Must the Jews be converted before the Second Coming?

[Robert_Tulip]

 

My response to this question posed to me today is as follows.

 

The generally accepted history of the early church, based on the Gospels and Acts, is actually quite different from the real history.  Establishing what the real history involved is extremely difficult, and is a question of high and broad controversy, with serious scholars subjected to exclusion and shunning.  The whole set of questions around how the New Testament came to be written, in what order, for what purpose, by whom, produces wildly conflicting answers. 

 

Part of the problem is that for more than a thousand years, under Christendom, any questioning of the accepted literal faith in Christ was condemned as heresy or blasphemy, and became a capital crime.  As a result, scholarship was corrupted and intimidated, and people assumed that generally believed stories must be true, a syndrome that continues to degrade the conversation about Christianity.

 

Against this history, the view is strongly emerging that the Gospels are entirely fictional, that Jesus Christ was invented, that there is no evidence whatsoever for any claims in the Gospel, and that the whole story of Jesus can only be explained as imagination, not as reality.

 

If this shocking claim is true that the Gospels are fiction, then it stands to reason that Jewish communities early in the common era would have been well aware of this fact, because they were the victims of the mass deception which falsely blamed them as Christ killers.  Jews would have strongly protested the Christian effort to claim ownership of the Jewish sacred texts to promulgate a political lie. 

 

Unfortunately, almost all ancient writings that might support that theory have failed to survive.  We have the Church Fathers texts where apologists attacked their critics, such as the Contra Celsus and the Dialogue with Trypho, but never hear these early critics of Christianity speak in their own voice.

 

We might think that such general failure of the sources to back up the hypothesis that Jesus was fiction in a clear way makes the hypothesis weak.  But this is a very special case. Firstly, the Roman destructions of Jerusalem in the first and second centuries were the biggest war effort in the whole history of the empire, a military context that made religious propaganda, including the development of literal belief in the gospels, a key instrument of strategic conquest. Then, as literal Christianity triumphed, the faith was co-opted by the empire, and imperial edicts made possession of heresy a capital crime for more than a thousand years. 

 

In that context, it actually is plausible that the efforts to eradicate specific major heresies such as the belief that Jesus was fictional could have been successful.  And indeed, that heresy has a name, Docetism, the belief that Jesus only seemed to come in the flesh, a widely discussed belief for which almost no supportive documents exist in any direct way.  The only support is found in concealed locations, in cryptic language in other texts, of the type that could plausibly survive the monkish sieve, the efforts of librarians over generations to neglect and discard any writings seen as suspect.

 

My reason for introducing this material in response to the question of the end times conversion of the Jews is that explaining Christianity in a rigorous way is essential for an understanding of the relation between Judaism and messianism.  Judaism maintains that the messiah has not yet been born. I think that is a very plausible argument, set against the real framework of what Harry Marks has called the arc of history.

 

The real ‘arc of history’ can be seen by study of deep time, the emergence of humanity from Africa a hundred thousand years ago, then the peopling of the world over the five successive glaciation cycles of rising and falling seas and advancing and retreating ice since then.  Against this big arc, the modern world is a severe aberration, since our technology dating from the Neolithic prevented the natural fall back into a new ice age, due mainly to methane from rice and cow cultivation.  So we have an artificial world where humans exercise dominion.  In the fallen alienated context of supernatural religion, dominion over nature is wrongly interpreted as domination, while in the messianic transformed vision of the future seen in the Gospel texts, dominion is read as stewardship.

 

I find it very helpful to interpret these big issues against the real astronomical framework of climate change, with the orbital drivers producing what Indian myth calls the cycle of the Yugas, between gold and iron ages over a twenty four thousand year period, in a remarkably accurate intuition of the historical reality. 

 

By that frame, the messianic impulse is the presence of the spirit of the golden age in the midst of the iron age, with a transformative call that is utterly rejected by the alienated ignorant spirit of iron, and yet proves redemptive, powerful and enduring.  This historic vision of gold and iron ages extended from India to Babylon, Israel, Greece and Rome, including in Plato’s Noble Lie as the basis of the philosopher kings, and is encapsulated in the archetypal Christian myth of cross and resurrection.

 

Now what is really interesting in comparing Judaism with Christianity is that this astronomical orbital model of time can also see the messianic impulse against the framework of zodiac ages, produced by precession of the equinoxes.  While speculative, this model has enough purchase on scientific reality to be worth pursuing.  What it indicates is that the Christian messiah Jesus Christ was imagined by his astronomer-priest inventors as the avatar of the Age of Pisces, when the equinox precessed from the sign of the ram into the sign of the fishes in 21 AD, a celestial event they could predict for centuries beforehand.  The Jewish coming messiah, by this astronomical model, is imagined as the avatar of the Age of Aquarius, the transformation of global consciousness that is occurring as a result of modern global unity. 

