Is the Jesus story an astrological allegory?

[Ishtar]

We have no hard evidence for those folk tales...just inference and supposition.

But Min, that's all you ever have for folk tales. You never have hard evidence because they're as a result of oral transmission.

But if you could temporarily suspend your disbelief and bear with me, you'll soon see how the story of Moses has to be a myth - not through dating, which we can never do anyway - but by seeing the archetypal patterns.

I don't understand why you're fighting me on this when it supports your cause anyway, and if you understood it, would give you another arrow in your quiver when fighting fundies!

[Minimalist]

From The Bible Unearthed...Page 69-70

"It is impossible to say whether or not the biblical narrative was an expansion and elaboration of vague memories of the immigration of Canaanites to Egypt and their expulsion from the Delta in the second millenium BCE. Yet it seems clear that the biblical story of the Exodus drew its power not only from ancient traditions and contemporary geographical details but even more directly from contemporary political realities.

The seventh century was a time of great revival in both Egypt and Judah. In Egypt, after a long period of decline and difficult years of subjection to the Assyrian empire, King Psammetchus I seized power and transformed Egypt into a major international power again. As the rule of the Assyrian empire began to crumble, Egypt moved in to fill the power vacuum, occupying former Assyrian territories and establishing permanent Egyptian rule. Between 640 and 630 BCE, when the Assyrians withdrew their forces from Philistia, Phoenecia and the area of th former kngdom of Israel, Egypt took over most of these areas and political domination by Egypt replaced the Assyrian yoke."

(He then launches into a discussion of Josiah's territorial ambitions.)

"We can thus see the composition of the Exodus narrative from a striking new perspective. Just as the written form of the patriarchal narratives wove together the scattered traditions of origins in the service of a seventh century national revival in Judah, the fully elaborated story of conflict with Egypt - of the great power of the God of Israel and his miraculous rescue of his people - served an even more immediate political and military end. The great saga of a new beginning and a second chance must have resonated in the consciousness of the seventh century's reades, reminding them of their own difficulties and giving them hope for the future."

(Then follows a discussion of Judahite attitudes towards Egypt.)

"New layers would be added to the Exodus story in subsequent centuries- during the exile in Babylonia and beyond. But we can now see how the astonishing composition came together under the pressure of a growing conflict with Egypt in the seventh century BCE. The saga of Israel's Exodus from Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change. The confrontation between Moses and pharaoh mirrored the momentous confrontation between the young king Josiah and the newly crowned Pharaoh Necho."


{bold added}

[Ishtar]

Min, I would like to reply to you on this, but not here.

As I suggested, could you start a new thread called something like The Dating of Exodus, and maybe also copy over our posts from here into there?

Or we could continue in the Syrian Palestinian thread?

It's up to you.

[Minimalist]

"Dating the Exodus" might attract Arch.

But I'm game.


How can you 'date' something that never happened?

[Minimalist]

I don't understand why you're fighting me on this when it supports your cause anyway,

We're arguing about the rationale for the myth...not the fact that it is a myth.

[Ishtar]

Min, you're misunderstanding the word 'myth'. That's because the word has become misused in recent times and it has come to mean any story that is not true. But for the purposes of this thread, I'm using it in its original meaning, and that is an ancient folktale that is an allegory or metaphor for something else.

You don't think that it is an allegory or metaphor for something else. You believe it was solely created as a piece of triumphalist literature, falsely purporting to recount a true event, for PR reasons. That is not a myth. If that is a myth, then Saving Private Ryan is a myth. But we know that it's not.

"Dating the Exodus" might attract Arch.
How can you 'date' something that never happened?

Sorry! I meant Dating Exodus (ie. the book in the Bible). I have now set up that thread.

[Ishtar]

Whether or not those who composed the Exodus story had an allegory in mind, the Gnostic Christians (who some say were the original Christians) certainly interpreted it that way. The Literalist Christian Hippolytus tells us that Simon Magus (of the Simonians, a Gnostic sect) interpreted the words of Moses and the Pagan poets.

