Freethought Nation

Hi Rik

You might like to read Acharya's response to Chris Forbes, where she provides this picture


Egyptian gods Ptah-Osiris-Sokar approach the baby sun god Horus (John Gardner Wilkinson, Manner and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, III p.31)

Robert

Thanks for the picture and link, however those three gods represent death and not birth. Osiris was the god of death in Abydos, Sokar was the god of death in Memphis, and Ptah was the god of Memphis where the old kingdom pyramids and tombs were located. The "son of Sokar" is represented, and that would be Redoudja, not Horus. For more information see:

http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/sokar.htm

Rik

Ptah is not a god of death, he is a creator god, later made syncretic with Amun and Re as part of a trinity, each being a form of the one true invisible god.

Osiris and Sokar (later made syncretic, with Sokar being a form of Osiris's "Ba") are not merely gods of death, they are also gods of rebirth, resurrection, and eternal life.

Moreover, being a god of birth is not necessary at all for the motif, as the three magi were likewise not gods of birth either, unless you have a version of Matthew I'm unaware of.

And since Ptah is a form of Re, he likewise becomes a god of rebirth as well.

Osiris set the precedent, when, after being killed and then resurrected, he ascended to heaven, passed over to the West and entered the Duat, which is located inside the womb of his mother Nut, and thus when he emerged from the Duat, and thus from her womb, he was literally born again.

For anyone to be born again in this tradition of Egyptian theology, they had to become one with, and thus emulate, Osiris. No one was an exception to this. Not even the chief of all gods- Re himself.

Re descends in the West and dies every evening, and in the fifth hour of the night, in the fifth cave of the Duat, he merges with Osiris and they become one being for part of the night. Later, Re merges with his deceased corpse in its form of Khepri and emerges from the Duat, and thus from Nut's womb, born anew, ready to rise from the horizon at dawn. This is all explained by Erik Hornung in his books on the Amduat journey. Since Ptah is also Re, well, there you go.

All the Egyptian deceased had to make this same journey as Re did and merge with Osiris to obtain resurrection and to be born again. The Egyptians already had the doctrine that to have eternal life in heaven you had to be born again millennia before Christianity did.

Sokar is reborn every year on Khoiak 26th (same as one of the birthdays of Horus) which, when the Egyptian Calendar was replaced by the Alexandrian calendar, became the equivalent to December 22nd on the Julian Calendar, which was the date of the winter solstice at the time the New Testament was being written.
This annual rebirth of Sokar is described and portrayed in several Egyptian texts. One of them, if I recall correctly, can be found in the Bremner-Rhind papyrus.

And aside from Sokar, other forms of the Ba of Osiris (and Re and Ptah) are repeatedly born again as well. The Phoenix is a form of the Bas of both Osiris and Re, and is born again every 500 years. The Apis bull is a form of the Bas of both Osiris and Ptah, and it is perpetually born again (and virgin born) when its previous body dies. Etc., etc.

So, even though being a god of birth is not a requirement for parallel to the Matthew story, it is indeed still a quality of all three of the gods depicted above.

Also, another way in which Osiris was born again, literally, was as his son Horus. Horus is the reincarnation of Osiris, and I've seen this attested to by many a scholar and it is evenly explicitly stated in sources like the Pyramid Texts that Osiris IS Horus and that they are one, etc. In the Book of the Creation of the Solar Disk, Horus is seen being born from directly out of the rotting corpse of Osiris.

Moreover, that is NOT Redoudja, and sorry Robert, but it's actually not Horus either, it is the new born Sokar.

But regardless of it not being Horus, it still parallels the motif. Here we have the birth of a divine child on the winter solstice (Khoiak 26/Dec 22 Julian) accompanied by three gods who are also kings.

Temple of Rameses III at Medinet Habu
Priests carry the Barque of Sokar in the Second Court. Sokar Festival Procession.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/11413503@N03/2428037838/

Here's the actual article from the Chris Forbe's refutation:


These 3 Gods are approaching the new baby sun going into the winter solstice. This is a type of blue print for the Christian Nativities along with the midrash and everything else.


