Bonkers parallels between Jesus and Mithras - examples?

[Maximos]

Roger, it is libel and calumny to falsely accuse Acharya of making stuff up and your obsession with constantly smearing her ruins your own credibility in the process. It appears to me that your agenda is only to shore up your Christian faith and euphoria at all costs.

Besides, you should've learned that lesson by now after the Bart Ehrman fiasco of falsely accusing her making stuff up, which even R. Carrier and Dr. Price defended her on.

The phallic 'Savior of the World' hidden in the Vatican

Acharya cited Higgins, Cumont, Ulansey and more so, you do owe her an apology for the libel and calumny and yet, you wonder why she is disgusted by you when you're always out to smear her or trash her in any way you can, for example:

A curious exchange with Acharya S on twitter
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=413

My own experience at this forum proves to me that it's impossible to have an objective and adult conversation on Acharya's work here, which is why Roger, Godfrey and others get a free pass to trash her and her work however they wish. It's disgusting but, my own experience is if you call them out on it the mods will remove your posts.

Roger Pearse was proven wrong repeatedly at Acharya's forum but, here at this forum Roger pretends like it never happened: Mithra: The Pagan Christ

"See Exodus 39:9-14: "...they made the breastplate... And they set in it four rows of stones... And the stones were according to the names of the children of Israel, twelve...according to the twelve tribes."

As Josephus says (Antiquities, 3.8): "And for the twelve stones, whether we understand by them the months, or whether we understand the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the zodiac, we shall not be mistaken in their meaning." (Josephus/Whiston, 75.)

Earlier than Josephus, Philo ("On the Life of Moses," 12) had made the same comments regarding Moses: "Then the twelve stones on the breast, which are not like one another in colour, and which are divided into four rows of three stones in each, what else can they be emblems of, except of the circle of the zodiac?" (Philo/Duke, 99.)"

- Christ in Egypt, 261-2

Roger, part of being a good scholar or, at least having credibility, is having the ethics to admit when you're wrong, especially after you've falsely smeared or character assassinated an author whose work you've never actually read, which is called intellectual dishonesty. You owe Acharya an apology for all your dishonest smears. You've been smearing her for many years now and you've never apologized for anything. So, I see no reason for anybody to trust you, Roger, or consider you a reliable source of information on Acharya's work that you PRETEND to be an expert on even though you've never studied it.

The same goes for Richard Carrier: STUPID THINGS RICHARD CARRIER HAS DONE AND SAID

[Mental flatliner]

On my Mithras pages, I've started a page "Mithras and Jesus", intended to deal with the crazy stuff. After all, most people who read that "Mithras had 12 disciples" and repeat it do so in good faith. Since I have another page to address connections that have some merit, I thought that I would comb out the crazy stuff, and research it.

As far as it goes, the page is here, but it only contains a couple of items so far:

http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/mithr ... _and_Jesus

What I would like, tho, is some suggestions of ideas of "similarities" that are in *wide* circulation which Mithras and Jesus have in common.

Suggestions please!

All the best,

Roger Pearse

I feel I have to fully reject the notion that they have anything in common until I see the following:

--the 12 disciples of Mithra quote the Old Testament
--Mithra claimed to be the Jewish Messiah
--Mithra quoted the 22nd Psalm on the Cross
--Mithra read from the Old Testament in Jewish synagogues
--Mithra attended Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles and Hanukkah in Jerusalem
--Mithra sent his 12 disciples to "the lost sheep of Susa"

I'm sorry, but Jesus of Nazareth drew much to heavily from Jewish tradition and scripture for him to have been anything other than a Jewish man preaching a Jewish philosophy.

Oh, by the way, I'd also like to see Mithra debating the finer points of Mikveh with someone--anyone, really.

[Robert Tulip]

Studying and understanding both ancient astrology and ancient astronomical ideas is interesting and important given that it helps us understand ancient cultures.

I agree. However, there are those we could call “Turtleistas”, hiding in their shell of faith, convinced that Jerusalem has nothing to learn from Athens, who will leap on any mention of astrology with a malleus maleficarum.

Genesis 1:18 says that on the fourth day of creation, “God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” This observation of the relation between the sun and the moon as ‘the two great lights’ is at the core of all primitive cosmology, providing the natural structure of time in terms of years, months, weeks, days and nights.

