RT
Paul was such a powerful and lucid writer that people assumed he was connected to the Jesus movement, but as Doherty points out, Paul's ideas seem to come from his own imagination rather than any tradition. So any discrepancy between the Epistles and the Gospels can be explained away by Paul's complete ignorance of and indifference to the historical story.

Wasn't Paul the original campaigner for Jesus? He recruited Mark or something around 70AD?

Robert Tulip wrote:What I am claiming is special is that the idea of the cosmic Christ within the Bible has a hidden astronomical ground.

Why, Robert, isn't the cosmic Christ the zodiacal Great Man that dies and is resurrected each year?

Interbane
Wasn't Paul the original campaigner for Jesus? He recruited Mark or something around 70AD?

The Epistles of Paul are the earliest Christian writings available… of course the content is extremely unhelpful to the historical Jesus theory.

Not only has Paul never claimed to have met an earthly Jesus he does not seem to ever encounter anyone who has either. Paul knows nothing about the stories associated with the current myth and repeatedly speaks of Christ Jesus as a spirit that has come to him with wisdom.

Now couple this with the common beliefs of the time, that many of these savior gods were in fact Logos, spiritual entities that performed their deeds in the heavens and were intermediaries between the ultimate god and humans.

When looked at carefully and removing the bias of the gospel claims, (that were written much later) it appears that Paul was speaking of a Logos and not an earthly person. By removing the assumption of an earthy Jesus and viewing the writings through the lens of the ancient culture that wrote it, the historical Jesus is completely missing in Paul’s works.

And if Paul had never even heard of the supposed historical Jesus, (being so close to the source) than how can we give credit to anything written hundreds of years after the fact?

Later

Interbane wrote:Wasn't Paul the original campaigner for Jesus? He recruited Mark or something around 70AD?

This whole "did Jesus exist?" sidebar is actually really helpful. It serves to clarify a major implication of the original thesis of this thread, namely that the concepts of Christ and Satan are primarily eternal cosmic theories about the connection between humanity and God rather than records of actual historical events or entities. I said to Frank that I have an emotional desire to believe, but I should clarify that this does not take precedence over a rational examination of the evidence. Mark and the other evangelists told such a compelling tale that salvaging it is an attractive default unless the holes are simply too big to ignore, as it seems they are.

The Paul story shows just how murky are the origins of Christianity. Yes, Paul was a main campaigner for Jesus, but his road to Damascus conversion where the scales fell from his eyes led him to convert from chief persecutor of Christianity to chief impressario. I have always thought that someone with such a bad past as Paul is quite untrustworthy. His line about seeing Christ “through a glass darkly” is a good example of how the sublime idea of Christ took complete precedence for him over any evidence. Doherty points out that Paul's letters in the Bible contain no biographical information whatsoever about Jesus Christ, whose name is more a title, translating to 'the anointed saviour from God' and is not an actual personal name.

The claimed connection between Paul and Mark is in Acts 12 and 15, suggesting that Paul took Mark with him from Jerusalem and then fell out with him. Perhaps Mark was already developing his science fiction imagination about Christ where Paul insisted on sticking to the simple cosmic basics?

The way I am seeing it now, following Anselm's slightly bizarre line of argument that an existing God is more perfect than one that does not exist, is that a story of the 'anointed saviour' would seem so vastly more potent if it was believed to be an actual historical truth than if it was just a cosmic myth.

To me, it all points to a coherent political explanation of the early church in terms of the cosmic ground I have outlined. The depth of popular fury against Greco-Roman Civilization was extreme, summarised in Paul's barb at Romans 1:19 that they worshipped the creature rather than the creator. A similar fury can be seen today in Islamic hostility towards the west. As this inchoate popular idea of a Creator struggled for expression, it first found a focus in the idea of Logos - which can be understood as a demiurge – a representative of the infinite and eternal within the finite and temporal. This demiurge – God's Saviour or Jesus – the intermediary between our blind planet and our fate – was initially understood in primarily metaphysical spiritual terms. However, it was soon discovered that such a disembodied version failed the basic marketing test and just did not get the ancient water cooler gossip happening. The times were ripe with yearning for a popular narrative explanation, and this is precisely what Mark and the other Gospel writers provided with their Tolkienesque epic myth of the incarnation and its catchy jingles like 'God so loved the world' etc etc.

I fear Frank has nearly converted me to a version of the Docetist Heresy, the widespread ancient claim that Christ was a spirit but not a man. Except of course that Frank is arguing, I would say invalidly, that the evidence that Christ was not a man implies also that he was not a spirit. It opens the question of why Biblical writers such as John had to be so aggressive in arguing that only agents of Satan would claim Jesus Christ didn't eat, drink and go to the toilet. What did John have to hide? Surely if Jesus was real as described in the Gospels the emerging church would not have to resort to such polarising political threats on the basic topic of whether their recent founder even existed?