They interpreted ‘escaping from Egypt’ as ‘escaping from identifying solely with the body’ (in other words, identifying more with the spirit or soull) and the Egyptians represented those who are ignorant, or ‘without Gnosis’ - in other words, without the spiritual knowledge of how to do that, gained by secret initiation.

The Literalist Hippolytus, (2nd century) who opposed the Gnostics, said dismissively of their teachings: “Those who are ignorant .... are Egyptians. And this, they assert, is the departure from Egypt, [that is] from the body.”

He also refers, when talking about the Naasene Gnostics, to their habit of calling themselves, to mark their three stages of initiation, respectively: ‘the chosen, the called and the captive’.

Freke and Gandy give some more detail about this:

The name Jesus itself comes from Exodus. In Greek, the Hebrew name ‘Joshua’ [who took over from Moses] becomes Jesus....

....Early Christians were well aware of the parallels between their Jesus Christ and the Jesus of Exodus. Justin Martyr (c 100 CE) for example, explains that the Christian Jesus will lead his people to the Promise Land just as the Jesus of Exodus led his people to the Promised Land.

In fact, in his Dialogue with Trypho, in the chapter entitled ‘Joshua was a figure of Christ’, he mentions Joshua 38 times in an effort to persuade the Jew Trypho of his point.

Justin Martyr traces the motif of the cross to Exodus where Moses holds up the serpent on the cross and says: “If you look at this image, and believe, you shall be saved by it.”

This is reflected in John, where Jesus is made to announce:

“The Son of Man must be lifted up as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the Wilderness.” John 3:14

Crossing the Red Sea was interpreted as baptism. Paul, who is suspected of being a Gnostic anyway, appears to be supporting that view when he says:

“Our ancestors passed through the Red Sea and so received baptism into the fellowship of Moses.” 1 Corinthians, 10: 1- 6.

So from this we can see that the Christian Gnostics were following something very similar (but not identical) to the Greek Gnostics and their Mystery religion.

This is Wiki on Mystery Religions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_religion

The term 'Mystery' derives from Latin mysterium, from Greek musterion (usually as the plural musteria μυστήρια), in this context meaning "secret rite or doctrine." An individual who followed such a 'Mystery' was a mystes "one who has been initiated," from myein "to close, shut," a reference to secrecy (closure of "the eyes and mouth"[or that only initiates were allowed to observe and participate in rituals. Mysteries were often supplements to civic religion, rather than competing alternatives of such, and that is the reason these are referred by many scholars as "mystery cults" rather than religions.

The Mysteries were thus cults in which all religious functions were closed to the non-inducted and for which the inner-working of the cult were kept secret from the general public. Although there are no other formal qualifications, mystery cults were also characterized by their lack of an orthodoxy and scripture. Religions that were practiced in secret only in order to avoid religious persecution are not by default Mysteries.

(Btw, imho the jury is very much out on whether the last sentence of first paragraph is true. Certainly in the case of the Christian Gnostics, there is evidence that they could have been the original Christians. It's Literalist history writers who perceive them as otherwise, and the same could be true of the Greeks)

As it says, much secrecy accompanied these initiation rites and also little was written down. But we have enough to know that the initation was comprised of three stages that were linked to three elements: water, fire and air.

So in the next post, I’ll explain how this mirrors the Gnostic Christian initiation rites and how they used the story of Moses as an allegory to mark each stage. From that we can start to understand how all the Gospels, and possibly the NT, was one huge collection of myths, or allegories (or parables as Jesus called them) with next to no histriocity at all, apart from that to be gleaned from the background.

[Ishtar]

So we’ve established that the Greek Gnostics and the Christian Gnostics followed a similar three-stage initiation process. The Greek system of water, fire and air becomes the captive, the called and finally the chosen with the Gnostic Christians, although we can see elemental allusions too.

