Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

But you realize of course that ALL of our ancient sources - most notably Celsus - emphasize that 'the Jews' refuse to worship the heavenly bodies including the sun. My point is only that there are sensitivities to be aware of. It's one thing to argue that the merkava developed from sun worship. But there are layers of distinction that Jews were especially sensitive to. God or the second god perhaps rides in the solar chariot. But he is not to be identified with the sun. Moreover the specific term merkava does not appear in Ezekiel.

There seems to be very little interest in the sun-god in Canaanite mythology in the Iron Age. The sun god is only a minor deity in the Phoenician and Aramaean religions despite what we see in Ugaritic texts and the Egyptian religion.

Samson's name may simply mean 'little sun', as suggested by the diminutive suffix -on, while the Aramaic proper name Shimshai (Ezra 4:8-9, 17, 23) can just be 'sunny' or 'sunlit.' But it would appear that the solar cult was imposed on Canaanite religions by the Assyrian astral cult.

The fact that Ezekiel doesn't use the specific merkava terminology may argue for a relatively recent introduction of this concept within the Jewish religion in particular. I don't see much evidence of a solar cult in the Pentateuch and Samaritanism in general. I don't know why that is.

The divine chariot seems to be especially dear to the members of the Sadducean community of Qumran. The Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice mention 'the model of the throne of the chariot', tabnit kisse' merkaba (4Q 403). According to their Ritual of the Daily Prayers (4Q 503), the morning service started "when the sun was coming out to shine over the earth", bs't hsms Ih'yr 'l h'rs. This confirms Flavius Josephus' statement about the Essenes, viz. that "their to the divinity take a particular form: before the rising of the sun they utter no profane word, but recite some ancestral prayers facing the sun, as if they beseeched it to rise" (Bell. Jud. 11,128). These "ancestral prayers" recall the men "with their faces to the east, prostrating themselves towards the rising sun", as Ezekiel saw them in the Temple (Ezek8:16). Relics of this ritual practice are found, perhaps, in the Blessing of the Sun, birkat hachamma.

beowulf would have us take note of the fact that my claim for Copernicus having feared of persecution, including death by burning at the stake as a heretic, had been remarkably silly, in view of my having offered as evidence for this supposed fear, the true story of the horrific murder of an intellectual, (a DaiFu in fact), Dr. Michael Servetus a century after publication of Copernicus' text.

I note and reject beowulf's objection, as obviously not following the train of thought. This example was provided to illustrate the contemptible behaviour of all Christians, not just the Catholics, during the era embracing, but not limited to, the time of Copernicus' life.

Since beowulf rejects this example, as too late to have any relevance to supporting the argument that Copernicus delayed publication for four decades, out of fear of challenging religious doctrine, because Servetus had been murdered a full century after the death of Copernicus, let us find some earlier burnings at the stake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Hus
http://books.google.com/books?id=7sT6ey ... ry&f=false
page 79

The inquisition was created in 1198. By 1521:
During the five year ministry of Pope Adrian, 24,025 persons were condemned by the inquisition, of whom one thousand six hundred and twenty were burned alive.
Snip
In Spain, each of the seventeen tribunals during a long period burned annually on an average ten miserable beings.

Robert Tulip wrote:

neilgodfrey wrote:list what we would expect to find if the passage indeed meant that Jesus is an allegory of the sun.

The allegory between Christ and the Sun as the light of the world makes complete sense in terms of the natural observational cosmology available to the ancient world. Everyone knows the sun is the light of the world, shining equally on the just and the unjust. This allegory appears in theological interpretation of Malachi 4:2, the "Sun of Righteousness" as a reference to Christ, as seen for example in the popular carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and in the first conventional theological commentary at the verse link, "By the Sun of Righteousness we understand Jesus Christ."

Working through a cosmic reading, we would expect that ancient knowledge of the apparent movement of the sun would form the framework for John's doctrine of cosmic reason, the word made flesh. We would expect that as we read the Fourth Gospel, we would find a range of references to this natural observed order of the structure of time, understood as the cyclic path of the aeons.

And in fact just such a coherent Gnostic vision of time does appear in John. The method to look for this has to start from science, from actual current astronomical knowledge of the cycles of the solar system, then looking to what extent current accurate knowledge could have been known in ancient times. Obviously we do not look for the modern physics of lunisolar torque in John, but what we do look for is the unfolding cycle of zodiac ages as calculable by long term naked eye observation.

