Is Zeus and Jehovah actually the same person?

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Hello I am a bit confused I believe Zeus and Jehovah are the same person however some people say they are not the same. Can somebody give me clarity on this?


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I do not know if they can be the same, but if we want to know more about the origin of the gods, I believe we should go back in time to the more remote ages, such as in ancient Mesopotamia, the Babylonians.

I think everything comes from there, for even the Sumerian writings on the flood and everything else was written long before there were the first biblical writings.
Unfortunately, with time and wars in that region a lot is being lost.

But that's just my little remark. After all, I think the same god can take different names in different cultures. But I could not tell if that was the case.


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No, they most definitely are not the same.


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Thank you for the answers.


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I was once asked a very similar question. I'm going to paste that question and my response here. Even though the specifics are somewhat different, there's a lot similar and you can follow this chain of analytical steps for any "are these two Deities the same?" question. "Yahweh" is, of course, interchangeable with "Jehovah" here. I think this sort of inquiry comes up often enough that what I'm pasting here should be added to the searchable records of this forum.

Here's the question (because you may appreciate the context when reading parts of the answer):
So I did some research into Cronus and I think he may have inspired the western concepts or notions of ‘God’? Take away the religion and the ‘dogmas’ or social beliefs and you would get a God that resembles Cronus very closely I found.

Regarding when it comes to manifestations like the ‘wise/kind but authoritative white bearded man’ especially? Any thoughts on these findings about his links to the western notion of ‘God’, and have you tried working with him in the past?

So here are the details I found. Cronus in Hellenic myth was the ruler of the golden age, where no people suffered and all death was temporary. There was only kindness, good etc and Astraea also ruled. He only took the ‘shocking’ actions we see when hearing about a prophecy that one of his children would overthrow him.

Anyways so hence he inspired the Roman Saturn, and some stuff from that was used for inspiration in Roman Christianity as you know?

Allegedly he made peace with Zeus or was released from Tartarus Cronus became the god of paradise, the Elysium Fields in the Hellenic afterlife.

It was also said in one source I read that prayer to/worship of Cronus could absolve you of actions that might be seen otherwise as ‘sin’ by the ruling gods, and allow you to be blameless in the afterlife.

These are some findings. Do you think by any chance that Cronus is the one people call ‘God’ in reality?

Some occult researchers already found very strong links between the western depictions of the white bearded male God to Cronus who was depicted basically the same way to worshippers. As in more leninent, ‘forgiving’ and different from ‘Zeus’ (not to be personal here) in certain ways.
Now. Before I get into my answer--because it does bog down into questions of syncretism and the linear human histories between human descriptions of Deities: We have to remember that not every system has a direct corollary in another system. Further, even when there does seem to be some sort of ancestry as between, say, Astarte and Aphrodite, this does not make Them the same Person. It means our ideas about Them have grown out of and influenced each other, but They can still be fully distinct Persons.

Still, that proviso doesn't change the contours of the starting place in these questions. We have to rigorously evaluate the relevant history. Because if there is no linear "descent," so to speak, then the inquiry dies there. A timeline (a visual one, if that's how your brain works) is the best starting point.
The shortest—and most correct—answer to your question is no, based on the evidence. And while a lot of what we do with regards to Gods is subjective, we lose important information and perspective when we forget to use objective evidence in interpreting our ideas.

It is very compelling that the first Christians viewed themselves as an offshoot of Judaism and therefore brought the tradition of El/Yahweh with them. We cannot break that God off into two different beings. They are parallel developments and understandings of the same God, but if you cannot draw historical and developmental parallels between Cronus and El/Yahweh, you will not be able to draw them between Cronus and the Christian God. And when they came into contact with the ancient Greeks, devout followers of Yahweh would have been disgusted by the idea that They might be anything alike. And the Christians never would have thought so in ancient times. In fact, the New Testament carries many references indicating disapproval of Greek pagan religion.