I see that you're more or less new to the mythicist position and there's much yet to digest. After reading CiE I'm sure that you'll probably understand the Egyptian connection to Christianity in new ways, especially as concerns Alexandrian influence and connection. There's just so much of it. And mythicism is simply addressed to the study of mythology. It's not addressed to a religious belief, so there are both theist and atheist mythicists.

Here's a few articles which can bring you up to speed on the term and it's usage:

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicist.html

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicism.html

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

A must read article!

THE STAR OF CHRIST IN THE LIGHT OF ASTRONOMY

Extracts:

"Abstract

Centuries of both theologians and astronomers have wondered what the Star of Bethlehem (Matt 2:2, 9) actually was, from miracle to planetary conjunction. Here a history of this search is presented, along with the difficulties the various proposals have had. The natural theories of the Star are found to be a recent innovation, and now almost exclusively maintained by scientists rather than theologians. Current problems with various theories are recognized, as well as general problems with the approach. The interactions between the sciences and religion are categorized and explored.

“‘Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we saw His star in the east and have come to worship Him’… and lo, the star which they had seen in the east went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child was” (Matthew 2:2, 9 NASB).

With these few clauses, the impact of the stellar light known as the Christmas Star, the Star of the Wise Men, or the Star of Bethlehem is impressive, having generated a substantial quantity of literature (Freitag 1979). Presented here is a two-millennia history of the debate about the Star and its relation to the sciences, with emphasis on the last two centuries. Although there were centuries of astrological speculation, this overview shows that naturalistic theories of the Star are a late innovation that began with apologetic attempts in the nineteenth century and not long after left the mainstream of biblical scholarship, leaving mostly astronomers to give credibility to this tale. With this historical background, an assessment of the interactions between religion and science is provided."

"We see unanimously from the earliest Christian commentators to the High Middle Ages, that there were no attempts to see the Star as some natural light in the sky or astrological sign, but rather a miracle (Allison 2005, 18–21). In later centuries, views on astrology would change, and likewise interpretations of the Magi story."

The comment above by Rik is simply not reality expecting such perfect and pristine sources and the comment: "all I have seen is a dubious Christian interpretation of an Egyptian engraving that had no reference to the three stars in Orion" is not accurate. We have pre-Christian primary sources on the connection of Osiris to Orion and mentions of the three kings along with primary sources confirming it and it's all throughout the articles in the original post here as well as in Acharya's books and her sources.



* Dr. Edwin Krupp, Astronomer & Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles also states:



"The moniker of ―Three Kings for these stars in the belt of Orion is documented all over the world. For example, South Africans call Orion‘s Belt Drie Konings―Three Kings‖—while in French they are the ―Trois Rois."



We don't have everything the Egyptians wrote down, and we also don't know what were all of their mysteries. One of their mysteries was the bringing out of the baby Sokar - who, by the way, was identified with Horus - in an "ark" at winter solstice, approached by three dignitaries. Anyone who can't see that correlation to the Christian nativity tradition is being disingenuous. The fact is we also need to keep in mind that we're not talking about creating a religion to appeal to theologians, but one that was created to appeal to the masses. How would the average person see these scenes? They would instantly recognize the similarities to the religion they already were following. And they did recognize these parallels in Egypt, as we know from all the Coptic Christian imagery and languages that imitated the Egyptian religion.

I find all this nitpicking to be really ridiculous and a waste of time. If you were going to create a religion to appeal to the masses, you would choose popular themes, which is what the creators of Christianity obviously did when they incorporated this blatantly Egyptian motif into their religion.

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

To understand why the Egyptians would have used observation of the main star patterns as a framework for their mythology, a key starting point is the Emerald Tablet of Thoth, a short hermetic text, translated by Sir Isaac Newton including the following lines:

More detail on the Emerald Tablet is at Sacred Texts, including Newton's original spelling. This central idea of Egyptian religion, 'as above so below', found its way into Christianity in the Lord's Prayer, with the line 'thy will be done on earth as in heaven'. The 'miracles of one only thing' indicate the natural unity between temporal events on earth and the eternal identity of the visible heavens. This was the central idea of hermetic philosophy.

