Boris Badenoff: Adam and Eve and Astrotheology

Yup. You are finding rough matches between bits of two large collections of stories. It would be odd if there were none. Bet you could find similar matches with Lord of the Rings or War and Peace if you tried.

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Boris,

Thanks for bringing these interesting ideas to the forum. I had never heard of astrotheology previously. It does strike me as similar to some of the gnostic writings in the third century that attempted to recast the gospels as eastern mysticism.

I contend that the provenance of a set of letters and religious writings should inform our discussion of their influences. It would be silly, for example, to suggest that the etiological myths of indigenous peoples in Australia directly influenced the writings of the New Testament. So let’s take a look at the provenance of those letters and religious writings we call the New Testament.

Whatever their beliefs about the historical validity of the gospels, the scholarly consensus is that the religious movement founded by Jesus of Nazareth came to life among Palestinian Jews. The Jewish roots of the movement are indisputable. For example:

  • The 5 major speeches in the gospel of Matthew are an allusion to the 5 books of the Pentateuch.
  • The Last Supper is very closely patterned after the seder meal of the Passover.
    • N.B., this Last Supper/Seder is in the gospel of Mark.
  • Passages from the Greek translation of the Torah appear in most of the books of the New Testament.
  • Jesus’ teaching style is recognizably that of a first century Palestinian rabbi. He is called “Rabbi.”

This list could grow much, much longer.

The gospel of Mark is clearly written for a non-Jewish audience, as it includes notes that explain Jewish terminology and practices. Yet the vast majority of its content is found in the other gospels–particularly Matthew, which targeted a Jewish audience which knew very little if anything of Homer. It is possible that Greek literature might have influenced Mark’s literary presentation of his source material, but the fact that his source material had its origin in a community of Palestinian Jews is not in question.

It is of course your right to ascribe moral and religious authority to whatever sacred writings you prefer, or none at all. But I would invite you to more closely examine the relationship between second temple Judaism and Christianity, as you do not seem to be familiar with it.

Respectfully,
Chris Falter

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This is evidence you don’t know what GAE is. Click the link highlighted in green or continue to wallow blindly in your ignorance.

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When a religion adopts a literal interpretation of something that is clearly allegorical and then invents its central doctrine (original sin) on the basis of that nutty interpretation.

None of these other people ever heard of it before either. But true to form for this crowd, they’re all experts on the subject anyway, so much so that they “know” my ideas about it are “insane.” They all ganged up on me before and things did not go well for them. I think they’re still smarting from the intellectual smackdown I put on them a while back.

I disagree. The first mention of any Christians were people in Rome, not Palestine.

The equinox passed from the sign of Aries into the constellation of Pisces. Aries is represented by Moses and YHVH the God of fire and the sword. Pisces is represented by Jesus the God of “living water” and peace. John’s Gospel illustrates this symbolically in the story of the Samaritan woman at the well. The disciples left the area to buy food which connects the story to the tale of Joseph who went to Shechem to find his brothers but discovers they have “moved on” in Genesis 37. Joseph (Taurus) shoulders his responsibilities at Shechem (the place of the shoulder) but then yields them. The disciples are still oblivious to the role of Jesus but the Samaritan woman eventually recognizes Jesus as the one now shouldering the responsibility of ushering in the new age of Pisces. The woman’s five husbands to whom she is no longer married represent the five books of the Torah. This implies that the woman (who represents all women) doesn’t have a part in Judaism under Mosaic law. Jesus symbolically incorporates the feminine back into Judaism thereby making it complete once again when asks the woman to give him a drink at the sixth hour, when Judaism is parched and dry.

The other gospels use the story of Jarius’ daughter as an allegory to teach the same thing. Jarius represents the masculine aspect of Judaism. His daughter is suffering under the 600+ masculine codes of discipline in the Mosaic law. Jesus wakes up the little girl and then commands that she be given something to eat, to nurture her. In the middle of the story Jesus heals the woman with the twelve year blood flow which has drained her. Jesus restores her by removing her uncleanliness which reinstates her to full participation in the Jewish community.

[quote=“Chris_Falter, post:42, topic:14486”]
The Last Supper is very closely patterned after the seder meal of the Passover.

In order to understand the gospels and the figure of Jesus they present we have to put them in the context of the larger Ancient Near Eastern story world of the gods. The passion narrative reiterates the myth of Dionysus, with its motifs of wine and fertility borne by a dying and rising divine figure. Among some of the variations, the most popular themes are the drinking of wine as blood (something an orthodox Jew would NEVER do), the dying and rising of one who is half god and half man, the transformation of tears of mourning into gladness and singing, suffering transformed into the intoxication of new wine, the ecstatic meal, the fertility of spring and a new creation. The figure of Dionysus has as much in common with the gospel figure of Jesus as it has with Isaiah’s Israel.

