Loaves and Fishes

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
Robert Tulip
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by Robert Tulip »

Mark 6:52 they had not understood about the loaves; their hearts were hardened.
Immediately after the loaves and fishes multiplication, Jesus miraculously walks on water, a story that concludes with this cryptic reference back to the loaves in verse 6:52. The point here is that the whole Jesus story is allegory for cosmic reconciliation, but most people are in a fallen alienated condition, and cannot understand the need to connect spirit and nature, which is what “understanding about the loaves” means.

This idea of connection between spirit and nature is the source of the authentic power of Christian faith as the hope of liberating cosmic transformation in love. The failure to understand about the loaves, ie the blindness to the allegorical meaning of the stories about Jesus as representing the sun and planets, produces hardness of heart, a wilful and cruel reinforcement of ignorant arrogance. Such hardness became the basis of church persecution of Gnostic vision, a syndrome which produced the dominant inverted religious pathologies that have come to see evil as good and good as evil.

The idea of cosmic reconciliation appears repeatedly in the Epistles with the Gnostic concept of pleroma or fullness. Texts such as Romans 8:21, “the creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of decay into the liberty of the glory of the children of God”, and the ideas from Colossians 1 about the reconciliation through the eternal logos or natural order, indicate a message within the Bible that salvation is about harmony with nature, whereas damnation is about alienation from nature. This is most vividly explained in the verse Revelation 11:18 which says the wrath of God is against those who destroy the earth.

The overall theme of cosmic reconciliation is central to the idea that the world had moved onto a new cosmic axis at the time of Pilate, seen in the shift of the equinoxes into the signs of the loaves and fishes in 21 AD. Against the broad ancient cosmology, this axial movement marked an incarnational moment of cosmic harmony, the only point in all history at which the seasons and the stars were aligned. Unfortunately you have to have some understanding to comprehend this, and what Mark calls hardness of heart makes it simply impossible for most people to understand.

An intense repressive hostility to cosmic comprehension is presented as the introduction to the loaves and fishes parable, with Salome asking for the death of the lead Gnostic in preference to Herod's offer of temporal power. This psychological analysis of cultural polarisation remains pertinent today to the intense blindness to the natural scientific meaning of Biblical texts.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by neilgodfrey »

Robert Tulip wrote:. . . The point here is that the whole Jesus story is allegory for cosmic reconciliation, but most people are in a fallen alienated condition, and cannot understand the need to connect spirit and nature, which is what “understanding about the loaves” means.

This idea of connection between spirit and nature is the source of the authentic power of Christian faith as the hope of liberating cosmic transformation in love. The failure to understand about the loaves, ie the blindness to the allegorical meaning of the stories about Jesus as representing the sun and planets, produces hardness of heart, a wilful and cruel reinforcement of ignorant arrogance. Such hardness became the basis of church persecution of Gnostic vision, a syndrome which produced the dominant inverted religious pathologies that have come to see evil as good and good as evil.

. . . . a message within the Bible that salvation is about harmony with nature, whereas damnation is about alienation from nature. . . .

The overall theme of cosmic reconciliation is central to the idea that the world had moved onto a new cosmic axis at the time of Pilate, seen in the shift of the equinoxes into the signs of the loaves and fishes in 21 AD. Against the broad ancient cosmology, this axial movement marked an incarnational moment of cosmic harmony, the only point in all history at which the seasons and the stars were aligned. Unfortunately you have to have some understanding to comprehend this, and what Mark calls hardness of heart makes it simply impossible for most people to understand.

An intense repressive hostility to cosmic comprehension is presented as the introduction to the loaves and fishes parable, with Salome asking for the death of the lead Gnostic in preference to Herod's offer of temporal power. This psychological analysis of cultural polarisation remains pertinent today to the intense blindness to the natural scientific meaning of Biblical texts.
Robert, you have just declared yourself irrelevant to any scholarly engagement with the Bible. I have always wondered why you (and D.M. Murdock) interpret any criticism as persecution -- thank you for explaining at long last. This is on a par with fundamentalists declaring scholars heardhearted because they do not believe the Word of God literally. I was right all along in comparing your (and her) reactions to those of cultists and fundamentalists whenever facing any sort of critical review. I was also right in comparing your (and her) dishonesty or pretense to be scientific as a public relations falsehood of the same type as used by fundamentalists and cultists when trying to engage the public and open minds to win converts.

