Loaves and Fishes

[Robert Tulip]

Thanks for the additional information, Robert! I found more about Aion at wiki. Apparently there are two versions of Aion, one Hellenistic and and the other Gnostic.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aion_%28deity%29
"... Franz Cumont positioned Aion as Unlimited Time (sometimes represented as the Saeculum, Cronus, or Saturn) as the god who emerged from primordial Chaos, and who in turn generated Heaven and Earth. This deity is represented as the leontocephaline, the winged lion-headed male figure whose nude torso is entwined by a serpent. He typically holds a sceptre, keys, or a thunderbolt.[8] The figure of Time "played a considerable, though to us completely obscure, role" in Mithraic theology.[9]" Off to read more about Franz Cumont.

Thank you Pakeha. I also find the God Aion extremely interesting. I discussed Aion in an essay I wrote called The Peratae – Gnostic Astrologers, available at http://rtulip.net/yahoo_site_admin/asse ... 193937.pdf
In this essay I analyse the heresiological critique of the Peratae by church father Hippolytus.

Aion relates directly to one of my main themes in this thread, that understanding the cosmology of the Bible enables us to see the most plausible evolutionary structure of Christian belief as it emerged from Gnosticism. If we fail to see the basic astronomy as it was available to the ancients, we cannot see how this astronomy provides the structural framework for core Christian ideas, such as the alpha and omega and the loaves and fishes. Until we place the faith stories within the cosmology of precession, we cannot see why the conventional theory of Gnosticism as a reaction to Orthodoxy is the reverse of the actual order of events.

The figure of Aion puts this precessional framework into a big accurate context, imagining the seven ages of time beginning with the Age of Leo . Here is a comment on Aion from my essay on the Peratae.

“A hot clue towards the precessional framework of Gnosticism now appears. Hippolytus says “Now these, falsifying the name of truth, proclaim as a doctrine of Christ an insurrection of Aeons and revolts of good into (the ranks of) evil powers.”

The term Aeon, or Age, is complex. Greco-Roman mysteries worshiped a God named Aion, also identified with Saturn, Kronos, and Time. A statue of Aion shows a man with a lion’s head and eagle’s wings, standing on top of a globe, with a snake coiling six times around the body from the man’s feet to the its head at the lion’s forehead. This image of Aion matches precisely to precession of the equinox, the vision of 12,000 years from when the spring equinox was in Leo the Lion to its current position at the start of Aquarius the Man. The six coils represent the six Ages of the Zodiac, Leo, Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries and Pisces, leading to the beginning of the New Age of Aquarius. Again, I note that this description is purely empirical astronomy, and needs no astrological magic to be understood as a perfectly accurate terrestrial cosmology that was understood as such in the ancient world.

But Hippolytus sees any discussion of Aeons as insufferably infused with magical error, and therefore mocks this Gnostic theory of the ‘doctrine of Christ’. However, it is readily possible to see the cosmic framework of fall and redemption against the markers of the Aeons. The idea, glimpsed in the Vedas, Daniel and Hesiod, is that the Age of Leo (the dawn of the Holocene) was the Golden Age when humanity was in tune with God, followed by successively worse ages of silver and bronze leading to the current low point of the age of iron, marked by ignorance of God. In this framework, the low point of the cycle is reached during the 7000 years beginning with the Age of Taurus in about 4000 BC, while return towards a better world begins at the time of Christ, with the dawn of the Age of Pisces, leading to the millennium of peace and restoration from 2000 AD. The Age of Pisces is only the beginning of a very slow 24,000 year cycle, and is seen as preparation for the next age, the Age of Aquarius, beginning about 2000 AD, when the redemptive teaching of Christ will finally begin to be understood.

This framework of Aeons actually matches to real climate cycles. The Holocene dawned when the northern summer was at perihelion, the orbital point closest to the sun. The opposite point, when the northern summer was furthest from the sun, was in 1246 AD. This cycle, driven primarily by precession of the equinox as the observable indicator of earth’s axial wobble, is the basis of earth’s glacial rhythms, observable in ice core records over the last million years.”

In terms of method, starting from cosmology as it was known to the ancients reveals a coherent Christology that is compatible with mythicism and also with the ethical idea that Christianity provides a sublime vision of the problems of the world and their solution. Christianity has seen this vision as through a glass darkly. Placing the emergence of Christian doctrine against the reality of ancient astronomy indicates a path to a clear view of how and why the story of Jesus Christ has had such immense cultural resonance. I expand on these themes at an essay on The New Heaven.

[pakeha]

Thanks for the link and the preview of your essay, Robert.
I see I have a great deal of reading ahead of me this evening.

[ghost]

Maybe if I rephrase my question:

How can either hypothesis demonstrate it is not an exercise in what Samuel Sandmel labelled "parallelomania"?

Sandmel drew distinctions between parallelomania and identification of genuine parallels: http://vridar.org/2014/03/20/parallels- ... ifference/

Can either hypothesis demonstrate it is a genuine parallel to "cosmic concepts"/"Caesar's bio"?

I have not read anything yet that puts either hypothesis beyond the very method Sandmel characterized as "parallelomania".

Both are essentially working by the same method.

There is no criterion to decide between one hypothesis based on an extravagance of a grab-bag of parallels and another. I demonstrated how your method can apply astrotheology to Casey's book. That demonstrates the invalidity of the method, surely.

Read these biodata into another bio:

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/esumma.html

[neilgodfrey]

Maybe if I rephrase my question:

How can either hypothesis demonstrate it is not an exercise in what Samuel Sandmel labelled "parallelomania"?

