Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I have to admit though I am fascinated with how Robert Tulip's brain works. How can he continue to assert these things to a gathering of rational people (rather than his familiar 'new age' believers and followers) without so much as providing a scrap of supportive evidence? Why does he think we won't demand at least something in the way of proof for his beliefs? Why even come here if you can't do that?

Mimi wrote:At Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France, in Egypt and Yucatan, across the whole face of the earth are found mysterious ruins of ancient monuments, monuments with astronomical significance. These relics of other times are as accessible as the American Midwest and as remote as the jungles of Guatemala. Some of them were built according to celestial alignments; others were actually precision astronomical observatories ... Careful observation of the celestial rhythms was compellingly important to early peoples, and their expertise, in some respects, was not equaled in Europe until three thousand years later."

Yes, and this is a fascinating topic. If you have ever been to Newgrange, where a burial chamber in a large building from 3200 BC is lit up by the sun at winter solstice (well, it's three days, but good enough) through a small window above the entrance, you will probably agree that it's awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, nobody knows who these people were and what they thought, as they didn't leave much more behind. It definitely doesn't help us with the Jesus story.

I agree that Egypt would be a good start to look for solar connections. However, no matter what you find, there's still the task of connecting whatever you find to the NT, at least in more than a "Moses came out of Egypt" fashion. A few sentences of solar imagery in hymns that are full of flowery images don't cut it.

Remember Josephus (or at least someone in antiquity) said Moses introduced sun dials to Egypt (it is amazing what memory preserves).

It was Apion https://books.google.com/books?id=pACJY ... es&f=false Close enough I guess.

Stephan Huller wrote:It was Apion https://books.google.com/books?id=pACJY ... es&f=false Close enough I guess.

That's actually an approach that makes sense. From Apion's claim that Moses "set up a model of a boat to serve as a sundial" you can go on to the "Samaritan" in Josephus who was looking for "Moses' vessels" on Mt. Gerizim in 36 CE (and killed by Pilate), and "vessel" means "ark" (of the covenant), and "ark" means "boat", and "boat" means "sundial", which means the messiah was a solar god, Osiris-Ra*. Isn't it obvious? Case closed .
*... or Aten. As "everyone" knows that Psalm 104 is the Great Hymn to Aten, right?

Robert Tulip wrote:I have been studying precessional cosmology for a long time. About ten years ago, I wrote this essay on The Twelve Jewels, which is a key precessional motif.

Precession of the Equinox in Christian Revelation
Robert Tulip

• Abstract:
  
  A hidden code embedded at the centre of the Christian faith (Rev 21:19-20) suggests that Revelation has real scientific purpose and scope, that the thinking behind the secret messianic ideas of Christ was grounded in astronomical understanding of the structure of time, and that Christian eschatology needs to be re-written in astrological terms to set the return of Christ in the long time frame of precession, abandoning facile ideas such as rapture in favour of a program to establish a world civilization.
  
  1. Chapter 21 of the Book of Revelation in the New Testament contains the following mysterious vision describing the holy city new Jerusalem:
  
  
  • ‘The foundations of the city wall were decorated with every precious jewel; the first course of stones was jasper, the second sapphire, the third chalcedony, the fourth emerald, the fifth sardonyx, the sixth carnelian, the seventh chrysolite, the eighth beryl, the ninth topaz, the tenth chrysoprase, the eleventh hyacinth, and the twelfth amethyst.’
    
  
  
  
  2. Standard Biblical commentaries, for example those of G.B. Caird and William Barclay, give several explanations of this verse. The notable one for our purpose here is an old tradition which sees the twelve jewels as a cosmic symbol representing the twelve constellations of the zodiac, the path of stars traversed each year by the sun from Aries to Pisces. The unusual thing, however, is that the commentators note the order of the star signs in the foundation jewels is precisely the reverse of their order in the sky. The first course of foundation stones of the new Jerusalem, made of jasper, is understood by tradition to represent Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac. The second course, of sapphire, represents Aquarius, the second last sign, and so through to the twelfth course of jewels, of amethyst, which represents Aries, the first sign of the zodiac.
  
  3. Barclay says that the symbolism of this order is impossible to tell, while Caird speculates that perhaps the reverse order indicates John’s total disavowal of astrology. My reading finds considerably more meaning in the jewels than do the anti-astrological prejudices of traditional theology. In asking why the twelve foundation stones of the holy city of God would match the signs of the zodiac in reverse order, the question I would like to pose is whether any natural phenomenon equates to this mysterious image. The intriguing fact I explore here is that the major cycle of time known as the precession of the equinox not only uses the zodiac signs in reverse order but provides an elegant scientific explanation for the Christian theory of the end times.
  
  

I can accept that precession fits in to this. Not too sure about Christian end times. I think that you stated that your ideas about Jesus and the Bible and the Holy Christian Binding-Together (Religion) have changed since you wrote this.

