KRST - Jesus a Solar Myth

[Leucius Charinus]

Over time, the myth of the perfect man evolved from very ancient Egyptian ideas of a divine king into the Greco-Egyptian Serapis, and then under the Roman hegemony also then grafted on the Jewish Nazarene tradition of the branch of Jesse from Isaiah 11:1. So Christianity was able to construct a Messiah who would speak to the newly mixed Jewish, Greek and Egyptian cultures of the Common Era. So I do find it thinkable, and even persuasive and compelling, that the solar myth of Christ Jesus evolved to express the common desires of communities and did not involve a man Jesus Christ as a single individual genius founder of Christianity.

I'd agree with this in respect of the gnostic communities. I guess we need to know how the gnostic communities related to the canonical communities, and vice verse. LC

A good starting point here is the divinity of pharaoh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Eg ... ne_pharaoh ........

Hi Robert.

We are using different definitions of the "gnostic communities". You are using the very broad brush by examining all ancient cultures. I have no problem with this study at all. However I am using a different definition which should have been qualified as "Christian gnostic communities". This is very specific in the sense that we are dealing with the authors and preservers of the "Christian gnostic literature", which forms a large subset of the (Christian) non canonical literature. I see the "Christian gnostic communities" as the communities who preserved the "Christian Gnostic literature". These communities are distinct and different from the "Christian orthodox communities" who preserved the canonical books.

I just thought I'd clarify this, as it is likely we have been talking past each other here and perhaps elsewhere.

Best wishes



LC

[Clive]

“So Mark appears to contradict himself. A modern-day equivalent would be for me to write: ‘On Boxing Day [December 26], when it was customary to prepare the dinner for Christmas Day [December 25].’” This remark accurately captures the basic problem that a lot of other scholars have noticed previously.

Maybe not - are we sure what calendars were being used by the writers and might this show where and when they were writing?

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/3 ... 8032&uid=4

Calendars, Ceremonies, and Festivals in a North Indian Village: Necessary Calendric Information for Fieldwork
Ruth S. Freed and Stanley A. Freed
Southwestern Journal of Anthropology
Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1964), pp. 67-90
Published by: University of New Mexico
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3629413
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Should not discussions of calendars acknowledge that as noted above a one day ceremony does continue for two days, and I do not recall discussion of sun rise calendars and how christianity may have adapted this idea - churches do face East....

The equations of the most general type of solar calendar and sundial, which were derived in Vandyck M (2000 A unified and general framework for sundials and solar calendars Eur. J. Phys. 22 79), are extended here to take into account the three main systems of time-reckoning employed by the Ancients: Babylonian hours, Roman hours, and Italian (or Bohemian) hours. The results provide insight into the notions of `temporary' and `equal' hours, which are related to the concept of `uniformity' of the flow of time.

http://iopscience.iop.org/0143-0807/22/4/305

https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en& ... rs&f=false

Hidden rhythms - sociology of time.

[Robert Tulip]

Why do churches face East?

Pre Vatican II, the consecration of the host was an engagement between the priest and God, with the altar facing the eastern window of the church, and the priest representing the people to God. God was represented by the rising sun, especially at dawn on Easter Day, when the sun is due east and the moon is due west, celebrating the daily resurrection of the sun and its victory over night. Almost overnight, under the weight of secularisation and lack of understanding of the solar origins of the Christ myth, ‘ad orientem’ was thrown out and ‘versus populum’ embraced, with the mass now celebrated by a priest facing the congregation. The secularisation of modern faith led to a shift of metaphysics, with the transubstantiation now understood by Catholicism in terms of a relationship between the church and the people, with God (the sun) essentially cut out of the picture. It is fascinating to see how the negative attitude towards the natural symbolism that animates Christianity has gone hand in hand with a hollowing out of faith.

And how can gnosticism post date christianity if Paul was gnostic?

It can’t. The church systematically distorted the meaning of Gnosticism. The Valentinians revered Paul as a gnostic, but this teaching was severely anathematised. The pretence that Christian Gnosticism was a mutant from an original Orthodoxy is a Big Lie, a reversal of the true story. It is somewhat like how the New Testament puts the Gospels before the Epistles to falsely imply that Paul was aware of the Gospel story, but actually much worse because it creates such a false impression about how the Christ Myth was fabricated.

http://gnosis.org/naghamm/Pagels-Gnostic-Gospels.html

That is a short extract from The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels (I recommend that people should explain what links are when they post them.)

http://freethoughtnation.com/forums/vie ... =18&t=3524

And this, thanks Clive, is my review of The Gnostic Paul by Elaine Pagels, which I have also posted at http://www.amazon.com/review/R2803T62V90MTR

[Clive]

A preliminary investigation into the orientation of twelve Greek Byzantine churches towards the east is made in relation to the day of sunrise. Measurements were carried out using magnetic compass with inclinometer and GPS (azimuth, latitude, angular altitude of horizon) while declination corrections included a) local magnetic declination and b) refraction. The position of sunrise in the horizon as well as during morning hours was computed with in-house software. Accounting for the differences between Gregorian and Julian calendars, orientation of the nave towards spring and/or autumn, i. e. around the two equinoxes, was found for most churches. Orientations toward the summer solstice and the name day of the saint were also found.

http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/byzs.20 ... 06.523.xml

[Clive]

Robert, The Vatican is a heretical branch of the true Orthodox faith!!! Protestants are heretics of heretics, pentecostals heretics of heretics of heretics....

