Marduk and Mismanaged Myth
So, I'm sure all of you are wondering what happens when myth goes bad.
Well, wonder no longer.
The above link will take you to a sight about "Babylonian Mystery Religion," which is a theory that attempts to unite Marduk (a Babylonian deity, of no relation to our third guest speaker, at least to my knowledge) with Mars, Nimrod, Indra (of Hindi fame), Poseidon, and many (okay, pretty much all) other mythic deities.
The problem with this? It's complete and total bunk. Not a word of truth to it.
It's goal is not so much to unite all peoples or all myths, but rather to suggest that all mythic deities were created from the same one, and that one was invented by Satan in order to corrupt the Children of God. They second major goal is to show that Catholicism is a false religion because of the veneration of the Virgin Mary. The entire premise depends on both bad theology, bad history, and bad philology.
All chronology is thrown to the wayside, and certain gods are ignored (Ares is never mentioned, but rather the author skips straight to Mars). The suggestion that the current image of the Blessed Virgin (one which has historical records of at least fifteen hundred years)
are in any way related to Nimrod and Semiramis are completely absurd, not to mention unsupportable.
The weight of the argument almost solely depends on a single traight: the M-R form of consonants found in Nimrod, Mars, and other names (it is in Mary, but that would not be mentioned because the author is likely a fundementalist and the virgin birth of Jesus is still central to their denomination of Christianity).
Any one familiar with Semitic linguistics knows that there is a linguistic rule involving triple consonants, and various vowels. For example the consonant combination p-r-d is used in Hebrew for words related to 'divide' (thus it is said that p-r-d means 'divide'). The foundational work of the BMR position is supportable, eccept that, while Babylonian is a Semitic language, Greek is not. In fact, Greek (and Latin) belongs to an entirely different family of languages (the Indo-European family), which does not have the tri-consonant root.
In a similarily related position, I need to offer one linguistic correction to what was disguised in class a few days ago (Monday, I believe).
A correlation was made between Pater (the Greek word for father) and the name Peter (from the word for rock). The issue is, both of these words develiped independently of each other, the first from *pəter, the later from some form of petros. While there is a similarity there, there is no linguistic support for uniting them, particularly because Peter, as a name and as the head of the Church, appeared long after both Pater and Petros were solidly ingrained in the language (plus, Christ spoke Aramaic, and said Kephas, not Peter, as is evident in the Gospel of St. John 1:42).
Mischief Managed
Well, wonder no longer.
The above link will take you to a sight about "Babylonian Mystery Religion," which is a theory that attempts to unite Marduk (a Babylonian deity, of no relation to our third guest speaker, at least to my knowledge) with Mars, Nimrod, Indra (of Hindi fame), Poseidon, and many (okay, pretty much all) other mythic deities.
The problem with this? It's complete and total bunk. Not a word of truth to it.
It's goal is not so much to unite all peoples or all myths, but rather to suggest that all mythic deities were created from the same one, and that one was invented by Satan in order to corrupt the Children of God. They second major goal is to show that Catholicism is a false religion because of the veneration of the Virgin Mary. The entire premise depends on both bad theology, bad history, and bad philology.
All chronology is thrown to the wayside, and certain gods are ignored (Ares is never mentioned, but rather the author skips straight to Mars). The suggestion that the current image of the Blessed Virgin (one which has historical records of at least fifteen hundred years)
are in any way related to Nimrod and Semiramis are completely absurd, not to mention unsupportable.
The weight of the argument almost solely depends on a single traight: the M-R form of consonants found in Nimrod, Mars, and other names (it is in Mary, but that would not be mentioned because the author is likely a fundementalist and the virgin birth of Jesus is still central to their denomination of Christianity).
Any one familiar with Semitic linguistics knows that there is a linguistic rule involving triple consonants, and various vowels. For example the consonant combination p-r-d is used in Hebrew for words related to 'divide' (thus it is said that p-r-d means 'divide'). The foundational work of the BMR position is supportable, eccept that, while Babylonian is a Semitic language, Greek is not. In fact, Greek (and Latin) belongs to an entirely different family of languages (the Indo-European family), which does not have the tri-consonant root.
In a similarily related position, I need to offer one linguistic correction to what was disguised in class a few days ago (Monday, I believe).
A correlation was made between Pater (the Greek word for father) and the name Peter (from the word for rock). The issue is, both of these words develiped independently of each other, the first from *pəter, the later from some form of petros. While there is a similarity there, there is no linguistic support for uniting them, particularly because Peter, as a name and as the head of the Church, appeared long after both Pater and Petros were solidly ingrained in the language (plus, Christ spoke Aramaic, and said Kephas, not Peter, as is evident in the Gospel of St. John 1:42).
Mischief Managed
posted by J.M.R. Burgard | 11:36 PM
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