Both the Hebrew and Greek texts were created simultaneously around the year 270 BCE.

Well I and others are definitely questioning that. The Gospel of Mark is the first and most important of the gospels because it is the primary source for Matthew and Luke. 76% of Mark appears in both Matthew and Luke. An additional 18% of Mark is found in Matthew but not in Luke, and another 3% of Mark is in Luke but not in Matthew. So 97% of Mark is contained in Matthew and Luke. Of the 661 verses that comprise Mark’s Gospel, 606 appear again in Matthew’s Gospel. Luke contains 320 of the verses in Mark’s Gospel. Of the 55 verses of Mark that do not appear in Matthew, 31 appear in Luke. So there are only 24 verses in Mark’s Gospel that are not part of Matthew or Luke.

I am Jewish by birth. We don’t know who wrote Daniel or for that matter many of the other books in the Bible. “Pseudepigrapha” is the literary category of Daniel. We know the book was written during the time of Antiochus, around 167 BC and completed before 164 BC. However Daniel is crafted as if it had been written centuries earlier. We have to understand that Daniel was written for a Jewish audience who correctly interpreted it as an apocalypse concerning the destruction of Jerusalem. But to Christians Daniel had accurately predicted the rise of Antiochus centuries earlier so his prophecy about the Son of Man was sure to be fulfilled soon. This misunderstanding led to and to this day still leads to false expectations.
Respectfully, Boris the Atheist

We seem to be talking past each other. I will restate my point so you can respond as you see fit: Almost every book of the NT quotes from the Greek translation of the Torah. It follows that Judaism, not Homer, was the primary influence on nascent Christianity.

It seems like we have substantial agreement here. The only thing I would add to your information is that New Testament scholars believe that an oral tradition of Jesus’ life and teachings rapidly coalesced into a small corpus referred to as Q (not to be confused with the modern, informal social media network that disseminates vaccine misinformation). Scholars regard Q as the source both of Mark and of the material in the other gospels which is not contained in Mark.

The first use of the Greek word xristianioi was in Rome, yes. But I was using the English word Christians in the modern sense to more generically to refer to followers of Jesus the Messiah. Many of the earliest documents (e.g., Luke’s Acts of the Apostles, several of Paul’s letters) record the origin of the movement to have occurred among Palestinian Jews. This is beyond dispute among New Testament scholars, including among skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman.

Respectfully,
Chris

How come other people also find these “rough” matches but you can’t? That’s a you problem Dude.

I don’t care what he believes. He reminds me of Bullwinkle the Moose’s characterization of Mr. Know-It-All. image

I don’t care what GAE is for the same reason I don’t care about evidence for a flat earth. The story is an allegory. Look up the word “allegory.”

Et tu, Brute?

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What? You don’t realize that astrotheology is a genuine science, on a par with pyramidology and phrenology?

Clearly, this writer has achieved that goal.

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This is not an entirely correct comparison. Flat-earth beliefs fly in the face of overwhelming contradictory evidence from astrophysics and other relevant fields. In contrast, GAE almost completely escapes any form of contradiction with well-established evolutionary science. A proper equivalent to flat-earth beliefs in evolutionary science would be that Adam and Eve were our sole genetic ancestors in the last few thousand years and that is massively contradicted by available genetic (and other types of) data.

Let me quickly tell you what GAE is about. Many millions of years our ancestors split from the ancestors of other modern great apes and they continued evolving to us at present. The population size of our ancestors dipped occasionally and per current genetic data all modern humans descend from a population of roughly 10,000 people in the past. So while all these is happening, God creates a garden and puts a couple in it (in the last 6000 years if you want), Adam and Eve (A&E). Remember human evolution is still occurring outside the garden. A&E sin and are kicked out of the garden. They have kids and these kids go on to have kids who in turn interbreed with those people evolving outside the garden. With these interbreeding, A&E get to be our genealogical ancestors.

Aside from the de novo creation of A&E (which science can’t refute or support, although it clashes with established knowledge on how new humans come into existence), every other thing about GAE pretty much agrees with established population genetics and evolutionary science.

Sure it could be (and that’s even my position), but that doesn’t mean A&E couldn’t have existed.