This is a sweeping and vague claim. What exactly do "all" ancient cosmologies have in common that we can identify as their "core" and what is the relation of the sun and moon to this core? Are you saying that all primitive peoples had the same way of structuring time: the same divisions of "years" (lunar or solar or both?), the same number of months? the same 7 day week? (Do you mean to say that the 7 day week is also a "natural structure of time"?)

All life on earth has existed for four billion years within the stable cyclic structures of the day and the year, determined by the spin and orbit of the earth. DNA embeds diurnal and annual patterns of activity and rest. In human culture, the day and year are universal governing patterns of light and dark, heat and cold, activity and rest. Terrestrial time is structured by the seasons of the year, as night follows day.
The role of the moon is more complex. As noted in Genesis, the moon ranks with the sun as a great light. The importance of the moon in mythology is undoubtedly universal, except perhaps for alienated modernity. It is in fact true that the seven day week is a natural structure of time caused by the orbit of the moon around the earth, given that neap tides are at first and third quarter and spring tides are at new and full moon.
Lunisolar dating is not universal, but was traditionally used in the Hebrew, Buddhist, Hindu, Burmese, Bengali, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Korean, Hellenic, Coligny, Arabian, Germanic and Babylonian calendars. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar

Do the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral illustrate cycles common to all primitive or ancient human kind? (If you are Australian you will know that certain indigenous tribes with a heritage going back many thousands of years have six or five or other numbers of seasons in a year. Darwin only has two seasons. It's more "natural" to divide seasons not by the moon but by weather and changing hunting and foraging cylces.)

The context here is Roger’s question about whether a common ‘leader and twelve’ motif informs Mithraism and Christianity. I accept your point that Australian indigenous culture had quite different seasons from the northern temperate region of the Mediterranean. But the year is exactly the same length in Australia and Europe. The cycles depicted in traditional Western months are universal to the extent that the sun shines equally on the just and the unjust, as someone somewhere said, so the year is a universal cycle.

Did all primitive cultures settle upon a neat one in twelve relation between the sun and moon? Did they all conclude that any discrepancy was "an error"?

My reference to an ‘error’ was to the fact that there are not exactly twelve lunar months in a solar year, so the relation is never ‘neat’. All lunisolar calendars need a way to insert a thirteenth month every few years. Similarly, a lunar month is 29 days, slightly more than four weeks.

In terms of the conjectural speculation of astrotheology, the point of this structure of time is that the role of the sun and moon as major divinities leads directly and inevitable to this archetype of a leader with twelve followers, and of related ideas such as the structure of Jewish politics with the twelve tribes. Observation is the foundation of myth.

Can you articulate the logical steps from one to the other?

Joseph Campbell’s articulation of the four functions of myth – awe, reason, ritual and identity – helps to explain why the natural relation between the sun and moon provides a foundation for the structure of religious ideas. Mythology stands in awe and reverence before the power and grandeur of nature, exemplified by the cosmology of the movement of the sun and moon, and seeks to explain its observations as somehow reflected in events on earth. This mythic theme of the reflection of the cosmos in history is at the ground of our sense of belonging to our context. The broad presence of the myth of a leader with twelve followers serves this psychological need to reflect nature in history, due to its correspondence to the sun as leader and moon as follower.

Have you thought to seek out alternative explanations to test your hypothesis?

One alternative explanation is that a supernatural God miraculously intervened on our planet by becoming incarnate in his only begotten Son, who went traipsing around the countryside of Galilee rustling up fishers of men, all documented in the Bible as inerrant history. I find that rather implausible, and in fact see the fictional invention of Christ by a Gnostic community as vastly more elegant than the corrupt conventions of historicism. Considering this fictional agenda, a desire to reflect the perceived natural order of the sun and moon within a human ideal story matches well to the myth of Jesus and the twelve.

Does the Chinese zodiac conform to your hypothesis if the moon, rather than the sun, is central?

Sorry, I can’t answer that, except to say that the Chinese used a lunisolar calendar, which means they had twelve months in a year and sometimes thirteen. This dates from earlier than 1000 BC.

Certainly later Jewish writings associated 12 tribes with signs of the zodiac but they also said lots of other ignorant things, too. What evidence is there that the twelve tribes of "Jewish politics" was derived from astrology? What evidence is there that the number of tribes was anything but a literary construct? If so, what evidence do we have for the source of that literary construct?