Sandmel drew distinctions between parallelomania and identification of genuine parallels: http://vridar.org/2014/03/20/parallels- ... ifference/

Can either hypothesis demonstrate it is a genuine parallel to "cosmic concepts"/"Caesar's bio"?

I have not read anything yet that puts either hypothesis beyond the very method Sandmel characterized as "parallelomania".

Both are essentially working by the same method.

There is no criterion to decide between one hypothesis based on an extravagance of a grab-bag of parallels and another. I demonstrated how your method can apply astrotheology to Casey's book. That demonstrates the invalidity of the method, surely.

Read these biodata into another bio:

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/esumma.html

The advantage Carotta's ideas have over Robert Tulip's is that they include structural matches. But this is then undone by piecing the matches together from different gospels, especially Mark and John. It would be stronger if the matches were all related to the one gospel narrative. Ditto for the sayings.

But some of the sayings and narrative matches look stretched thin to me. If the author was basing his narrative on Caesar then how do we account for some of the matches being explained as "confusions of the original names/sayings"? Confusion is not very likely to someone who supposedly knows the Caesar story.

But again, we have the problem of extracts, or excerpts, being the basis of the matches. There is a lot of detail in between those points in the gospels that are matched that would seem to have no significance to the life of Caesar, from what I understand and know of the thesis at this point. I'm reminded of the matches between the assassinations of the U.S. presidents -- by selecting excerpts to match up we can have lots of fun making matches like that.

None of these explanations match the structural and semantic overlaps found between gospel narratives and OT passages. So I still think the motive, intentions, ideologies, literary presentations are best explained as creating a theological metaphor for a new community facing the destruction of the old cult in 70 ce.

[neilgodfrey]

I cannot demonstrate that a midrashic analysis is ... incompatible with the Jesus is Caesar theory.

That is a piece of rhetorical exuberance, to put it kindly, that shows why your contributions in this thread are largely useless except as false statements that deserve correction.

Here is what I believe to be the essence of valid and invalid parallels, Robert:

Detailed study is the criterion, and the detailed study ought to respect the context and not be limited to juxtaposing mere excerpts.

(p. 2, Sandmel)

Your interpretation of the loaves and fishes appears to be a classic instance of "juxtaposing mere excerpts" from astrotheological concepts and applying them wherever they fit to images in the narrative. Do you disagree?

If so, I believe that this is why I was able to apply the astrotheological interpretation to Casey's book. That demonstrated that it is possible to apply "mere excerpts" to almost any text one deems fit to make a case.

I do not believe, however, that I can apply key motifs and structural patterns in the narrative of Exodus/Moses and Psalm 23 to Casey's book or to very many other texts that an author did not consciously use these as a model for his work.

You have mentioned the Hypothetico-deductive method and linked, I think iirc, to the wikipedia article which lists its steps:

1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Gather data and look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.

2. Form a conjecture (hypothesis): When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.

3. Deduce predictions from the hypothesis: if you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?

4. Test (or Experiment): Look for evidence (observations) that conflict with these predictions in order to disprove 2. It is a logical error to seek 3 directly as proof of 2. This formal fallacy is called affirming the consequent.

Your hypothesis fails at points 3 and 4. It fails at point 3 because your prediction is so vague and general that it can apply to any hypothesis. Your prediction, as I recall (correct me if I have misremembered) is that you will find other passages that also match the astrotheological parallels. I think any hypothesis can say it will find more stuff and be able to interpret anything else in its own parameters. That is not a specific enough prediction to be useful.

Your hypothesis fails at point 4 because you do not look for evidence or observations that conflict with your predictions. You are falling into the fallacy of confirming the consequent. Yes?

I get the impression you are not interested in studying alternative arguments and are unaware of what alternatives exist -- apparently in many instances on the basis that you think they must be wrong because they assume the existence of a historical Jesus.

Thompson does not assume the existence of the historical Jesus and has alerted us to many examples of passages in ancient Near Eastern culture that demonstrate the Biblical (New Testament) motifs are derived from this-worldly political and ethical concepts (not astrotheology): http://vridar.org/2010/05/22/jesus-a-sa ... d-babylon/

Hector Avalos does not assume the historicity of Jesus and demonstrates that the New Testament and OT injunctions to love God (Jesus) and keep his commandments and submit humbly and the promise to inherit the earth are not to be read through apologist or modern concepts of those terms, but in their original contexts they expressed "sentiments parallel to what was expected of slaves and imperial subjects" -- the only difference is that Jesus has replaced Caesar and there is a new body loyal to him, now -- but the concepts of bondage, slavery, etc are the same -- (and the earth to be inherited in the beatitude is the land of Israel.)

Thompson and Avalos together point to evidence that the NT teachings had a somewhat different and less liberating context in their original reception and are not really applicable to theologies of personal liberation in modern senses of the word.

It is encouraging to see that Robert it taking his time to prepare a most thoughtful response to the above post and its criticisms.

Meanwhile, here are some other gems from Hector Avalos (Fighting Words):

theologies have been constructed mostly by Christians and Jews, whose links to the Bible result in inevitable selection bias based on unverifiable theological grounds. . . .

an overarching theme of our thesis is that the lack of verifiability in religious belief . . . .

Arbitrary selectivity and interpretation is the main reason that the New Testament is so often viewed as preaching only or essentially love. . . .

Ultimately, all of these defenses are premised on selectivity that is not more arbitrary than that of so-called fundamentalists. The fact is that we can no more verify that God meant [X] than we can that he did not. We cannot verify the [sayings X] represent God's thoughts anymore than the [y] ones. . . .