I can now understand why you are impervious to logic, reason and evidence from a scholarly perspective. I am reminded of the times I have been fooled by people approaching me with questions they pretend are sincere only to eventually learn they were wolves in sheep's clothing, coming to try to evangelize. That sort of deception does not endear me to such people. Does Earl Doherty really know this is what Murdock and her followers like you believe? I doubt it.

So Stephan Huller was right. You are only here to evangelize as surely as any fundamentalist witness. Just like Scientologists you plead an exception to that category because you argue your religion is scientific.

Anyone who disagrees with you (just as anyone who disagrees with a fundamentalist) is according to your religious doctrine hardhearted and wilfully ignorant -- you have said as much here. We have no common ground at all for any discourse.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

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all these references to "scientific" - surely that is a category error: not much around theology is 'scientific'
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neilgodfrey
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

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MrMacSon wrote:all these references to "scientific" - surely that is a category error: not much around theology is 'scientific'
Robert Tulip has insisted from the outset that astrotheology is scientific. He has stressed always that his methods are hypothetico-deductive according to standard scientific methods of inquiry. It is also evident that it is a quasi-religious belief system.
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Robert Tulip
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by Robert Tulip »

MrMacSon wrote:all these references to "scientific" - surely that is a category error: not much around theology is 'scientific'
Mr MacSon, no, it is not a category error to describe the scientific facts which give rise to theological imagination.

What you have asked raises central issues for Biblical studies, including how we can base an understanding of Biblical texts on objective empirical analysis, and how we can find an intersection between the categories of the theological and the scientific. Astrotheology contends that science and theology are not distinct categories, but rather that theology is actually grounded in natural science as it was understood in ancient times, although this grounding has to a large extent been forgotten. This approach requires an upending of traditional theology to systematically interpret all supernatural and magical concepts as natural allegory, including the Historical Jesus.

This question of the relation between science and theology raises problems of how to reconstruct the most probable intent and process of the Gospel authors and the probable course of evolution of the texts and institutions of the faith. In terms of method, astrotheology argues that analysis of theological ideas should be grounded in analysis of what the original authors actually knew, in terms of the regular order of nature. So concepts such as Logos (divine reason) appear as allegory for natural reason. This makes complete sense against the real natural order seen in the stately measured movement of the heavens, allegorised as the incarnate Christ.

The scientific hypothesis presented by astrotheology is that Jesus Christ is allegory for the sun. This theory has abundant corroboration, for example in this analysis here of the loaves and fishes miracle, and in texts such as the light imagery in John 1. The Biblical solar imagery hypothesis predicts that coherent and systematic analysis of the Bible can best progress on the assumptions that the original authors used an allegorical natural method to construct their myths, and this understanding was lost and degraded in the upheaval of ancient politics.
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MrMacSon
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by MrMacSon »

Robert Tulip wrote:
MrMacSon wrote:all these references to "scientific" - surely that is a category error: not much around theology is 'scientific'
Mr MacSon, no, it is not a category error to describe the scientific facts which give rise to theological imagination.
I agree.

But I still contend that science & theology are different categories, even if theology, through 'astrotheology',
  • looks at how "we can find an intersection between the categories of the theological and the scientific"; or
  • "theology is actually grounded in natural science as it was understood in ancient times, although this grounding has to a large extent been forgotten."