Again this touches on what Jerusalem can learn from Athens. I am aware that some people think that Josephus and Philo were just lying when they said the breast plate of the high priest of Israel was based on the twelve signs of the zodiac. It would not surprise me if such people also thought the Testimonium Flavianum is true in all respects, given their obvious pious inspiration and devotional yearning. If we instead start from the premise of coherence, that what people say tries to match what they see, then the ‘literary construct’ of the twelve has a natural origin in the observed structure of time. We should recall here that the human brain has not materially evolved for a hundred thousand years, and there have been twelve months in a year for four billion years, so setting this observation into mythic form probably has a long pedigree, well before the emergence of writing.

Observation is the foundation of myth, but seeking out alternative explanations and hard evidence and the testing of hypotheses is the foundation of more accurate (if tentative) knowledge.

The hard evidence of Mithraic belief was systematically destroyed by Christians. In this context it makes no sense to assert that it is “more accurate” to say this sun god did not have twelve followers and that questioning this orthodoxy is insane. The more plausible approach is to recognise the commonalities between Christianity and Mithraism as solar religions and to accept that patriarchal censorship has obliterated much of their feminine lunar content. The aim should be to reconstruct what is most likely out of the fragments. Similarly, there are abundant astral clues in the Bible which we should respect as hints of an original but suppressed intent.

we may have to be satisfied that the data does not support a universal 'natural structure' of time.

The year, the month, the week and the day are all objective natural structures for terrestrial time, even when they are not properly understood by primitive cultures. All terrestrial life has evolved in these temporal structures.

What power did Tertullian and others like him (and who, exactly?) wield to destroy ancient records? Do many scholars really "regard what has survived as typical and representative" of what once existed? I thought they all (well the critical ones certainly) recognized the filters involved in what was preserved.

The church had immense destructive power. See for example http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/dark-age.htm
Roger Pierce’s delightful assertion that it is “bonkers” to imagine the sun god Mithras may have had twelve followers in line with other similar lunisolar calendrical myths is a perfect example of regarding what has survived as typical.

Mithras and Jesus Christ stood in mythic competition as sun gods, as representatives of the stability and order of the Roman Empire provided by the invincible sun, Sol Invictus, source of light and life. It is entirely plausible that like Christ and the Sun, Mithras as the sun also was imagined as surrounded by twelve followers. This model describes the actual observed relation between the two great lights, the sun and the moon. It appears that the lunar basis of the twelve disciples has been neglected in theology, along with the broad suppression of matrifocal imagery by rampant patriarchal hierarchs.

Odd that such representations of Jesus appear in the record after your thesis appears to suggest that such information had been suppressed, yes?

Sorry, I don’t understand your point here. Church representation of the Blessed Virgin Mary aimed to control women through the fantasy of the virgin mother with its patriarchal equation between sexuality and sin. The existence of astral themes - such as the four living creatures as the symbols of the four evangelists or the twelve disciples and Christ as the moon and sun - illustrates that observation continues to have power and resonance even where a mad overt ideology denies it. This is an important feature of the unconscious psychology of archetypes.

So in terms of intellectual coherence, it is more likely that a myth of Mithras and the twelve existed and was suppressed than that such a myth never existed. Restoring the moon to its dignity as the source of the twelve helps to imagine a more coherent picture of ancient cosmology, and how this archetypal structure of the one and the twelve should be expected to pervade the mythical frameworks of ancient culture.

That's not very high dignity for the moon. The Chinese made the moon the centre and demoted the sun to doing the twelve annual loops around the moon until it managed to catch up with moon back in the same place again. Isn't that a more natural structure of time? Or isn't a more natural structure of time related to where on the planet one lives and how that -- whether via weather, animal migrations, etc -- affects one's cycles of activities?

Maybe you enjoy moonbaking Neil, but the universal reality (using universal to mean planet-wide) is that the sun is recognised as the source of light and life, while the moon reflects the sun. No, the sun “doing annual loops around the moon” is not a natural structure of time. A natural structure is something attested by astronomy. Looking at the sky shows that the moon appears to go twelve times as fast as the sun. Of course we can now explain this false perception through modern scientific knowledge, but it remains an objective perception available to all who live under the sun.

[Roger Pearse]

On my Mithras pages, I've started a page "Mithras and Jesus", intended to deal with the crazy stuff. After all, most people who read that "Mithras had 12 disciples" and repeat it do so in good faith. ...

