CHRISTIAN / PAGAN

Any Difference?

The Shroud of Turin seems to be strong evidence that Jesus existed and exists. The following material shows that Jesus accepted or promoted ancient Pagan ideas. However, I think he was doing so in order to correct people’s subconscious beliefs. The New Testament has the same message as the Old Testament, but the Old Testament became greatly misunderstood, so the New Testament was written in order to correct people’s understanding of the Old Testament. So I don’t see a reason to be bothered by Jesus’ usage of Pagan ideas to help explain true religion. I think the main false belief of Pagans that Christianity intended to change was the belief in the need for human sacrifice.

The following are excerpts from an old Catastrophist magazine article.

Thanatos and Anastasis [Aeon]

__From: Aeon III:4 (Dec 1993) Lewis M. Greenberg

https://www.catastrophism.com/intro/search.cgi?zoom_query=%22Thanatos+and+Anastasis

_Jesus was crucified and died on a Friday. "Now everybody knows that Friday ... was sacred to the goddess of the planet Venus...." Jesus thus died on the day of Venus, descended into the Underworld on the day of Saturn (Saturday), and was resurrected on the day of Sol (Sunday). In these events, and others, we may discern certain pagan parallels.

_As previously noted, the date of Jesus' resurrection has … been assigned to the 25th of March, thereby superimposing another Christian religious belief upon a pagan stratum. Osiris, Attis, Mithras, and Dionysus were all purported to have been resurrected on this very same date

_Jesus' descent into Hell echoes the Netherworld journey of Ishtar (among others)

_Firmicus ... asserts that "salvation is only to be found in the Easter mysteries of Christ, who like a sun gives light to the nether world and who, radiant as the sun, rose from the dead on Easter day." Yet, we need not look far to find the pagan counterparts of Easter eve. Indeed, the ceremonial details of the early Christian celebration of Easter were probably rooted in Egyptian paganism. From Herodotus we learn that - the commemoration of the divine passion [of Osiris] was held once a year [and] the sufferings of the god were displayed as a mystery by night.... A great feature of the festival was the nocturnal illumination. People fastened rows of oil-lamps to the outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all night long.

_So Lucius ... is admitted ... into the nocturnal rites, or orgia, of "invincible Osiris," i.e., the Osiris who as Ptah or Ammon or Horus or Zeus/Sarapis or Horus/Apollo or Dionysus is the Lord of life, the all-seeing eye, the Ruler of the greatest gods. It should be recalled once again that, in the religious thought of ancient Egypt and the Near East, nocturnal light was linked with the planet Saturn. The Egyptian Saturnian god Atum was a sun of night as was the Assyro-Babylonian Shamash.

_The coming forth of Saturn inaugurated the archaic day, which began at sunset. So long as the solar orb was visible, the fiery globe of Saturn remained subdued, unable to compete with the sheer light of the former body. But once the solar orb sank beneath the horizon, Saturn and its circle of secondary lights acquired a terrifying radiance. Eventually, the ancient Near East came to believe in two suns. The Sun became "the greater, and [Saturn] the lesser sun; and the two together form[ed] the two chief lights of the heaven, one to serve during the day and the other at night."

_This last concept is reminiscent of the passage in Genesis 1:14-16 wherein it tells of God creating two great lights - "the greater one to dominate the day and the lesser one to dominate the night" - which may at one time have referred to the Sun and Saturn [[when Saturn was close to Earth]]. The ancient pagan festivals of light, as recounted by Herodotus, Apuleius, and others, were probably ... ultimately traceable to the days when Saturn's luminosity held sway in the heavens, and Venus [[then near Saturn]], "bright torch of heaven," possessed an awesome brilliance that "rivaled the sun in brightness."

_The Easter festival, then, was most probably linked ... to the earlier cultic rites of Osiris and Isis, the divine representatives of the planets Saturn and Venus respectively.

_Christ's death and resurrection has been compared to the three-fold aspect of the Sun: its setting, nocturnal journey, and rising. Yet, Osiris also reputedly rose in living triumph at the end of three days following his death; and, because of his name, Osiris could conceivably have been thought of as "the young sun." So too Brahma. But neither was in fact the Sun; both were associated with Saturn.

_[[A]] passage in the Apocalypse [of John] suggests the Osirian Mysteries": I am the Living One; and I became dead, and lo! I am alive for ever and ever. The "very title, the Living One, is one of the great titles of Osiris, known in Egypt as Asar-ankhti, i.e., Osiris the Living One."

_From the Sayings of Jesus, we have the following statement: Raise the stone and there thou shalt find me, Split the wood and there I am.

_Harris [[commented]] It is absolutely and entirely Osirian: the wood to be split is the tree in which the coffin of Osiris was ensconced at Byblos, round which Isis flitted like a swallow, until the king of the land, perceiving something unusual, had the tree cut down and made into a house pillar from which Isis excised her husband [[Osiris]].

_[[Similar to Osiris]] the death and resurrection of Jesus who was crucified upon a cross of wood (a slight reversal of coffin to tree theme) and then extricated therefrom; was interred within a hewn rock whose mouth was covered by a huge stone (a variant of Osiris' coffin and its stone lid); arose from the dead and left his sepulcher after the stone was "rolled away" to be revealed before his disciples and adorants for one last earthly moment prior to heavenly ascent. The resurrection of Christ is not only a palimpsest of Osirian rebirth but, in his death and renewed life, Jesus became an Osiris as did the ancient Pharaohs.

_Just as Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate and questioned about his "pretensions to kingship" and taunted with the question "what is truth?" so, too, Osiris was called before the gods of Heliopolis (An) to stand trial. ... Osiris, having been declared true of word, or true of voice, by Thoth, went up into heaven, and reigned there as king. He also became judge of the dead ... when they should be tried at the last judgment. Though Jesus was ultimately crucified, Pilate could find no fault with him and "washed his hands of this innocent man's blood." Later, Jesus was even termed the "Sun of Righteousness." Jesus and Osiris both came to preside over a kingdom not of this world; both became the recognized ultimate Judge of the dead....

_At the Last Supper, for example, Jesus offered to his disciples the "bread" which was his body while ... "Osiris is identified with barley."

_"The bread and water of the [Osirian] mysteries are Osiris-Hapi [[Hapi = Nile River = Osiris]] himself," just as the wafer and wine of Christianity are Jesus himself.

_Osiris has been identified with the planet Saturn. Velikovsky and others have [[found Saturn associated with the Great Flood, thus Water]].

_As the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and end (Rev. XXI. 6), he [[Jesus]] is the old and the new or, more specifically, the old sun (Saturn) and the new sun (Sol Invictus). [[I.e. he's the first Sun, Saturn, and the last Sun, the Sun]].

_In certain texts, Jesus does call himself the Sabbath - the day of Saturn.

In my substack, https://cataclysmicearthhistory.substack.com/archive, I discuss the evidence that the Solar System was very different over 4,000 years ago. It was about that time that it changed from its previous arrangement to the present one.

I haven’t checked out the following videos as yet, but they also discuss the similarities between Christian and Pagan views.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Christian+Pagan