The idea in terms of observation of the stars is that regular patterns seen in the sky form the template for divine action on earth. The main regular pattern seen in the sky is the annual cycle of the sun, marked by its symbolic death at the winter solstice and rebirth on the third day at Christmas. This annual event occurs against a backdrop of the same recurring constellations, notably the prominent position of Orion and Sirius (the Duat). Robert Bauval presents his analysis of these events in an article The Egyptian Star of Bethlehem.

Now, if Christianity secretly based its idea of the reconciliation of earth and heaven in Christ on the old mythic theme of the unity of earth and heaven in the ideas of Thoth, then we have a guide instructing us to look to the sky to see the origin of this story.

Looking to the sky at Christmas, we see the three kings rising at dusk followed by the star in the east, Sirius, follwed then at midnight by the deck of Noah's ark, the celestial ship Argo, beneath the star in the east, with three stars at the head of the manger in the same shape as Orion's Belt. The template of as above so below is fulfilled by the correspondence between the Christmas stars and the story of the Nativity, a coherence also visible in the physical reflection of the stars in the Nile River.

All of this material is about reconstructing how the ancients plausibly thought, against a scientific observational framework. It does not mean that Jesus actually lived and incarnated the reflection of the stars, but that Jesus was imagined as an ideal for the presence of the eternal within time. This imagined myth was gradually forgotten due to Judeo-Christian cultural hostility to worship of the stars, and replaced by the fictional idea that the mythic events described in the Gospels were actually historical.

The Egyptian religion was centred on the idea that events on earth reflect the heavens. This argument as applied to the Star of Bethlehem story is compatible with existing evidence and helps to explain it coherently, far more so than other accounts. The loss of Egyptian culture means there are massive gaps in our knowledge. These gaps were deliberately created by Christian destruction of pagan wisdom as reportedly commanded by God to Moses in the first of the ten commandments at Exodus 34. Reconstructing the fragments involves taking the first principles and finding how they could most plausibly have provided the original template for the altered surviving myths of Christianity.

A for effort natselection1st, thanks for posting it but, that article was disappointing. Notice how it provides nothing more than a one-sided brief history and borders on incomprehensible? The author obviously knows very little about this subject outside the Christian mainstream status-quo. I suspect the author is a Christian who knows nothing about the pre-Christian mythological/astrotheological background primary source evidence such as has already been provided throughout this very thread. I was hoping for something interesting in that article as I was reading it, but it never came. I was really disappointed because the abstract you quoted sounded so good. I suppose it would be a good article for a Christian who wanted a one-sided brief history.

_________________
2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

FTA22



Would the connections between the Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Orion have been made in post-Alexander times? Homer in the Iliad referred to the constellation of Orion and described the star Sirius as being Orion's dog.

Myth fantasies can be created or borrowed from other cultures. Sometimes similar myths can be created independently. The cutting up of the body of, scattering the pieces, and then bringing the parts together to resurrect the body can be found in the Egyptian story of Osiris but also in the story of Lemminkainen in the Kalevala, and in Siberian Shaman stories of drug trips into other worlds. The biblical Jesus birth myth could have been borrowed from the Egyptians or it could have been created separately. I still have not seen any archaeological CONNECTION between the three stars in the belt of Orion to any Egyptian myths saying they represent three kings or wise men bringing gifts to a divine baby. Zahi Hawass did not make any connection between the three Pharaohs who built the three largest pyramids at Giza in succeeding generations and the three stars in Orion's belt.

I am beginning to get the impression that some at this forum see the biblical Jesus story as coming strictly from celestial myths. I do see some influences from various myths, but I also see stories from various historical persons being used also to form a composite. One example is seen in the following from Origen's work when he was contradicting the second century historian Celsus.

Celsus thought the Jewish scriptures were late compositions, and he labelled Christianity “blockheaded wisdom” to accept the Jewish scriptures yet reinterpret them allegorically. To give the Jewish viewpoint, Celsus introduces a hypothetical Jew, who says to the son of God:

You were born in a small Jewish village. Your mother was a poor woman who earned her bread by spinning. Her husband divorced her for adultery. You were born in secret and were afterwards carried to Egypt, and were brought up among the Egyptian conjurers. The arts which you there learnt, you practised when you returned to your own people, and you then persuaded them you were God. It was given out that you were born of a virgin. Your real father was a soldier named Panther. The story of your divine parentage is like the story of Danaë.

