The Rise And Fall Of The Christian Myth

Author : Burton L. Mack
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 320 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2017-02-07
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780300227895

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The Rise and Fall of the Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack Pdf

This book is the culmination of a lifelong scholarly inquiry into Christian history, religion as a social institution, and the role of myth in the history of religions. Mack shows that religions are essentially mythological and that Christianity in particular has been an ever-changing mythological engine of social formation, from Roman times to its distinct American expression in our time. The author traces the cultural influence of the Christian myth that has persisted for sixteen hundred years but now should be much less consequential in our social and cultural life, since it runs counter to our democratic ideals. We stand at a critical impasse: badly splintered by conflicting groups pursuing their own social interests, a binding common myth needs to be established by renewing a truly cohesive national and international story rooted in our democratic and egalitarian origins, committed to freedom, equality, and vital human values.

Author : Jeffrey Burton Russell
Publisher : InterVarsity Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 51,5 Mb
Release : 2012-05-15
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780830866878

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Exposing Myths About Christianity by Jeffrey Burton Russell Pdf

Renowned historian, Jeffrey Burton Russell, famous for his studies of medieval history, turns to the serious questions that confront Christianity in contemporary culture. Russell examines a wide array of common mispercerptions, characterizations, stereotypes, caricatures and outright myths about Christianity that circulate heavily within today?s society, and are even believed by many Christians. In a succinct and engaging manner, Russell discusses these errors and provides thoughtful, even-handed, carefully researched and sharp-witted responses. The author sets the record straight against the New Atheists and other cultural critics who charge Christianity with being outdated, destructive, superstitious, unenlightened, racist, colonialist, based on fabrication, and other significant false accusations.

Author : Candida Moss
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 247 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2013-03-05
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780062104540

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The Myth of Persecution by Candida Moss Pdf

In The Myth of Persecution, Candida Moss, a leading expert on early Christianity, reveals how the early church exaggerated, invented, and forged stories of Christian martyrs and how the dangerous legacy of a martyrdom complex is employed today to silence dissent and galvanize a new generation of culture warriors. According to cherished church tradition and popular belief, before the Emperor Constantine made Christianity legal in the fourth century, early Christians were systematically persecuted by a brutal Roman Empire intent on their destruction. As the story goes, vast numbers of believers were thrown to the lions, tortured, or burned alive because they refused to renounce Christ. These saints, Christianity's inspirational heroes, are still venerated today. Moss, however, exposes that the "Age of Martyrs" is a fiction—there was no sustained 300-year-long effort by the Romans to persecute Christians. Instead, these stories were pious exaggerations; highly stylized rewritings of Jewish, Greek, and Roman noble death traditions; and even forgeries designed to marginalize heretics, inspire the faithful, and fund churches. The traditional story of persecution is still taught in Sunday school classes, celebrated in sermons, and employed by church leaders, politicians, and media pundits who insist that Christians were—and always will be—persecuted by a hostile, secular world. While violence against Christians does occur in select parts of the world today, the rhetoric of persecution is both misleading and rooted in an inaccurate history of the early church. Moss urges modern Christians to abandon the conspiratorial assumption that the world is out to get Christians and, rather, embrace the consolation, moral instruction, and spiritual guidance that these martyrdom stories provide.

Author : Stephen Greenblatt
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 41,8 Mb
Release : 2017-09-12
Category : History
ISBN : 9780393634587

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The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve by Stephen Greenblatt Pdf

“Endlessly illuminating and a sheer pleasure to read.” —Jack Miles, author of God: A Biography Daring to take the great biblical account of human origins seriously, but without credulity The most influential story in Western cultural history, the biblical account of Adam and Eve is now treated either as the sacred possession of the faithful or as the butt of secular jokes. Here, acclaimed scholar Stephen Greenblatt explores it with profound appreciation for its cultural and psychological power as literature. From the birth of the Hebrew Bible to the awe-inspiring contributions of Augustine, Dürer, and Milton in bringing Adam and Eve to vivid life, Greenblatt unpacks the story’s many interpretations and consequences over time. Rich allegory, vicious misogyny, deep moral insight, narrow literalism, and some of the greatest triumphs of art and literature: all can be counted as children of our “first” parents.

