"Our bible teacher will be pastor doug hamp." seriously..... I suspect you brought up Zeitgeist to discredit what I've added to the topic. What concerns me about hamp's analysis is, he keeps asking what is the source for the pagan claims? His key point is the pagan stories were copied from the New testament, turning the argument on its head. But without the internet how did the people in North Scandinavia, or India, or Tibet, or Myanmar learn about the new testament so quickly? Printing was only invented in about 1050.... in China!
Hamp says at one point, "If there's a source [for pagan events matching christian events] that happens after the time of the New Testament, it really has no relevance because we can easily claim that they were copying the new testament, so you have to have some kind of a primary source before the time of the new testament... and there is no such thing."
However, Hamp is using the new testament contrary to his own argument. He's using it as an authoritative document of facts, even tho it, too, was written well after the events it refers to. The one historian who refers to the actual existence of "jesus", namely Tacitus, also post-dated the life of the alleged "jesus".
You'll recall, "jesus" was born in nazareth, when a census was being taken. The Romans were obviously active in recording things associated with life in their time. It's quite extraordinary that 30 years later, when the alleged execution of "jesus" occurred- an apparently huge public event- NOTHING was written about it....! Amazing.....
Hamp's systematic rebuttal of all the pagan myths ignores the fact that there were so many of them, so many duplications of them, from different parts of the world, and, despite claiming the source of them as being post-"jesus", they have been sourced to pre-christian times, eg., Norse pagan mythology arose from Iceland, where the oral tradition stemming from the pre-Christian inhabitants of the island was collected and recorded in manuscripts. Furthermore, Encyclopedia Britannica records, "The fullest and most important source of myths about the origin of the gods is the Theogony of Hesiod (c. 700 bc)." http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/244670/Greek-mythology
700 BC. The cornerstone of Hamp's argument is demolished, surely??? He continually says, there's no record of pagan mythology before the new testament was written. He could've just checked an encyclopedia....
"and those claims are true when applied to pagan/christianity"
So, that means "jesus" is a construct of pagan religions, adapted by the christian church for its own motives.... surely?
