Flaming Moe

So it seems that we can at least agree that there is within Astrotheology and Acharyas work a lot worth investigating. Obviously some people believe in the unifying theory being solely responsible for the Sun God mythos and others dont but we're going over the same ground with Tertullian and are already 9 pages into the thread.
Lets remember that even with weighty evidence against the historical person of Jesus we can still tie ourselves up in speculation and Spaghetti monster loops of trying to prove a negative.
I find the topic overwhelmingly more worthy of discovering parallels in various religious traditions than becoming fixated on why Acharya used the CE.

youngalexander

Yup, I am a mere cipher.

Mind you, I think it monstrance that such angst be derived from a perfectly natural phenomena - sun worship. Whilst trouping about Bavaria in 06 I discovered that Sol Invictus was alive and well and 'beaming' in the many splendid baroque churches in that fair land. Now, I am sure that there is a thoroughly orthodox explanation, but what does the taciturn schilling.klaus have to say?

apropos to nothing in particular, you may recall my interest in EC art. There are certain puzzles, eg. why is there no image of Jesus in the first half century at Callixtus? When I remind you that these dead guys were Modalistic Monarchians, ie. extreme monotheists, as in

"If Christ is God, he must certainly be the Father; for, if he is not the Father, he is not God."

then all becomes clear, does it not?

Regretfully, citations etc. shall have to wait. I am off on hols - just remember, you saw it here first!:wave:

MarmINFP

I picked up a book at a book sale recently. Its 'Secret Origins of the Bible (or via: amazon.co.uk)' by Tim Callahan. I don't know anything about the author and I've only skimmed it, but it seemed related to this thread. Its an analysis of the Bible according to comparative mythology and it was published only 6 years ago. I didn't see any references to Acharya or Campbell, but in the bibliography I noticed Budge, Pagels, and G.A. Wells.

Has anyone read this book?

I looked in the index. There is no reference to astrotheology, but astrology of course gets some reference. There is quite a bit about sun worship not that its the central theory of the book. He presents several examples of sun worship amongst the Israelites including connecting the solar symbol of the cross with Yahweh through identification with Anu. He says that he believes "that the myth of the risen Christ represents a syncretism of the messiah figure with the dying and rising gods..."(p. 419). He does mention Tertullian, but not in reference to the quote about sun worship.

It seems that he has come to the conclusion of sun worship in Judaism and Christianity independent of both Acharya and Campbell. This isn't surprising though because various other scholars have theorized about this.

In this book, the author also argues against most of the evidence given for Jesus historicity. This is also in line with Acharya.

GakuseiDon

I don't think I've monstranced angst myself, but if that means what I think it means, then I don't think there is any doubt that there was some kind of sun worship going back when. The problem is then trying to avoid seeing it everywhere that sun is mentioned. I suspect some 19th C writers went overboard with their connections -- took too much sun, so to speak -- and it has been uncritically picked up by more modern writers like Acharya. Sometimes the sun is just the sun (not said by Freud).

Have a good one!

GakuseiDon

But, is sun worship synonymous with "astrotheology"? Seeing the sun in its own right as a god, and using the movement of the heavens as the basis of myths seem to me to be two different things. That is, astrotheology may incorporate sun worship, but I'm not sure that sun worship necessarily means astrotheology.

What we need is the earliest example of astrotheology, then we can take it from there.

Malachi151

Err, garbage. This entire tract and line of thought seems to be some tangent that was put forward in the 19th century that has been picked-up on and really taken over the field by ahistorisicitists (is that a word?) due to seeming cool or due to their tendency to have a broader background in classical studies or something, but I find it wholly and completely without one ounce of merit, and find it to be a total distraction to the field and to completely undermine the credibility of the field.

In none of the works that I have seen this claim made have I seen the authors make any significant use of the Jewish scritpures and Jewish writings, so if they aren't studying Judaism, then how the hell can they make claims that the Jesus story isn't based on Judaism?

Judaism is very clearly the source of all of the major ideas in the Jesus cult, and every single aspect of the story was filtered through Judaism. Is there any outside influence? Sure, but its very minor and it makes its way into Christianity via Hellenized Judaism.

