Despite this being a sensitive and, to some, potentially blasphemous thread :yh_nailbi for the sake of fascinating topics I am willing to take the chance.
Before anything else is said let me assert that I believe a man named Jesus, or represented by that name, did exist. How he was born, what he actually said word for word, even whether or not he died on a cross are not essential details that must be true for the beauty of his message to be just as valid.
I do, however, think that some of the details surrounding him as currently written in the Bible may have been...embelished.
![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_e_biggrin.gif)
I am gathering info that other people have posted on the web that bring certain parts of the "Jesus story" to question. I am also looking for good responses from the Chritian retaliations against these claims. I want to present both sides of the case and hope others will do the same.
Case number one:
The Virgin Birth.
from The Truth About Jesus
by M.M. Mangasarian
Stories of gods born of virgins are to be found in nearly every age and country. There have been many virgin mothers, and Mary with her child is but a recent version of a very old and universal myth. In China and India, in Babylonia and Egypt, in Greece and Rome, "divine" beings selected from among the daughters of men the purest and most beautiful to serve them as a means of entrance into the world of mortals....
A nymph bathing in a river in China is touched by a lotus plant, and the divine Fohi is born. ...
In Siam, a wandering sunbeam caresses a girl in her teens, and the great and wonderful deliverer, Codom, is born. In the life of Buddha we read that he descended on his mother Maya, "in likeness as the heavenly queen, and entered her womb," and was born from her right side, to save the world." [Stories of Virgin Births. Reference: Lord Macartney. Voyage dans 'interview de la Chine et en Tartarie. Vol. I p. 48. See also Les Vierges Meres et les Naissance Miraculeuse. P. Saintyves. p. 19, etc.] In Greece, the young god Apollo visits a fair maid of Athens, and a Plato is ushered into the world.
In ancient Mexico, as well as in Babylonia, and in modern Corea, as in modern Palestine, as in the legends of all lands, virgins gave birth and became divine mothers. But the real home of virgin births is the land of the Nile. Eighteen hundred years before Christ, we find carved on one of the walls of the great temple of Luxor a picture of the annunciation, conception and birth of King Amunothph III, an almost exact copy of the annunciation, conception and birth of the Christian God. Of course no one will think of maintaining that the Egyptians borrowed the idea from the Catholics nearly two thousand years before the Christian era. "The story in the Gospel of Luke, the first and second chapters is," says Malvert, "a reproduction, 'point by point,' of the story in stone of the miraculous birth of Amunothph." [Science and Religion. p. 96.]
Sharpe in his Egyptian Mythology, page 19, gives the following description of the, Luxor picture, quoted by G.W. Foote in his 'Bible Romances,' page 126: "In this picture we have the annunciation, the conception, the birth and the adoration, as described in the first and second chapters of Luke's Gospel." Massey gives a more minute description of the Luxor picture. "The first scene on the left hand shows the god Taht, the divine Wolrd or Loges, in the act of hailing the virgin queen, announcing to her that she is to give birth to a son. In the second scene the god Kneph (assisted by Hathor) gives life to her. This is the Holy Ghost, or Spirit that causes conception. ... Next the mother is seated on the midwife's stool, and the child is supported in the hands of one of the nurses. The fourth scene is that of the adoration. Here the child is enthroned, receiving homage from the gods and gifts from men." [Natural Geneses. Massey, Vol. II, p. 398.] The picture on the wall of the Luxor temple, then, is one of the sources to which the anonymous writers of the Gospels went for their miraculous story. It is no wonder they suppressed their own identity as well as the source from which they borrowed their material.
Okay, rant away if you wish or write whatever else may come to mind. I will be looking to post a response to these allegations next.