Before I go through the specific points of your message, here's some of the chronology involved in the pre-Christian religions relevant to his question:

1. Ptah appears in the Shabaka Stone, whose text of origin can be credibly dated to 1188 - 1075 BCE, based on the ideas and theology articulated on the stone. However, the cult of Ptah, the creative Demiurge behind Egyption cosmology dates back much further—to the Old Kingdom (spanning c. 2686–2181 BCE.) Ra, however, might Ptah by a little bit, clocking in as one of the primary ancient Egyptian Gods by around 2400s-2300s BCE. He and Ptah were considered rivals; sometimes Ptah is said to have created Ra, and sometimes Ra is said to have been Self-created.
2. There does seem to be an underlying Indo-European divine castration/patricidal/pantheon upheaval myth in the same sense as an underlying flood myth may have existed, but it looooooong predates Cronus. Proto-Indo European myth is likely the earliest source for this. The concept can be recognized in the mention of “former Gods” (Asuras) which appears in the Rigveda, likely written around 1500 and 1200 BCE. The oldest I could find of these stories was The Song of Ullikummi, which was written in the 1500s or 1600s BCE. The name of the specific mytheme is “*(s)kert wersmn diwos” (by means of a cut he created the loftiness of the sky.”)
3. The ancient Egyptian God Ptah is identified with the Semitic El in around 1430 BCE, thus marking the earliest appearance of that particular Semitic God (as opposed to the more generic use of the word “El” as just referring to “a God” or “any God” in the sense of little-g “god” in English today.)
4. Yahweh is identified with El as early as anywhere from 1200-1000 BCE. There are varying theories as to whether the ancient Israelites always considered El and Yahweh to be one Entity. Several very credible schools of thought conflict on that point. But, at the latest, we would see Yahweh identified with El for the ancient Israelites around that timeframe, if not sooner. Still super old.
5. Hesiod's Theogony is dated to about 700 BCE and is our earliest written mention of Cronus. While His story is a descendent of that proto-Indo-European myth, He does not appear in Linear B or A, meaning that for the ancient Greeks, the specific and recognized Entity Cronus did not pre-date 1190 BCE. Zeus, by contrast, does show up in Linear B, giving Him a date of having existed since at least 1450 BCE (likely earlier since His birthplace is traditionally considered to be Crete, placing His roots in the Minoan civilization of c. 2700–1420 BCE.)

What the lines therefore looks like is this:
Utterly unidentifiable ancient beliefs --> Ptah the self-creating God -->Semitic El -->(likely ancient Israelite polytheistic God El) --> monotheistic El/Yahweh OR Yahweh --> Christian worship of Yahweh --> dominant Christian God (meaning this is our final form and until the next change happens, this lineage is a dead end)
Proto-Indo-European mytheme --> Indo-European Mytheme --> Vedic Asuras --> Vedic Indian contact with ancient Greeks --> Cronus myths --> Blending of Cronus/Kronos --> Roman Saturn --> eventual death of ancient Greco/Roman religion because of the dominant Christian religion (meaning this descendent of the mytheme dies and this trail has a dead end)
Based on this chronology alone, Chronus cannot be said to be the original Great God. The absolute earliest indication of worshipping any supernatural Deity is the Löwenmensch figurine or Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel. That figure dates to 37,981-32,981 BCE, and it could have been made for literally any purpose—we simply do not know whether it represents an ancestor, a God or was used in sympathetic magick to give its possessor some kind of power of the lion its figure includes. Are there earlier Gods than the ones on my list above? Probably. I haven’t checked. But this particular constellation is important because it takes in stories related to Cronus’ and Deities associated with Cronus and the Christian God. It is worth noting that there is not overlap between the Gods within the proto-Indo-European mytheme and the Godly Individuals associated with Ptah/El/Yahweh. That is, there is no myth where Ptah goes through the mytheme, and the same is true of both El and Yahweh. Christians might put forth that the war in heaven where Satan is cast out constitutes such a story, but that’s problematic as applied to Yahweh prior to Christianity: This myth only began just before Christianity did, so it is not a longstanding part of the Yahweh tradition. (Only Christians identified “Lucifer” as mentioned in the book of Isaiah as being Satan—the earliest record of their having done so is Jerome/Origen.) Even then, the war of heaven myth does not feature a God rising up against a ruling class of other Gods, but an incumbent God successfully defending His position. Ptah/El/Yahweh myths also lack the patricide and castration aspects.