I can appreciate
  • * "This approach requires an upending of traditional [current/recent 20th C] theology to systematically interpret all supernatural and magical concepts as natural allegory, including the Historical Jesus", and
    * that "a hypothesis presented by astrotheology is that Jesus Christ is allegory for the sun",
but I cannot agree such a hypothesis is 'scientific'. I'd contend it is a theological hypothesis, or even a mixed-category hypothesis involving anthropology, history, & theology (& possibly other aspects of ancient history).
Robert Tulip wrote:The Biblical solar imagery [astrotheological] hypothesis predicts that coherent and systematic analysis of the Bible can best progress on the assumptions that the original authors used an allegorical natural method to construct their myths, and this understanding was lost and degraded in the upheaval of ancient politics.
I can see how "This theory has abundant corroboration"
Robert Tulip wrote:for example in this analysis here of the loaves and fishes miracle, and in texts such as the light imagery in John 1.
Robert Tulip
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by Robert Tulip »

MrMacSon wrote:science & theology are different categories, even if theology, through 'astrotheology'
Your statement places theology outside natural science. While correct for the way theology is usually practiced with supernatural assumptions, it is possible to excise the supernatural from theology and approach it as a natural science. That is what I am trying to do.
MrMacSon wrote: I cannot agree such a hypothesis is 'scientific'. I'd contend it is a theological hypothesis, or even a mixed-category hypothesis involving anthropology, history, & theology (& possibly other aspects of ancient history).
Thank you. Your comment opens epistemic questions about the relations and boundaries between science and theology. My interest, as a goal, is to understand and explain how religious ideas and institutions actually arose.

So for example early on I was interested in the Hegelian scholar Ludwig Feuerbach’s thesis that God is a psychological projection of human imagination. Feuerbach largely expressed this idea in evidentiary or scientific terms, whereas Marx adopted it as an ideological tool in a political struggle against religion. That cultural process gives strong reason to be suspicious of any claim regarding a scientific analysis of religion. We see such claims also in modern atheism, but often closely linked to value claims about the social worth of religion.

Which reminds me of another writer on related topics whom I much admire, David Hume. I agree with Hume’s fact=value distinction as a philosophical heuristic. Science is about the discovery of facts, whereas religion is about determining what facts are important.

All the scholarly disciplines have as much science in them as they have factual content. So history, anthropology and even theology can restrict their methods to pure discovery and analysis of evidence, and thereby maintain scientific objectivity. However, as soon as the researcher’s own values determine writings, we see a shift away from science, into political and religious ideation.

So, my inquiry into whether the loaves and fishes miracle arose as allegory for the movement of the equinox is a purely scientific inquiry. I am asking what was the actual cause and process for the evolution of the texts as we have them. I do support value propositions arising from this factual analysis, but it is possible to separate the value judgments from the empirical findings.

The central Biblical idea from The Lord’s Prayer, ‘thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ indicates a prima facie case that we should explore how the writers actually used this principle to present allegories for what they could see in heaven. So they could see the movement of the stars in heaven, and used this objective visual observation as the template for their ideal story about what was happening on the earth, in the myth of Jesus Christ.

For this hypothesis about the actual natural relation between heaven and earth to be possible requires that it was transmitted orally within secret mystery schools in the ancient world, and was targeted as an unacceptable idea by what one writer called the powers and principalities of the present darkness. As such, our reading from an antique land sees in the desert a shattered visage of the king of kings. However, it is not correct that nothing beside remains apart from the face with its vast and trunkless legs of stone and pedestal text. If we ask who actually is the king of kings, the answer is time, more powerful than any temporal entity, and stretching to eternity as seen in the ordered patterns of the cosmos.

The analysis of time can explore how this ‘king’ is embedded in the understanding. Modern science, and especially astronomy, geology and biology, provides abundant excellent accurate information about the real nature of time. The ancients only had partial knowledge compared to today, but a scientific reconstruction of what they did know can explore how this knowledge influenced their ideas.
MrMacSon wrote:I can see how "This theory has abundant corroboration"
There are very many other examples in the bible of how natural observation of the structure of time was used as the framework for theological allegory. At viewtopic.php?p=7687#p7687 I provided the following examples:
There is abundant evidence that the evangelists were aware of precession, which is not just “some” star clock of history but is the actual long term structure of time, correctly defined by Copernicus as the third motion of the earth, visible in various ancient uses of the precessional number 4320, and known explicitly in Greek astronomy more than a century before Christ.