So by examining the stages of the initiations, we can see how each one represents a major and similar milestone in both the Moses and the Jesus story. Thus we can start to see similar patterns emerging between the Moses myth and the Jesus myth.

Then once we start to these patterns more clearly, it begins to make sense why some people think that the Gnostics were not just some weirdo bunch of heretics around 100 BC – 300 CE, as the later Literalist church would have us believe, but that they could have actually been responsible for the creation of the Jesus myth itself, which they never intended to be taken literally.

So let's look closer at these initiations and see how they compare in the Moses and Jesus stories.

The first initiation is ‘water’, which is inaugurated in Exodus by the crossing of the Red Sea. At this stage, the initiates are confronted with their own doubts and confusions and old habits that no longer serve their highest purpose. So they have to break through and overcome these to reach a new way of being (10 Commandments). Their confusion and doubt is symbolised by their wandering around the Wilderness of Sin for 40 years. Jesus, after his water baptism from John the Baptist, gets through the whole process a lot quicker - it takes him only 40 days to overcome Sin or the Devil - but note the parallel 40s here.

The second initiation ‘fire’, is inaugurated by the burning bush. This stage represents the death of the old self - a classic shamanic initiation in which the shaman has to die to his old life and be born again. In Exodus, it is represented by the 'death' of Moses. This same death is represented in the NT by the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The third initiation, 'air', is represented by Moses' rebirth as Joshua/Jesus who completes the journey to the Promised Land, or spiritual enlightenment. And of course, in the NT, we have the resurrection of Jesus Christ and his ascension into Heaven or the Promised Land.

So that's the basic structure of this myth, rather like a sketch of an artist that has yet to be coloured in - in other words, going down to a deeper level and looking at the various motifs that make up the story. We can make a start on that, which I will do. But I notice there's a lot of you reading this thread, and it would be great to hear some suggestions from you too:

Anyway, I'll get us started with a couple:

For instance, after crossing the River Jordan, Joshua/Jesus selected 12 men to represent the tribes of Israel. Likewise Jesus Christ, after his baptism in the same river, the River Jordan, selected his 12 disciples. And as we said earlier, this could be symbolic of the 12 signs of the Zodiac.

Or here's another example of a similar motif running through both stories:

In the Moses story, he is born in Egypt at a time that a Pharaoh has sent out an order to cull the Hebrew male babies. So he is hidden in the bulrushes and adopted by an Egyptian princess. In the Jesus story, it was Herod who was committing the infanticide and so Jesus was hidden in Egypt. This second example, called The Hidden Child, runs through many, many myths - Krishna and Arthur to name but two. And so this is what's known as an ‘archetypal theme’, and by tracing these archetypal themes, mythologists can determine whether a religious story is true or actually a myth designed to teach spiritual or Gnostic initiates a wider and deeper truth.

So from the above, it’s easy to make the deduction that the Jesus story is very probably a myth based on the Exodus story, which in itself could also be a myth. So is the Jesus story a myth based on a myth? This is what I’ve been trying to establish.

But at the very least, it does look as though the Jesus story was composed by the Christian Gnostics as an allegory for the initiates going through the captive, the called and the chosen stages of an spiritual initiation. And so this leads us logically to the conclusion that the original Christians were in fact the Gnostics - and Jesus never existed at all.

[zale]

All this allegory stuff could very well be true, but I just can't seem to put myself in the correct frame of mind to buy it. The arguments (like Moses crossing the Red Sea symbolising baptism) all seem so stretched, with no apparent purpose.

I mean, what is the point of forcing people to buy the story of your ancestors crossing the Red Sea, only for the top priests to tell the select few after decades of initialisations:" You know how our people crossed the Red Sea to escape the evil Egyptians? Well, what we really wanted to say is : one should baptize!"
Why bother? Why not just call a spade a spade? What could possibly be lost by skipping the Moses story and just saying "baptize"?