 

Further, this model involves the idea that Piscean Christianity has ‘primed the pump’ for the emergence of an Aquarian messiah, through an explanation of what messianic consciousness involves, in a world that was not ready to hear those transformative ideas.  Therefore, the advent of the Jewish Aquarian Messiah is one and the same event as the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.  The Aquarian Messiah will arrive in power as king of the world while the Piscean Messiah only fulfilled that role in imagination.  Christianity has explained what a Jewish messiah will do, around the central ethical principle of the Gospels, from Matthew 25, that the least of the world should be treated as though they are Jesus Christ.

 

Marlowe’s line about awaiting the conversion of the Jews in his famous poem To His Coy Mistress therefore emerged from the false consciousness of Christendom, the corrupted Roman idea that the Gospels were history.  The end of the age will not bring conversion of Jews to Christianity, but rather conversion of Christians to a renewed form of Judaism that recognises the Christian Gospel message as the central ethical story of salvation through love and truth, while seeing how the depraved state of fallen humanity failed to accept the imaginative truth of that story and instead twisted it into a mythical doctrine of imperial security and stability. 

 

Empowering Jesus Christ as king of the poor does not imply a communist revolution, but rather a complex open redemptive dialogue, a scientific analysis of how the truth may set us free, and an evolution of culture building upon the rich precedents of Christendom, Judaism and all the deep religious heritage of all humanity.

[Joshpantera]

On 12/11/2017 at 9:52 PM, Robert_Tulip said:

The Jewish coming messiah, by this astronomical model, is imagined as the avatar of the Age of Aquarius, the transformation of global consciousness that is occurring as a result of modern global unity. 

 

Now that's something different. 

 

 

 

 

 

[Joshpantera]

One thing that sort of plays into this is the issue Buvual writes about concerning the Giza Necropolis and the Sphinx being oriented to the former age of Leo-Aquarius, Zep Tepi. And how it marks out half a precession cycle, which, concerns observation of the stars. For instance, half a precession cycle ago Orion's Belt stars were observed lower on the meridian and at more of a horizontal angle which is what he sees the Giza Necropolis commemorating. Sun rising in Leo, Orion's belt stars at their minimum position on the meridian. But now we're on the opposite side of the observation, with the belt stars observed nearly vertical at their maximum on the meridian. From there, the movement stops and reverses back towards the minimum again. And it goes back and fourth from maximum to minimum as the earth wobbles on it's axis. He feels that the Egyptian's clued in on this. The Nabta Playa stone monolith circles out in the desert appear to display the exact same thing, the observational effects of Orion's belt stars through precession. 

 

I remember years ago playing around with the idea that a first and second coming could stem out of this old stellar mythology, passing down from Egypt, to Judaism, and finally Christianity, through the astronomer priests. The first sign or coming being the Piscean age, the alpha and omega point of the Platonic Great Year. The cycle ends and begins anew on the zodiacal calendar with the crossing of Aries to Pisces. But then there's this 'secondary player', which happens after the age of Pisces into the age of Aquarius, which is the observed effect of precession at it's half cycle mark, marked out at Giza. I wondered if the myth makers may have taken off hyping the Piscean age only to have had other astronomer priest myth making types add in the bit about the Aquarian age to come and playing around with the second coming ideas. 

 

Now I realize that the traditional line of thinking shows the second coming as an after thought, a reaction to failed prophecies that Jesus would return within his disciples lifetime. And that's the general scholarly view. But I wonder if there's not more to it than just that. It's interesting that along with two precession traditions also fits the idea of a first and second coming. With Luke 22:10 spelling out this idea of anticipating the age of Aquarius. In this sense the 12 constellations, are told to follow the water bearing man into an upper room that he enters into, by Jesus who would represent the sun going around the circle of the zodiac durning precession, from one constellation to another for around 2,160 years each. It's like mapping out what to do next. Granted this language would be from one initiate to another and not so much an announcement to the general public. 

 

So Robert, your post made me think of that issue again. 

 

 

[Robert_Tulip]

·         The Egyptian “Zep Tepi” myth of the ‘first time’ in the Age of Leo matches to the peak of the most recent interglacial age at the dawn of the Holocene Age about ten thousand years ago.  And that point in time matches to what the Vedic myth of the Yuga calls the golden age, or Satya Yuga, interpreted astronomically as occurring when earth’s perihelion crossed the June solstice.

