Word: paganism
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...foreign to Matthew, who wrote sometime after A.D. 60, a decade or two before Luke. "He would have found it very odd, very goyish, perhaps even offensive," says the University of Texas' White. But that, he contends, is the point. Unlike Matthew, Luke is thought to have been a pagan rather than a Jewish convert to Christianity, writing in fine Greek for other non-Jews and so using references they would find familiar. His version's heraldic announcements, parallel pregnancies, angelic choirs and shepherd witnesses bear a tantalizing resemblance to another literary form, the reverential "lives" being written about pagan...
...Testament scholars have delved deeper into the pagan faiths that competed with early Christianity for followers, Mary's virginity has been challenged from the opposite direction--not as an impossible novelty but as a theme borrowed from the literature of the non-Jewish world. Stephen Patterson of Eden Theological Seminary lists divinely irregular conceptions in stories about not only mythic heroes such as Perseus and Romulus and Remus but also flesh-and-blood figures like Plato, Alexander and Augustus, whose hagiographers reported he was fathered by the god Apollo while his mother slept. "Virgin births were a rather Gentile thing...
...infancy narrative echoes Old Testament themes," he argued. "Are we to think that he accepted all that background but then violated horrendously the stern Old Testament [rule] that God was not a male who mated with women?" Other scholars claim that Luke especially might have been familiar with pagan models closer to the spiritual interaction that today's Christianity believes marked Jesus' conception...
...On” and “Easy Money”) to musically temper the fact that, lyrically, this is an album built from an erudite classical myth (fittingly, perhaps, about a man who can’t make the music he wants) and which dabbles heavily in pagan-bucolic imagery: “The fox chases the rabbit round / the rabbit hides beneath the ground” Cave liltingly observes in “Breathless.” Yet the overall effect is convincing, if at times a little benign; Cave manages to blend convention and allusion seamlessly enough...
...countrymen and their hopes for release from occupation by the hated Romans. This brought him into direct conflict with Rome, and that is why he was killed by the Roman method of crucifixion. The elaborate maze of contradictory theories, doctrines and dogmas formulated centuries later takes up the ancient pagan themes of blood sacrifice as ransom paid to gods who humans felt had been offended. Today, instead of the dualism of a good-vs.-evil world, we need a different perspective and myth to define human error and sin. Roger Payne London...