They may just have healed the split, depending on how one reads a Pope bowing to a Patriarch!

[Peter Kirby]

The date of the Passion and of Easter, by way of Passover, clearly has some astronomical significance. This was not lost on Christians of later centuries either. Perhaps it had astronomical significance for its first tradents; perhaps it did not. That is a fair question.

The Christians of the second century, and especially before Commodus (the first emperor to have any sympathizers of Christianity tolerated in his court), built no church buildings, let alone church buildings facing east. While it can be fascinating to understand why church buildings face east and so on, it tells us little about the very origins and earliest development of the Christian myth, which I suppose is the main concern.

The same can be said regarding the date of the birth of Jesus, a date not given in the New Testament gospels.

The historical-critical method is based on, founded on, and takes its very reason for being from just these kinds of observations. It thrives on the separation of events and ideas by provenance and date, so that it can accurately trace cause and effect and understand the course of historical development.

By essentially ignoring the date of the individual items of Christian myth that are analyzed and stewing it all together in some great pot, out of which we may boil and reduce it down to an "astrotheological" origin and understanding of the earliest Christian myth, we will have given up the practice of historical criticism, with its promise of a better understanding of the historical development than that which has been codified in accumulated tradition, for a mess of pottage, none better than that hoary myth which it replaces.

Perhaps the old saw of the theologians grasping at the elephant may apply here, in the explanation of the development of Christianity. The first step to recovery would be to abandon the "astrotheological" superstructure, in which everything is stretched to fit, and start by examining the historical evidence closely instead. Then you could observe whether and how any bits thrown in that mix had some merit.

[Clive]

Not sure if I have posted in wrong thread, but I was referencing the calendrical confusion in another thread, and asking are we sure there is not a reason behind this alleged confusion, like several calendars being used at the same time, or a writer writing somewhere else with a different set of time assumptions to the locality they are writing about.

The facing East thing and the priest facing East may actually track back to the alleged beginnings - I think these are examples, developments in stone and formalised ritual of the original rituals, which possibly were related to typical "oriental cults" of leaving the cave at dawn, as imagined in Gore Vidal's Julian.

I think we are looking at series of rituals that had just so stories written about them - your recent comment about christ being crucified and risen before them says precisely this - the ritual of the eucharist was the evidence that christ had risen!

This cult had a few usps that got it going - eternal life isn't to be sneezed at!

[Clive]

Are the gospels necessary?

[Clive]

Look at the rituals! They probably tell us a lot more than we realise! We do not need to create huge overarching theories - my position is that there are rituals and practices and theologies that track back to our common experiences of the seasons, day and night. They also track back to many other things!

http://stephanhuller.blogspot.co.uk/201 ... olved.html

Could One of My Readers Have Solved the Mystery of Fire Baptism?

[Pier Tulip]

@MrMacSon

How about a sect other than a Mythraic one?

Much of KRST is devoted to Mithraism and its correspondences with Christianity.

Does such "decoded allegorical key" have parallels in Barbara Thiering's Pesher methodology?

No, my llegorical key is the same you can find in this Book https://books.google.it/books?id=olU-k9 ... CCoQ6AEwAQ
but I found out after having already applied it. It derives from using Egyptian Heliopolitan theology.


@neilgodfrey

outhouse wrote:

Pier Tulip wrote: the Gospels are based on allegorical stories from Therapists in Alexandria

Unsubstantiated.

That reminds me: I have never yet seen a substantiation of the claim that the gospels are based on oral traditions of historical events.

I refer mainly to this step:
EUS II,17,11-12: "«They have also writings of ancient men, who were the founders of their sect (then prior to the first century), and who left many monuments of the allegorical method. These they use as models, and imitate their principles». These things seem to have been stated by a man who had heard them expounding their sacred writings. But it is highly probable that the works of the ancients, which he says they had, were the Gospels and the writings of the apostles."

it is not about "oral traditions of historical events" but oral traditions of allegories.
There is no historical event handed down in the Gospels

@arnoldo

my bolding. . . where does a possible figure of a historical Jesus fit into the Solar Myth hypothesis?

Indeed. But I do not associate a historical character to the solar myth, I present a historical figure who may be responsible for an initial and mystery cult, which gave birth to early Christianity.
It could be, that is, that the character Jesus was molded on a real character, but the story told in the Gospels, at least initially, was an allegorical tale.