better poised to save humankind — not from temptation, or the “original sin” of an errant ancestry, but from fundamentalism, anti-intellectualism, and the mesmerizing thrall of magical thinking.[5] [6]
“For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie– deliberate, contrived and dishonest– but the myth– persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forbearers. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.” John Fitzgerald Kennedy Yale Commencement Address 1962
Indeed, we may yet learn the ‘truth that will set us free’. Not from some expiating act of human sacrifice, but from Jesus’s forensic journey from myth to historicity, and back again.
“It is one of the great lessons of our study [of religions] that for the vulgar, ill- or uninstructed mind, myths tend to become history.”
Joseph Campbell Myths to Live By.
[1] Did Jesus Exist? The Trouble with Certainty in Historical Jesus Scholarship | Thomas Verenna -Academia.edu
[2] Jack Tsonis’ interview with Professor Dale Martin cited in “Is There a Christian Agenda Behind Religious Studies Departments?” By Raphael Lataster, University of Sydney Published by the Religious Studies Project, on 23 January 2013
[3] Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus– April 24, 2012 by Richard Carrier Prometheus Books
[4] From the Internet: Cosmologist Lawrence Krauss: Religion could be largely gone in a generationhttp://www.salon.com/2014/11/04/cosmologist_lawrence_krauss_religion_could_be_largely_gone_in_a_generation/
Why the Internet is slowly strangling religionhttp://www.salon.com/2014/11/14/why_the_internet_is_slowly_strangling_religion_partner/via @Salon
The Internet: Where religions come to die http://youtu.be/0Rqw4krMOug
The End of Christianity John W. Loftus Prometheus Books; July 26, 2011
[5] The Bible: So Misunderstood it’s a sin Kurt Eichenwald Newsweek”
“When the illiteracy of self-proclaimed Biblical literalists leads parents to banish children from their homes, when it sets neighbor against neighbor, when it engenders hate and condemnation, when it impedes science and undermines intellectual advancement, the topic has become too important for Americans to ignore, whether they are deeply devout or tepidly faithful, believers or atheists.
http://www.newsweek.com/2015/01/02/thats-not-what-bible-says-294018.html
[6] Hence it was Suetonius* speaking in the language of his party, who calls the Christians Genus hominum superstionis maleficae, ‘the men of the magical superstition.
Excerpted from The Screenwriter’s Jesus: A Roadmap to Mass Storytelling and Future Myth
© Copyright Michael Chase Walker Mentor Press 2015
Radical Imaginism 