Will read the other articles. There is no doubt that precession is central to understanding astronomical observations. Rev 21:19-20 is hardly central, although it must be highlighted as being authored, most likely by someone who knew about precession. OR ALTERNATIVELY, the author of Revelations simply borrowed that quote from another author who knew about precession.

The other allegories below are interesting ....

My study of specific precessional images that define the real meaning of the Christ Myth has continued.

These include
• Loaves and fishes as Virgo and Pisces axis of Christian precessional age, as symbols of creative abundance resulting from cosmic attunement
• Virgin Standing on Moon as description of 4 BC lunar eclipse
• Tree of life as zodiac
• River of life as galaxy
• Holy City as observable sky
• Alpha and Omega as beginning and end of Great Year
• Seven Days of Creation as 3.5 zodiac ages over 7000 years (with Psalm/Peter line that 1000 years are as a day for God).
• Day of Rest as Millennium of peace in first half of the Age of Aquarius
• End of the Age when gospel has been preached to oikoumene as transition from Age of Pisces to Age of Aquarius
• Dragon tail sweeping 1/3 of stars as historic observed movement of north celestial pole
• Dragon giving ‘seat, power and authority’ to Leopard-Bear-Lion as shift of the north celestial pole from Dragon to Bear/Lion
• Man with water jug as Dawn of the Age of Aquarius
• Fish imagery as Age of Pisces
• Moses/Joshua imagery of symbolic transition from Age of Taurus (Adam/Noah/Golden Calf) to Age of Aries (Ram symbols)
• Transition from covenant of law to covenant of grace as precession of September equinox from Libra (law) to Virgo (grace) at time of Christ.
• Chi Rho Cross as shift of sun path/equator X across first fish of Pisces in 21 AD

That is all such a wrenching departure from conventional thinking, and has such an odour of imaginative fiction, that it does not surprise me that there has been little traction with what really is a new paradigm in Biblical studies. Nonetheless I consider all the coded references listed here to be simple and clear and factual, and am happy to defend them in detail.

Thanks for the listing of these references.

The first challenge for the reader is to understand that it was historically possible for the authors to hide all this material in the Bible.

How does this material compare to the rest of the material in the Bible? Would it not be possible that whoever wrote the NT incorporated a great many motifs in it and not just one? It is not difficult to see that these astrotheological motifs are present, the difficulty is seeing them central in the Bible. The NT Bible has a lot of material in it that is relevant to fields outside of astronomy.

The key question is how the methods and motives that gave rise to the abundant presence of this concealed accurate cosmology in the Bible are explicable against the real events of religious evolution at the time of composition of the New Testament and before.

Well this is indeed the key question, and it relies heavily upon WHEN you think the NT was authored, and by whom, and where etc. No matter what fundamental motivation anyone thinks may have inspired the authorship of the NT, at the end of the day we need names and dates and a political history.

Thanks for your response and the listing of precession related material.




LC

I do still very much want to respond to Peter Kirby’s question about Shakespeare’s comparison of Juliet to the sun, but first….

Leucius Charinus wrote: I can accept that precession fits in to this. Not too sure about Christian end times. I think that you stated that your ideas about Jesus and the Bible and the Holy Christian Binding-Together (Religion) have changed since you wrote this.

End Times is a topic to frighten the horses, but it is still something that can be approached scientifically, systematically analysing all the magical imagery against real data about time, in terms of what we know now, what they knew then, and what the ancients may somehow have been able to correctly intuit.

Religion and astronomy were intimately linked from very ancient times in Babylon and Egypt. This empirical interest flowed into the intermingled religion around the turn of the common era, with an astronomical interest in using the stars as a clock for history. This approach was based on the (re)discovery by Hipparchus of the speed of precession, providing the rough model of two thousand years per age as the long term Biblical measure of time.

Now what I find interesting in considering this material from a purely modern scientific approach is that science has discovered the orbital drivers of climate, and this data can be used to check if the ancients somehow got it right in the core of their big picture of eschatology. It turns out that they did.

Precession of the equinox is not just some irrelevant observation with no effect, but is a primary cause of glaciation cycles, with a 21,000 year wave function of global temperature mapped in ice core and sediment data. Precession was responsible for dumping a wall of ice two miles high across nearly the whole of North America, a bulldozer from the North Pole that made Long Island as one of its glacial moraine calling cards. This glacial cycle is 21,000 years rather than the 25771 year period of precession because the whole egg of the earth’s orbit is also spinning against the stars in a motion called apsidal precession. You can read the science at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles if it doesn’t make your head spin too much.