I feel I have to fully reject the notion that they have anything in common until I see the following:

--the 12 disciples of Mithra quote the Old Testament
--Mithra claimed to be the Jewish Messiah
--Mithra quoted the 22nd Psalm on the Cross
--Mithra read from the Old Testament in Jewish synagogues
--Mithra attended Passover, Pentecost, Tabernacles and Hanukkah in Jerusalem
--Mithra sent his 12 disciples to "the lost sheep of Susa"

I'm sorry, but Jesus of Nazareth drew much to heavily from Jewish tradition and scripture for him to have been anything other than a Jewish man preaching a Jewish philosophy.

Oh, by the way, I'd also like to see Mithra debating the finer points of Mikveh with someone--anyone, really.

Selective reading of texts in order to highlight "parallels" is a very dubious business. The parallels invariably involve omitting things that are crucial. Arguments from parallels must always be tested for false positives; and in general only work if the "fingerprint" is very specific.

The negative example that I always use is pyramids. There are pyramids in Egypt, and pyramids in Mexico. Therefore, the argument goes - and people do argue this - this shows connection, and therefore proves the existence of an intermediary; either that Egyptians sailed the Atlantic, or that Atlantis existed in between. In reality the "connection" is that both countries have the same gravity, and people piling stones on top of one another will come to similar conclusions.

It might be interesting to find an example in the other direction: a parallel that really does show connection and derivation. But that's another story.

The "Mithras = Jesus" stuff is just a nuisance. It prevents us studying Mithras, really; because we keep introducing all these bits and pieces from Christianity. It is highly unlikely that a Jewish-derived cult can inform us much as to how the initiates of Mithras thought and acted. That must come to us from the archaeology, literature, and other pagan mystery cults.

[neilgodfrey]

Studying and understanding both ancient astrology and ancient astronomical ideas is interesting and important given that it helps us understand ancient cultures.

I agree. However, there are those we could call “Turtleistas”, hiding in their shell of faith, convinced that Jerusalem has nothing to learn from Athens, who will leap on any mention of astrology with a malleus maleficarum.

If it has nothing to do with my criticisms it is best not even to raise it.

Genesis 1:18 says that on the fourth day of creation, “God made the two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” This observation of the relation between the sun and the moon as ‘the two great lights’ is at the core of all primitive cosmology, providing the natural structure of time in terms of years, months, weeks, days and nights.

This is a sweeping and vague claim. What exactly do "all" ancient cosmologies have in common that we can identify as their "core" and what is the relation of the sun and moon to this core? Are you saying that all primitive peoples had the same way of structuring time: the same divisions of "years" (lunar or solar or both?), the same number of months? the same 7 day week? (Do you mean to say that the 7 day week is also a "natural structure of time"?)

All life on earth has existed for four billion years within the stable cyclic structures of the day and the year, determined by the spin and orbit of the earth. DNA embeds diurnal and annual patterns of activity and rest. In human culture, the day and year are universal governing patterns of light and dark, heat and cold, activity and rest. Terrestrial time is structured by the seasons of the year, as night follows day.

I didn’t know DNA “embeds . . . annual patterns of activity and rest”. What is your source for that?

What is your evidence that “the year” (presumably you mean a year generally to include a solar year or a lunar year or a combo of both or an astral year) is a “universal governing pattern of . . . activity and rest”? Or do you mean just one kind of year is universal and governing a pattern of activity and rest?

You say “terrestrial time is structured by the seasons of the year”. What seasons are universally so structured in human cultures?

In what sense, and with what evidence, do you say that “In human culture, the day . . . [is a] universal governing pattern of . . . heat and cold”?

The role of the moon is more complex. As noted in Genesis, the moon ranks with the sun as a great light. The importance of the moon in mythology is undoubtedly universal, except perhaps for alienated modernity. It is in fact true that the seven day week is a natural structure of time caused by the orbit of the moon around the earth, given that neap tides are at first and third quarter and spring tides are at new and full moon.

What cultures have used the seven day week? If this is so “natural” why is it not found as a cultural universal? (Does your seven day week have the same first and seventh day as a regular universals, too?)

Lunisolar dating is not universal, but was traditionally used in the Hebrew, Buddhist, Hindu, Burmese, Bengali, Tibetan, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mongolian, Korean, Hellenic, Coligny, Arabian, Germanic and Babylonian calendars. See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunisolar_calendar

So if it is not a universal cultural practice it is not considered natural in your scheme of things? But the 7 day week and twelve “seasons” or months are natural even though not universal practices?

