So who has the burden of proof in this mythicism/historicism debate? It appears to me that the mythicists do for no other reason than that the historical Jesus is firmly established traditionally.

Being firmly established traditionally does not specify how it was established. By all observation, it has been established on nothing but faith, which amounts to the populace simply believing the what they're told. That does not fulfil the burden of proof for the claim that Jesus was historical. Both sides have a certain amount of burden to support their positions.

If the historical claim only has the "firm tradition" in it's support, then it relies on argumentum ad antiquitatem, a logical fallacy. Actual evidence only seems abundant on the mythicist side of the debate. Even if neither side has sufficiently filled the burden, the mythicist side seems much closer to doing so.

Thanks Interbane, this burden of proof question is complicated. It is always the way that a new idea has to meet a higher standard of proof, just as invaders need more force than defenders. Argument from antiquity may be a fallacy, but in this case it is so pervasive, and superficially so plausible, that there are exceptionally high hurdles for the suggestion that it lacks empirical basis. An alternative superior theory needs to be articulated. It is not enough just to point to the inductive inconsistencies between faith and evidence, what is required is a deductive theory that explains why this massive error became so dominant.

And CiE was written to contribute more proofs to the puzzle. Murdock goes beyond most of the mythicists with her Alexandrian hypothesis and providing a very clear presentation of what happens when all of the writings of ancient sources are put together and considered free and clear of preconceived ideas about what Christian origins ought to have entailed. It provides a fresh new perspective towards the skepticism towards an historical core to the Jesus myth.

But the burden proof issue is so very simple. Mainstream authorities claim that the life of Jesus is one of the most well documented of the time, irrefutably concrete and absolute. A claim has been made, the first claim as a matter of fact. The mythicist is simply a skeptic, an agnostic who lacks enough information to move from a position of uncertainty to certainty on the issue. The mythicist looks at the initial claim made by authority, considers the evidence provided as proof for the initial claim, and declares that the burden of proof has not been met by the mainstream authorities standing behind the initial claim. There is a lot of evidence linking the Christian myth to previous mythological motifs that break down to mystical nature references. The mythicist concludes that the story is largely mythical in content, there's no credible evidence given in support of an historical core for the mythology, and the mythicist would prefer to approach the Jesus myth as fully mythological until proven otherwise.

And then the historicist comes back at the mythicist by demanding the burden of proof from the mythicist, a burden of proof which has not yet been established for the historical claim made by authority in the first place. The mythicist doesn't have to prove that Jesus was entirely mythical. Can that even be proven absolutely? I doubt it. But the same applies to Horus and Zues. The Jesus myth can be understood along the same lines of the Egyptian and Greek myths that academics regard as pure mythology until proven otherwise. We can't say with certainty that Horus was based on the life of an ancient king, and anyone seeking to make that claim would have to prove it. Those skeptical of the historical claim don't have to prove anything other than to point to the lack of credible historical evidence as the reason for their skepticism. What applies to one supernatural storyline ought to apply to another.

And as I see it, that's where this paradigm shift begins...

Robert Tulip wrote:. . . So for mythicists to address the burden of proof, they need a new paradigm that explains how the historical story arose, and presents a new explanation that explains all the facts in a coherent and parsimonious theory. This is where the question of a scientific basis of mythic ideation becomes critical. Murdock argues that astrotheology, the idea that myth originates in explanation of observation of the cosmos, is the basis of this new paradigm. This is an idea that I have supported since writing my BA Honours thesis in 1985 on the topic of messianic visions of precession of the equinox. At that time I was only 22 years old, and was relying more on intuition and logic than a fully worked out scientific theory. My readers at the time found the ideas incomprehensible, and almost failed me for it. Since then I have been avidly reading a wide range of supporting material, and now consider we are at the cusp of a breakthrough, with a new scientific explanation of religion about to emerge into public debate. Discovering Murdock's work through Booktalk, and seeing how she is comprehensively ignored, showed me that this new paradigm touches deep emotional questions, and requires a sound scientific framework in order to obtain traction.