You say that, when you were baptized in Jordan, a dove descended upon you, and a voice was heard from heaven declaring that you were the Son of God. Who saw the dove? Who heard the voice, except you and another who suffered as you suffered? The prophets have foretold that a Son of God is to come. Granted. But how are we to know that they referred to you? They spoke of a glorious king who was to reign over the world. You, we know only as wandering about with publicans and boatmen of abandoned character.

You tell us that the wise men of the east came at your birth to adore you, that they gave notice to Herod and that Herod killed all the children in Bethlehem to prevent you from becoming king. You yourself escaped by going to Egypt. Is this story true? And, if it be, could not the angels who had been busy about your birth have protected you at home? When you grew up, what did you accomplish remarkable? What did you say? We challenged you in the temple to give us a sign as your credential. You had none to give.

You cured diseases, it is said. You restored dead bodies to life. You fed multitudes with a few loaves. These are the common tricks of the Egyptian wizards, which you may see performed every day in our markets for a few halfpence. They too drive out devils, heal sicknesses, call up the souls of the dead, provide suppers and tables covered with dishes, and make things seem what they are not. We do not call these wizards sons of God. We call them rogues and vagabonds.

http://www.askwhy.co.uk/christianity/06 ... Celsum.php

As Celsus shows, even in the 2nd century the biblical Jesus gospel story was considered to have come from exaggerated historical stories instead of from celestial myths.

Rik

That's all covered in Gerald Massey's "The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ" lecture.

I suppose you haven't read it yet. And I see that the lecture has been suspended since the last time I posted it. You may have to look around to find another free copy. I suppose this is yet another link fallen to Christian censorship or whatever. This is getting a little ridiculous.

But in anycase, this lecture is essentially where Massey covers the Talmudic sources that Celsus was referring to - Yeshua Ben Pandira / Sedata. And he goes through it all and points out how the gospel Jesus is an amalgamation of different false prophet type characters - including Pandira / Sedata - and that a composition of 20 people turns out to be no one in particular in the end. It's after that part of the lecture that he moves on to address the celestial mythos and it's relation to the Christ myth as the next layer of consideration. And once again Massey comes back and summarizes that an amalgamation of both historical and mythical characters (these are solar and astrological) turns out to be no one in the end. And that once all of the historical and mythological layers are removed it's like an onion without a fixed core.

So yes, I'm sure that most people posting here are very familiar with the amalgamation factor of the Christ myth and how certain historical characters may fit in. There's much more than that to consider as well, which is why there's been a bit of a communication problem between you and some of the other posters. The problem is that you're coming at this thing from the angle of choosing an historical amalgamation INSTEAD of the celestial mythos. People who have read further on this matter know that it isn't really a situation of INSTEAD as much as it's a situation of AS WELL AS. Take me for instance, you'd be hard pressed to convince me that it's an INSTEAD OF situation rather than an AS WELL AS. I think you're mostly right about Marcion and the midrash angles. That doesn't replace the celestial mythos however. It's all worked in together...

_________________
The Jesus Mythicist Creed:
The "Jesus Christ" of the New Testament is a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical. A composite of multiple "people" is no one.

The celestial Origins of Religious Belief
ZG Part 1
Jesus: Hebrew Human or Mythical Messiah?

You misunderstand. Osiris is only identified with the constellation Orion, not the Greek character. The Egyptians called it "Sah", but English scholarship still uses the word Orion out of convenience because that's what the English speaking audience is most accustomed to.

And yes, Osiris was identified with that constellation post-Alexander and even post-Christ.

Here are some comments I have posted at Jesus Mysteries that partly address this theme of the need to incorporate solar mythology into the explanation for the origin of the Christ myth, in addition to the more well known historical factors.

Sid Green wrote: "Everything begins from a "single discrete starting point" - from the universe to skin cancer; from conception to a thunderstorm."

My response:
No. A perfect storm is a confluence of unrelated events that produce a result greater than the addition of the individual inputs. This well describes Christianity as a synthesis of disparate factors where the whole is more than the sum of the parts.