Do the stained glass windows of Chartres Cathedral illustrate cycles common to all primitive or ancient human kind? (If you are Australian you will know that certain indigenous tribes with a heritage going back many thousands of years have six or five or other numbers of seasons in a year. Darwin only has two seasons. It's more "natural" to divide seasons not by the moon but by weather and changing hunting and foraging cylces.)

The context here is Roger’s question about whether a common ‘leader and twelve’ motif informs Mithraism and Christianity. I accept your point that Australian indigenous culture had quite different seasons from the northern temperate region of the Mediterranean. But the year is exactly the same length in Australia and Europe. The cycles depicted in traditional Western months are universal to the extent that the sun shines equally on the just and the unjust, as someone somewhere said, so the year is a universal cycle.

So the Bible is your authority? (You also regularly refer to Genesis when you assert the sun and moon are the universal culturally leading measures of time.)

How do you know “the year” of the Australian aboriginals was “exactly the same length as it was measured in “Europe” (which part of Europe and when?) What kind of year? How was it measured by the Australian aboriginals?

Did all primitive cultures settle upon a neat one in twelve relation between the sun and moon? Did they all conclude that any discrepancy was "an error"?

My reference to an ‘error’ was to the fact that there are not exactly twelve lunar months in a solar year, so the relation is never ‘neat’. All lunisolar calendars need a way to insert a thirteenth month every few years. Similarly, a lunar month is 29 days, slightly more than four weeks.

If it’s not “neat” it doesn’t sound very “natural” to me -- it sounds like the many varied attempts to work out various calendars through the history of civilizations is testimony to how “unnatural” their measurements and efforts to create a “natural” pattern are. It’s lack of “neatness” is testimony to the well-known fact that our universe is the product of blind nature and forces without design.

In terms of the conjectural speculation of astrotheology, the point of this structure of time is that the role of the sun and moon as major divinities leads directly and inevitable to this archetype of a leader with twelve followers, and of related ideas such as the structure of Jewish politics with the twelve tribes. Observation is the foundation of myth.

Can you articulate the logical steps from one to the other?

Joseph Campbell’s articulation of the four functions of myth – awe, reason, ritual and identity – helps to explain why the natural relation between the sun and moon provides a foundation for the structure of religious ideas. Mythology stands in awe and reverence before the power and grandeur of nature, exemplified by the cosmology of the movement of the sun and moon, and seeks to explain its observations as somehow reflected in events on earth. This mythic theme of the reflection of the cosmos in history is at the ground of our sense of belonging to our context. The broad presence of the myth of a leader with twelve followers serves this psychological need to reflect nature in history, due to its correspondence to the sun as leader and moon as follower.

Do you mean that humankind universally is so over-awed by the sun and moon and their movements -- and that humankind universally feels that the sun and moon govern their daily and annual lives -- that they universally create myths about them?

And do you mean by “broad presence” that all of these myths -- universally -- that clearly relate to the sun and moon include a “leader with twelve followers”?

But you have not explained how this logically led to the creation of twelve tribes of Israel.

Does every instance -- universally -- of twelve in political or social divisions relate to the same basic myth?

Have you thought to seek out alternative explanations to test your hypothesis?

One alternative explanation is that a supernatural God miraculously intervened on our planet by becoming incarnate in his only begotten Son, who went traipsing around the countryside of Galilee rustling up fishers of men, all documented in the Bible as inerrant history. I find that rather implausible, and in fact see the fictional invention of Christ by a Gnostic community as vastly more elegant than the corrupt conventions of historicism. Considering this fictional agenda, a desire to reflect the perceived natural order of the sun and moon within a human ideal story matches well to the myth of Jesus and the twelve.

One hardly needs to “seek out” the literal interpretation of the Bible as an alternative hypothesis.

I take it you don’t know or are not interested in the various scholarly explanations for the origin of the twelve tribes of Israel. I also take it that you have not studied cultures to see if there are exceptions to your hypothesis.

Does the Chinese zodiac conform to your hypothesis if the moon, rather than the sun, is central?

Sorry, I can’t answer that, except to say that the Chinese used a lunisolar calendar, which means they had twelve months in a year and sometimes thirteen. This dates from earlier than 1000 BC.

If you are speaking of human universals then surely you must know the details of the Chinese systems.