The key to seeing precession as the framework of mythology is recognising that the observed shift of the spring point at the time of Christ matches exactly to Christian theology of Christ as a turning point of time, as reflected in our BC/AD calendar. The big idea is that the time of Christ was seen as a moment of cosmic harmony, when the seasons matched the stars, but that later interpreters could not understand this vision. The Biblical idea of the second coming of Jesus Christ fits into this paradigm, as a prediction of a future situation where Christianity will be reconciled with science through astrotheology.

Robert, you lost me about midway through. You seem to agree with Murdock's argument that Christianity is rooted in older myths that are based on the observation of the cosmos. This is all above board and seems to be supported by the evidence.

The argument that Jesus never existed at all possibly takes us onto slightly less firm ground. It still seems plausible that older myths were grafted onto an actual person named Jesus, but this is beside the point. I'm open to either possibility. I can also see the possibility that Jesus was completely fabricated, presumably like many other deities, and the idea of a historical Jesus came into being and was perpetuated by true believers.

But then you make this statement: "The Biblical idea of the second coming of Jesus Christ fits into this paradigm, as a prediction of a future situation where Christianity will be reconciled with science through astrotheology." This seems to be more your wish that astrotheological component of Christianity will someday become more relevant. I doubt the early mythologists could have anticipated the extent to which modern science would split from mystical explanations of the world. Were people at the dawn of Christianity even aware of Christianity as a religion? It seems to me that 2,000 years ago, we were still groping in the dark in terms of scientific understanding and that such a statement is not as well supported by evidence as your basic premise that Christianity is rooted in an observation of the cosmos. I don't know if Murdock goes into such mystical territory or not, but it seems that if there is to be a paradigm shift leading to wider acceptance of the astrological basis of Christianity, it has to be strictly evidence-based or you risk having the proverbial baby tossed out with the bathwater.

Just my $.02.

It is about trying to work out the intentions of the writers of the Gospels. To attempt to reconstruct how the gospels came to be written, we have to consider what the source documents were. The Gospels have an astrotheological framework grounded in observation of precession of the equinox. The interesting thing is that this framework has been suppressed and hidden for the last two thousand years. If we imagine Jesus Christ as the hidden genius responsible for this big idea that gave the impetus to the embroidered tales, we do come back to an evemerist reading, but one that is entirely different from conventional pictures. You can consider this a gospel according to Robert Tulip.

The most comparable modern writer in my view is Milutin Milankovitch. He worked in complete isolation and great difficulty to develop a mathematical model of how orbital factors, primarily the Great Year of precession of the equinox, are the primary long term drivers of regularity in the cycles of terrestrial climate seen in glaciation. After being mocked and ignored, Milankovitch is now recognized in mainstream science as a brilliant genius.

If we think of Jesus in similar light as an astrotheological genius who studied the long term patterns of astronomy, we can imagine that he travelled from Israel to Egypt in his youth, and like Moses and Plato, learned the ancient wisdom of Egyptian star religion, with its amazing scientific precision and beauty, as the basis for understanding how the earth relates to the cosmos in terms of slow temporal cycles. The key and decisive observation at his time was that in the slow sweep of the stars against the seasons, the alignment had reached exactness in 20 AD, as predicted at Daniel 9 in the prophecy of the 69 weeks from Ezra to the Anointed One. This turning point of time, shown in the diagram below, marks the moment when the spring equinox passes from its location in the sign of the Ram, Aries, to the sign of the Fishes, Pisces.

If this observed change in the heavens is postulated to be reflected in world history, we then have an ancient basis to see Christianity as a new age religion, and can speculate that Christ wrote core lost texts that explained this vision. Here I wish to focus on two of these texts, the feeding of the multitude in the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the prediction of the second coming in the Olivet Discourse.

