Continuing my backlog:

You surely have read OHJ, yes, where I explicitly discuss this verse and explicitly answer your question?

Homework assignment: find that, and quote it here.

(Hint: the people who found him are the same ones who killed him.)

It’s also indisputable that the next verse says that Jesus… “having been found as a man…”

So — where do you suppose this “made man” was found? Floating in the Cosmos?

To the contrary, both the Jewish Philo and the pagan Plutarch explain that supernatural beings often assume mortal bodies below the orbit of the moon. That’s precisely what distinguishes that section of outer space from above it.

Please read OHJ. You keep revealing you haven’t read it with remarkes like this.

But only Jesus comes in the “likeness of sinful flesh” (Romans 8:3). No heavenly being is ever described as having the “likeness of flesh” or even bodies made of flesh and blood in Jewish religious literature. This means that Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection could not have occurred in “outer space,” as you claim it does.

ROBERTTULIP: I was very intrigued by your explanation of Revelation 22’s zodiacal connection. I’ll confess I am poorly education on some of that and the problem for me is that there are so many cranks running around preaching knowledge of astrotheology. Still, I approach the subject with an open mind. Would you point me to a good resource to find these explanations like you have provided for Rev. 22? Thanks!

Yes, it does explain the reason: the scriptures predicted a specific form of messianic apocalypse and even stated a timetable for it. Thus motivating literally the entire pesher genre to figure out what date that timetable meant and how the events would proceed. Resulting in Christianity. No astrology, no astronomy, involved. Nor is there any evidence Christians ever referenced any in the origination of the religion or even the later Gospels in the canon.

Pesher from the Hebrew Scriptures explains the method of the Gospels – how they were constructed – but not the motive – the reason why the story was constructed. To answer why the Gospels have their form it seems to me we must turn to astronomy and comparative myth.

The role of Jesus as anthropomorphisation of the sun appears with lines such as the description of him as the light of the world at John 8:12. Similarly the direct correlation between the 1:12 ratio of the orbits of the sun and moon and the relation of Jesus and the disciples suggests a natural origin for the myth.

The central role of astronomy in ancient religion is explained in scholarship such as Lockyer’s analysis of star worship in Egypt, and Taylor’s analysis of sun worship in Israel. I also think there is high plausibility in Massey’s comparison between Jesus and Horus but recognise this is more controversial.

This cosmic material tends to be ignored, but an underlying naturalistic cosmogony provides a highly consistent explanation of why the Gospels were written, to imagine the orderly divine grace seen in the heavens as appearing on earth. The moral framework of Christianity saw the orderly perfection of God as appearing in the stable movement of the heavens, a theology that was widespread in ancient myth.

Taking this basis further, the hypothesis can be advanced that the Deuteronomistic tradition of God as totally transcending nature objected to any such overt naturalism, and therefore suppressed it from the Christian texts. However, this naturalism had been central to the construction process and so the suppression was only partial, from the Gospels and also from the epistles and especially the Apocalypse.

Remember the part where they banged mortals and had kids with them? Or the parts where they wielded flaming swords? Or where they had four heads?

There are no anomalies that establish Gnosticism existed. That’s precisely what Westar found. It’s a modern made-up construct that in fact the actual evidence contradicts or doesn’t support.

And there are no “clues” to Christianity having any astronomical content in its earliest century. We have the writings of Paul, Clement, Hebrews, the Gospels, the earliest Apocrypha, Ignatius, and so on. No astronomy. To the contrary, it’s all scriptural numerology. The only evidence of astronomical ideas entering Christianity are in very late texts that radically differ from all the earliest literature. That’s why it can’t have had any likely role in the origin of the religion.

I was not suggesting to build a hypothesis on lost data; rather my point is that we have anomalies in the existing data which imply the existence of lost data that has been systematically suppressed, notably around the role of astronomy and precession in early Christian thinking, such as in the tree of life example I gave. These anomalies suggest paths to reconstruct the most plausible Christian origin hypothesis, requiring a paradigm shift to explain why and how the story of Christ was invented as a way to reflect the observation of precession in an anthropomorphic mythology.

Further examples of precession in the Bible include the correlation between the chi rho cross, the alpha-omega symbolism and the movement of the equinox from Aries into Pisces; the old tradition that the twelve foundations of the Holy City in Rev 21 are the zodiac signs in reverse, as per precession; and the correlation between the loaves and fishes as symbols of abundance and the new celestial axis of Pisces and Virgo. This is all existing evidence which is best explained by a lost coordinating cosmic theology grounded in observation of precession of the equinox.

There are enough of these clues of a lost astronomical framework for Christianity to support the hypothesis that the whole movement started as grounded in hermetic astronomy, as above so below, imagining Jesus Christ as avatar of the New Age of Pisces.

The Jesus Seminar run by the Westar Institute supports historicity of Christ. My criticism of their work is based on the view that historicity is a basic all-pervading error in Christian theology, and so we need a completely new framework to explain how Christianity evolved in the absence of Jesus of Nazareth as its historical founder. Precessional cosmology serves as that new framework.

However, having climbed that ladder to invent Jesus, the church found the astronomical blueprint uncongenial for institutional growth. They not only kicked the ladder away, but worked assiduously to remove every direct trace of the ladder of visual cosmology from records, rejecting it as heresy. But the visual cosmology was so intimately entwined with the origins of Christian faith that it was not possible to eradicate all the evidence, and numerous veiled clues survived.

This theme of the centrality of astronomy reflects the Egyptian and Babylonian influences on Israel, and is what I mean by claiming there is a hidden Gnostic movement behind Christianity, quite different from the conventional theory of Gnosticism as a heretical Christian sect. There are strong traces of visual cosmology in Gnostic literature such as the Peratae. That does not at all imply that Gnosticism was a unified sect. Rather, it points to hidden and lost knowledge that can be studied as having contributed to the invention of the Cosmic Christ, but which was subsequently suppressed, ignored, forgotten and denied.