[

Certainly later Jewish writings associated 12 tribes with signs of the zodiac but they also said lots of other ignorant things, too. What evidence is there that the twelve tribes of "Jewish politics" was derived from astrology? What evidence is there that the number of tribes was anything but a literary construct? If so, what evidence do we have for the source of that literary construct?

Again this touches on what Jerusalem can learn from Athens. I am aware that some people think that Josephus and Philo were just lying when they said the breast plate of the high priest of Israel was based on the twelve signs of the zodiac. It would not surprise me if such people also thought the Testimonium Flavianum is true in all respects, given their obvious pious inspiration and devotional yearning. If we instead start from the premise of coherence, that what people say tries to match what they see, then the ‘literary construct’ of the twelve has a natural origin in the observed structure of time. We should recall here that the human brain has not materially evolved for a hundred thousand years, and there have been twelve months in a year for four billion years, so setting this observation into mythic form probably has a long pedigree, well before the emergence of writing.

Who says Josephus and Philo were lying? It’s very clear, isn’t it, that they understood the twelve stones corresponded to the twelve signs of the zodiac. But it’s just as clear that that tells us absolutely nothing about their historical origin -- it only tells us what was thought in their own day. They also thought God made the earth in six days. That doesn’t tell us how it really began. Archaeologists have uncovered a lot more knowledge about the real origins of Israel of which people in Josephus’s and Philo’s day were ignorant.

Why do you resort to your niggling ad homina here -- “It would not surprise me if such people also thought . . . “?

Observation is the foundation of myth, but seeking out alternative explanations and hard evidence and the testing of hypotheses is the foundation of more accurate (if tentative) knowledge.

The hard evidence of Mithraic belief was systematically destroyed by Christians. In this context it makes no sense to assert that it is “more accurate” to say this sun god did not have twelve followers and that questioning this orthodoxy is insane. The more plausible approach is to recognise the commonalities between Christianity and Mithraism as solar religions and to accept that patriarchal censorship has obliterated much of their feminine lunar content. The aim should be to reconstruct what is most likely out of the fragments. Similarly, there are abundant astral clues in the Bible which we should respect as hints of an original but suppressed intent.

To question an orthodoxy is “insane”? Yet you are questioning orthodoxy yourself. I don’t think you would call yourself insane. Why do you call others insane for questioning other orthodoxies that your hypothesis depends upon?



Now I am quite open to points in common between Mithraism and Christianity. But I can’t assume a particular direction or time of influence. Some of the points in common emerged only after Christianity was well-founded and do not appear at its earliest stages.

But from what I have seen you go way beyond the evidence that exists in the earliest layers of Christianity. Why do you assume that Christianity began as a solar religion? Just having some narrative props that are also found in Mithraism does not entitle us to assume these religions had the same origin. Far from it: that is a hypothesis that has to be demonstrated, not assumed.

For example “fish” or “twelve” may appear in a number of myths, but what their relationship needs a case by case study and cannot be assumed. We know that myths and literary tropes can be reapplied and readapted to apply to quite different narratives that serve quite different functions.

we may have to be satisfied that the data does not support a universal 'natural structure' of time.

The year, the month, the week and the day are all objective natural structures for terrestrial time, even when they are not properly understood by primitive cultures. All terrestrial life has evolved in these temporal structures.

The week -- which one: 7 days or 5 days or other? Which year -- solar or lunar or other? What about the alternative seasonal divisions in various other cultures that don’t occupy a temperate or Mediterranean climate zone?

So, “even when they are not properly understood by primitive cultures” -- now that’s starting to sound like a confession that there is nothing “natural” or “universal” about them at all but a matter of imposing Western constructs upon the rest of the “primitive and ignorant” world.

What power did Tertullian and others like him (and who, exactly?) wield to destroy ancient records? Do many scholars really "regard what has survived as typical and representative" of what once existed? I thought they all (well the critical ones certainly) recognized the filters involved in what was preserved.

The church had immense destructive power.

See for example http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/dark-age.htm

Roger Pierce’s delightful assertion that it is “bonkers” to imagine the sun god Mithras may have had twelve followers in line with other similar lunisolar calendrical myths is a perfect example of regarding what has survived as typical.

I asked what power Tertullian and others like him had, exactly. You spoke about a certain corporate entity from another time instead.