Or perhaps the "mystery" religions placed fake meanings into old stories (created for completely different reasons, such as politics etc) to make themselves, well, mysterious and cool. A bit like the deconstructionists today, who are able to take perfectly logical texts, and "find" some complete other (nonexistent!) meanings in them.

[Ishtar]

Hi Zale

Myths are very very old stories, and they are so old that sometimes even the people telling them - the travelling storytellers of the time - have forgotten themselves, if they ever knew, what the original purpose of the story was. That goes for priests too and, might I say, especially the priests whose main concern is forming a religion that successfully underpins the aims of a government and monarchy.

So by the time the Bible was put together - the exact date of which we're not sure, but safe to say, thousands of years after the Moses myth was created - the Moses story, which no-one could remember the reason for was added in because it was a great way to bring about a feeling of nationhood and provide heroic leaders that the people could be proud of.

Around this time, the priests were adding in whole chunks to the original story of Moses (written by J and E) which were all about the centralisation of worship, ie. you had to worship at the Tabernacle and nowhere else. J and E don't mention the Tabernacle.

So you really have to look at how myths evolve over very long periods of time, and then getting used for other, less 'spiritual', purposes later on.

[Ishtar]

The thing we have to remember that this is a secret teaching, and thus not available to most priests and also the reason why the real meaning is cloaked in metaphor and allegory.

An initiation is a very real, life changing experience - much more so than just the simple baptism we receive in a church these days. The church's baptism is symbolic of rebirth. In a shamanic (and thus possibly Mystery School or Gnostic) initiation, you actually are reborn in a very real sense.

But I wondered how and where the Christian Gnostics got the idea of the story of Moses being an allegory for spiritual rebirth. Then I discovered the Jewish Gnostics:

According to Freke and Gandy, there were earlier Jewish Gnostics who formed groups such as the Essenes, and the Therapeutae that counted Philo of Alexandria (c 200 BC to 100 CE) among their initiates:

By the first century CE, huge numbers of Jews in Judaea and throughout the Mediterranean were fully integrated into one sophisticated Pagan society, none more so than the Jewish Gnostics....Philo writes of being part of an international fellowship of Greek philosophers who, ‘although comparatively few in number, kept the covered spark of wisdom secretly throughout the cities of the world’.

Jewish Gnostics claimed to be inheritors of secret mystical teachings passed down from their Gnostic master, Moses. These teachings were so similar to Pagan (Greek) Gnosticism that some claimed that even the Greek Gnostics had originally received their wisdom from Moses....

The spirituality of the Therapeutae and Essenes is an example of this fusion of Jewish and Pagan Gnosticism. As well as being followers of their own Jewish master Moses, they were also followers of the great Pagan philosopher, Pythagorus.....

The Jewish historian Josephus informs us that the Essenes are comparable to the Pythagoreans, enthusing ‘all who have tasted their philosophy are attracted to it.’

Philo tells us that their ‘wisdom stems from Greece [and that] this kind exists in many places in the inhabited world.’ .....

So this tells me that the Gnostic Christians took the Jewish Gnostic ideas and modified them to fit current times. But essentially, where it counts, in its major milestones and motifs, the Moses myth and the Jesus myth are practically identical.

[Minimalist]

They interpreted ‘escaping from Egypt’ as ‘escaping from identifying solely with the body’ (in other words, identifying more with the spirit or soull) and the Egyptians represented those who are ignorant, or ‘without Gnosis’ - in other words, without the spiritual knowledge of how to do that, gained by secret initiation.

That's all very interesting except for the fact that there was an actual historic event, the Hyksos Expulsion, which did occur and which must have been burned into Canaanite consciousness. For 4 centuries afterwards they got to see the Egyptians occupying their homeland.

In addition, the Canaanites did not rise up (as the Egyptians had done) and evict the Egyptians. Egyptians withdrawal from Canaan is coincidental with the Philistine arrival. In military terms, the Egyptian base at Beth Shean in the north became untenable because of Philistine control of the SW coast of Canaan.