All of the ideas about the persecution, death, and resurrection of Christ can be found in the Jewish scritpures and other non-canonical Jewish writings. The symbolism and meaning of the persecution, death, and resurrection of Jesus is purely Jewish in its presentation and interpretation within the New Testament and Christianity.

MarmINFP

Callahan's book is primarily about the Old Testament. Yes, he is saying that Jesus is based on pagan myths, but he doesn't deny strong influence from Judaism. However, most of the book is about how Judaism is likewise based on pagan myths.

He is using canonical Jewish scriptures, but he also uses some non-canonical writings such as midrash stories. He is drawing on a wide variety of sources most of which I'm not familiar with. I'll have to look at the book more closely. If you have any particular writings or writers in mind, I could check to see if he mentions them and what he says.

Flaming Moe

That would be great,MarmINFP, if we were to establish a consensus on what we agree to have been originally pagan within Judaism itself it would push this thread forward.

Malachi151

This is "essentially" true, though not strictly, because the term pagan is very specific in the most technical sense. Pagan, bascially by definition, refers to the religions of the Greeks and Romans during the time of the rise of Christianity.

Yes, it is often used more broadly to mean anything outside of the Abrahamic faiths, but that really just starts painting with too broad a brush. The idea that you can basically lump Abarahamic into one basket and everything else in the "pagan" basket is not helpful to scholarship.

Anyway, yes, Jewish religion(s) descended from some other polytheistic Mesopotamian source, and also continued to pick up influences from other sources throughout history. Ancient Judaism was also relatively diverse compared to post-Christian Judaism as well.

Nevertheless, that doesn't really address the issues.

The central question is, at its origin, were the ideas that gave rise to the cult of Jesus Christ gleaned from the Jewish scritpures and other stories written by Jews, or were they gleaned from Greek/Roman cult practices, emperor worship, temples, rites, stories, plays and writings?

My anwser to that is very simple. All of the ideas came from Jewish works.

Did some ideas from Hellenistic culture make their way into Jewish works in the hundreds of years prior to Christianity? Sure, but they were given a distinctive Jewish spin as well.

Are things like the Twelve Tribes of Israel likely to have originated from zodiac designations when what became Judaism evolved from earlier Mesopotamian religions? Absolutely.

But, to say that (as Acharya does) the author of the Gospel of Mark invented the twelve apostles because of some intended reference to the zodiac or to zodiac symbolism or something (its never clear exactly what these supposed references are supposed to mean) instead of that the author of the Gospel of Mark invented the twelve apostles because the number twelve is used as a major number throughout Judaism, just like 40 days is, etc, and that in major stories about hero figures in Judaism the hero (namely Joshua (Jesus)) appoints twelve helpers, is bogus.

Now, if you ask me. Why did the author of Mark invent the twelve apostles?

My answer is that he invented the twelve apostles because this followed the tradition of Jewish hero stories, where the leader apoints twelve people to help him, based on the twelve tribes of Israel.

Were there really twelve tribes of Israel? No, almost certainly not.

Where did the claim of twelve tribes come from? Probably from the zodiac.

Did Jews in the 1st century associate the twelve tribes with the zodiac and think that the twelve tribes had some "astrotheological significance"? No, probably not, and I've seen no evidence of such. Did Jews of the 1st century actually believe that there were historically twelve tribes of Israel? Absolutely.

Was the author of Mark thinking about the zodiac or Jewish story telling tradition when he used twelve apostles? He was thinking about Jewish story telling tradition.

So this I think is the clear difference in the line of reasoning used by those who see the elements of the Jesus story as "Jewish" in origin vs. "pagan" in origin.

BTW:

http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/...1=31&bookset=1

MarmINFP

Also, if anyone has any questions about what Acharya says in her books, I can check and post quotes. Since we're discussing her theories, some more direct quotes from her might be useful. I'm open to whatever anyone else wants to discuss. For right now, I'll take Flaming Moe's recommendation and see what Acharya says about paganism in Judaism. I'll post what I find later.

Good night!