Norman Lockyer, discoverer of helium and founder of the journal Nature, intensively studied Egyptian astronomy and concluded that “the effects of precession were familiar to the Egyptians.” For the evangelists, we find the star clock of precession appearing in the 'first and last' archetype of Christ, the law-grace covenant motif, the fish symbolism, the man with the water jug showing the way to the upper room, the loaves and fishes, and the concept of the age as the basis of eschatology.

The Apocalypse is the abundantly precessional text of the Bible, for example with the alpha-omega motif, the moon at the foot of the woman, the holy city, the king of the ages, and the bear-lion-leopard as marking precession of the North Celestial Pole.
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Blood
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by Blood »

Robert Tulip wrote: An intense repressive hostility to cosmic comprehension is presented as the introduction to the loaves and fishes parable, with Salome asking for the death of the lead Gnostic in preference to Herod's offer of temporal power. This psychological analysis of cultural polarisation remains pertinent today to the intense blindness to the natural scientific meaning of Biblical texts.
The "natural scientific meaning" of Biblical texts exclusively supports astro-theology?

:o
“The only sensible response to fragmented, slowly but randomly accruing evidence is radical open-mindedness. A single, simple explanation for a historical event is generally a failure of imagination, not a triumph of induction.” William H.C. Propp
Robert Tulip
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

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Blood wrote:The "natural scientific meaning" of Biblical texts exclusively supports astro-theology?
Astral meaning is not the only meaning in the Bible. But cosmology is a big part of the meaningful content in terms of the Biblical vision of objective order.

Your question provides a good opportunity to explore issues around the origin and meaning and status of astral symbols in the Bible such as the loaves and fishes. I should say first regarding your use of the term ‘exclusively’, any ‘exclusive’ reading is likely to be partial, and can easily go astray if it fails to respect sincere views that people find meaningful, even when these sincere views can be shown to be untrue. I don’t want to advocate a simplistic dichotomous or exclusive reading, even while presenting a radical position regarding what the ancients really meant.

A core function of religion is to explain reality. In the ancient world, that meant explaining how events on earth could be understood within the encompassing objective context of the visible ordered patterns of the cosmos. It also meant explaining things within a cultural heritage that was nested within but did not always directly relate to the bigger picture of cosmology.

Astrotheology is grounded in the scientific observation that human life is governed by a single orderly structure of time defined by observation of the heavens, seen in the patterns of the day, the week, month, seasons, year and precession. Observation of the temporal structure of the cosmos provides an all-encompassing reality, the ground of our being and the origin of reason.

The question of how and why Judaism veered away from its astral origins is fascinating and difficult. As testament to the Jewish tradition of veneration of nature, the high priests in the temple in Jerusalem through into the common era wore a holy breastplate symbolising the twelve signs of the zodiac. As well, the ‘snake on a pole’ motif from Moses suggests an esoteric cosmic idea of temporal cycles linked to both the snake in the tree in Eden and the snake on the pole used to lead in to the central Christian text of John 3:16.

However, the Yahweh cult, in its separation from the feminine Asherah tradition, was explicitly and violently opposed to all perception of divinity within nature. The Josiahite school sought to eliminate worship of nature in favour of belief in a wholly transcendental Father God.

My reading explores this conflict of religious visions in terms of the role of faith in supporting political security. Israel sought to distinguish itself from its large neighbours and to base its political security upon an ethical doctrine of God as revealed in transcendental patriarchal language. So the power faction developed a theory of male supremacy and hostility to nature, as a way to focus the community on the law of God, in terms of obedience, unity and social control. But this power faction was not representative of religious identity within Israel, which included ancient traditions of gender equality in which nature was venerated.

Robert Graves’ Introduction to the Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology asserts that myth is a dramatic coded record of events like invasions, migrations, dynastic changes, admission of foreign cults and social reforms, with the beliefs of conquered people returning in a subordinate form over time.