Feeding the Multitude: in this miracle, Jesus produces abundant resources by 'looking up to heaven', complaining that no one understands him, and transforming a few loaves and fish into enough food to feed thousands of people. Considered as astrotheology, as an allegory for the shift of precession into a new zodiacal age, loaves are the sign of Virgo while fish are the sign of Pisces. At the Jewish New Year at the spring equinox in March, the position of the sun was precessing from Aries into Pisces, while the position of the full moon (Easter) was precessing from Libra into Virgo. Based on the 'as above so below' Hermetic cosmology of Egypt, reflected in Jesus' prayer 'thy will be done on earth as in heaven', this decisive syzygy was shifting the earth from an axis symbolized by balance and lamb to an axis symbolized by loaves and fishes. If the loaves are the Easter moon in Virgo and the fishes are the Easter Sun in Pisces, we have a cosmic framework for a new age, a roughly 2000 year long period that is only now ending. Similarly, the 4000 or 5000 men who are fed represent the stars of the sky. A further allegory is that the five loaves are the five visible planets, while the two fishes are the sun and moon. The twelve baskets of broken pieces left over are the twelve signs of the zodiac, the months of the year.

The parable here is that the old age of Aries/Libra had lost its creative dynamism, and that human spirituality had to orient to the emerging positions of the cosmos that would characterize the time to come in the then dawning age of Pisces.

If the loaves and fishes symbolize the Age of Pisces/Virgo, then the Second Coming symbolizes the future age of Aquarius/Leo. This is a model of time that finds strong reflection in Christian sources with the idea, through Peter and Augustine, that a day is as a thousand years to God. Augustine taught that there would be seven thousand years from creation to consummation of the cosmos, matching to the seven days of Genesis, with the last day as the sabbath day of peace as the time of the second coming of Christ. Setting this cosmology against the framework of precession, as shown below, we see that the mythic time of Adam is the dawn of the Age of Taurus, Abraham and Moses represent the Age of Aries, Christ is the avatar of the Age of Pisces, and the Second Coming of Christ inaugurates the millennium of global peace in the Age of Aquarius. The old estimate is two thousand years per age, producing a creationist history of the universe over 3.5 ages. It is possible to take this material out of its creationist milieu and understand it against the scientific observation of astronomy, seen in precession.

The Olivet Discourse coheres precisely with this framework as an explanation of "the end of the age". The term "age" here has a parsimonious and elegant scientific meaning as the period in which the spring equinox would occur when the sun is in the constellation of Pisces. In saying that the gospel of the kingdom of god would be preached to the whole inhabited earth and then the end would come, the prediction is that the story of the Age of Pisces would be that a message of its origin would become a basis for global religion before it would be explained correctly. The prediction is that the messiah would need to come twice, first to establish universal belief, at which time he would not be understood, and then to convert this universal belief into universal knowledge. So the first coming of Christ was essentially a time of preparation for an actual salvation of the world that will occur with the shift to the new age of Aquarius.

There are two plausible models for the timing of the Age of Aquarius. Precession has a period of 25765 years, giving an age period of 2147 years, suggesting a transition point more than a century in the future. However, using the findings of Milankovitch to see how this spin wobble drives the climate, we find that the whole orbit of the earth is processing around the sun, shortening the precession period to 21,636 years, as I explained here. The real cycle of 21,636 years is how long it takes the solstices and equinoxes to travel around the earth's orbit from perihelion (closest to the sun) to aphelion (furthest from the sun) and back. We reached the low point in 1296 AD.

If we consider the Great Year to be the actual long term climate cycle driven by precession, the long term force that pushed sea level down by 140 meters 20,000 years ago and dumped a mile of ice on North America and Europe, then we see that precession considered alone does not drive terrestrial cycles, but it has to be seen together with the other orbital cycles measured by Milankovitch, and other non-periodic factors such as anthropogenic emissions. If we still consider there is a meaning in dividing this long term cycle by twelve, a question with no proven dynamic basis, but one that aligns to the old structure of astrology and the months, then we find that one twelfth of the period of the terrestrial light cycle of the Great Year is 1803 years. It all suggests that we are now reaching the time of the end of the age of Pisces predicted in the Olivet Discourse, as a time when a fundamental paradigm shift would align human thought to reality.

Exploring further this question of how orthodox Christianity came into existence:

1. Saint Paul almost certainly wrote his seven unforged epistles, probably in the mid first century. They have no detail on a historical Jesus, except for a few fragmentary references to Christ being descended from David according to the flesh, James being his brother, the last supper, and quasi symbolic discussion of the cross and resurrection, but no miracles, parables or family. Paul says he never met Jesus, and it is possible that his account is a distortion by hearsay from others who spoke of a mythic Christ in cosmic terms, with Paul introducing the meme of incarnation. The cosmic sense that the divine was present in the world evolved into the idea that God the Father was materially incarnate as God the Son.