That is, the theses of Atwill, Carotta, Astrotheology as explained by Robert here, are grounded on selective and ultimately unverifiable interpretations by applying excerpts of data that they wish to find validated in the Bible. Take a body of belief one wants to find in the Bible for justification, and select concepts, motifs, terms in it and see where they can be matched to a suitable passage in the Bible -- whether those belief systems relate to astrotheology, doctrines of Mormons and JWs, racist ideas, ethical wishes that Jesus taught only love and goodness and ways to human fulfilment, coded messages for the last days or some secret society -- and one will find exactly what one wants.

[Robert Tulip]

Here is what I believe to be the essence of valid and invalid parallels, Robert: “Detailed study is the criterion, and the detailed study ought to respect the context and not be limited to juxtaposing mere excerpts.” (p. 2, Sandmel) Your interpretation of the loaves and fishes appears to be a classic instance of "juxtaposing mere excerpts" from astrotheological concepts and applying them wherever they fit to images in the narrative. Do you disagree?

Yes, I disagree. The issue is to establish a coherent and logical understanding of the texts. This means assessing the most likely path of textual evolution, and grounding interpretation in the motives and knowledge and beliefs of the authors.

A core claim of astrotheology is the need to invert the traditional theory of Christianity as emerging from social response to a single founder, Jesus Christ. A far more coherent reading of the evidence is that mystery schools saw an intimate connection between religious ideas and their observation of reality, seen especially in the idea of reflection between the movement of the heavens and the deep meaning of events on earth, and incorporated this vision in the myth of Jesus Christ.

Against this structure of intent, reading the loaves and fishes miracle as a cosmic parable makes complete sense. I have not found any coherent interpretation that stands in conflict with this cosmic parable hypothesis.

If so, I believe that this is why I was able to apply the astrotheological interpretation to Casey's book. That demonstrated that it is possible to apply "mere excerpts" to almost any text one deems fit to make a case.

Your phrase ‘mere excerpts’ fails to recognise that real astral reading applies to the Bible in a systematic way, very different from the ad hoc parallels of some other methods. Your link to Casey was entirely ad hoc, lacking in systematic theory. By contrast, astrotheology is systematic, using actual observation of the cosmos as the structured ground of belief and knowledge.

This is a method that coheres with the role of Gnostic movements in seeking to answer fundamental philosophical questions, to find salvation through knowledge.

A key basic question is the relation between eternity and time, between the changeless and change, seeing what Bonhoeffer called ‘the beyond in the midst of the world’. Christology seeks to answer this question of the relation between time and eternity through the idea of the person of Jesus Christ, connecting time represented by the imagined historical saviour Jesus with eternity represented by the unchanging heavens and the idea of the anointed Christ as Logos or reason.

This model lends itself both to traditional historicism, taking the Jesus stories as true, and to a recognition of the deeper meaning found in Gnosticism, taking the stories as allegory for a cosmological perception of what it meant for the authors to describe an anointed saviour, Christ Jesus.

I do not believe, however, that I can apply key motifs and structural patterns in the narrative of Exodus/Moses and Psalm 23 to Casey's book or to very many other texts that an author did not consciously use these as a model for his work.

Sorry, the bad grammar in that sentence renders it meaningless. I am not again going to use your bad grammar to read what you might have intended to say, except to note again that your connection of excerpts to Casey fails to engage with the theoretical basis of astrotheology.

You have mentioned the Hypothetico-deductive method and linked, I think iirc, to the wikipedia article which lists its steps:

1. Use your experience: Consider the problem and try to make sense of it. Gather data and look for previous explanations. If this is a new problem to you, then move to step 2.

The Christian paradigm is broken. Conventional faith maintains a tired and unbelievable historicism, while a range of new theories contend to provide a more coherent explanation. We are in a classic situation of paradigm shift. Mythicism is intimately tied to cosmology, in its recognition of the leading role of Gnosticism in the ancient world, and how the active suppression of Gnosticism has grossly distorted common perceptions of history. There is in fact abundant data to support a mythicist cosmology as a new paradigm for theology, but the simple political fact is that this data was targeted by the orthodox as heresy, due to its conflict with a range of beliefs regarding heaven, Jesus, salvation, grace, faith, knowledge and ethics.

In a way it reminds me of the Greek myth of Kronos castrating his father Uranus,and then eating the Gods, with Zeus enabling the victory of the Gods by releasing them from the Titan’s belly. With Christianity the attempted suppression was that the child Orthodoxy tried to eat its parent Gnosticism. We could explore that motif against the Oedipus myth, including regarding the role of the sphinx, to see the curse Christianity has inflicted through its denial of its real origins.

2. Form a conjecture (hypothesis): When nothing else is yet known, try to state an explanation, to someone else, or to your notebook.

I first presented my conjecture that precession of the equinox is central to understanding the Bible in my BA Honours thesis in 1985. In the face of complete incomprehension and indifference to this idea, I have been studying the problem ever since. I wrote my MA Honours thesis on ethics and ontology in Heidegger in order to explore how philosophy deals with the relation between being and time.

Since then my research has uncovered a wide coherence between the precession hypothesis and the evidence, looking in the Bible for examples of how the authors encoded astral imagery to explain their real deeper meaning of a natural cosmology grounded in precession.

3. Deduce predictions from the hypothesis: if you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?

The predictions are around the claim that theology can attain a natural coherence by recognising the ancient role of cosmology in the origins of Biblical faith. This means that everything in the Bible can be framed against the evolutionary perspective provided by the existence of secret mystery societies who constructed the Christ myth as a true theory of time, seeing events on earth in the framework of the slow unfolding of the heavens.