The book The Perfect Storm describes the confluence of warm air from a low-pressure system, cool dry air from another direction and tropical moisture from a hurricane. You could similarly map the separate inputs for the perfect storm of Christianity as the combination of:

- Jewish prophetic messianism
- Egyptian and Babylonian myths
- Politics of conflict with Rome
- Greek Logos philosophy
- widespread mystery cults open to a unifying message
- A new age 'written in the stars'.


Earl Doherty then commented: "The missing link in Sid's conundrum vs. Robert is the Q tradition. Robert's list produced the Pauline side of the things, the heavenly Christ whom scripture revealed not only existed but had undergone a crucifixion. That
'collective' did not have a specific starting point. Many groups and exegetes came up with their own version of elements that were literally in the air; the wide variety present between Paul and Hebrews and Paul's rivals who did not have a theology of the cross (his "another Jesus"), each with its own 'revelation' experience at the start of the group (as in 1 John 1 and Hebrews 2:1f, which are entirely unconnected experiences by unconnected groups), shows this."

Sid Green said: "I would suggest that your 'confluence of unrelated events' implies a sequence - or that a sequence to any confluence is inevitable anyway ... I am surprised that no gospel is represented in your list of inputs for the 'perfect storm' of Christianity, nor any story, myth or rumour about anyone called 'Jesus', nor any Jewish belief that a Messiah had arrived by being resurrected, nor any sign of the Nazorean mission to the gentiles - a rare if not unique example of proselytisation by the Jews. Personally, while I don't disagree with any item on your list, as it stands I cannot see it coming to anything that looked much like Christianity, so I presume you do not intend it to be seen as exhaustive?"


My response:
Thanks Sid and Earl. Sid, you are right that such a table of inputs would struggle to be exhaustive to explain a historical phenomenon as polyvalent and luminous as Christianity. Earl is perfectly right to note my emphasis on the eternal mythic side, and the need to add the ethical teachings from Q as an essential part of the causal mix that produced the Christ story.

Today I visited Thirroul, a beach south of Sydney, and sat just where DH Lawrence wrote Kangaroo, where a coal seam meets the headland. Watching the sea makes me think of another analogy, expanding on Christ as the perfect storm.

The waves of the ocean have travelled unbroken for perhaps ten thousand miles, until the sand rises beneath them and they curl and break. In similar fashion, Christianity imagines that the eternal logos has existed for all time, with the rational constancy of the laws of physics, like a wave rolling steadily across the deep. Something about the time of Christ was analogous to a breaking of the wave, as other factors arose, like the sand of the beach beneath an ocean wave, to create a story of incarnation of the logos at one point in time and in one special person, Jesus of Nazareth.

Like the perfect storm, the `perfect wave' arose in Israel. Watching the ocean, there are very many waves which would perfectly fit a surfer, but they roll to shore without a rider. What we do not know, in looking at Christian origins, is if there actually was a perfect rider, living there ready to catch the perfect wave at the right time and place, and with the skill to surf it to shore. One can well imagine that as the seers collected the evidence of the time and place of the perfect wave, they felt by an ineluctable logic that there must also have been a perfect rider.

The gospels bear comparison to the psychological compulsion of Anselm's proof of God, his argument that an existing God is more perfect than an imaginary one, and therefore God exists. Pressing the wave analogy, the original seers would have asked each other, what is the point of a perfect wave if its perfection is not crowned by the existence of a perfect rider, the anointed surfer Christ Jesus?

Like a tribute to the imagined greatest song ever written, the gospels saw the perfect wave as through a glass darkly, and imagined the identity of the champion surfer catching at the curl.

The denotation of the Roman Empire as the Common Era helps to explain why Christ had to be invented. The mashing of multiple myths in the maw of material might meant a magical messianic melding made sense, as a basis for peace and stability. Christ took over from Sol Invictus as a unifying narrative to redeem Rome, with the church coopted to secure Rome's power and to meld the mix of cultures into the common matrix of imperial belief.

Christ stood at the head of a new literalist pantheon that would deftly displace imperial guilt into a supernatural story that spoke to popular emotional resentment, channelling political dissent away from the throne of Caesar and sublimating it towards belief in Christ in heaven, a common myth for a common era.