For example, the snake on the pole at John 3:14, immediately preceding the theory of eternal life, indicates an ancient tradition, seen in Moses' comment about the snake on a pole, and also in the serpent in the tree of life in Eden. This symbol appears also in the Mithraic God of Time, Aion, the man-lion with eagle wings encoiled by a snake, with its six coils representing the six ages from the Golden Age of Leo the lion to the restoration of divine understanding in the Age of Aquarius the man.

This model of six ages of fall followed by an age of redemption is a possible interpretation of the woman at the well, whose six husbands are succeeded by the true seventh husband Christ.

Several years ago I wrote an extended essay on Astrotheology in John's Prologue. My key point there is that the actual cosmic order visible to the ancients provides the basis for the doctrine of the word of God. In that essay I explore the allegory between Christ and the earth is in terms of the earth's relation to the sun, as the axis of cosmic order.

Another precessional theme in John's prologue, and also seen in Paul, is the idea of the new covenant of grace replacing the old covenant of law. John says "the law was given through Moses. Grace and truth came through Jesus Christ." This is a directly precessional statement. To see that, we have to understand that the Aries-Pisces spring movement is part of a cosmic axis, and at the other end of this axis, at the autumn equinox, the sun precessed at the time of Christ from Libra into Virgo. The ancient symbolic understanding of this shift, flowing through into modern astrology, was that Libra, representing the position of the equinox in the Age of Moses, is symbolised by the scales of justice, or law. Virgo, representing the Age of Christ, is symbolised by the virgin, whom Christian doctrine celebrated as full of grace. So John's allegory of law and grace has a direct observable counterpart in the ancient observation of the slow movement of the star clock of history.

Granted that all of the above is true, what led to this alleged original allegorical meaning of the gJohn regarding a cosmic christ to the earthly Jesus depicted in 1 John 4:2?

Beloved, do not believe all spirits, but be distinguishing between the spirits whether they are from God, because many false Prophets have gone out into the world. The Spirit of God is known by this: every spirit who confesses that Yeshua The Messiah has come in the flesh is from God.

I've heard it argued that there was a proto-catholic/anti-docetic faction which developed sometime in the second century however I'm not sure if this is your POV as well.

bcedaifu wrote:What makes it so fascinating to me, is that these days, the uber Catholic Polish revere Copernicus as a near saint, and it would appear that the conventional Christian churches, all of them, now accept heliocentrism as valid, absolute truths. Why? How can they gloss over the meaningless deaths and torture imposed on hundreds, ?thousands, who faced the ultimate threat, in proclaiming the importance of a scientific, rational approach to the study of our universe, and the laws that govern it.

Copernicus' concern was such that he delayed publication for four decades, fearing not only for his own life, but that of his entire family, and friends.

From what I've read, that is just a myth. According to Tim O'Neill:
http://www.quora.com/History/What-is-th ... ical-event

• In fact, many of Galileo's staunchest champions and defenders were churchmen and many of his attackers were fellow scientists...
  
  The Church was also quite open to the ideas of Copernicus. Copernicus himself was aware that there were several strong objections to his model, as noted above, and hesitated publishing his work as a result. But he was strongly encouraged by Bishop Giese of Culm and so initially circulated a summary of his ideas in 1530. This got him widespread attention and in 1533 Pope Clement VII asked Johann Widmanstadt to deliver a private lecture on Copernicus' theories in the Vatican Gardens. He was so intrigued and delighted by the lecture that he rewarded Widmanstadt with the gift of a valuable manuscript.
  
  Galileo himself was lauded and revered for his learning and the Jesuit Order, in particular, claimed him as one of their own, since he was Jesuit-educated. Initial objections to his telescopic observations were overturned when Jesuit astronomers of the Collegium Romanum made their own telescopes and repeated his results.
  
  As noted above, by 1616 there were no less than seven competing cosmological models under discussion in scientific circles and, as some of the leading scholars of the day, churchmen were in the thick of these debates. None of these models was without its flaws or serious objections, but the science of the day tended to continue to favour geocentrism. Galileo's position was actually in a minority amongst the scientists of the time and this was well understood by scientifically-literate churchmen. At this stage, however, heliocentrism was an entirely valid alternative idea and one thought worth consideration and study. It was not (yet) condemned, not suppressed and not declared heretical.

