Yes, I believe that mixing ancient pagan philosophy with Christianity is terribly wrong. Eating the flesh of God was a practice of the ancient Greco-Roman mystery religions. This is not conspiracy stuff. Even non-religious (people without an axe to grind) historical research show this to be a fact. Surely Christ wouldn’t model his Sacred meal after this… would he? Did he?
Understanding John 6 in context and realizing that Jesus was speaking figuratively eliminates the need to embrace pagan philosophy and practice within the worship of Jesus Christ.
Which mystery relgion there were a number of them. Very little is known about since they left no source material and rituals and liturgies were verbally passed from iniate to iniate.
Was it the Mithraic, Eleusian, Dionysian, Orphic or the ones based on isis or osiris? please clarify.-From the theology website
Fellowship Meals
Sharing meals was a common religious activity in paganism, Judaism, and Christianity, and there are certain similarities in all these meals. The significance of the “communion,” however, was different in each case. The weekly memorial of the death and resurrection of Jesus and the specific note of thanksgiving (Eucharist) in the prayers of consecration provide no pagan counterparts.
from Paul and the mystery religions"The first argument against this view is the logical fallacy of false cause. This fallacy occurs when someone argues that just because two things exist side by side, that one must be the cause of the other. As one theologian has written, the History of Religions School had the tendency “to convert parallels into influences and influences into sources.”{5} Causal connection is much harder to prove than proximity. The mere fact that other religions may have had a god who died and then came back to life in some manner does not mean that this was the source of Christian ideas, even if it can be shown that the apostles knew of this other set of beliefs.
Some scholars, hostile to Christianity, tend to exaggerate, or invent, similarities between Christianity and the mystery religions. British scholar Edwyn Bevan writes:
Of course if one writes an imaginary description of the Orphic mysteries . . . filling in the large gaps in the picture left by our data from the Christian Eucharist, one produces something very impressive. On this plan, you first put in the Christian elements, and then are staggered to find them there.{6}
An example might be the practice of the taurobolium in the cult of Cybele or Great Mother. This initiation rite, in which the blood of a sacrificed bull is allowed to pour over a neophyte, is claimed by some to be the source of baptism in Christianity. Arguments have been made that the language “blood of the lamb” (Rev. 7:14), and “blood of Jesus” (1 Peter 1:2) was borrowed from the language of the taurobolium and criobolium in which a ram was slaughtered. In fact, a better argument can be made that the cult borrowed its language from the Christian tradition.
The cult of Cybele did not use the taurobolium until the second century A.D.; the best available evidence for dating the practice places its origin about one hundred years after Paul wrote his epistles.{7} German scholar Gunter Wagner points out that there was no notion of death and resurrection in the cultic practice.
After noting the change in meaning that the taurobolium experienced over time, scholar Robert Duthoy writes:
It is obvious that this alteration in the taurobolium must have been due to Christianity, when we consider that by A.D. 300 it had become the great competitor of the heathen religions and was known to everyone.{8}
Stop getting your theories and theology from Jack Chick magazines and similar slimeYour theory is complete ****.
