That’s because Christians are still a majority. However in about twenty years they won’t be and remaining orthodox Bible scholars will then be a small group of fringe “workers” if you can even call them workers.
I suspect that astrotheology is a fringe subject even among the non-Christian bible scholars. Can you provide evidence to the contrary?
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The percentage of people who believe something has no bearing on its validity. If 2 billion people believe a stupid thing it’s still a stupid thing. If only a hand full of people know the truth about something it’s still the truth. I can provide plenty of evidence that the Bible is based on astrology as well as Homer. It’s very revealing that you ask for opinions rather than facts.
That would be more effective if you hadn’t been the one to introduce the argument from percentages. This also seems like tacit agreement that astrotheology is a fringe subject even among non-Christian scholars. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it’s at least the way to bet.
I’ve seen your facts; that’s why. Your comparison of the death of Hector to the death of Jesus is risible.
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How so?
I made a late edit to that comment so replace “still be consistent with evolution” with “still not clash with evolution”.
Contrary to your position, this has been shown.
Do you know about the genealogical Adam and Eve?
This poses no problem at all for a genealogical Adam and Eve.
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What and where is the evidence that this creation myth was ever supposed to be taken as a literal account? Adam and Eve were the Egyptian deities Geb and Nut. Their children were the children of the earth and heavens. The punishments God gave them and the serpent come from the Egyptian Osiris cycle. This is the Hebrew creation cycle:
A. Headnote: ”These are the generations…” (2:4)
B. No field economy “…no one to till the ground…” (2:5-6)
C. Human beings given life, installed in the Garden (2:7-17).
D. Man prefers human companionship over beasts. (2:18-22)
E. Man calls his companion “Woman.” (2:23)
F. Etiological summary “Therefore a man leaves…” (2:24)
G. Human couple “…naked and …not ashamed.” (2:25)
H. Serpent promises “…eyes will be opened…” (3:1-5)
I. Transgression. (3:6)
H. The couple’s “eyes are opened.”(3:7a)
G. They experience shame. ( 3:7b-10)
F. Etiological summary “For you are dust…” (3:19b)
E. Man calls his companion “Eve” (“Life barrier”) (3:20)
D. Man and woman wear skins of beasts. (3:21)
C. Humans expelled from Garden, denied and mortality. (3:22-3:24)
B. Field economy begins
A. Birth of a child completes one generation (4:1)
This is theology, NOT history.
You won’t see it even if I explain. Just trust me.
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Trust you? You who knows absolutely nothing about this subject as this is the first time you’ve even been exposed to it? Do you think that is the only comparison of Homer and the gospels? It isn’t nor is the best one. How about I show you undeniable proof that the gospel narratives are largely based on Homer?
Odyssey 9.101-565 — Mark 5:1-20
The Cyclops and the Demoniac
Odyssey: In a convoy Odysseus and his crew arrived at the land of the Cyclops.
Mark: Jesus and his disciples along with other boats arrived at the land of the Gerasenes.
Odyssey: On the mountains a large number of goats grazed.
Mark: On the mountains about two-thousand swine grazed.
Odyssey: Odysseus and his crew disembarked.
Mark: Jesus and his disciples disembarked.
Odyssey: They encountered a savage giant who lived in a cave.
Mark: They encountered a savage demoniac who lived in the caves.
Odyssey: The cyclops asked if Odysseus came to harm him.
Mark: The demoniac asked Jesus not to torment him.
Odyssey: The cyclops asked Odysseus his name.
Mark: Jesus asked the demoniac his name.
Odyssey: Odysseus answered, “Nobody.”
Mark: The demoniac answered, “Legion.”
Odyssey: Odysseus subdued the giant with violence and trickery [Circe had turned Odysseus’s soldiers into swine.]
Mark: Jesus subdued the demons with divine power and sent them into the swine and then into the sea.
Odyssey: The shepherd called out to his neighbors.
Mark: The swineherds called on their neighbors.
Odyssey: The Cyclops came to the site of the incident and asked about Polyphemus’s sheep and goats.
Mark: The Gerasenes came to the site to find out about their swine.
Odyssey: Polyphemus was depicted as being nude.
Mark: The demoniac, was naked but is now clothed.
Odyssey: Odysseus and crew reembarked.
Mark: Jesus and his disciples reembarked.
Odyssey: Odysseus told the giant to proclaim that he had blinded him.
Mark: Jesus told the healed demoniac to proclaim that he had healed him.
Odyssey: After Odysseus boarded the ship the cyclops asked him to come back
Mark: After Jesus boarded the boat the demoniac asked Jesus if he could be with him.
Odyssey: Odysseus refused the request of the cyclops.
Mark: Jesus refused the request of the demoniac.
Odyssey: Odysseus and his crew sailed away.
Mark: Jesus and his disciples sailed away.
There are a lot more comparisons. Ill give you list to choose from if you’d like.
I would agree, given that he’s so deeply committed to false dichotomies that he’s calling you and @Tim “religionists.”
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I’m sorry to upset you, but this can only be called insane. Equating the Gadarene swine with Odysseus and Polyphemus? No.
