| Aren’t there some striking parallels between the Jesus and Aeneas stories? |
| Someone wrote me saying that they were told that, in Virgil's pre-Christian
text "Aeneid", the hero, Aeneas, was born of a virgin, was the son of God,
and was called "savior" and "king of kings". Aeneas was a mythical
Trojan warrior who appeared in Homer's "Iliad" (among other texts), but was
the central character in Virgil's "Aeneid", which was written between 29
and 19 B.C. I've seached an English translation of the text (first
link below) for the words "savior", "son of God", and "king of kings", and
none of those phrases appear anywhere in the text. The word "virgin"
does appear six times, but never in reference to Aeneas' mother or his birth.
Aeneas was, per mythology, the child of the goddess Aphrodite (aka
Venus) and a human prince named Anchises. The mythology is specific
about the fact that they had sex, since Anchises is afraid that the gods
would destroy him for having slept with a goddess (and in some versions,
Zeus does kill him with a thunderbolt).
Links:
Pre-Christian sources:
General sources: |