2. The first clear mention of the four canonical Gospels, as distinct from passages within them, is by Irenaeus late in the second century. As such, there was plenty of time for an original message to be distorted and hidden. It does not even require an overt conspiracy: it is enough that ignorance, convenience and adaptation to the needs of the society of the time were triumphant. We can now turn Christian dogma on its head, and say that it was enough that the orthodox church did not understand the astrotheological message of the natural unity of the earth and the cosmos in Christ, they failed to recognize the light through which the world was made, and so they rejected the stone which was the head of the corner, placing their own invented creation in its place, which they worshiped rather than worshiping the real natural creation.

3. Irenaeus devoted much energy to rejection of 'heretical' Gnostic ideas that Christ was a cosmic spirit closely associated with the structure of the zodiac. If we consider this cosmic spirit as the original myth of Christ, the idea of precession of the equinox indicates that the moment of cosmic unity, when earth reflects the stars, occured at the time when the signs of the zodiac, based on the equinoxes and solstices, matched exactly to their corresponding constellations. This occurred only at the time of Christ.

4. The proto-Christians in Alexandria wished to establish a new universal religion, based largely on the invented Greco-Egyptian religion of Serapis, but incorporating Jewish traditions from Moses and the prophets. The new universal religion was centered on the moment when the seasons matched the stars as a turning point of time.

5. Now, the question is where they got the Jesus story. The central theme, embodied in the story of cross and resurrection, is that the vision of salvation is rejected by the world, but proves triumphant. This is already clearly present in Paul, for example with the Epistle to the Philippians speaking of how, if I may slightly paraphrase it, the universal God had to manifest on earth in the most ignominious situation, death as a political criminal by slow torture, nailed to a tree, in order to be exalted as the last who would be first. The principle is established here that the way of God and the way of the world are so radically opposed that Christ was unrecognized when he lived.

6. Looking then to how the Alexandrian Jews used this myth to produce the Gospels, we find they inhabited a milieu full of astrotheology and old mythic archetypes. (I will start a thread soon on the chapter of Christ in Egypt on Horus at Age 12 and 30 to illustrate the prevalence of this Gnostic cosmic vision.) Orthodox Christians had to aggressively attack these 'heresies', showing how widespread they were. Irenaeus devoted considerable energy to attacks on Gnostic heresies that are highly astrotheological. Looking at this debate from the vantage point of today, it appears the Gnostics had the intellectual high ground, while the main orthodox motive was the growth of the church among the ignorant masses, restricting its message to something easily believed, and excluding complex messages that recognized the continuity between the new gospel and earlier mythology. The simple out-competed the complex as a matter of evolutionary survival.

7. One point of detail where I differ slightly from Murdock in emphasis is her comment that Christianity brought nothing new, but was just a 'rehash' of older mythology. My view is that the vision of Christ as avatar of the Age of Pisces was entirely new, albeit updating an old cosmic vision for a new age in a way that had strong continuity with previous established religious thinking. The problem was that this vision, wherever it originated, was and remains intellectually difficult to understand, because people cannot imagine that something so subtle and invisible as the movement of the equinox by one degree per lifetime could be the tectonic plate of human culture. This cosmic vision is seen throughout the New Testament in fragmentary form, indicating that it started as a coherent vision, but was steadily diluted to make it acceptable to a mass audience. Astrotheology, seeing Christ as allegory for the sun, is the stone at the head of the corner that the builders refused.

This is all true in terms of the Christ myth representing the major astrotheological event of the complete 360 degree cycle of the precession of the equinoxes ending and then beginning again at what was later deemed the BC/AD turning point. Count down to the end of the last cycle and count up since the beginning of the new. The astronomer priests are to thank for our timeline of history according this conception of BC/AD.