Against this image of the incarnation as the riding of a breaking wave, Sid's comment that 'a sequence to any confluence is inevitable' does not look to be the whole story. The shape of the wave is caused by multiple co-factors, which do not form a linear sequence. The spinning of the earth, the direction and speed and temperature of the winds and currents and tides, the shape of the ocean floor and the beach, all come together in a way that is not just sequential, but integral. Yes there is a sequence from causal factors, imagined event, debate and interpretation, but the causal factors all occur simultaneously, and have to be synthesised into the narrative. Irenaus was like the pretty girl kissing the champion cyclist on the Champs Elysees podium in the Tour de France, marking a point of victory but not explaining the events that led to that point.

My view is that there was no 'rider of the wave' and that Jesus Christ was invented afterwards. But still, and especially with the cosmic story, the time of Pilate has a natural elegance that well fits it to provide the context for the Gospel narrative, and this beauty helps to explain why the story has been so compelling for believers.



Jane asked "Is this your way of expressing that "if Jesus did not exist, he had to be invented"?"

My response
Hi Jane. Yes. The questions can be posed, why was Sol Invictus inadequate as a unifying myth for the Roman Empire, and why was the sun supplanted by the Anointed Saviour, Jesus Christ? My view is that Rome had a guilty conscience about its violent subjugation of conquered peoples, and needed a narrative that would assuage this guilt while legitimizing the authority and stability of Empire. The blank and pitiless sun lacked the human element required to serve this function of conferring legitimacy. A recognition was needed that good and evil are human qualities seen in history, and that the evil of imperial conquest had to somehow find a channel for forgiveness as a necessary condition for imperial unity.

Christianity displaced the cosmic functions of the sun onto Jesus Christ as the source of light and life, while identifying evil with the desire to crucify the messiah, placing it within the political framework of history. Unlike the Manichaean idea of good and evil as conflicting cosmic principles, Christianity located evil as a corruption of an originally good nature. As such, Christianity provided a hope for redemption of the world, dissolving corruption by grace, where the pre-Christian myths were essentially hopeless.

Enter the Anointed Saviour. This phrase starts as an empty shell, an idea that salvation is necessary, and must originate from a point of connection between heaven and earth, as the presence of eternity within time, or as Bonhoeffer put it, 'the beyond in the midst of the world.'

From an initial vague and general concept, the Anointed Saviour, denoted with the abstract name of Christ Jesus, was steadily concretized. How did this abstract concept save? How was it anointed? Only through incarnation in history, presence in the world. The Anointed Saviour was Christ Jesus by definition, just from the very meaning of the words. But the events of the anointing required imaginative expansion for popular use.

Such presence required a persuasive narrative. Starting with the idea that just as the sun dies and is reborn each year at Christmas and Easter, with winter and spring as turning points, the saving idea steadily acquired a mythology, with the Epistles and then the Gospels as decisive elaborations.

Hope means we can see a path out of inevitable destruction, and is necessary for human life. As the Psalmist said, without a vision the people perish. A story that explains the path of hope through faith and love is necessary for moral legitimacy, and acquires power through vesting it with the mandate of heaven.

From the initial vision that our world is part of the cosmos, that earth is necessarily connected to heaven, that time is the moving image of eternity, the question arises of where and when the decisive point of connection occurred. The answer, initially abstract and timeless, was that the world is saved through the redeeming grace of the Anointed Saviour Jesus Christ. This eternal word was steadily enfleshed, as the bare bones came together and acquired life, with the abstract Nazarene becoming the man from Nazareth in Christian imagination. A story that touches the emotional nerves of the desire for belief will naturally evolve to encompass those features to which hearers respond most strongly. In Kantian terms, we can say that insofar as hope and unity are needed for social existence, an anointed saviour must exist a priori, as a necessary condition of experience, as viewed by transcendental imagination.

These psychological and political and philosophical needs of the Common Era for a common framework of belief could not possibly be satisfied by previous myth, but the vital parts of older myths could be combined and transformed into a shared story, a new mythology for a new age, Christianity.

Robert Tulip

FTL,
What you say is true but there are some "inadvertent admissions" if you will that makes it stand out to me.