Author : Arthur Drews
Publisher : Litres
Page : 407 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2021-12-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9785040829743

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The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews Pdf

Author : John M. Robertson
Publisher : Jazzybee Verlag
Page : 491 pages
File Size : 50,6 Mb
Release : 2023-01-10
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9783849663056

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Christianity and Mythology by John M. Robertson Pdf

The three treatises making up this volume stand for a process of inquiry which began to take written form in the 1870s. It set out with a certain scientific principle and a certain historical purpose: the principle being that Christian origins should be studied with constant precaution against the common assumption that all myths of action and doctrine must be mere accretions round the biography of a great teacher, broadly figured by "the" Gospel Jesus; while the practical purpose was to exhibit " The Rise of Christianity, Sociologically Considered." To that end thr author was prepared to assume a primitive cult, arising in memory of a teacher with twelve disciples. But the first independent explorations, the first rigorous attempts to identify the first Jesuists, led to a series of fresh exposures of myth. " Jesus of Nazareth " turned out to be a compound of an already composite Gospel Jesus, an interposed Jesus the Nazarite, and a superimposed Jesus born at Nazareth. And none of the three aspects equated with the primary Jesus of Paul. Each in turn was, in Paul's words, " another Jesus whom we have not preached." And the Twelve Apostles were demonstrably mythical.

Author : Markus Vinzent
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 55,7 Mb
Release : 2022-12-31
Category : Bibles
ISBN : 9781009290487

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Resetting the Origins of Christianity by Markus Vinzent Pdf

How do we know what we know about the origins of the Christian religion? Neither its founder, nor the Apostles, nor Paul left any written accounts of their movement. The witnesses' testimonies were transmitted via successive generations of copyists and historians, with the oldest surviving fragments dating to the second and third centuries - that is, to well after Jesus' death. In this innovative and important book, Markus Vinzent interrogates standard interpretations of Christian origins handed down over the centuries. He scrutinizes - in reverse order - the earliest recorded sources from the sixth to the second century, showing how the works of Greek and Latin writers reveal a good deal more about their own times and preoccupations than they do about early Christianity. In so doing, the author boldly challenges understandings of one of the most momentous social and religious movements in history, as well as its reception over time and place.

Author : David Sehat
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 43,9 Mb
Release : 2011-01-14
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0199793115

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The Myth of American Religious Freedom by David Sehat Pdf

In the battles over religion and politics in America, both liberals and conservatives often appeal to history. Liberals claim that the Founders separated church and state. But for much of American history, David Sehat writes, Protestant Christianity was intimately intertwined with the state. Yet the past was not the Christian utopia that conservatives imagine either. Instead, a Protestant moral establishment prevailed, using government power to punish free thinkers and religious dissidents. In The Myth of American Religious Freedom, Sehat provides an eye-opening history of religion in public life, overturning our most cherished myths. Originally, the First Amendment applied only to the federal government, which had limited authority. The Protestant moral establishment ruled on the state level. Using moral laws to uphold religious power, religious partisans enforced a moral and religious orthodoxy against Catholics, Jews, Mormons, agnostics, and others. Not until 1940 did the U.S. Supreme Court extend the First Amendment to the states. As the Supreme Court began to dismantle the connections between religion and government, Sehat argues, religious conservatives mobilized to maintain their power and began the culture wars of the last fifty years. To trace the rise and fall of this Protestant establishment, Sehat focuses on a series of dissenters--abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, socialist Eugene V. Debs, and many others. Shattering myths held by both the left and right, David Sehat forces us to rethink some of our most deeply held beliefs. By showing the bad history used on both sides, he denies partisans a safe refuge with the Founders.

Author : Burton L. Mack
Publisher : Burns & Oates
Page : 248 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Religion
ISBN : UOM:39015053530294

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The Christian Myth by Burton L. Mack Pdf

Mack rejects depictions of Jesus that have emerged from the quest for the historical Jesus--peasant teacher, revolutionary leader, mystical visionary or miracle-working prophet--on the grounds that they are based on a priori assumptions about Jesus, and are therefore contradictory. In addition, he argues, these portrayals are untrue to the many images of Jesus produced by the early Christians. Using systematic analysis, Mack seeks to describe and understand the cultural and anthropological influences on the conception and adoption of Christian myths and rituals.

Author : Burton L. Mack
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2019-10-23
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781532679544

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Critical Times for America by Burton L. Mack Pdf

Human societies live and breathe through their myths. A myth is not a simple story; it is the complex social reasoning of a people, a way of making sense of the world. Burton Mack calls this reasoning "social logic," and as a master of ancient Rome and the rise of Christianity, he knows that the Western experience has been embedded in the Christian myth as its "big picture" narrative. But what happens when the big picture becomes fragmented and when an old myth loses its ability to function in a new world order? Mack is convinced that at the heart of contemporary political crises lies the need to create a new myth beyond the grand narratives and lingering fragments history has given us. Mack invites his reader to think historically about the present, and imaginatively about the future, in this important book about ourselves.

