Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

I've missed the comment explaining the message of these images. . . . ?

There is no comment. I just have been looking everywhere for chiasmic cross images of the Crucifixion. I will stop posting them.

I was looking for loaves and fish symbols along the lines of the twelve constellation framework Robert has identified in Leonardo's Last Supper painting: http://www.scribd.com/doc/207868712/Astrotheology

neilgodfrey wrote:

Mental flatliner wrote:That's why we got the song, "Age of Acquarius" in the 60s, decades before the exact date of the new age.

God you still blab ignorance even when you're not talking about the Bible. The "Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" was well understood at the time to precede the astronomical change-over point of time. That's why it was said to be the Dawning of the Age, not the Age.

Yes and during the time of jesus they were in the Age of Pisces. I guess astronomically we have moved out of that age into the Age of Aquarius.

neilgodfrey wrote:I've missed the comment explaining the message of these images. . . . ?

Jesus Christ stands on a Chi cross. Stephan has posted these images to illustrate the dawn of the Age of Pisces, the Chi Rho cross shape formed by the intersection of the zodiac, the equator and the first fish of Pisces in 21 AD.

The fascinating fact about these glorious icons is that they illustrate an esoteric cosmic basis of Christian faith which has been lost in the exoteric tradition. How this loss could occur is an extraordinary historical problem, central to the problem of the status of theology.

Jesus explains it in fairly simple terms in the miracle of the loaves and fishes, that popular ignorance is obstinate about the possibility that religion explains reality in a scientifically accurate way.

Neil - maybe you missed the whole discussion of the Chi Rho cross. Stephan's posting of these images is entirely on topic.

The Chi Rho derives from the chiastic Cross

The image goes back now to the sixteenth century

The X in these resurrection icons indicates that Easter occurs at the spring equinox, the time of rebirth of life in the new year after the death of winter in the previous year. Traditionally, this X derives from Plato's intersection of the same and the different. Here is a relevant comment from my review of Ulansey's Mithras book

The lion-headed God with body of a man and wings of an eagle, wrapped by six coils of a snake, often known as Aion, the god of time, [shown below] is found in association with Mithraic ceremony. Aion seems much more plausibly associated with precession than is Mithras, as the lion and man form a precessional axis from Leo to Aquarius, separated by six ages, represented in the statue by the six curls of the snake. Aion stands on top of a globe marked by the Chi Rho cross. Plato in the Timaeus had said this cross represented the same and the different. It may well be that the same is the ecliptic path of the sun along the unchanging stars of the zodiac, while the different is the moving position of the celestial equator caused by precession. Alternatively, the same might be the galaxy, and the different could be the zodiac, with the shifting positions of the planets indicating change. Both these readings are plausible. In any event, we cannot rule out that precession was central to a secret oral mystery tradition going back at least to Plato, and probably much further into the distant past in Egypt and Babylon and India.

This is the problem again. You just went from 'X' (literally) to all this other shit that doesn't necessarily apply. You haven't demonstrated that Jews and Christians who accepted the cosmic chi also allow this other garbage. I don't know why you continue to do this.

To put it bluntly - (a) one can fuck one's wife (b) one can fuck other people who are not one's wife but one can't do (b) while (a) is in force without there being severe consequences.
That's the result of thousands of years of Judeo-Christian values.

I don't know how else to put. A married man is fully capable of having sexual relations with other people. An alien studying contemporary culture could take all sort of images from pornography and 'apply' this to human relations generally. 'People were having indiscriminate sex.' But that's a bad inference because there are rules enforcing monogamy throughout most societies.

The Jews took the prohibition on adultery to apply to religious ideas. You can't ignore this and pretend your nonsense applies to Judaism and Christianity. You want to say 'but hey there is all this other stuff that is connected with the cosmic chi.' But it doesn't necessarily apply to Judaism and Christianity. You have to take the time, argument by argument, inference by inference, to show that Jews and Christians applied these pagan ideas to their astrological interests.

Robert Tulip wrote: The fascinating fact about these glorious icons is that they illustrate an esoteric cosmic basis of Christian faith which has been lost in the exoteric tradition. How this loss could occur is an extraordinary historical problem, central to the problem of the status of theology. . . . . . Stephan's posting of these images is entirely on topic.

Robert -- allow me to ask a question without prejudice: Are you saying that the original secret meaning of Christianity was not lost upon the church or the artists responsible for these paintings?

(I was asking for the relevance -- and yes you are correct, I did not read the posts you refer to. So I appreciated Stephen's explanation.)