Just a bias of mine, I guess. I re-read the article and it has only one offhand unsupported mention of our topic - Mithra:
This brings to mind the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Gods of Babylon and of the whole of Nearer Asia; for example, Tammuz, Mithras, Attis, Melkart, and Adonis, Dionysus, the Cretan Zeus, and the Egyptian Osiris.
But in reviewing it, I notice it actually does argue against another issue (which I had chosen not to get into) raised at the end of your last post (the vexen citation) which argued that the Jewish messiah figure was a leader who was to lead his people to freedom which was very different from the Hellenistic "christs" who were god-kings who died as a sacrificial offering:
"Paul mistook the Jewish "Messiah" to mean the Hellenistic "Christ". This happened before anything was written down; it happened during Paul's conversations with people as he was working through what had happened. A messiah is a person who is a great leader who leads your people to freedom. The title was taken by Jews from Persian culture. A christ is a god-king who dies as an offering to some divine being as a sacrifice in return for prosperity, especially agricultural prosperity.
The positive atheism article argues that Jewish tradition had long had a tradition of a messiah who suffers and dies as a sacrifice like the "christs" of Hellenistic and other traditions. This conflicts with the view of the vexen site as noted above. Here's the positiveatheism sites arguments on the subject:
In this way we understand the 53rd chapter of Isaiah: "Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed...." Here we obviously have to do with a man who dies as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of his people, and by his death benefiting the lives of the others is on that account raised to be a God. Indeed, the picture of the just man suffering, all innocent as he is, itself varies between a human and a divine being.
And now let us enter into the condition of the soul of such an unhappy one, who as "God man" suffers death upon the gibbet, and we understand the words of the 22nd Psalm: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? ... All they that see me laugh me to scorn: they shoot out the lip, they shake the lip, saying, Commit thyself unto the Lord, let him deliver him: ... I am poured out like water. And all my bones are out of joint: ... They look and stare upon me: they part my garments among them, and upon my vesture do they cast lots...."
When the poet of the psalms wished to describe helplessness in its direst extremity, before his eyes there came the picture of a man, who, hanging upon the gibbet, calls upon God's aid, while round about him the people gloat over his sufferings, which are to save them; and the attendants who had taken part in the sacrifice divide among themselves the costly garments with which the God-king had been adorned.
.....
The view that the idea of a suffering and dying Messiah was unknown to the Jews cannot accordingly be maintained. Indeed, in Daniel ix. 26 mention is made of a dying Christ. We saw above that among the Jews of the post-exilic period the thought of the Messiah was associated with the personality of Cyrus. Now of Cyrus the story goes that this mighty Persian king suffered death upon the gibbet by the order of the Scythian queen Tomyris. [36] But in Justin the Jew Trypho asserts that the Messiah will suffer and die a death of violence. [37] Indeed, what is more, the Talmud looks upon the death of the Messiah (with reference to Isaiah liii.) as an expiatory death for the sins of his people. From this it appears "that in the second century after Christ, people were, at any rate in certain circles of Judaism, familiar with the idea of a suffering Messiah, suffering too as an expiation for human sins." [38]
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