Whether or not the eternal Son ate and shat and was stigmatised makes no material difference to the theological question I am raising here, of whether we can interpret the relation between humanity and the cosmos through the concept of a Demiurge that is analogous to Christ. Talking about such subjects is hard, because we need to make archetypal words mean just one thing when they are actually bringing together ambiguous symbols.

This thread started by describing the story of Christ interpreted against the Zodiacal Ages of precession as a Miltonic Parable. Paradise Lost, with its epic fable of the battle in heaven between God and Satan, is just as fantastic as the Gospels. Both books have enormous spiritual power. They tap in to what people want to believe, and more crucially, they provide a path of hope towards the transformation of our planet to recover a primeval harmony with cosmic truth.

Thomas Hood wrote:

Robert Tulip wrote:What I am claiming is special is that the idea of the cosmic Christ within the Bible has a hidden astronomical ground.

Why, Robert, isn't the cosmic Christ the zodiacal Great Man that dies and is resurrected each year?

Tom, you can't just say the cosmic Christ "is" this or that to the exclusion of other meanings and analogies. To illustrate, there is a lovely analogy between Christmas and Easter. The solstice (sun still) on December 21-22 is the day 'the sun stops', meaning that it appears to rise at the same point on the horizon for three days at the southern extremity of its range, marking an end and beginning of the natural year. Then, Christmas Day is the first movement as the sun begins its apparent northward trek towards the northern summer. Hence we have the sun dying and being reborn after three days, in a neat analogy to Easter that could also be identified with 'the cosmic Christ'. Your analogy, seemingly between the annual collected symbolism of the zodiac and Christ, is another. The longer timeframe of precession provides the equation with the cosmic Christ that seems most meaningful to me. I'm not quite sure what you mean by the term 'Great Man'. In any case, any such symbolism in the Bible is encoded, which I take to be a strategy by the authors to convey their message in a way that would protect it. Robert

Robert Tulip wrote:Tom, you can't just say the cosmic Christ "is" this or that to the exclusion of other meanings and analogies.

Robert, the zodiac as man is the simplest theory. The zodiac accords with Bible culture and is the principle of organization of Ecclesiastes. It's an object that anyone can see and its human association is traditional. It's the humane structure through which the sun moves. It is the human pattern in the sky -- a logos in the heavens.

In any case, any such symbolism in the Bible is encoded, which I take to be a strategy by the authors to convey their message in a way that would protect it.

There isn't any encoding -- if one considers the culture of the time. Cultural change conceals sources. Despite creationists, First Genesis is clearly based on astrological thinking:

Sun day: light created;
Moon day: waters separated;
and so on for the rest.

Thanks for the explanation of why Christmas occurs after the solstice.

Tom

Anyone following this thread ever watch zeitgeist? The first third of the movie is about religion, and how the beginnings of religion have strong astrological and egyptian ties. Or something. I would definitely be interested in Robert's and Frank's interpretation of it.

RT
I fear Frank has nearly converted me to a version of the Docetist Heresy, the widespread ancient claim that Christ was a spirit but not a man. Except of course that Frank is arguing, I would say invalidly, that the evidence that Christ was not a man implies also that he was not a spirit.

I see no evidence of such a spirit, so no, I do not believe one exists, but just as I cannot prove that there is no god, I make no positive claims in the matter. The same applies here, I make no claims about a possible spirit except that in my opinion it seems unlikely.

Interbane
Anyone following this thread ever watch zeitgeist? The first third of the movie is about religion, and how the beginnings of religion have strong astrological and Egyptian ties. Or something. I would definitely be interested in Robert's and Frank's interpretation of it.

Nope… never saw it.

Later

Interbane wrote:Anyone following this thread ever watch zeitgeist? The first third of the movie is about religion, and how the beginnings of religion have strong astrological and egyptian ties. Or something. I would definitely be interested in Robert's and Frank's interpretation of it.

Hi Interbane, thanks, I just watched Zeitgeist and you are right, it provides an excellent explanation of the origins of Christianity in Egyptian religion and of how precession of the equinox provides a physical cosmic framework for the world. I liked the reference to Luke 22:10 as a prediction of the Age of Aquarius:

"8Jesus sent Peter and John, saying, "Go and make preparations for us to eat the Passover." 9"Where do you want us to prepare for it?" they asked. 10He replied, "As you enter the city, a man carrying a jar of water will meet you. Follow him to the house that he enters,

Wikipedia provides a good summary of Zeitgeist, noting that

Few film critics have reviewed Zeitgeist, and those that have, have generally been dismissive despite its vast audience of well over 50 million viewers (when Google stopped counting views) and its heavy reliance on factual information supported by references and actual media coverage. Supporters of the film claim that mainstream boycotts are due to the highly incriminating material presented, especially in sections 2&3.