4. Test (or Experiment): Look for evidence (observations) that conflict with these predictions in order to disprove 2. It is a logical error to seek 3 directly as proof of 2. This formal fallacy is called affirming the consequent.

I have not found any evidence that conflicts with these predictions. There is of course widespread opinion that rejects the presence of natural cosmology in the Bible, but my study indicates that this traditional failure to engage with cosmology lacks grounds in evidence.

Your hypothesis fails at points 3 and 4. It fails at point 3 because your prediction is so vague and general that it can apply to any hypothesis. Your prediction, as I recall (correct me if I have misremembered) is that you will find other passages that also match the astrotheological parallels. I think any hypothesis can say it will find more stuff and be able to interpret anything else in its own parameters. That is not a specific enough prediction to be useful.

Neil, I think you make this claim because you do not understand what I say. There is nothing vague and general in my proposed overturning of conventional belief in favour of a scientific hypothesis. The example here, the loaves and fishes, shows how specific detail of the text can be fruitfully read against a cosmic intent. Similar analysis is possible for the whole Bible, including with the observation that a strong religious meme insisted on the pure transcendence of God and rejected on principle the idea that the authors had a primary natural meaning.

This requires an understanding of the heuristic of the wheat and tares, the idea that true and false teachings are intermingled in tradition, and they will only be sorted out in a new age. The true teachings are natural, while the false teachings are supernatural. A radical exclusion of the supernatural from the original intent of the authors enables understanding that they were far more enlightened and far seeing than is now generally understood. This is a way of finding respect for the Bible and Christianity against a systematic scientific method.

Your hypothesis fails at point 4 because you do not look for evidence or observations that conflict with your predictions. You are falling into the fallacy of confirming the consequent. Yes?

No. As I have explained, I simply reject the claim that there is evidence that conflicts with my predictions. I claim that astral reading of the Bible resolves a number of puzzles, especially why and how the false meme of the historical Jesus emerged and suppressed its origins.

I get the impression you are not interested in studying alternative arguments and are unaware of what alternatives exist -- apparently in many instances on the basis that you think they must be wrong because they assume the existence of a historical Jesus.

Of course I am interested in studying alternative arguments, and that is why I welcome the discussion in this thread, except where comments are simply rude and ignorant. I do not see where any alternative arguments have been shown to prove any holes in what I have said.

There are of course scholars who bracket the historical Jesus in their analysis. We have to recognise that such ideas do face persecution and incomprehension, illustrated by the widespread derision and suppression that mythicist ideas still encounter. I do not have a persecution complex, and I recognise that modern acceptance of free thought enables dialogue. But I also know that Christians generally will reject my ideas on emotional grounds, and that there are few forums where serious analysis in theology is possible, given the dominant vested interests of the church in matters touching on religion.

Thompson does not assume the existence of the historical Jesus and has alerted us to many examples of passages in ancient Near Eastern culture that demonstrate the Biblical (New Testament) motifs are derived from this-worldly political and ethical concepts (not astrotheology): http://vridar.org/2010/05/22/jesus-a-sa ... d-babylon/

I have not read Thompson, and would be interested to do so. I wonder if you are reading opposition to astrotheology into Thompson or if he specifically discusses it? I could give as a conflicting example Frank Zindler, of American Atheists, whose brilliant essays in rebuttal of Bart Ehrman rest on astrotheological grounds.

Hector Avalos does not assume the historicity of Jesus and demonstrates that the New Testament and OT injunctions to love God (Jesus) and keep his commandments and submit humbly and the promise to inherit the earth are not to be read through apologist or modern concepts of those terms, but in their original contexts they expressed "sentiments parallel to what was expected of slaves and imperial subjects" -- the only difference is that Jesus has replaced Caesar and there is a new body loyal to him, now -- but the concepts of bondage, slavery, etc are the same -- (and the earth to be inherited in the beatitude is the land of Israel.)

”The only difference”? Did you read Robert Price’s review of Atwill? As Price says, ““Only the most obtuse reader, the most tin-eared, can possibly fail to appreciate the sublime quality of so much of the New Testament (agree or disagree with it), which is necessary to do if one is to dismiss the whole thing as an elaborate joke on the reader.” For Avalos to see no moral difference between early Christianity and Roman Imperialism fails to comprehend the central ideas in the Bible. Only nihilist error can fail to see any ethical difference between Jesus and Caesar. It is utterly ridiculous to say that the Christian ideas, ‘the last shall be first’, ‘neither slave nor free’, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, parallel imperial expectations. These basic ideas are anti-imperial. Caesaro-Christism illustrates that in a context of paradigm shift wildly incorrect theories will be advanced. By contrast, astrotheology explains and grounds Biblical ethics in a coherent cosmology.

Thompson and Avalos together point to evidence that the NT teachings had a somewhat different and less liberating context in their original reception and are not really applicable to theologies of personal liberation in modern senses of the word.

One area in which I have actually read quite widely is liberation theology. Even though authors such as Boff, Gutierrez and Segundo assume a historical Jesus, they have a deep intuition of the transformative and liberating intent of the Gospels. But what I don’t think liberation theology has recognised is how the liberatory intent is concealed within the Gnostic origins of Christian faith.

The Gnostics had a long term theory of social liberation, in contrast to the orthodox misunderstanding of their teachings as about personal escape. Bondage to decay is a theme that Paul http://biblehub.com/niv/romans/8.htm sees in the broad problem of the fall from grace. Against Paul’s Gnostic vision of a state of free grace, the political ambitions of the church used Christianity as an instrument of social control.