In the Jewish context of the Bible, astrotheology represents a subordinate tradition, an older and more authentic spiritual view that was conquered at the edge of the sword but which continued to exercise deep influence upon the religious values of the ancient communities. Astral ideas could only be reflected in Biblical texts in concealed form due to the prevailing repressive politico-religious climate. But astral myth provided the content which was repeatedly used by the patriarchal powers and principalities to construct their visions of myth as a ground of imperial stability and security, first in Israel and later in Roman Christendom.

While astrotheology is subordinate within the extant texts, the patriarchal political faith grounded in obedience and punishment is itself derivative from the older authentic astral traditions. Patriarchal monotheism is a distorted and corrupted reflection of older natural visions of the real meaning and purpose of religion. So the intellectual challenge in reading the Bible is to identify the traces of the authentic astral vision, and how these traces have been concealed to await a time when they will be understood and celebrated.
Robert Tulip
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Re: Loaves and Fishes

Post by Robert Tulip »

Continuing the verse by verse analysis of the loaves and fishes texts in Mark
Mark 8:1 In those days, when there was a very great multitude, and they had nothing to eat, Jesus called his disciples to himself, and said to them, 8:2 "I have compassion on the multitude, because they have stayed with me now three days, and have nothing to eat.
The second telling of the miracle is in Mark 8, following the sandwich filling of the other miracles in Mark chapters 6-7. The repetition illustrates the importance Mark must have placed on this story as a central explanation of the identity of Christ. This time Mark begins with the statement that the multitude have nothing to eat, which against the cosmic reading here can be seen as an allegorical reference to the alienated disconnect between human culture and the natural cosmos. Continuing the interpretation of the multitude as representing the visible stars of the sky, the idea in 8:1 that the stars have nothing to eat may be read in Gnostic terms to point to the fallen state of separation between nature and culture, and by contrast to an eschatological hope, a vision of the pleroma, a situation of fullness and satiation.

The experience of the Gnostics was that the militarised ignorance and cruelty of the imperial world produced a widespread simplification of public religion, and an inability to comprehend mystery. So Mark is suggesting that when we do understand cosmic mystery, it will be as though we are connected to the stars.

This line can be read both scientifically and astrologically. Scientifically, we actually are stardust. The cosmos actually is a single entity of which we are part, and we are evolving within the broad connected context of the stars. Astronomy is the king of the sciences, explaining the great objective framework of time and space. So astrophysics provides the intellectual foundations for systematic thought. For theology, the challenge is therefore to ground its theories of value in the actual factical reality observed by science.

Consideration of the astrological side here is more complex. Like religion, astrology contains much false folk belief. The stars do not actually influence life on earth, other than in the sort of broad slow ways observed by astronomy. With precession of the equinox, the movement of the spring and fall points into the signs of the loaves and fishes at the time of Christ is purely symbolic. And yet, this barely perceptible stellar movement had in earlier times dumped a two mile high pile of ice on the northern hemisphere down to New York, leaving Long Island as one of its calling cards. I will expand on the science behind that observation later. Here the relevance is that a new paradigm for theology can be grounded in astronomy, symbolised by the idea of feeding the stars.
8:3 If I send them away fasting to their home, they will faint on the way, for some of them have come a long way."
Failure to connect to the cosmos risks human extinction. We need to understand who we actually are, and where we came from. This verse expands the eschatological meaning of the loaves and fishes story, with our feeding the stars seen as important for the stars themselves.

That links to another old idea, that man is created in the image of God. My view, based on the pantheist equation between nature and God, is that human language represents the universe itself coming to self-awareness, with scientific understanding formulating the order of the cosmos as mathematical law. We are but flotsam of the sun, which is 500 times heavier than all the planets combined. So just as allegorically it is important to God that humans should flourish, so too it is important to the natural universe that its represented image in scientific knowledge should prosper and expand, as a matter of natural evolutionary teleology, the ability of humanity to achieve our ultimate potential purpose.

Mark's allegorical idea of the men fainting, understood as a stellar reference, indicates the need for us to nurture our understanding of physical reality, as a basis for growth of spiritual identity.
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