In purely political terms it is hard to see how the Canaanites could have considered themselves better off. They were exchanging a weakening Egypt for a newly arrived and presumably more energetic Philistia and it is not as if they had not had a century's worth of experience with the Sea People. I don't know that they would have been all that happy to see the Egyptians go. Then again, the scattered destruction layers throughout the region suggest that the Canaanite culture had already been thoroughly ransacked and that provides the impetus for William Dever's refugees fleeing inland to become the Israelites....later on.

It still feels as if there is at least one piece of the puzzle missing.

[Ishtar]

That's all very interesting except for the fact that there was an actual historic event, the Hyksos Expulsion, which did occur and which must have been burned into Canaanite consciousness. For 4 centuries afterwards they got to see the Egyptians occupying their homeland.

True.

But there's nothing to say that you can't use real life events or backgrounds upon which to hang an allegorical myth.

The Greek myth in which Paris abducted Helen of Troy, for example, was set against a backdrop of the Trojan Wars, thought to be totally mythological until Schliemann dug up what is now considered to be Troy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_War

Ancient Greeks thought the Trojan War was a historical event that had taken place in the 13th or 12th century BC, and believed that Troy was located in modern day Turkey near the Dardanelles. By modern times both the war and the city were widely believed to be non-historical.

In 1870, however, the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann excavated a site in this area which he identified as Troy; this is now accepted by most scholars. Whether there is any historical reality behind the Trojan War is an open question. Many scholars believe that there is a historical core to the tale, though this may simply mean that the Homeric stories are a fusion of various tales of sieges and expeditions by or Mycenaean Greeks during the Bronze Age.

Those who believe that the stories of the Trojan War derive from a specific historical conflict usually date it to the 12th or 11th centuries BC, often preferring the dates given by Eratosthenes, 1194–1184 BC, which roughly corresponds with archaeological evidence of a catastrophic burning of Troy VIIa.

[Minimalist]

Yes but all Schlieman proved was that there was a settlement at the location. In fact, there were a series of settlements extending over a couple of thousand years.

Judging from the timing of the destruction layers (1200 BC) it seems more likely that it was the Sea Peoples who took out both Troy and the Mycenaean Greeks.

Abolutely true that real people's deeds are quickly fictionalized...look at George Washington, for example. "He never told a lie?" Nonsense. He was a military commander. He lied to everybody. "He threw a silver dollar across the Potomac?" We didn't use "dollars" when Washington was a youth...we used British currency. Did George Washington chop down a cherry tree? Most likely a literary creation of parson Mason Locke Weems who wrote an 1800 biography of Washington which holds the earliest written account of the story.

But they make a good story, don't they.

For myself, the similarity between Ahmose and Moses is too damned close to be coincidental.

[Ishtar]

Yes but all Schlieman proved was that there was a settlement at the location. In fact, there were a series of settlements extending over a couple of thousand years.

Didn't they also find a burnt layer, signifying its destruction in the way told in the myth?

For myself, the similarity between Ahmose and Moses is too damned close to be coincidental.

What exactly are those similarities in your opinion?

Ahmose came from a long line of Theban rulers, and he persecuted the Hyksos (Canaanites) and threw them out of Egypt.

• he didn’t lead them, or anyone else, across the Reed Sea
  he did not witness the destruction of the Pharaoh and his forces by the Reed Sea – in fact, he was the Pharaoh
  he did not lead the CofI around the Wilderness of Sin for 40 years
  he did not talk to God in a burning bush
  he did not produce the 10 Commandments
  he did not strike a rock with a rod and cause water to gush forth
  he did not get left in the bulrushes as a baby

I could go on...

Here is the Autobiography of Ahmose. As you’ll see, there is not one similarity between him and Moses, apart from his name...unless you're talking about another Ahmose.

http://touregypt.net/autobiographyofahmose.htm