[ghost]

But some of the sayings and narrative matches look stretched thin to me. If the author was basing his narrative on Caesar then how do we account for some of the matches being explained as "confusions of the original names/sayings"? Confusion is not very likely to someone who supposedly knows the Caesar story.

It's a diegetic transposition. I.e. the story/narrative has been transferred to a different setting, and thus the names and sayings have been adapted to the new setting accordingly. It's an adaptation. Confusion here does not imply that the author himself is confused, but that he has confounded things in a playful way.

http://www.carotta.de/subseite/texte/ar ... ial_en.pdf

The Gospels as diegetic transposition – A possible solution to the aporia “Did Jesus exist?”

[neilgodfrey]

The Gospels as diegetic transposition

That makes more sense and answers some of my questions. But the new question arises: how do we decide what elements of the plots qualify for transposition? Again, here we encounter the question of selectivity, of excerpts -- a subjective choice.

One can see concentrations of transfer in gospel episodes, such as Jesus/Moses leaving a place after being threatened by the ruling power, going to the sea, crossing the sea, with a vast and "mixed" multitude (a distinctive feature) following; ascending the mountain to appoint a following of twelve as a new following. It becomes a different story when the entire gospel narrative is said to follow the plot of another. Yes, there are general structural outlines between the gospels and other episodic/epic literature, but they don't follow the plots of, say, Homer's works, Aesop, etc.

One would like to test what other plots could be transposed against the gospels by means of focusing on excerpts.

[neilgodfrey]

. . . Your interpretation of the loaves and fishes appears to be a classic instance of "juxtaposing mere excerpts" from astrotheological concepts and applying them wherever they fit to images in the narrative. Do you disagree?

Yes, I disagree. The issue is to establish a coherent and logical understanding of the texts. This means assessing the most likely path of textual evolution, and grounding interpretation in the motives and knowledge and beliefs of the authors.

If the issue is to establish "a coherent and logical understanding of the texts" then I suggest we fall into an unverifiable subjectivism. What is coherent and logical to one person can be quite different from what is coherent and logical to another. I return to the various other religious interpretations of the gospels. The various sects have their own understandings that they all consider coherent and logical. There is no independent way to judge between them. They are all ultimately unverifiable opinions -- as is yours.

You can't assess the motives and knowledge of the authors until you first analyse the text with some ensure some objective certainty in their meaning. So your reliance upon what you call their motives etc is circular.

I have not found any coherent interpretation that stands in conflict with this cosmic parable hypothesis.

And you never will. You have stacked the argument in such a way that it is unfalsifiable. Other sectarians can make the same claim. You will disagree with them but they will disagree with you and there is no one to decide in your favour except you and those who agree with you.

If so, I believe that this is why I was able to apply the astrotheological interpretation to Casey's book. That demonstrated that it is possible to apply "mere excerpts" to almost any text one deems fit to make a case.

Your phrase ‘mere excerpts’ fails to recognise that real astral reading applies to the Bible in a systematic way, very different from the ad hoc parallels of some other methods. Your link to Casey was entirely ad hoc, lacking in systematic theory. By contrast, astrotheology is systematic, using actual observation of the cosmos as the structured ground of belief and knowledge.

It doesn't matter how "systematically" you apply excerpts, they are still excerpts that you are applying. The analogy I used was taking decorations to place on a Christmas tree. You can do that very systematically, too.

The reason you reject the Casey analogy was not because it was ad hoc -- it was no more ad hoc than yours -- is because Casey's book is not considered a sacred text and hence not worthy of such treatment. That, I submit, is the only difference. That's exactly what you are doing: looking at some word or phrase and thinking to see what astrotheological concept it could possibly refer to, and when you find one, apply it.


This is a method that coheres with the role of Gnostic movements in seeking to answer fundamental philosophical questions, to find salvation through knowledge.

A key basic question is the relation between eternity and time, . . . .

This is merely repeating your theological belief. It is not adding to the argument.

Sorry, the bad grammar in that sentence renders it meaningless. I am not again going to use your bad grammar to read what you might have intended to say, except to note again that your connection of excerpts to Casey fails to engage with the theoretical basis of astrotheology.

I am terribly sorry. I should have noticed that extra use of the word "these" and removed it. Bad me. I guess I have to concede you that point by default.

3. Deduce predictions from the hypothesis: if you assume 2 is true, what consequences follow?

The predictions are around the claim that theology can attain a natural coherence by recognising the ancient role of cosmology in the origins of Biblical faith. This means that everything in the Bible can be framed against the evolutionary perspective provided by the existence of secret mystery societies who constructed the Christ myth as a true theory of time, seeing events on earth in the framework of the slow unfolding of the heavens.

And so we come full circle. It was my raising this point to you that I think initially led to this thread in the first place -- you were trying to prove the predictions of your hypothesis. But all you have done is repeat your hypothesis. Anyone can predict that his or her hypothesis will show that more and more of the evidence can be interpreted or explained by the same hypothesis. It is that circularity, that tautology, that confirmation bias that the scientific method is intended to protect against. You are ignoring the protective barriers.

4. Test (or Experiment): Look for evidence (observations) that conflict with these predictions in order to disprove 2. It is a logical error to seek 3 directly as proof of 2. This formal fallacy is called affirming the consequent.

I have not found any evidence that conflicts with these predictions.

Ground hog day. . . .

And you never will. You have stacked the argument in such a way that it is unfalsifiable. Other sectarians can make the same claim. You will disagree with them but they will disagree with you and there is no one to decide in your favour except you and those who agree with you.