As I understand it, Galileo was originally free to teach heliocentrism as a theory. But he went on to criticize the Pope (whom originally was friendly towards Galileo) and disputed Catholic readings of passages in the Bible that appeared to support geocentralism. That's what got him charged with heresy. Copernicus never disputed the readings of Biblical passages, so was not persecuted for his ideas of heliocentrism.

arnoldo wrote:what led to this alleged original allegorical meaning of the gJohn regarding a cosmic christ to the earthly Jesus depicted in 1 John 4:2?

Beloved, do not believe all spirits, but be distinguishing between the spirits whether they are from God, because many false Prophets have gone out into the world. The Spirit of God is known by this: every spirit who confesses that Yeshua The Messiah has come in the flesh is from God.

I've heard it argued that there was a proto-catholic/anti-docetic faction which developed sometime in the second century however I'm not sure if this is your POV as well.

Thanks Arnoldo. I see the point you have raised here as central. Rather than the Big Bang Theory of Christianity exploding from an individual founder as point source, the reality is more like the Cambrian Explosion, where the time became ripe for simultaneous emergence of the same idea in many places. Yes, my point of view is that early Christianity (ie first century and before) was Docetic and Gnostic, understanding Jesus Christ as a cosmic myth, not as a real person. As the church evolved into catholic belief, in the context of the use of Christ as a political weapon against Rome after the 70 AD destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, this cosmic mystery lacked the power to impel church growth, and had to be replaced by the simple literal story of orthodox faith.

The myth of Jesus Christ was seen by the early church as a high moral vision, grounded in solar cosmology. However, as Stephan has pointed out, Orthodox Judaism was hostile to nature worship, having smashed the groves of Yahweh’s wife Asherah to obliterate its own origins. Following military defeat of the Jews by Rome, Christ as cosmic myth could not inspire a feasible political organising strategy. The church, centred on Hellenizing Jews and their allies, needed plausible deniability regarding sedition, while still being able to secretly teach seditious messages. This stratagem produced the Nazarene/Nazareth distinction, with the invented place of Nazareth used to deny that Christianity represented the seditious Nazarene sect, in line with the Romans 13 injunction of surface loyalty to the Empire. The strategic objective for the church was to generate a doctrine of moral legitimacy, and thereby deny legitimacy to the Empire. That attitude goes back to Daniel and the vision of the four successive empires buffeting Israel.

With estimated 3% literacy in the community of the time, the Christ story had to be simplified in order to provide a framework for popular belief. So when Mark came up with the beautiful story of the crucified saviour of Galilee, making real the cosmic myth, it appears to have struck such a deep popular nerve in popular culture that many could not imagine it was anything other than historical fact.

I have long been intrigued by how a Docetic myth, equating Christ and God, could transform itself into its opposite, a doctrine that effectively equated Docetism and Satanism. The psychology and politics of this process bear comparison to Orwell’s parable in 1984 of Oceania’s switch from war with Eurasia to war with Eastasia. The compulsory forgetting of the former situation occurred through a process Orwell calls crimestop, “an elaborate mental training [that made everyone] unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever…. the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.”

At http://www.booktalk.org/post55245.html#p55245 I expanded on a memetic analysis of early Christianity, exploring how ideas could gradually reverse their content if that proved politically and emotionally desirable for the prevailing culture. Jesus provided a lightning rod for emotional hostility to Rome, sublimated into safe religion, with miraculous historicism providing the means for the messianic political dimension to be neutered.

The memetics of language, the changing stability of central concepts, is central to cultural evolution. Regarding linguistic evolution, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyaus_Pita and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyeus explain that Zeus, Jupiter and Deus Pater (ie God the Father) derive etymologically from the Indian Dyaus Pita, the sky father of the Vedic Pantheon. Greek Zeus Patera = Roman Ju Piter = Christian Deus Pater. None are entities, but rather human efforts to explain the meaning of life against the natural framework of day and sky.

God is a meme with strong durability, fecundity and stability. In looking at how religious belief evolves, one way in which the meme differs from the gene is in the stability of the transmission. Genes have strong copy fidelity, only mutating very rarely, with most mutations causing death. By contrast, the mutation of memes is far faster and more various. To stabilise the God meme, preventing unwanted diversity, the church had to anathematise contrary views.

Consider the origins of Christianity. One mythicist view is that the Gospels are a fiction that was written in Alexandria with the express purpose of establishing a new religion by inventing a mythical saviour who would have mass appeal. Christians maintain that the gospels were written between 70 and 100 AD, but there is no evidence that they existed in final form before the second or perhaps even the third century.