While the antiquity of this astronomical observation is debateable, what is factual is that by the earlier first century AD precession was known to the Greeks, at the very minimum. And if it had only been discovered not long before the first century of the common era as believed, then it most certainly would have been regarded as special and advanced knowledge to an astronomer priesthood at the time. The same holds true for the deep antiquity perspective as well. In discussing the Therapeutan brotherhood in Alexandria who were much like the astrotheological Egyptian priesthood of antiquity, this time period where the stars above matched up to the seasons below is something that would have been anticipated by mathematical calculation. The name of Joshua (Yeshua) is suddenly applied to solar mythology in all of this. And we end up with the Jesus myth as we have it today as the result.

It would be interesting if any of the "short works" of allegory described by Philo in the first century and then commented on by Eusebius and Epiphanius as being the early "gospels" were ever unearthed. It would be the find of the ages if so. I can imagine how damaging it would be to discover a collection of blatantly allegorical works that refer to the "word" and speak of a fictional "Joshua" character taken right out of OT lore in a Graeco-Jewish astrotheological context. Something like that would dam near settle the issue. And I wonder if those "short works" were ever housed in the libraries at Alexandria before the Christian destruction of said Libraries? All we have is Philo referring to them and the Christian fathers referring to Philo as it stands. Just going by Philo's writings alone it's obvious that there was in play a type of mystical Son of God belief which was not at all historicized or carnalized as of the early to mid first century. It's very interesting to consider when getting into Murdock's chapter on the Alexandrian Roots of Christianity.

I have been debating this material with Christian theologian James McGrath at http://www.patheos.com/community/explor ... -291275442

Here is my latest comment from that blog.

If we start from the observation that ancient myth routinely explained stories by reference to observation of the sky, such as the movement of the sun, and constellations as symbols for myth, the hypothesis is that Christianity originated from this same widespread approach. Precession of the equinox was known by the Greeks centuries before Christ, using information that Hipparchus obtained from meticulous ancient Babylonian records of star positions. The Egyptians clearly recognized precession, as Norman Lockyer (first editor of Nature) explained in his book The Dawn of Astronomy.

The question then, is how the story of Jesus Christ matches to the stars? Some key ideas about Jesus include that he marked a 'turning point of time' as reflected in our BC/AD dating of years. Looking to see how this turning point actually occurred, we see that the start of the Jewish Year, the spring equinox, moved in 20 AD out of the sign of Aries and into the sign of Pisces. This is a very slow change, tectonic in pace at one degree of arc per lifetime, but readily observable by people with a keen interest in the stars.

So, if the ancient seers understood the time of Christ as an observable turning point, a shift of Aeons, just in terms of the astronomy that they clearly possessed, we have a natural source for the elaboration of the literal historical myth of Jesus Christ, the anointed savior predicted in Daniel 9.

Building on this hypothesis, we find abundant corroboration within the New Testament. This slow change of the sky serves as a natural pre-existent logos, or cosmic reason, supporting the Pauline cosmology of Philippians and Colossians. Numerous Gospel references, especially the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the discussion of the end of the Age in the Olivet Discourse, support this natural cosmology of Christ as the incarnation of a new cosmic age.

The Book of Revelation presents this scientific observational allegory, especially with the idea of Christ as the Alpha and Omega. There are other allegories within Revelation, such as the river of life as the Milky Way, the tree of life as the zodiac, and the dragon who sweeps one third of the sky giving his seat to the leopard-bear-lion as the precession of the North Celestial Pole.

Overall, rebasing Christianity in natural cosmology presents a method to reconcile faith and reason, putting the supernatural myths into a scientific framework. There is no need to speculate about any magical astrological meaning here, because this framework is simply compatible with the broadly understood nature of ancient thought in its actual observation of the stars as the temporal framework of heaven.

What is really interesting is how this natural vision was suppressed. We see it is not compatible with the injunction in Deuteronomy not to worship nature, or with the panentheist transcendence of God. It appears that this source for the idea of Christ was seen as too close to the pagan views that the church was in political combat with, so its presence within the text was systematically concealed, and then forgotten.

Note: This discussion is more relevant to the thread on mythicism, so I have responded here. Readers can find the quoted post at the thread on Horus at the Age of 12 and 30.