Your hypothesis fails at points 3 and 4. It fails at point 3 because your prediction is so vague and general that it can apply to any hypothesis. Your prediction, as I recall (correct me if I have misremembered) is that you will find other passages that also match the astrotheological parallels. I think any hypothesis can say it will find more stuff and be able to interpret anything else in its own parameters. That is not a specific enough prediction to be useful.

Neil, I think you make this claim because you do not understand what I say. There is nothing vague and general in my proposed overturning of conventional belief in favour of a scientific hypothesis. The example here, the loaves and fishes, shows how specific detail of the text can be fruitfully read against a cosmic intent. Similar analysis is possible for the whole Bible, including with the observation that a strong religious meme insisted on the pure transcendence of God and rejected on principle the idea that the authors had a primary natural meaning.

More of the same. Any believer in any set of doctrines can and does say the same things about their interpretations of the Bible. The fact that you apply your interpretations to the whole Bible -- a collection of works canonized by various accidents and machinations in history -- suggests also that you are just as religiously biased in your privileging of the Bible as any other believer and are not following a truly historical inquiry with respect to sources you use.

There is nothing "general or vague" about religious believers predicting that their "only true and coherent" explanations of the Bible stand to turn the world upside down -- just like yours.

Your interpretation is no more verifiable than anyone elses. It all comes down to personal interpretation and convictions.

If I have failed to understand anything you have said you can help me. I have asked -- and you have declined to reply -- for you to help me ensure I do understand your view by having you sum up what you think it is I am arguing, what you think my view is, so I can see whether or not I am communicating meaningfully and accurately.

Your hypothesis fails at point 4 because you do not look for evidence or observations that conflict with your predictions. You are falling into the fallacy of confirming the consequent. Yes?

No. As I have explained, I simply reject the claim that there is evidence that conflicts with my predictions. I claim that astral reading of the Bible resolves a number of puzzles, especially why and how the false meme of the historical Jesus emerged and suppressed its origins.

You are repeating the logical fallacy as you deny it. Another believer can just as validly say that his interpretations offers the best explanations of the details in the Bible.

I have not read Thompson, and would be interested to do so.

You could start with the excerpts I linked to.

I wonder if you are reading opposition to astrotheology into Thompson or if he specifically discusses it?

Neither. Astrotheology is irrelevant to his thesis. I was quoting excerpts from it to demonstrate my claim that the Magnificat in Luke had wide cultural background such that it showed how flawed are claims that it is one example of how truly radical or revolutionary etc the Bible was in its own day and ours.

Hector Avalos does not assume the historicity of Jesus and demonstrates that the New Testament and OT injunctions to love God (Jesus) and keep his commandments and submit humbly and the promise to inherit the earth are not to be read through apologist or modern concepts of those terms, but in their original contexts they expressed "sentiments parallel to what was expected of slaves and imperial subjects" -- the only difference is that Jesus has replaced Caesar and there is a new body loyal to him, now -- but the concepts of bondage, slavery, etc are the same -- (and the earth to be inherited in the beatitude is the land of Israel.)

”The only difference”? Did you read Robert Price’s review of Atwill? As Price says, ““Only the most obtuse reader, the most tin-eared, can possibly fail to appreciate the sublime quality of so much of the New Testament (agree or disagree with it), which is necessary to do if one is to dismiss the whole thing as an elaborate joke on the reader.” For Avalos to see no moral difference between early Christianity and Roman Imperialism fails to comprehend the central ideas in the Bible.

You have misread me (again). Where did this "moral equivalence" come from? What does that mean exactly? What does Price's view of Atwill have to do with anything I have raised anywhere here in this thread?

Only nihilist error can fail to see any ethical difference between Jesus and Caesar. It is utterly ridiculous to say that the Christian ideas, ‘the last shall be first’, ‘neither slave nor free’, ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’, parallel imperial expectations.

Not exactly open to new ideas or questioning old ones, are you. Again, the false dichotomy. Avalos has to be a "nihilist" to argue what he does! Oh boy, Robert. Yes, if you read Thompson (even the excerpts I linked to) you would see that those "Christian ideas" about last/first and slave/free and golden rule do indeed fit well within the tropes of imperial propaganda in the ancient Neat East.

Love of neighbour, love of God, first and last, -- all of these are concepts that fit well with the ethics of ancient Rome, pietas and Stoicism and the rest. And yes, the Bible really is a product of its own day and culture and it does indeed embrace values of the day and reapplies them to a new master, Jesus. Modern interpreters have reinterpreted them to make them relevant to today. But a literary critical study demonstrates the context of the sayings was indeed the culture in which they were written.

As for liberation theology, that, too, is an unverifiable biblical interpretation -- and what is truly revolutionary has more to do with certain educational principles. But that's another topic.

[Robert Tulip]

I was not talking about the social contract when mentioning parallels. I should have separated the paragraphs. I simply used social contract to mean a requirement for rule by consent, as seen in Biblical ideas such as covenant and discussed in Plato’s Republic. Amos and the other prophets are full of ideas about social consent, with their critique of the broad negative consequences of injustice. Similarly, the Sermon on the Mount raises the problem of consent and of absence of a proper social contract, for example with the statement by Christ that people are blessed when they are persecuted for his sake. To imply that there was no consent in politics before the Scientific Enlightenment, which seems to be the gist of the attack on this point, appears odd to say the least.

I would be very surprised if you found a single text, a single scholarly work on imperial/monarchical government structures of the ancient Near East at all, that were based on any notion of "social contract". It's simply not the way ancients understood imperial power. The God of the OT is very much a despot like any other worldly king, commanding "love and obedience" from his subordinates, offering them protection in return like any Godfather. This is all pretty standard stuff. Noncontroversial. The Roman system and the New Testament views of authority are no different. They are products of their time. They can be nothing else. They model their kingdom of God on what they took for granted among kingdoms of their own day. Monarchs presented themselves as saviours who debased the unjust and proud and exalted the lowly -- that was all standard propaganda of those eras.