Author : Simon J. Joseph
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 249 pages
File Size : 42,9 Mb
Release : 2022-12-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000822120

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A Social History of Christian Origins by Simon J. Joseph Pdf

A Social History of Christian Origins explores how the theme of the Jewish rejection of Jesus – embedded in Paul’s letters and the New Testament Gospels – represents the ethnic, social, cultural, and theological conflicts that facilitated the construction of Christian identity. Readers of this book will gain a thorough understanding of how a central theme of early Christianity – the Jewish rejection of Jesus – facilitated the emergence of Christian anti-Judaism as well as the complex and multi-faceted representations of Jesus in the Gospels of the New Testament. This study systematically analyses the theme of social rejection in the Jesus tradition by surveying its historical and chronological development. Employing the social-psychological study of social rejection, social identity theory, and social memory theory, Joseph sheds new light on the inter-relationships between myth, history, and memory in the study of Christian origins and the contemporary (re)construction of the historical Jesus. A Social History of Christian Origins is primarily intended for academic specialists and students in ancient history, biblical studies, New Testament studies, Religious Studies, Classics, as well as the general reader interested in the beginnings of Christianity.

Author : Glenn T. Stanton
Publisher : Worthy Books
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2019-06-18
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9781546015161

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The Myth of the Dying Church by Glenn T. Stanton Pdf

False news is not limited to politics. There is a pervasive myth circulating that says the church is dying. GLENN STANTON rebuts that fake news and paints a truly positive picture of America's churches. Much has been made of the so-called "nones" - those who claim no spiritual affiliation. Media has spun the nones into a chicken-little the sky is falling narrative. The nones are an infamously difficult subsection to understand and there is a lot of false information on them. Glenn Stanton believes the nones story has become overblown and has become "a thing" due to curiosity and repetition of their supposed irreligiosity. THE MYTH OF THE DYING CHURCH digs deeply into the research concerning spirituality in America and reveals the hope and truth about the vitality and future of the church.

Author : Jan N. Bremmer
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2003-09-02
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 9781134768226

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The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife by Jan N. Bremmer Pdf

Belief in the afterlife is still very much alive in Western civilisation, even though the truth of its existence is no longer universally accepted. Surprisingly, however, heaven, hell and the immortal soul were all ideas which arrived relatively late in the ancient world. Originally Greece and Israel - the cultures that gave us Christianity - had only the vaguest ideas of an afterlife. So where did these concepts come from and why did they develop? In this fascinating, learned, but highly readable book, Jan N. Bremmer - one of the foremost authorities on ancient religion - takes a fresh look at the major developments in the Western imagination of the afterlife, from the ancient Greeks to the modern near-death experience.

Author : Armin Navabi
Publisher : Atheist Republic
Page : 64 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2014-10-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 8210379456XXX

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Why There Is No God by Armin Navabi Pdf

"Science can't explain the complexity and order of life; God must have designed it to be this way.""God's existence is proven by scripture.""There's no evidence that God doesn't exist.""God has helped me so much. How could none of it be true?""Atheism has killed more people than religion, so it must be wrong!" How many times have you heard arguments like these for why God exists? Why There Is No God: Simple Responses to 20 Common Arguments for the Existence of God provides simple, easy-to-understand counterpoints to the most popular arguments made for the existence of God. Each chapter presents a concise explanation of the argument, followed by a response illustrating the problems and fallacies inherent in it. Whether you're an atheist, a believer or undecided, this book offers a solid foundation for building your own inquiry about the concept of God.

Author : Rogene A. Buchholz
Publisher : AuthorHouse
Page : 598 pages
File Size : 43,7 Mb
Release : 2019-11-13
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9781728333915

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An Arrogant Nation That Creates Its Own Reality: by Rogene A. Buchholz Pdf

Americans seem prone to create their own reality in situations that have faced them over the past several years and this arrogance cost the country dearly. Three events stand out as prime examples this arrogance. The first of these events was the war in Iraq which was based on the false reality that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction and had ties to terrorist organizations. The second example was the financial crisis of 2008 which was precipitated by the invention of new and complicated investment vehicles. The last example is the current Trump administration which was filled with falsehoods during the campaign and his first years in office, such that one could not believe anything that this administration said. This book is going to focus on religious reasons for this situation as I believe that it is the Christian religion that is largely at fault for this condition. It is religion that has set up most Americans to believe our leaders when they outright lie and claim to know things beyond what the evidence will support and create a false reality that eventually comes crashing down to disrupt American life. If our nation is ever going to be great it must quit living in a fantasy world and give up a belief in magic as far as its future is concerned. Decisions in government and business must be based on reality as it is and not on what we arrogantly think we can create. The two go together as the more we try and create our own reality the less able we are to come to grips with the reality that actually exists. The place to start is by recognizing the role the Christian religion has played in this phenomenon and letting go of the fantasies that comprise this religion and live a secular life that finds meaning and purpose in this world rather than in some hereafter. We will not successfully deal with all the problems with which we are faced and have a political and economic system that works for everyone until this happens.