DWill wrote:I have in mind a slightly different view of an ideological response, whereby we're so certain that an operating principle applies across a broad range of cases, that we don't really look at individual factors in those cases. We might say that Marxism or libertarianism applies to anything political, or that mythicism or literalism applies to anything religious. This is where the overreach also comes in. I know that the remark by Price may be a low-hanging fruit, and that he is not actually a mythicist, but it might serve to highlight the difference in views. Do you find anything exaggerated in his estimation of the stellar origin of many OT heroes and heroines? I would go as far as ridiculous, frankly.

Good questions. If mythicism is just what falls out from rigorously applying the scientific method to religious texts, then it contains no more ideology than science does. The 'ideological response' of science consists in assumptions such as that we have one universe, that it is internally consistent, and that rigorous observation provides reliable access to the nature of reality, which is the same thing as the reality of nature. Science is about comparing rival hypotheses and assessing which have the greatest explanatory value. Here we are comparing orthodox literal history, including its variants which assume the existence of Jesus Christ a priori as a real man, against the mythicist claim that it is most likely there was no individual founder of Christianity living at the time of Christ as described in the Bible.

Price commented "many of the epic heroes and ancient patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament were personified stars, planets, and constellations." To assess this comment, we have to look for evidence of similarity between the Biblical figures and the sun, moon, planets, etc. For a start, the name of Israel includes reference to the god El, a personification of the planet Saturn, understood as the outer limit of the solar system. Adam bears a striking resemblance to the Egyptian solar deity Atum. Abraham is presented as an avatar of the Age of Aries. Esther bears close etymological similarity to Ishtar, and along with Lucifer is associated with the planet Venus.

As I commented in the post to which you responded, religious texts operate at multiple levels. I don't think anyone wants to say there is nothing in history that contributed to the hero figures. Rather, the gradual process of story telling, whereby some elements of history were woven in to a narrative whose archetypal vision was set by explaining how our life reflects the eternal stability of the observable sky, suggests that these constant stellar themes were at the foundation of the meme, and the historical parts were added in to make them more entertaining, interesting and believable.

Moving to the New Testament, Murdock presents some interesting relevant commentary in her chapter Was Horus Crucified? The key theme here is that ancient thought used such terms as the cross primarily as cosmic symbols, and it is hard for us to get behind millennia of literalism about Jesus and the cross to see the deeper natural vision, and to start to get inside the ancient mind in which the visible heavens are the primary meaning of heaven. I will expand on this in a new thread on that chapter.

I'm not under the impression that Murdock is promoting belief in the myths themselves. She has said as much here and I believe her. My statements were prompted by your strongly revisionist view of the character of the pre-Christian religions that are the subject of Murdock's work. That they can be seen in historical perspective as scientific or empirical implies that they also were non-superstitious. To establish that generalization requires a good deal of proof. Having thought, apparently, that you provided that, you then turned grievance-filled invective against the folks who destroyed the Egyptian enlightenment--the founders of Christianity. All this just raises my skeptic's antennae. Such blatant partisanship doesn't sort with scholarship or history.

I don't suggest that any early religion was not superstitious. Science was so limited at that time that the assumption that divinity played a major magical role in events was pervasive, especially in Egypt. However, what we are looking at is why some mythemes proved durable. This is where the scientific analysis comes in, with the observation that durable ideas often corresponded to actual observation, whether consciously or not. We see this continuing through Christianity with the popular images of the four evangelists which are entirely based on the four most prominent constellations of the zodiac, a match that goes back to the Egyptian four sons of Horus as the cardinal points of the compass. People do not have to consciously understand this correspondence between image and observation for the mytheme to resonate with their religious sensibility.

I really don't agree that "grievance-filled invective" is a fair description of my views. When I commented in the referenced post about orthodoxy suppressing older ideas, it was just stating a matter of fact. It is entirely scholarly to look at events such as the suppression of Gnosticism and pagan religion, the closure of the pagan centers of learning, and the mass burning of ancient literature, as factors that have to be considered in trying to get to the truth behind the stories. After all, Christianity did manage to establish the Dark Ages.