Your entire line inquiry utterly depends on one unbroken line of one Great God. And that line does not exist. Even the oldest of these Gods first appear in a polytheistic tradition and, of them, only El/Yahweh developed into a monotheistic tradition (Ra temporarily won that honor in Egypt, but Ptah did not.) There is no historical evidence a lone Great God Who benevolently ruled descending to us in an uninterrupted mythic chain. If there were, we would see that historical progression somewhere in this constellation, and we do not. And our earliest candidates for this mytheme, much like Cronus Himself, appear in a polytheistic context.

Speaking of context, it’s very important and impacts your individual points.

For one thing, when you are talking about Something WORSHIPED AS A GOD you CANNOT just "take away the religion and dogmas or social beliefs.” If we did not have those things, there would be no Gods. That is the entire context of our awareness of and conversations about Them. It’s kind of like trying to talk about atoms while setting aside all the chemistry. Not just setting aside talking about the chemistry, but the chemistry itself. Atoms wouldn’t be a thing if the laws of chemistry weren’t also a thing. Gods would not exist in human consciousness outside the context of religion.

Furthermore, In Ancient Greece patricide was FAR more shocking than infanticide. One was fully against the natural order and the other was occasionally an act of devotion or to ward off bad luck. That’s not to say it wasn’t widely distasteful, but patricide was the much bigger deal. So Cronus did not just suddenly make an evil decision when He heard a prophecy, making that His “fall.” His death at his children's hands was viewed by Ancient Greeks as a direct and just result of killing Ouranos. The Killing Ouranos is what sealed his fate.

Also, he did not "inspire" Saturn. Saturn was, for once, an indigenous Latin/Roman God who was accidentally identified with Cronus over the confusing conflation with Kronos (the time God.)

Nothing about Roman paganism was "used for inspiration in Roman Christianity." When it first became dominant, the early Roman church co-opted and re-branded what they couldn't stamp out. They borrowed Saturnalia and famously re-packaged it for Christmas. We don’t see that close identification with Saturn until the Renaissance, which was big on using Classical symbolism to point back to the monolithic religious truth as it existed in Europe at that time. This is the next step removed from the Cronus/Kronos conflation (which conflation is discussed here: https://www.waggish.org/2013/father-tim ... nd-kronos/.)

Insofar as we see accounts of Cronus' fate after the Titan/Olympian wars…there’s chronology and context for this too.

1. Hesiod has Him going to Tartarus in Theogony in 700 BCE. The work is a large-scale synthesis of a vast variety of local Greek traditions concerning the gods, organized as a narrative that tells how they came to be and how they established permanent control over the Cosmos. It is the first known Greek mythical cosmogony. In formal terms it is a hymn invoking Zeus and the Muses: parallel passages between it and the much shorter Homeric Hymn to the Muses make it clear that the Theogony developed out of a tradition of hymnic preludes with which an ancient Greek rhapsode would begin his performance at poetic competitions. It is necessary to see the Theogony not as the definitive source of Greek mythology, but rather as a snapshot of a dynamic tradition that happened to crystallize when Hesiod formulated the myths he knew—and to remember that the traditions have continued evolving since that time.

