Especially the word “testament” used: A governor crucifying some thieves, a soldier being placed in the grave so that no one could steal the body, the crucified bodies disappearing. “The missing body illustrates that the absent corpse is now a god or godlike with or without explicit explanation.” The works of Robyn Faith Walsh, who…

Barry Powell, “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (Oxford, 2014), theorizes that written Greek came into being for the purpose of putting these remarkable oral epics into written form. Some clever people among the seafaring and trading Greeks, and the equally seafaring and trading Phoenicians (who had a consonantal phonetic alphabet), got together to devise a system to…

Richard Miller, comparing the translation narratives of Jesus and Romulus

The text refers to a πνεῦμα πύθωνα (pneuma pythona) which is translated in the NSRV as a “spirit of divination”. This is a reference to “the Python” which was a mythical monster slain by Apollo, and which became used firstly as the title of a famous oracle of Apollo, and then as a general name…

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity

Ancient Egypt Investigated: 101 Important Questions and Intriguing Answers (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), Thomas Schneider: Ever since Egyptian texts became widely known in the second half of the nineteenth century, scholars began searching for ancient Egyptian parallels to biblical texts. At first, their goal was to confirm the scripture, while later it was to situate the…