Examples:



I think everyone here would say (A)men to the last sentence highlighted above! Further, such a admission admits astro-mythology or astro-theology as the possible explanation for what is not fully fiction per se nor an actual historical occurence.



Here is where the authors ignorance of the possible astro-mythological or astro-theoogical implication of what Voigt was trying to convey. The phrase "at it rising" brings to mind Sirius, the dog star of the Egyptians.



The above quote displays a specific instance of the one-sided treatment you may be talking about. Calling it naive rather than demonstrating why this explanation is wrong is of no use in evaluating the objection.Albert Schweitzer may here be using the earlier version of the "no true scholar" fallacy. Again none of these objections are presented here. I guess the author thinks repudiation and refutations are the same things.



I guess theologians were waking up to the fact but this idea continue to permeate the world of ordinary believers and apologists.







In sum there was a lot of waffling and that shows the gymnastics that otherwise intelligent persons will perform when their faith conflicts with reality!

I've just stumbled across this blog by Aaron Adair and feel it must be addressed:

Aaron, there are many sloppy errors here that show you've not actually read any of Acharya's work and are relying on others who also have not studied Acharya's works. For starters, you say that "Zeitgeist," Part 1 is "based on astrology or astrotheology." This assumption is false, as astrology as we know it today and astrotheology are two completely different things that have next to nothing to do with each other. It's a sloppy and egregious error. Had you read Acharya's work you'd already know this fact.

It's also very biased to provide completely unrelated trash from Richard Carrier about Luxor, Egypt, without providing Acharya's responses to it. Acharya S has responded to Carrier's trash, demonstrating he made sloppy and egregious errors in his criticism of her work. Carrier simply doesn't have the integrity to admit his errors, especially since he got caught by Acharya herself (I guess Carrier assumed she couldn't read German). Carrier has never been a reliable or credible source on the work by Acharya S, as he has never read a single book of hers and doesn't know her work at all. Harshly criticizing another's work one has never read is well known as intellectual dishonesty. Carrier and his fanboys will continue to spread these lies across the net without any regard to accuracy at all; it's an embarrassment to all freethinkers, mythicists etc..


Parallelophobia, personal attacks and professional jealousy: A response to Richard Carrier's 'That Luxor Thing'

Is Jesus's nativity an Egyptian myth?

What Egyptologists (and other scholars) say about Egypt's role in Christian origins

Myopia is not expertise


These are lies spread across the net by mendacious people who also have never read a book by her, and/or it's just an attempt to smear the author by bludgeoning her to death with a few minor errors from her first book from 1999. Acharya is in the process of writing a new 2nd edition. It's also incredibly unscholarly to smear all scholars of the past century by claiming that "quality was much lower in scholarship." That's a malicious lie - these older scholars were often better educated than most people are today. They actually read Greek and Latin on a regular basis, and they studied the primary sources in their original languages.

Aaron, it's important to keep in mind that you are a Grad Student at OSU for physics, not theology, not mythology - nothing related to these issues. What linguistic skills have you - do you read ancient Greek, Hebrew, Latin or Egyptian? Acharya S specializes in linguistics, and she cites the primary sources and highly respected scholarly commentary on them from relevant experts - another fact that one would already know had one actually read her work, instead of lying about being an expert on it.


It's significant to realize that it was Christians themselves who chose that date based on their own research at the time. It's still the date used to celebrate Jesus's nativity to this very day. Celebrating birthdays was not a popular theme in those days, in fact, they were against it. It's still just more evidence that Jesus is a mythical character. This is an absurd straw man argument that holds no water at all. "Christmas" was established in imitation of solar mythology. So too was much of the gospel story, which actually has indications of the winter-solstice birth as well. If you read Acharya's ebook Jesus as the Sun throughout History, you would comprehend the significance, but you haven't read Acharya's work and are just pretending to be an expert on it and on the subject. You aren't.


"Were the Chalki manuscript of Hippolytus genuine, evidence for the December feast would exist as early as c. 205."
- Catholic Enc. "Christmas"


A ludicrous assertion, to say the least, that demonstrates you are extremely ignorant of the subject. From what I've seen from you so far, I don't think you've studied the issue well enough to jump to such assumptions:

The Origins of Christianity and the Quest for the Historical Jesus Christ

Zeitgeist Part 1 Sourcebook with the transcript & sources


Acharya discusses Numbers 24:17 in 'The Christ Conspiracy' and 'Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection.'