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Which Christianity? The Christianity of the cosmic Christ in the epistles or Christianity of the Jesus of the gospels? These are two very different figures. They eventually morphed into one personage but originally there were many different sects. And really, for all intents and purposes, there still are. Many Protestants don’t count the Catholics as even being Christians unless they want to claim Christians number around 2 billion. But when they aren’t doing that everyone outside of their particular denomination and often outside their particular church is going to burn for eternity in hell.

Well either way the author of Matthew included the narratives based on the Homeric epics. I think Hellenized Jews were aware of Homer.

I think Q is like a lot of other things Bible “scholars” talk about: they made it up. There’s no evidence such a document ever existed. Plus there’s no need for it. Between the night sky and various star catalogues, the Old Testament, Homer and Greek dramas and their own rhetorical training, the evangelists who wrote the gospels had all the material they needed and then some. It’s obvious that the author of Luke used Josephus as well since he repeats some of the things Jospehus was wrong about. It is not surprising that the format of the gospel of Mark follows the conventions of a Greco-Roman tragedy. I think it was originally a Jewish mystery drama, a play, modeled after Greek melodramas. It originated as a religious drama rather than remembered history.

I doubt Luke, Acts or the epistles record anything. I don’t believe the letters attributed to Paul are actual letters addressed to real churches. They were made to appear that way in the Second Century by the Church in order to give itself authority with which to foist money and power and likely young males to itself.
Just because something is supposedly “beyond dispute” among New Testament scholars dosen’t mean it’s beyond dispute. In fact those are the very things ones that need to be disputed. Among those of us that don’t have a prior commitment to the supposed historicity of the New Testament they are widely and quite solidly disputed.
Bart Ehrman is NOT my idea of a skeptic. He questions the existence of God because he can’t reconcile the existence of evil with the God of the Bible. A lot of Christians do that. Nothing new to see here.
Respectfully, Boris

So then Manu could just as likely existed. Correct?

Well to be fair so is the idea that the Heavens and Earth are divine persons capable of having offspring. The nuttiness of all this becomes apparent in light of modern science, but from the perspective of iron and bronze-age knowledge and even older mythologies and superstitions, the idea that there had to have been some sort of beginning to humanity, here in the divine creation of a couple that would then go on to become the ultimate ancestors of the rest of humanity isn’t, like, logically incoherent or anything. I do not think someone would have had to be insane to believe that. I’m not even convinced it’s truly insane to believe it today, at least in part because people can be genuinely ignorant and sheltered about a lot of things.

Of course, when it comes to certain apologists for creationism who seem to be aware of the findings of modern science and yet still deny it and insist in the talking snake and zap-things-into-existence story, yeah, they’re nuts.

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Perhaps not directly, though the space-age and arms race did spawn a lot of technological development as a byproduct. And while the job could have been done with robots and rovers, the people who walked on the moon were able to return lunar rock and dust samples for exhaustive analysis back here on Earth. That’s rather practical in my view.
It may not provide me with a superior toaster, or sturdier sneakers, but the knowledge gained was worth it for it’s own sake in the same way writing a poem so others can enjoy it can be a worthwhile and purposive endeavour too. Things don’t always have to be of practical utility, like a tool or medication, to have worth or purpose. Studying the cosmos and knowing about it is it’s own reward.

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Wrong as usual Eddie. The difference between astrothology and the pseudoscience you compared it with is that astrothrology has explanatory power and makes accurate predictions. Any good theory has to do that. Christians have been waiting for the return of Jesus and the “end of the age” for 2000 years. This is because they believe the end of the age means the end of the world as we know it. However the “end of the age” is simply the end of the astrological age of Pisces which is what Jesus represents. Hence the fish signs. Also theologians can’t tell us when Jesus was supposedly born or when he supposedly died. It’s not December 25th like the other dying and rising godmen of mythology as the movie Zeitgeist falsely claims and many Christians believe. Astrotheology gives us the exact date, month and year for the birth of Jesus. Can your religion and any of its so-called scholars do that? No they cannot.

You have so far failed to mention any. Why?

What good is an exact date when there is no way to test it?

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The Manu story (just like YEC) requires a global flood which is massively contradicted by available geological data. It also requires two genetic ancestors of all modern humans: if this is recent then it is contradicted by genetic data; if it stretches back far enough then that’s possible. Its death knell as a historical event is its global flood requirement.

In any case it seems you have got nothing on the GAE. Thought as much.

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Oh please. That’s like saying that the cow couldn’t have jumped over the moon because it relies on the dish running away with the spoon, which we all know is the impossible part of the story.