I never argued the story of A&E be taken literally, but if one does take it literally then the GAE is one of the best versions to adopt as it almost completely avoids any struggle with evolutionary science and gives you two de novo created parents who came to be genealogical ancestors of everyone today.
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Religionist? Moi? Now you’re just being insulting. 
I actually don’t give the proverbial pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys whether Biblical scholars “believe in magic and fairies and have a religious agenda” – these days there are even a reasonable number of atheist and agnostic Biblical scholars. I do however tend to prefer the “experts” foisted onto me by others to have some degree of demonstrable expertise in the field they are being cited for. Therefore, I see no more reason to accept Drummond or Taylor on Biblical Studies or Theology than WLC on Physics.
I am quite sure that if I trawled all the obscure treatises on Biblical interpretation that have been written in the last two millenia, I would find a veritable cornucopia of novel and bizarre, but almost certainly often mutually-contradictory, claims.
Why should I prefer your preferred obscure treatises on Biblical interpretation over all the others?
Your claim that Drummond and Taylor are “unbiased” is nothing but bald unsubstantiated assertion. You also fail to even assert that their “studies” were in any way rigorous.
No, as you’ve given me no reason to grant greater credibility to them than any other obscure author on Biblical interpretation in the last two millennia.
Yes, and so that is the logical first step in establishing their credibility (or lack thereof).
No Boris. You made an Argument from Authority when you claimed “it’s a widely held view among experts in the study of astrotheology”, and cited Drummond and Taylor as your purported “experts”. By doing so, you made their credibility a legitimate issue of inquiry. So I inquired into their credibility, rather than naively accepting their purported claims at face value.
So have most people on this forum, including I suspect everybody disagreeing with you on this thread – myself included.
Given that I rather doubt that any college course would teach the works of Drummond or Taylor, I don’t think this follows in the least. I would suspect that most college graduates would be forced to look them up, to find out any information about them – including whether they have sufficient credibility to be worth investigating further.
Then, speaking as another atheist, I would suggest that you (i) don’t label your far-way-from-expert sources as “experts”, and (ii) don’t give the impression that the claims that they are making are some sort of “theology” (as labelling it “astrotheology” clearly does). Otherwise you have little cause for complaint when people point out that they are not in fact experts in theology.
No Boris. Speaking as a number-cruncher, I find raw data lacking sufficient context to be useful to be ubiquitously “mind-numbingly tedious” (not merely “mind-numbing” – if you are going to quote me then please do so accurately!).
Important context we lack includes:
- the proportion of the relevant passage that have been matched;
- information ruling out literary conventions, artifacts of translation, and similar effects as a source of ‘false positives’ in matching; and
- the appropriate statistical models to rigorously test whether the degree of match is significant.
Lacking this context, then no, this is no more “interesting” than any other semi-random contextless raw data.
Given that I haven’t been a Christian in something like thirty years, “all [you] need to know” would appear to be nothing but an admission of your own Epistemic Closure.
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Upset me? If I was the least bit unsure of my position the fact that you, John Harshman a believer in an historical Jesus, disagree with me would only bolster my confidence. How do you explain the similarities in these narratives? Coincidence? Here’s another comparison:
Parallels Between the Telemachia and Mark’s Feast.
Odyssey 3 — Mark 6:34-44
“Odyssey: The first feast.
Mark: The first feast.
Odyssey: Telemachus and Athena sailed and disembarked.
Mark: Jesus and his disciples sailed and disembarked.
Odyssey: They found a great crowd on the shore - 4500 men
Mark: They found a great crowd on the shore - 5000 men
Odyssey: Everyone sat down in companies, nine groups of 500 each
Mark: Everyone sat down in drinking groups and garden beds by 100s and 50s
Odyssey: Peisistratus ordered his guests to sit
Mark: Jesus had ordered the people to sit
Odyssey: Nestor sacrificed and others prayed
Mark: Jesus offered thanks to God
Odyssey: They took meat and divided the food
Mark: Jesus took the loaves and fish and divided them
Odyssey: Everyone ate was was filled
Mark: Everyone ate was was filled”
The evangelists who wrote the gospels were well trained in the art of rhetorical writing. They knew how to take the works of others and make them their own. This is not plagiarism, it’s an art form. The author of Mark’s gospel is not trying to hide what he borrowed from Homer from his audience. He knows that they know what he was doing. You on the other hand, definitely do not.
There were never fewer than 12,000 humans on the planet. So there were no first two ancestors. What is you obsession with these mythical characters? Like Jesus, they did not exist. Neither did Moses, Abraham, David, Paul, the Virgin Mary - none of them ever existed.
Nitpick time:
…except in cases where speciation is the result of polyploidy or hybridization.
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Do you not know that people can see the post you are replying to?
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I for one welcome our new astrotheological overlords. All hail Adam, who illuminates my path and irradiates my body preventing me from extended space travel. All hail Eve. Whosoever standeth upon her shall be considered great among the nations, though such an achievement has no practical purpose whatsoever.
How sure are you that @John_Harshman believes in a historical Jesus?
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At which point, exactly, does this become “just nuts?” 