It is easy to imagine an evolutionary memetic process akin to ‘Chinese whispers’ which turned imaginative and fictional ideas into dogma. A good example of Chinese whispers is the story from the First World War, where an order from the front was passed by word of mouth to the rear, and “We’re going to advance, send us reinforcements” was eventually transmitted as “We’re going to a dance, send us three and four pence.” People’s hearing and memory and desires are flawed, giving great potential for hearing whatever you want to hear, rather than what is actually said. As Paul Simon famously put it, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

In the Christian example, we have to look to the psychology of belief to explain how the Christ meme became the Christian dogma. This psychology is illustrated in one of the famous “proofs” of the existence of God – that if we can imagine a perfect being, then a real one is better than an imaginary one so a real one must exist (cf Anselm and Aquinas). The same psychological logic applies to Jesus, that if we can imagine a perfect messiah, then a real messiah is so much better and therefore exists. The emotional yearning means the idea gives birth to the history.

Trying to recreate how the Christ meme may have evolved, we can see the religious scholars of Alexandria, including Jewish refugees, wanted to imagine a better world than the Roman Empire. We can imagine their original thought processes, building on the prophecies of the Old Testament, joined together with other traditions, such as Serapis, in the Egyptian melting pot. Starting from ‘if only we had a messiah, this is what he would have been like’, the oral transmission of these messianic stories occurred over centuries before they found their final form. Conceivably, the first tellers meant the stories as myth.

However, fish stories improve in the telling – it was thiiiiis big. As hearers tell a good story to others, they steadily embroider it. A useful first improvement, when you have a political agenda, is that the fantasy you heard is an actual story of events. If, as stated in John 20:31 the agenda of this greatest fish story is that “these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God” then clearly the agenda is not to provide an accurate record of events, but rather whatever will be most conducive to spreading belief, ‘that you may believe’.

The meme is an evolving and mutating idea. To interpret the origins of Christianity memetically, a key point is that in an oral culture, the weight of moral stories is increased by falsely claiming that invented fictions are historically based. The status of an idea such as the historical Christ would evolve through stages, each of which could last decades as the view of a community.

A possible gradual historical evolution of the Christ Myth is as follows:
1. I made it up
2. I know from the author that it is false
3. I heard that it is false
4. I don’t know if it is true or false
5. I would like it to be true
6. It is probably true
7. It is definitely true
8. If you so much as ask if it is true you are a heretic and blasphemer and will go to hell.

This last dogmatic imperial phase is expressed in the Bible, with the statement at 1 John 4:2 “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. Every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God but is the spirit of the antichrist.”

Just as Asherah was written out of Judaism, so was the cosmic identity of Christ written out of Christianity, but unsuccessfully due to its central place in Christian identity. The reason was to enable a unified and emotionally satisfying belief system, an agenda that had primacy over intellectual coherence or historical accuracy.

The Christian meme became that belief in the story of the incarnation was a test of faith, a shibboleth. Pagans such as Celsus regarded this Christian method with contempt, as there was no historical evidence that Jesus lived, and abundant evidence of invention. However, history shows that this meme of the Word made Flesh proved more powerful than pagan logic, and produced the Dark Ages. This meme of blind faith is only now unravelling at the popular level.

Robert Tulip wrote: . . .I have long been intrigued by how a Docetic myth, equating Christ and God, could transform itself into its opposite, a doctrine that effectively equated Docetism and Satanism. The psychology and politics of this process bear comparison to Orwell’s parable in 1984 of Oceania’s switch from war with Eurasia to war with Eastasia. The compulsory forgetting of the former situation occurred through a process Orwell calls crimestop, “an elaborate mental training [that made everyone] unwilling and unable to think too deeply on any subject whatever…. the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. CRIMESTOP, in short, means protective stupidity.”

At http://www.booktalk.org/post55245.html#p55245 I expanded on a memetic analysis of early Christianity, exploring how ideas could gradually reverse their content if that proved politically and emotionally desirable for the prevailing culture. . .

According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the perception of "atheism" and orthodox christianity have become reversed between the second and 21st century.

