Mortal Man,
My reply to your opening post continues.
As post-Pauline leaders with new agendas took over, Christianity began to splinter into competing sects, largely divided along social status lines. Groups of elite Gnostics perpetuated Paul’s Orphic disdain for the flesh (Romans 7:18-8:18) by rejecting any idea of a physical resurrection. Their chief goal was to become free forever from the taint of matter and the shackles of the body, and to return to the heavenly realm as pure spirits. The uneducated masses however, were disturbed by the idea of losing their body. They were not impressed by highbrow arguments for a disembodied immortality; they just wanted to get their bodies back, which is what the Jewish sects and pagan cults offered.[6] As the Christian movement spread throughout the ancient world, it bumped up against these neighboring cults with their rival gods and competing mythologies.
Most of the other gods, including the Jewish god, were able to raise people bodily from the dead. Indeed, physical resurrections were all the rage before and during the first century.[7]
The Jewish God was indeed believed to be able to raise people bodily from the dead; this is what the Jews
meant by “resurrection from the dead.” And this is one of the reasons why it is simply not credible for you to claim that Paul did not believe in a bodily, physical resurrection.
On the other hand, Greek philosophy and at least most of Greek religion was skeptical about the resurrection of the body, which is probably the source of the skepticism at Corinth that Paul sought to counter in 1 Corinthians 15. The one primary source you cited in an endnote for pagan belief in resurrection exemplifies nothing of the kind. Cicero refers to Greco-Roman belief in mortals becoming gods, not in mortals dying and then being raised from the dead.
One Greek god in particular, Ἀσκληπιός Σωτήρ (Asclepius the Savior), was so adept at bringing people back from the dead that Hades feared no more dead spirits would come to the underworld.[8] Coincidentally, "Jesus" (properly, Yeshua) means "Savior" in Hebrew.
No, the coincidence is not that
Yeshua meant Savior (actually, “Yahweh is Savior,” as you mention in your note 10) but that Asclepius happened to be called “Savior.” That is a coincidence and nothing more. I don’t think that Mary and Joseph decided to name their son so as to allude to Asclepius!
This fact, combined with Jesus’ reputation as a “fisher of men”, made it only natural for first-century Christians to construct an acronym from the Greek word for “fish” (ΙΧΘΥΣ) in which Jesus, like Asclepius, was assigned the title of “Savior”; i.e., ΙΧΘΥΣ = Ἰησοῦς Χριστός, Θεοῦ Υἱός, Σωτήρ (Jesus Christ, God’s son, Savior). This acrostic became a confession of faith, in conjunction with the “friend or foe” fish symbol adapted from Greek and Roman pagans in response to persecutions, which had commenced under Nero (AD 64-68).
One stubborn little fact: the apostle Paul had already called Jesus “Savior” a decade earlier (Phil. 3:20). This proves that the description of Jesus as Savior, on which you lean so hard to establish a post-Pauline connection between the Christian bodily resurrection doctrine and the pagan Asclepius cult, actually dates too early for your theory to work.
Paul’s reference to Jesus as Savior, not coincidentally, comes in the context of resurrection. He says that Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Phil. 3:21). Note that our present “lowly body” will not be replaced, but will be “transformed…to be like his glorious body.”
As large numbers of lower-class Jews and pagans streamed into the church, bringing their former beliefs along with them, a natural syncretism developed between Yahweh and several other gods.[9] Additionally, many Jewish Christians were of the opinion that Jesus was the earthly manifestation of Yahweh.[10] These two forces combined to imbue Jesus with popular features of several other deities, especially those of Asclepius.
Paul was among those Jewish Christians who viewed Jesus as Yahweh (e.g., 1 Cor. 1:2-9, cf. Joel 2:32; 1 Cor. 8:4-6, cf. Deut. 6:4; Phil. 2:9-11, cf. Is. 45:23; etc.). He did so in a context of stiff resistance to syncretism (e.g., 1 Cor. 8-10). In retrospect, Christians saw the name Jesus as profoundly revelatory of his divine identity as well as his divine, redemptive work (e.g., Matt. 1:20-23). But these ideas were present at the very beginning of the Christian movement, as documented famously by such scholars as Larry Hurtado and Richard Bauckham.
You go on to compare an artistic representation of Jesus’ healing of a sick girl with a fourth-century BC stele that, you say, represents Asclepius healing a sick girl. This comparison is rather weak. The picture of Jesus healing a sick girl depicts Jesus raising Jairus’s little girl from the dead. This healing is narrated in the Gospel of Mark (5:21-43), written no more than about forty years after the ministry of Jesus, and contains various indications of historicity. These include the reference to the name of Jairus (for which no plausible explanation can be given for Mark or his source inventing the name), the unlikelihood of Christians in the 60s or 70s making up a story about Jesus helping a synagogue official, and Mark’s quotation of Jesus’ exact Aramaic words
Talitha kum (5:41). The stele dates from roughly eight centuries after the time of Asclepius, if he even existed (i.e., it would date from about
20 times later than Asclepius than Mark dates after Jesus). It appears to picture Asclepius attending to a woman, not a little girl; the woman is sick or infirm, not dead (as indicated by the fact that she is pictured laying on her side); and Asclepius appears to be either physically examining her or administering some sort of physical treatment to her.
It is easy to draw “parallels” between Jesus and almost any religious or mythological figure, as long as one is selective, uses Christian-sounding language to describe the other figure, finesses the narratives to make them fit neatly, and ignores the positive evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Jesus and the Buddha both were of a royal line; each had a revelation under a tree; each had disciples; each spoke in often enigmatic sayings; each challenged the religious status quo of their culture; etc. Isn’t this fun? But it has absolutely nothing to do with the origin of the Jesus story. Asclepius has the merit of being a significant figure in Hellenistic religion in Jesus’ part of the world, but the parallels still are not good evidence for the claim that Christian beliefs about Jesus were significantly indebted to Asclepius devotion.