Excellent points, Neo: "The Golden Bough assembled all manner of stories of dying and rising gods, but none of them claimed to take on the sins of the world for the salvation of men, which was a fly in the ointment of the book's attempt to "archetypize" the Gospel. In the same way, the story of Noah has particularities that are indifferent in, say, Gilgamesh: God is sickened by vice, wants to start fresh, chooses the most righteous partriarch to assemble a remnant to save, and so on......."
Still, 'taking on the sins of the World' is a New Testament development, while the Flood is an Old Testament story.
As far as the paradigm shift from a vengeful afterlife, to the possibility of a paradisical afterlife... we can clearly trace the evolution of these changes from the Indian Gods (say: Krisna)... through the Babylonian and Assyrian (Ahura Mazda, born in a manger, new star in the East, three wise men presenting gifts at his birth, promise of a reward in the afterlife for 'good living', all some 1000 BC) --- occurring at a time when Jews were captive in Babylon, and later migrated back to their ancestral lands after the fall of the regime freed them from captivity... to the Old and then New Testaments which re-tell many of these same, or similar, stories.
Of course, there are many parallels in so-called 'secular literature' also... as the Great Flood story in Gilgamesh which we talked about, itself an echo of Indian stories. (Or perhaps they echo each other....) |