Today Christianity is regarded as an “otherworldly” religion, whereas pagan atheism claims to be an affirmation of life in this world. In the second century, Gnosticism, the anti-christian experiment, was seen to be a flight from the world and the body, a pale and arid spiritualism. It replaced the real world-violent, indeed sinful, yet redeemable by God, and actually redeemed through the Incarnation of the Word—with an imaginary world, thus splitting the one nature of man in two. Christianity, by contrast, proved us plausibility not lest because it wholeheartedly acknowledged the goodness of creation, and gladly and bravely affirmed man, man threatened by destiny, sin, and death as well as God.
Scandal of the Incarnation

neilgodfrey wrote:the miracle being a midrash on various OT passages (Psalms, Exodus, 2 Kings) demonstrating the superiority of Jesus to the prophets and the superiority of the new Israel to the old… explains far more than the astrotheology hypothesis that simply relegates most of the details to fictional padding to make the story more palatable to ignorant folk…

Midrash is the method, and we have the remaining NT corpus to give us direction on how the early Christians interpreted such images and concepts. There is no need to look for any other hypothesis that proves unable to explain nearly as many of the details of the miracle.

My explanation does "fail to engage with a higher meaning in terms of cosmology" for a very good reason. My explanation explains the data far more comprehensively than does yours. My explanation accounts for multiple points in the data and yours for only a few. The miracle is explained without any need to invoke "a higher meaning in terms of cosmology".

The midrash sourcing of some of the imagery explains less than the astral reading of the loaves and fishes. Neil has chosen only those select mundane details which fit within his Jewish superiority hypothesis. But that is just a starting point. The meaning of the miracle resides in why Christ is superior to the earlier Jewish prophets, and why a 'New Israel' is coming into being. That is what astrotheology explains, with the central alpha and omega mystery of Christ simply depicted as the reflection on earth of what was visibly occurring in the sky at the time of Pilate.

Jesus indicates the real cosmic meaning of the miracle at Mark 8:17-21, rather like how he explains the parable of the sower at Matthew 13:18f. The Mark 8 explanation has to be read within the political context of natural cosmology being rejected by Judaism. So Jesus expresses his frustration at the inability of his followers to see the real cosmic meaning of his message:

Jesus Christ wrote:”Don't you perceive yet, neither understand? Is your heart still hardened? Having eyes, don't you see? Having ears, don't you hear? Don't you remember? When I broke the five loaves among the five thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" They told him, "Twelve." "When the seven loaves fed the four thousand, how many baskets full of broken pieces did you take up?" They told him, "Seven." He asked them, "Don't you understand, yet?"”

Jesus says here that vision, hearing, understanding, openness and memory are required to comprehend his repeated question “How many?” And the answers, the numbers, 5, 7, 12, 4000 and 5000, present simple well known matches in visual astronomy – the number of visible planets, months and stars. Breaking the five loaves among the 5000 means seeing how the five visible planets move against the background of the stars through the twelve constellations of the ecliptic.

Again we see the driving Gnostic intent within the Gospels, that understanding of temporal life on earth requires us to see the connection to the real eternal framework of cosmic order available to vision, hearing, understanding, openness and memory.

John 6:26-7 reinforces the cosmic meaning:

Jesus Christ wrote:“you seek me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves, and were filled. Don't work for the food which perishes, but for the food which remains to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you.”

The loaves are not sign but allegory for eternal life. “Eating of the loaves” means placing life within the framework of visible cosmic order. And the encompassing cosmic order, known to the Jews since at least the captivity in Babylon, was the slow movement of the stars against the seasons defining the ages, with the new 'bread and fish' axis marked by the movement of the equinoxes into the signs of bread and fish at the time of Pilate as the source of creative abundance.

arnoldo wrote:According to Hans Urs von Balthasar, the perception of "atheism" and orthodox christianity have become reversed between the second and 21st century.

von Balthasar wrote:Today Christianity is regarded as an “otherworldly” religion, whereas pagan atheism claims to be an affirmation of life in this world. In the second century, Gnosticism, the anti-christian experiment, was seen to be a flight from the world and the body, a pale and arid spiritualism. It replaced the real world-violent, indeed sinful, yet redeemable by God, and actually redeemed through the Incarnation of the Word—with an imaginary world, thus splitting the one nature of man in two. Christianity, by contrast, proved its plausibility not least because it wholeheartedly acknowledged the goodness of creation, and gladly and bravely affirmed man, man threatened by destiny, sin, and death as well as God.