Now, the really interesting thing is that mapping the Milankovitch Climate Cycle to the Biblical Myth of fall and redemption shows an exact alignment. Basically, if we want to imaging a cosmic summer or Golden Age, followed by a cycle of worsening climate with Silver and Bronze and Iron Ages, we find in the climate record that this is a 20,000 year period. In the current cycle the cosmic summer was from about ten to five thousand BC, the cosmic fall from five thousand BC to about the time of Christ, and the cosmic winter from Christ to 5000 AD.

Here is a diagram I made a few years ago that illustrates this natural cycle.

What we see here is that the cosmic fall, measured by northern insolation as the main global climate driver, ran from the approximate mythical date of the Garden of Eden to the time of Christ, matching to when the global insolation was falling in the same way it does each year in the northern hemisphere from the September equinox to Christmas. The fall from grace imagined in the Bible actually occurred at the same time as the physical fall of the long term climate cycle.

This shows how it is possible to use modern knowledge to put the eschatological myths onto a scientific footing. My approach is to start with the science, and explore how the ancients could have had a correct intuition of the real long term pattern. This method provides material evidentiary support for the core hypothesis of astrotheology that the Bible authors framed their myths against observation of the stars in ways that are largely forgotten but can be reconstructed.

The key meaning is that the ancients could see the world was moving into a time of worsening conflict, a psychological fall to match the climate fall, but they had a hope that after several millennia this culture of conflict would be replaced by a vision of long term progress. In this they were prescient, when their model of time is assessed against the real model of time shown in my diagram above.

What this diagram illustrates is that the insolation level hit rock bottom in 1246 AD, when the perihelion point, where earth is closest to the sun, crossed the December solstice, the shortest day of the year. This event would have been a new glacial maximum except that the rise of agriculture had added so much methane to the air that humans accidentally engineered the stability of the Holocene climate including its sea levels. The perihelion, as the main long term natural climate marker, has now advanced to 4 January, and is on a ten thousand year upward march towards the next golden age, defined as when the perihelion reaches the June solstice.

The core of the Biblical eschatology is a sense of a global clash between good and evil, a sense that the downward cultural trajectory characterised as the forces of fall from grace is very powerful, and will resist a cosmic vision of recovery and ascent to a new Golden Age. This is the meaning of the apocalyptic war in heaven between Michael and Satan. The message from the orbital climate data is that the Biblical vision of a millennium of restoration after the global triumph of good over evil (meaning the victory of knowledge over belief and of science over fantasy) should have a high level of confidence of its match to the underlying patterns of time and nature.

Leucius Charinus wrote:But isn't that pretty much what everyone in the field is doing?



LC

No.

My hypothesis is "New Testament writers used the Old Testament".
His hypothesis is "New Testament writers used astrotheology".

An overwhelming point of evidence for my hypothesis is that New Testament writers quote the Septuagint, sometimes verbatim. This is not a matter of interpretation, this is not a matter of "hidden codes", this is not a matter for subjectivity of any kind. There is no serious explanation other than that they were either recalling the Septuagint from memory or had a text in front of them, and therefore my hypothesis "New Testament writers used the Old Testament" is demonstrated by that data alone.

Equivalent evidence for the hypothesis "New Testament writers used astrotheology" would be, say, near-verbatim use of some known astronomy treatise. Or authorial citation of some known writer of astronomy ("according to Ptolemy" or "according to the Babylonian astronomers" or whatever instead of "according to the Scriptures"). Or unambiguous description with many points of contact to some known piece of architecture, some religious rite, some anything where scholars are sure that the thing in question has connections to astronomy (or astrology or whatnot) along with some textual evidence that the writer is aware of the astronomical usage.

This is not as unreasonable a bar as it may seem. For example, the author of Jude 14-15 quotes the Book of Enoch more or less directly, and that combined with a few more oblique references to Enoch scattered about is enough to make reasonable an interpretation of Jude that relies pretty heavily on its relationship to Enoch. In fact, many mainstream scholars do this and it is a fruitful interpretation of Jude with considerable explanatory power. Note well: this is a case that mainstream scholars are quite willing to acknowledge a non-canonical book as as influence on a canonical New Testament text. But the evidence for the thesis "New Testament writers used astrotheology" isn't even close to the level of evidence for the thesis "The author of Jude used Enoch".

But it is incredible to the crude psychology that attempts to argue for equivalency here! Yes they are both arguments but one has evidence "at hand" and the other mere assertion. That doesn't mean that astrotheology argument is "untrue" but for crying out loud Robert make a bloody argument which actually references "what Christians believed" or "what Christians said." This is assertion piled on top of assertion

Stephan Huller wrote:That doesn't mean that astrotheology argument is "untrue" but for crying out loud Robert make a bloody argument...

You can just stop there. There's lots of quotes of astronomical data and concepts coming, but no evidence for anything of this actually having any impact on Christianity.

Except finding the zodiac in the description of Jerusalem in Revelation. Which still doesn't tell us what the impact of this was, except that it makes clear that the celestial Jerusalem was meant.