Neil, while we are obviously in total disagreement about how to read the Bible, I will respond to your comments in detail because they provide a good opportunity for me to rebut your views and explain my reading.

In this case, the social contract in the Bible, consider Jeremiah 7:3, “Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, Amend your ways and your doings, and I will cause you to dwell in this place.” The social contract here claims to provide a basis for political security in true faith, and continues to give examples – “don't oppress the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow, and don't shed innocent blood in this place, neither walk after other gods to your own hurt: then will I cause you to dwell in this place”. God requires that the powerful look after the powerless.

Your rhetorical claim that the absence of a social contract in the Bible “is all pretty standard stuff, noncontroversial” is here shown to be in conflict with the core prophetic message of the absence of ethical framework in Israelite society and the need for a social covenant to secure political sovereignty and stability.

This same intent underpins the loaves and fishes miracle, whose message is that if people see and understand cosmic identity we can produce universal abundance and peace, in a new social contract grounded in a shared cosmology. The problem is that people do not see, much less share, the Gnostic cosmology of precession that provides the impetus and meaning for the social contract. This failure of vision explains why Jesus responds so vigorously to the disciples saying they have no bread.

The parallels I am claiming as regards the loaves and fishes miracle are between what the writers observed and what they said. What is so difficult to see in that? They observed the sky, with longstanding connections to astronomical traditions of veneration of the sky in Babylon and Egypt, and used these observations to construct the theory of Jesus Christ as Alpha and Omega, Avatar of the Age of Pisces. There is no “mania”, to use your delightful term redolent of accusations of insanity, in this scientific hypothesis. Nor is there any pareidolia, the imagination of non-existent connections. The connections are all already there implicit in the cosmology of the Gospels. The loaves and fishes actually formed the new visible axis of the seasons, in a way that ancients had seen and measured for a long time before the Gospels were written. This observation can be understood as informing the miracle story against an accurate theory of time.

Geeze I get tired of your constant accusations of persecuting you or accusing of things I never do. Where does this "accusation of insanity" come from? I have made very clear exactly where the term parallelomania comes from. I have never interpreted it in terms of "insanity" when scholars have used it as a criticism or warning. This is as poor as you once suggesting I'm calling you a sodomite. Get real and get off the victimhood thing.

It is amazing that you would raise the sodomite claim again when that should have been so embarrassing for you. I fully accept that you did not mean to call me a sodomite (and in fact I am not). But my point was that the actual literal meaning of your comment was to call me a sodomite, even though that was not what you meant. You subsequently explained that it had not occurred to you that anyone would read your statement against its literal meaning. It remains entirely possible for any reader encountering your claim as you first presented it to read it incorrectly as referring to me with your “wilfully evil sod” phrase, even though your intention, quite unclearly, was to put words in my mouth rather than describe me. The point here is about clarity of expression, and how a badly worded statement, in this case an ambiguous pronoun, can easily be misread, as I and at least one other misread your sod statement.

A similar ambiguity appears in the ‘parallelomania’ phrase. Now you are implying this is just a descriptive phrase, not normative. That is ridiculous, and it is perfectly reasonable to draw out the implied mental illness in this term. Parallelomania is routinely used as a term of abuse, for example in Carrier’s appalling analysis of the Luxor birth friezes. It implies the maniac is not rational, and is gripped by an obsessive need to see things that are not there. Against astrotheology, the accusation of parallelomania is simply used as a patronising deflection device, a way to fail to engage on content.

Of course your argument is parallelomania according to Sandmel's defintion. You do not follow the controls built in to the "hypothetico-deductive" model you say you use. You skip a key step. You never replied when I pointed that out to you before more than once. You do not use the controls or methods Sandmel says protect an argument from parallelomania. You begin with your assumptions and read them into the data and then call them conclusions.

This is a point that my last post expanded on in some detail. It is entirely in line with the hypothetico-deductive method to start with a hypothesis and explore how that is justified against the evidence. That is all I am doing, with the hypothesis that a Gnostic Hermetic intent pervades the original meaning of the New Testament.

The authors wished to explain how humanity can connect to an eternal cosmic truth. This intent appears clearly in the loaves and fishes story, and in fact throughout much of the Bible, as a natural meaning underpinning the supernatural veneer.

You talk about considering alternatives, but never say how any sensible alternative actually conflicts with the Gnostic thesis I am presenting. My point is to show that we can reconstruct the Gnostic intent of the Jesus story, and that this provides a coherent and accurate method of interpretation.

I have used this thread to comment on the verses in the Gospel of Mark that discuss the loaves and fishes miracle. Neil Godfrey has responded with vague accusations of methodological error, while never engaging on detail to explore how the method I am suggesting could be valid.

I have made very specific points about your methodological errors. I have reached the stage where I don't bother to repeat it all in detail because you have always ignored my point. You do not engage in the sort of close verbal and structural analyses required to avoid the trap of parallelomania and you do not follow the step of testing (to see if you can disprove) your hypotheses. You fall into the fallacy of piling up proof after proof after proof for a hypothesis as if oblivious to the nature of scientific method.