Arnoldo, von Balthasar’s comment illustrates the difficulty of dialogue with faith, as his comments are a superb example of what Orwell called protective stupidity in the text you requoted. Neil Godfrey may tut-tut at my lack of respect for a champion of faith and leading light of the curia, but the agenda here is analysis, not deference.

Apart from his first correct description of the current view of the relation between atheism and Christianity, every sentence in Balthasar's paragraph is wrong, based on massive long standing false Catholic assumptions.

He asserts that Christianity has “actually redeemed the real world through the incarnation”. This is a statement of pure faith, a belief grounded in acceptance of the historicity of the Gospels and the theology constructed upon them by dogma. This entire dogmatic framework is imaginary, deriving its social power from its impudent assertion of historical accuracy.

Then, Balthasar’s depiction of Gnosticism is empty heresiology. Calling Gnosticism an “anti-christian experiment” and implying that it arose in the second century, simply accepts the fraudulent framework built by the church to justify its historicist fiction. The far more plausible evolution is from Gnosticism to Christianity, gradually developed over centuries beforehand by mystery schools, with the original ladder kicked away after the emotionally comforting and popular incarnational myth had finally been developed by Mark. The weight of messianic expectation built up by Gnostic theology was so great that Mark was the spark to convert fantasy to imagined fact.

Next, Balthasar disparages the demiurge idea of an evil subordinate maker of the cosmos by his claim that Gnosticism failed to “acknowledge the goodness of creation.” This is more empty gonging. The meaning of the Gnostic doctrine of the demiurge is highly complex. Its coherence rests in a vision that is compatible with the Judeo-Christian idea of the fall from grace. Cosmos means world. World is not simply the physical planet, but as Heidegger argued, our constructed framework of meaning, interpreting nature and truth through language. So Gnosticism can be read as holding that our constructed framework of meaning is degraded and false, even though an eternal natural truth exists behind the appearance.

Gnosticism is not a “flight from the world and the body” any more than Pauline Christianity is. Paul taught to follow the path of spirit and spurn the path of the flesh. This was not an assertion that material reality is evil, but rather that ethics requires a vision of what is enduring, a sense of the eternal ideal values of faith that give purpose and direction to material life through language.

Thanks arnoldo for providing this clear example from von Balthasar of a conventional theological perspective on Gnosticism. I just don't think we will get any reliable views out of the Curia, even with the reforms of Francis. The entire institution of the Roman Catholic Church is too corrupted by power and dogmatic inertia, by centuries of only listening to what they want to hear, and by constructing an imaginary fantasy to serve their temporal interests. They are built on sand, not rock.

Noting that von Balthasar died in 1988, your suggestion that he presents a 21st century inversion seems more relevant to the last century. What is happening now in this new century is a paradigm shift, an effort for dialogue between faith and reason, from a view that faith needs to humble itself, recognising the primacy of reason as regards facts, to provide a framework for faith to assert values.

Robert Tulip wrote:

neilgodfrey wrote:list what we would expect to find if the passage indeed meant that Jesus is an allegory of the sun.

The allegory between Christ and the Sun as the light of the world makes complete sense in terms of the natural observational cosmology available to the ancient world. Everyone knows the sun is the light of the world, shining equally on the just and the unjust. This allegory appears in theological interpretation of Malachi 4:2, the "Sun of Righteousness" as a reference to Christ, as seen for example in the popular carol Hark the Herald Angels Sing, and in the first conventional theological commentary at the verse link, "By the Sun of Righteousness we understand Jesus Christ."

Working through a cosmic reading, we would expect that ancient knowledge of the apparent movement of the sun would form the framework for John's doctrine of cosmic reason, the word made flesh. We would expect that as we read the Fourth Gospel, we would find a range of references to this natural observed order of the structure of time, understood as the cyclic path of the aeons.

Robert, are you saying that the only prediction you can make is that you will identify a few other references in the Gospel that can similarly be interpreted with the same cosmology allegory?

How is such a prediction worth anything? I think I could make up just about any hypothesis and predict I can find "a range of" images or terms throughout the Gospel that could be interpreted in its terms.

Compare the prediction that my literary-theological hypothesis made on the miracle of the loaves. Your prediction is vague and patchy and no different from the potential ability of almost any other hypothesis one could think of.

The point of prediction is to explain something otherwise not understood very well at all. On that basis your hypothesis has no predictive value at all. It is unfalsifiable.

Not sure 'prediction' (or predicitve value) is the right term/s for these proposals.

Not sure falsifiablity or 'unfalsifiability' is, either.