What your comments in this blog help me with is in determining that you've never read a single book by Acharya S and are in no position to comment on the subject, as your assumptions are false, and it appears you've gotten your information about this author from others who also have never read her work, yet they're prejudiced against it (misogyny ?). I hope you will be more responsible and careful next time. You have lost all credibility and reliability here on this blog regarding "Zeitgeist," Part 1 and the work by Acharya S, who has never used the name "Dorothy," which is just a sign of disrespect on the part of those who use it.

Aaron Adair, age 27:

- Grad Student - Physics
- Ohio State University Researcher/TA
https://plus.google.com/113175244343413640359/about

kirk703's channel
http://www.youtube.com/user/kirk703

Star of Bethlehem Index
http://gilgamesh42.blogspot.com/2010/11 ... index.html

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2013 Astrotheology Calendar
The Mythicist Position
Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection
Stellar House Publishing at Youtube

Astrotheology and Astrology
Astrotheology is the theory that religious symbols represent real cosmic observations, for example Jesus Christ as symbol of the sun. Astrology is the theory that events on earth reflect the observed patterns of the heavens. There is obviously some overlap between astrotheology and astrology, but it is useful to clarify the distinction between them.

The study of astrotheology does not require the acceptance of any astrological claims. Astrotheology is primarily an investigation into what ancient people actually believed, reconstructing a cosmic back story to explain the real meaning of the popular supernatural fantasy, especially in Christianity. Part of the study of astrotheology includes the recognition that ancient religious belief had an intimate connection to astrology. For example, church fathers condemned the Gnostic claim that the twelve apostles were symbols of the twelve signs of the zodiac, revolving around Christ as the sun. If this Gnostic claim actually has some foundation in a real ancient cultic belief that contributed to the formation of the Christ myth, it can readily be discussed as an astrotheological theory, without opening any astrological speculation.

The problem in analysing such material is that astrotheology and astrology are routinely conflated by mischievous apologists, who wish to discredit and ignore all rational critique of Christianity using the well-worn fallacious method of argument of guilt by association. They say astrotheology is just astrology so should be ignored as Satanic, along with all natural theology.
In responding to such accusations, it is important, in my view, not to concede too much ground to the apologists. The probable fact is, as Emperor Hadrian allegedly wrote early in the second century, that most early Christians actually were astrologers. This is the only way to explain the presence of the abundant astrological motifs in Christianity, especially those associated with Jesus Christ as the avatar of a new solar age of Pisces.

There is no advantage for astrotheology in ignoring the presence of such astrological ideas in Christianity. However, it is important to analyse these ideas using rational scientific evidentiary methods. Where astrologers may claim correlations that lack any possible mechanism, astrotheology can observe that the possibility of such beliefs informing ancient thought does not make those beliefs true. But the apologists do not even want to debate whether such beliefs may have existed, as the possibility undermines their traditional supernatural orthodoxy in Jesus as man rather than idea.

The same problem of guilt by association arises in relation to other fields that are generally regarded as fringe. Gerald Massey, one of the great writers of astrotheology, felt the need to distance himself from theosophy, the mystical movement founded by Helena Blavatsky, in view of the widespread wacky errors propounded by theosophists. For readers of Massey today, there is some overlap between his ideas and theosophy. Apologists and so-called scientific atheists routinely call for Massey to be treated with disdain as a pariah, cast into the outer darkness with the theosophists. Such attitudes ignore the potential of finding legitimate research in both Massey and Blavatsky. It is fallacious to use Blavatsky’s hostility to evolution, for example, to discredit her work on the possible Indian origins of Christian myth. That would be like using Galileo’s incorrect theory of tides to attack his discovery of the moons of Jupiter.

The conflation of astrology and astrotheology in the minds of ignorant apologists is an example of the fallacy of ad hominem reasoning. The apologists reason as follows:
A. Astrology is false
B. Astrotheologists discuss astrological concepts
C. Therefore astrotheology is false.
This fallacious reasoning completely ignores the distinction between reconstruction of ancient thought and advocacy of current belief.