A key theme in this debate is the ancient status of what DM Murdock has called "astrolatry". Aster is Greek for star, while latreia is Greek for worship. The fact is that ancient religions were suffused with worship of stars, from the oldest time through to the Roman imperial cult of Sol Invictus, the invincible sun. At this final high point, the sun was worshipped as the source of light and life, and the cult of the sun became the unifying belief system and symbol of stability of the Empire, celebrated at the birth of the sun on 25 December when the sun starts its long annual trek south to summer.
For some reason this natural symbol became unacceptable as a basis for universal religion. The Judeo-Christian idea that man is made in the image of God came to have a much stronger moral purchase, perhaps as a way of emphasising the value of compassion and shared belief, and the need for respect for human rights. Worshipping the pitiless sun lacked the emotional power of worship of the point of connection between divinity and humanity, incarnated in history as Jesus Christ, whose name means Anointed Saviour.
So Christianity steadily supplanted the cult of Sol Invictus. But, and this is a key point, Christianity had evolved in a context where pagan worship of natural reality was pervasive. The power of Christianity rested in its capacity to deliver the same spiritual and political needs that had been supplied by natural religion, while arguing that these needs were actually supported by a wholly transcendent God who had made man in his image, with Christ as the eternal exemplar of human divinity. The steadily growing mood of anthropocentrism, the sense of human superiority over nature, was produced by the growth of civilization and its alienation from nature. The human-centred paradigm was served by the Christian idea that spirit transcends nature.
Orwell's 1984 is a classic analysis of how history is written by the victors. Capacity to change perceptions of the past is a key to present legitimacy. Christianity is the biggest ever example of concerted effort to change the past. Today (May 27) is Pentecost, when Acts 2 tells us that believers 'breathe together' with God. This sense of common breath, forming the basis of our word conspiracy, led the church to accept claims that supported strong provenance for its doctrine of the separation of nature and spirit, unified only in Christ, and to reject teachings which saw spirit as originally grounded in nature.
Tat Tvam Asi speaks above of a paradigm shift. This sense of a reunion of nature and spirit is key to this shift, a reconciliation which is the basis of old ideas such as atonement, redemption and salvation. The tragedy and danger of current supernatural delusion is its effort to see salvation as involving a separation of spirit from nature, rather than their union.
I discussed how these themes play out in Erhman's book at a
thread analysing his critique of Murdock and of Freke and Gandy.
I get criticised for these arguments, but as I say in my linked review of Ehrman, these criticisms come from a denialist agenda regarding the natural origins of Christianity. Assessing this material from a rigorous scientific perspective leads to observation of abundant cosmic imagery within the Bible, and artful efforts to conceal the meaning of these images. This makes it obvious there was intense cultural conflict over the nature of early Christianity.
One of the most distinguished of contemporary theologians, Professor Elaine Pagels of Princeton University, argues there was a clash in the early church between initiates and the broader group of believers, which the broader group won by force of numbers. It is difficult now to reconstruct the nature of the initiate beliefs, because of the comprehensive efforts to suppress and destroy all evidence of Christianity's real origins. But the initiates were too clever, and they managed to conceal their ideas within the Jesus story, hidden as miracles and parables whose real meaning points to the one reality of the natural universe.
This is a way of thinking that would be highly controversial if it actually got debated, but it is so distant from the dominant patterns of supernatural Christian faith that such analysis simply gets ignored. Bart Ehrman has done us a big favour by shifting the ground to debate, in the futile view that his worn out claims justifying the ancient power grab of the ignorant over the enlightened will be justified. The more these questions face public scrutiny, the more the defenders of the Historical Jesus will be revealed as entirely lacking in intellectual rigor, honesty and scholarship.
