>>19470754>>19470759Speaking of which, the story about Mary being a prostitute who became pregnant by a Roman soldier called Panther and Jesus being a king, but a king who was humiliated and sacrificed on the Cross is reminiscent of the Mesopathamic religious tradition of the Holy Whore and the Sacred Replacing/Sacrificed King who gave rise to the story of Moloch and Baal.
>The Babylonians also held an annual festival called Sacaea, which went for five days and ended with a resurrection ritual where a human sacrifice taking on the role of the king, who had come to represent a dying god, was whipped and then crucified>“According to the historian Berosus, who as a Babylonian priest spoke with ample knowledge, there was annually celebrated in Babylon a festival called the Sacaea... During these five days masters and servants changed places, the servants giving orders and the masters obeying them. A prisoner condemned to death was dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed to issue whatever commands he pleased, to eat, drink, and enjoy himself, and to lie with the king’s concubines. But at the end of the five days he was stripped of his royal robes, scourged, and crucified." —The Golden Bough, James G. Frazer, vol I, p226>Another annual Babylonian festival, which went for twelves days in December, was called Zagmuk. It involved sacred prostitution rites using priestesses from the Temple of Venus in Babylon representing Ishtar, who would have ritualistic sex with the king, representing the dying god Tammuz, who would then be killed afterwards. Though they would come to use a substitution sacrifice in the place of the king to circumvent having to ordain a new leader annually>So we have three religious traditions happening in Babylon and closely associated with Ishtar around 2 BC:>A ritual reenactment of a resurrection through baptism>A ritual of death and resurrection using a human sacrifice who is whipped and then crucified 