Robert Tulip wrote: Good questions. If mythicism is just what falls out from rigorously applying the scientific method to religious texts, then it contains no more ideology than science does. The 'ideological response' of science consists in assumptions such as that we have one universe, that it is internally consistent, and that rigorous observation provides reliable access to the nature of reality, which is the same thing as the reality of nature. Science is about comparing rival hypotheses and assessing which have the greatest explanatory value. Here we are comparing orthodox literal history, including its variants which assume the existence of Jesus Christ a priori as a real man, against the mythicist claim that it is most likely there was no individual founder of Christianity living at the time of Christ as described in the Bible.

Good decision to shift my post, Mr. Moderator. The problem I'm having with your analogy between science and mythicism is that physical science, as you say, uses epistemologic standards that have been broadly agreed on and proven to be trustworthy. It also devotes itself to that which can be subjected to experiment and quantification. A scientific spirit in areas that do not lend themselves to experiment and quantification is of course also important, and is responsible for the higher criticism of the Bible, among other approaches that have yielded better understanding of history and society. But as we venture into culture and history our ability to exercise control over variables nearly disappears; and our own placement within a particular subjective framework--from which we cannot escape--crucially affects what we think we see. Regarding generalizations and broad conclusions, we need to be extremely cautious and tentative. Historians merely try to furnish small bits of a basis from which we might draw conclusions. Their awareness of the limitations to knowing all the factors that contributed to the unfolding of history makes them conservative, just as scientists are extreme conservatives. So historian equals scientist, and there is no difference between your "scientific" approach and a "historical" approach. If mythicists employ the careful tools of historians, then no problem. I'm not saying that they never do this, but I am saying that being committed to a specific outlook will ramp up the probability of subjective interference, which is always there in some degree anyway.

Price commented "many of the epic heroes and ancient patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament were personified stars, planets, and constellations." To assess this comment, we have to look for evidence of similarity between the Biblical figures and the sun, moon, planets, etc. For a start, the name of Israel includes reference to the god El, a personification of the planet Saturn, understood as the outer limit of the solar system. Adam bears a striking resemblance to the Egyptian solar deity Atum. Abraham is presented as an avatar of the Age of Aries. Esther bears close etymological similarity to Ishtar, and along with Lucifer is associated with the planet Venus.

At the risk of seeming obtuse and prosaic, since we're reading a text, shouldn't most of our attention be going to the text, to the narrative in front of us? I can't help thinking that you're placing an attribute or a vestige at the top level, instead of noting what the narrative means and what it says about the culture that produced it. Take the domestic dramas of the descendants of Abraham as an example. If there are astral parallels that someone might deduce, it seems perverse to say that these are what the narrative is about, or that the stars were the inspiration for these tales that are very specific to the culture of that time and place. Life experiences are what mark people and shape the narratives they make about themselves.

As I commented in the post to which you responded, religious texts operate at multiple levels. I don't think anyone wants to say there is nothing in history that contributed to the hero figures. Rather, the gradual process of story telling, whereby some elements of history were woven in to a narrative whose archetypal vision was set by explaining how our life reflects the eternal stability of the observable sky, suggests that these constant stellar themes were at the foundation of the meme, and the historical parts were added in to make them more entertaining, interesting and believable.

I think the vision begins with the life, not with impulses from the skies. There is no way I can see that this difference can be resolved. I would appeal to the stronger, more visceral effects of the struggle for existence vs. the intellectual/spiritual experience you see as primary.

I really don't agree that "grievance-filled invective" is a fair description of my views. When I commented in the referenced post about orthodoxy suppressing older ideas, it was just stating a matter of fact. It is entirely scholarly to look at events such as the suppression of Gnosticism and pagan religion, the closure of the pagan centers of learning, and the mass burning of ancient literature, as factors that have to be considered in trying to get to the truth behind the stories. After all, Christianity did manage to establish the Dark Ages.

Okay, invective was strong, but you have a grievance. Nothing wrong with that except that it can skew your outlook. Yes, of course the things you point out about Christian suppression went on, but isn't this where perspective and proportion come in? Religion could be the most political endeavor we've come up with, so skullduggery is the order of the day. It was no different throughout the history of Egypt, no doubt. Christian monotheism brought with it a greater concentration of power, a greater ability to control the game. Now, as to the causes of the "Dark Ages," that's an opportunity for some detailed historical exploration.