I have used the close verbal and structural analysis of the loaves and fishes stories as presented by Saint Mark to illustrate in this thread how an astrotheological reading applies sound method. Unfortunately none of your comment here engages with that, but rather simply asserts a failure to do what I have in fact done. I start from a theoretical premise and explore how the texts support that premise. But you seem to have a blind spot regarding the premise of cosmic connection, which requires a paradigm shift. As Kuhn explained in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, adherents to an old paradigm are rarely convinced to change their view. I am proposing a scientific paradigm shift regarding how to read the Bible. This shift has abundant antecedents in the ancient world and in the astrotheological tradition since Dupuis. But it is rejected on a range of unstated political and emotional grounds, not because of a lack of lucidity and accuracy.

But I think sometimes you reject the true scientific method because you sometimes imply Popperism means relativism?? I stand to be corrected.

The question of the status of Popper’s theory of falsificationism is a very big and important one. Popper did indeed present a liberal thesis that science has no absolute knowledge, which does produce a form of cultural relativism, if not epistemological relativism. He saw this as grounded in scientific humility about confidence, but also in the political vision of an open society, and how absolutes are intrinsically totalitarian.

Popper has underpinned the ethical basis of modernity with his explanation of how to avoid the evils of Hitler and Stalin through a liberal society, and so is an immensely important philosopher. But his ideas get taken too far, with the assertion that any claim of absolute knowledge, such as from the Platonic theory of ideas, is intrinsically dangerous. That does in fact lead to relativism, with the idea that we lack grounds for certainty about anything.

Popper's falsificationism "envisioned science as evolving by the successive rejection of falsified theories, rather than falsified statements. Falsified theories are to be replaced by theories that can account for the phenomena that falsified the prior theory, that is, with greater explanatory power." My claim is that supernatural theology is falsified, and can be replaced by a natural scientific astrotheology which has high explanatory power for the phenomena.

My view on scientific method draws from Heidegger, who was the object of ridicule from Popper’s associates such as Carnap. For Heidegger, the founding axioms include that existence is being in the world with others, and that care is the meaning of being. He presented these as absolutes, in a way that conflicts with the method of confidence advocated by Popper. Heidegger is a substantial and influential philosopher, as the founder of existentialism, and cannot be refuted simply by presenting Popper as an unquestionable authority. Existential ontology has roots in Gnosticism, presenting an entirely coherent and valuable critique of the absolute status claimed for Popper’s argument that there are no absolutes.

Most analysis of the Bible assumes the existence of a Historical Jesus, and I have argued that this assumption lacks evidence, and that the data can be explained better against an imaginary cosmic Jesus. I have not said that Midrashic analysis is false, but rather that it can readily be accommodated within the broader context of a cosmology. And as you agreed, if I recall correctly, Midrashic analysis mainly concerns the sourcing of language, and has little to say about intent and purpose. It seems to me that your implied rules of method largely exclude discussion of why the writers used the images they did.

This is a waste of time. I have pointed out repeatedly that certain methods of analysis of the NT are valid and whether or not scholars believe on other grounds that there was an HJ is irrelevant to those methods. But you ignore that point -- just keep repeating your mantra. As for intent and purpose, I don't there is much that can be and that is clearly said about that as a result of literary analysis. You simply reject it. Most books on midrashic and similar types of literary-critical analysis make the immediate purposes or intentions pretty clear. And they are grounded in evidence based on close and detailed studies of literary structures and concepts and semantics.

Midrash primarily addresses the how, not the why, regarding the construction of New Testament texts. Mark drew from well-known literature in many of his stories. That is a literary method. But his intent was to explain how Jesus Christ connects human society to eternal cosmic truth, for which midrash is simply a structural framework rather than an explanation. Midrash shows social continuity between Jesus and Moses and the prophets, but that social function ignores the core cosmological agenda in Mark.

You have done nothing to advance either the Caesar Theory, or the Historical Jesus theory, or the traditional theory that the miracles show God can break the laws of physics. You have done nothing to explain why a Midrashic analysis is incompatible with my close textual analysis of the cosmic intent in the loaves and fishes story. So your assertion that I refuse to consider alternatives is a clanging gong, noisy but empty. You have not proposed any alternatives.

Well I don't advance any of those theories so you'll have to excuse me for not doing anything to support them. What's your point?

A debate requires conflicting views to be assessed on common ground. Rebuttal requires direct engagement with an opponent’s argument. You keep asserting that I am wrong, but never really discuss how or where with any precision or detail. You implied that the loaves and fishes meaning is exhausted by its claimed parallels to Old Testament passages, but ignored my close textual analysis in Mark, for which the whole parable becomes meaningful against a cosmic intent, simply using Judaic continuity as context.

And right you are. I cannot demonstrate that a midrashic analysis is incompatible with your analysis (though it is far from a "textual analysis" if by textual analysis we mean anything approaching the detail used by comparative literary critics) -- and that's because I can't demonstrate it is incompatible with the Jesus is Caesar theory, either.

I already responded in detail to this point, illustrating that it reflects an astonishing failure of understanding. The Jesus is Caesar theory is junk, incompatible with core Biblical intent and ethics. By contrast, an astral reading is fully compatible with evidence and illuminates and deepens the intent and ethics of the Bible.

And that's the point. There is no criterion to decide between one hypothesis based on an extravagance of a grab-bag of parallels and another. I demonstrated how your method can apply astrotheology to Casey's book. That demonstrates the invalidity of the method, surely.

Here your blindness to the astral intent leads you to use the false term ‘grab-bag’. That is an accurate description of the Caesar-Christ theory, and of your facile Casey example, but not of astrotheology, which starts from a coherent hypothesis of Gnostic Hermetic origins and analyses the sources against that framework. As in the loaves and fishes example, seeing the original astral intent indicates a path to a fruitful scientific understanding of Mark’s ideas in their social and theological context.