Mithras and Jesus Christ stood in mythic competition as sun gods, as representatives of the stability and order of the Roman Empire provided by the invincible sun, Sol Invictus, source of light and life. It is entirely plausible that like Christ and the Sun, Mithras as the sun also was imagined as surrounded by twelve followers. This model describes the actual observed relation between the two great lights, the sun and the moon. It appears that the lunar basis of the twelve disciples has been neglected in theology, along with the broad suppression of matrifocal imagery by rampant patriarchal hierarchs.

Odd that such representations of Jesus appear in the record after your thesis appears to suggest that such information had been suppressed, yes?

Sorry, I don’t understand your point here. Church representation of the Blessed Virgin Mary aimed to control women through the fantasy of the virgin mother with its patriarchal equation between sexuality and sin. The existence of astral themes - such as the four living creatures as the symbols of the four evangelists or the twelve disciples and Christ as the moon and sun - illustrates that observation continues to have power and resonance even where a mad overt ideology denies it. This is an important feature of the unconscious psychology of archetypes.

My point is chronology. The Church as you describe it emerged well after Christianity itself appeared. We are talking about Christian origins, are we not?

Jungian archetypes have been scientifically verified?

So in terms of intellectual coherence, it is more likely that a myth of Mithras and the twelve existed and was suppressed than that such a myth never existed. Restoring the moon to its dignity as the source of the twelve helps to imagine a more coherent picture of ancient cosmology, and how this archetypal structure of the one and the twelve should be expected to pervade the mythical frameworks of ancient culture.

That's not very high dignity for the moon. The Chinese made the moon the centre and demoted the sun to doing the twelve annual loops around the moon until it managed to catch up with moon back in the same place again. Isn't that a more natural structure of time? Or isn't a more natural structure of time related to where on the planet one lives and how that -- whether via weather, animal migrations, etc -- affects one's cycles of activities?

Maybe you enjoy moonbaking Neil, but the universal reality (using universal to mean planet-wide) is that the sun is recognised as the source of light and life, while the moon reflects the sun. No, the sun “doing annual loops around the moon” is not a natural structure of time. A natural structure is something attested by astronomy. Looking at the sky shows that the moon appears to go twelve times as fast as the sun. Of course we can now explain this false perception through modern scientific knowledge, but it remains an objective perception available to all who live under the sun.

Hoo boy, more sarcasm. Why do you keep doing that, Robert?

So the Chinese “structure of time” doesn’t count? Their structure is not “natural”? It is “ignorant” of “true structure”? The Chinese calendar is a “false perception”? I think the Chinese would disagree with you.

You have one way of looking at how time might be structured and the Chinese another. They assign a complete cycle to and from the same starting point of the moon. That’s twelve years. That sounds as natural to me as anything anyone else has suggested.

I actually expected you to reply that the Chinese still use the same natural elements and are even more complex and therefore more advanced in their perceptions.

[neilgodfrey]

I was not talking at this point about how time is conceptualised, but rather the natural structure of time, as an objective scientific discovery in astrophysics. Neil has given me the impression that he thinks there can be no objective universal absolutes, so it does not surprise me that he is oblivious to the objective universal absolutes in astronomy, which for the topic of terrestrial time include the year, the month, the week, the day, and for that matter, the Great Year of precession of the equinoxes. These terrestrial temporal structures have been much the same, with barely detectable change, since before humans evolved.

Without such basic astronomical understanding of time it is not possible to have a sensible conversation about how the cosmology of time influenced the Bible. Neil seems to think I am engaged in confirmation bias just because I understand that time is real.

Robert, I have taken this from your comment that posted on another thread but I consider this is its proper context. I have addressed the other points you made in the comment above.

Why oh why the continual personal swipes, Robert?

But what you appear to be saying here is that we can only "sensibly" converse about how "cosmology of time influenced the Bible" if we understand scientific discoveries of "astrophysics" (sic). To me that sounds a bit like saying we can only understand what the author of Genesis 1 really meant if we understand modern scientific discoveries of the origin of the universe.

I think what you really mean is that we can only understand how the Bible was influenced by "cosmology of time" if we understand as much about the movements of sun and moon and stars as did the ancients, yes?

But one detail not covered in the above comment: How do you arrive at the "natural structure of time" (I think "measurement" would be better than "structure" -- but perhaps "measurement" does not sound objective enough?) for the week from the tides? There is no regular 7 day cycle with tides. The "natural" way of measuring time by tides or the moon would be to simply use whatever number of days there are with each tidal or lunar cycle -- there is no set number of days for these. They vary. This returns us to my earlier question about the week.