Therefore, Theogony contains devotional and religious elements that would try to choose what Hesiod considered the most universal takes on the stories he was telling (there was a big push to systematize and universalize things in Greece at this time.) Since it is written *to* Zeus, Hesiod really wouldn’t lose anything by writing about Zeus’ mercy to Cronus if he believed that version of things. Given the chronology above, it seems likely to assume that Cronus was NOT viewed as someone worth feeling positive about by the majority of Greeks in Hesiod's time. There are no surviving remains of any temple to Cronus and one mention by Pausanias (CE 110 – c. 180) of His having one in Athens. So it is unlikely that Cronus’ happy ending in Elysium became prominent until rather later on.
2. Homeric Hymn 3 in 522 BCE has him going to Tartarus. It was likely composed for performance at the unusual double festival held by Polycrates of Samos to honor Apollo of Delos and of Delphi, so it is a devotional work honoring a God whose mythology in no way supported many connections to Cronus, and none of those connections would have been complimentary to Chronos since Apollo didn’t have much in the way of a strong chthonic tradition.
3. Pindar is VERY pious relative to other ancient Greek poets. He takes care to show a lot of reverence—more so than Homer, for instance.
He selects and revises traditional myths so as not to diminish the dignity and majesty of the gods. Such revisionism was not unique. Xenophanes had castigated Homer and Hesiod for the misdeeds they ascribed to gods, such as theft, adultery and deception, and Pythagoras had envisioned those two poets being punished in Hades for blasphemy. A subtle example of Pindar's approach can be found in his treatment of the myth of Apollo's rape of the nymph Cyrene.[58] As the god of the Delphic oracle, Apollo is all-knowing, yet in keeping with his anthropomorphic nature he seeks information about the nymph from a third party, in this case the centaur Chiron. Chiron however affirms the god's omniscience with an elegant compliment, as if Apollo had only pretended to be ignorant: "You, Sire, who know the appointed end of all..." Apollo's abduction of the nymph is not presented as a shameful act. Pindar's gods are above such ethical issues and it is not for men to judge them by ordinary human standards. Indeed, the finest breeds of men resulted from divine passions: "For Pindar a mortal woman who is loved by a god is an outstanding lesson in divine favours handsomely bestowed".
Pindar in Pythian 3 (475 BCE) has Cronus going to Elysium in a victory oath to Horton of Syracuse for winning a horse race. Given that the focus of the ode is on Asclepius and not Cronus, Cronus is both performing a poetic/literary function and getting Pindarian reverential treatment.
4. Orpheus in the 200s or 100s BCE has Him imprisoned in the cave of Nyx (devotional works with the same religious concerns borne of a tradition of performative oral history as Hesiod’s and the Homeric Hymn’s traditions.) It’s a fairly ambivalent fate. Being imprisoned in Night’s cave isn’t exactly a place that screams “reward,” although Nyx was said to have reared Cronus. So, He had a Friend of sorts. At any rate, it represents yet another Elysium-free tradition.


He becomes a king of Latium in The Aeneid, but since that's a Roman work, it would be all about the Romans' friendly view of Saturn and Rome (and playing up anything favorable to them) rather than representing anything about Cronus Himself.

So, while there does seem to be an underlying proto-Indo-European mytheme that weaves in and out of Cronus’ story and indicates He’s properly ancient, there is absolutely no unbroken chain (or even a reasonably reconstructable chain) between how His identity was viewed and how El/Yahweh (and, therefore, ultimately the Christian God)’s identity was viewed. Neither started out as the Great God, therefore casting doubt on historic probability of a Great God tradition sitting at the base of both of them—Both were among Equals at the beginning. Both developed independently of Each Other, not sharing any significant myths, and not along the same lines at all, and Cronus never did enjoy either the monotheistic or even Great God status achieved and sustained by El/Yahweh.

There is no evidence that He was ever viewed as a contemporary “King of the Gods” either, but always ever viewed has having been so at some point in the past—that is, from the moment of Him hitting the mainstream mythic scene, that story was already in the past. In a matter of speaking, He was born with it upon entering the human consciousness. Up through the fifties it was thought that He might have been the God King for an indigenous people’s pantheon until the Greeks bust onto their scene, but since he doesn’t show up in Linear A or B it’s no longer a credible position.

Essentially, everything you are viewing as a connection between Cronus and the Christian God is a byproduct of the Renaissance fashion of using Classical imagery to elevate its own contemporary themes and values.
I think when there IS a linear relationship between two Deities (and I am not remotely suggesting there is one between Yahweh and Zeus,) you then have to ask how the two cultures believing in Each would have viewed each other's Deity and His identity in relation to their Own. Which is a whole other set of considerations.

Every single time a YouTube video pops up with a theory about how all these Individuals are really just one Individual, this is the way their claims should be evaluated.

Given the various chronological, geographic and cultural considerations involved in the big picture of this question with Zeus and Yahweh, I would echo the others in saying, "Probably not."


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