·         The Egyptian and Indian astronomer-priests could well have had a much deeper understanding of these effects of the structure of time than we now give them credit for.  If so, they were in a position to predict that the “Age of Pisces” would correspond to the Kali Yuga iron age of ignorance, with Jesus Christ as avatar of Pisces, as earth moves toward the low point of the long cycle, and the Jewish Aquarian Messiah as avatar of the Age of Aquarius, occurring as earth moves upward from the low point. 

·         A remarkable website http://www.bibhudevmisra.com/ proves the Indian Yuga tradition did support a 24,000 cycle of light and dark, in line with the actual evidence of astronomical precession, just in terms of orbital drivers of climate change.

·         As I mentioned in our conversations at Free Thought Nation, this model of half a precession cycle corresponds directly to the ancient Gnostic mythology of zodiac ages.  The lion-man Mithraic/Gnostic statue of Aion, as used by Carl Jung as frontispiece for his book Aion, has the six coils of the snake matching to the six days of creation, six months between solstices, or six ages between the golden age and the iron age, from Leo to Aquarius.  The head of the snake joins the head of the lion as a symbol of enlightenment.

·         These ideas illustrate that Christianity originated in secret mystery societies that had an organic link back to the initiatic cultures of the stone age – I discuss this in a recent book review, The Memory Code by Lynne Kelly,   https://www.amazon.com/review/R11RNVYFT2LZ5N/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

·         Orion’s Belt is also a convenient marker of this large cosmic planetary cycle, which since the dawn of human evolution has marked climatic change at a planetary level. The golden age defines warm interglacial periods, the cosmic summer when seas are high and glaciers are small, and the iron age defines cold ice ages, the cosmic winter when seas are low and glaciers are big.

·         This scientific correlation is important to place mythology on an empirical basis.

·         My view is that the Orion movement, while important, is perhaps secondary to the movement of the pole, with Vega swinging back and forth from the pole every 26,000 years.  Golden Ages occur when Vega is the pole star.

·         Sourcing of precession myth in India and Babylon looks just as strong as Egypt.  Also, I question if the first and second coming idea is specifically stellar, just in the sense that the stars provide markers for the structure of time rather than causing the cycle in an astrological way.  So if the origin is the accurate Yuga concept of a 24,000 year cycle of light and dark, then the ‘Age of Pisces’ begins with the descent into the darkest point, while the Age of Aquarius begins with the ascent out of the darkest point.  Think 11pm and 1am.

 

·         The way I understand this material is against the physical orbital framework of glacial drivers.  The main driver is the date when earth is closest to the sun.  When this date, the perihelion, happens on the June solstice we have a golden age, and when perihelion is on the December solstice we have an iron age. That is a stable cycle of terrestrial time over billions of years. By this cycle, the last golden age was ten thousand years ago, and the middle of the iron age was 1246 AD.  We are now ascending out of the iron age. The perihelion advances by one day every 59 years, and is now at 5 January.

·         The Age of Pisces began at the descent toward the nadir of the iron age, and Aquarius is the beginning of ascent toward the next golden age.

·         Calling that modern sceptical line on the failure of Jesus to return early “traditional” only reflects liberal critical traditions. It most certainly does not reflect creed dogmas such as that Christ is ‘sitting at the right hand of the father’, and ‘he will return in glory to judge the quick and the dead’, where the day of doom is at the centre of faith.

·         As well as the failure of the ‘this generation will not pass away’ line, the failure of Jesus was more broadly connected to his death on the cross, that instead of being anointed as king of the world he was executed and humiliated. The whole resurrection story appears in some respects as a triumphalist way of dealing with that humiliation, although we do not say the sun is humiliated because the weather gets cold in winter.

·         Christianity has always held that the redeeming vindication of the resurrection message of Jesus would occur with the second coming.  It is like the first coming was a pump-priming exercise of an imaginary messiah, with the second coming expected to involve political rule of the world by Christ the King arriving on the clouds of heaven.

 

·         These two traditions that you mention, Pisces and Aquarius, are part of a Great Year precession tradition that sees every age as an Aeon, a new age, through the whole Gnostic Duodecad cycle of twelve ages mentioned by the ancient heresy-hunters.  Various writers have imagined the Age of Taurus from 4000 BC as the Age of Adam, and the Age of Aries from 2000 BC as the Age of Abraham or Moses.  We could equally imagine an Age of Capricorn starting in 4000 AD. 

·         The underlying idea is that the spirit of the old age becomes worn out and corrupt, and the world needs renewal through a revitalised original dynamic spiritual energy corresponding to the new zeitgeist, as in the Chinese concepts of dynastic cycle and mandate of heaven, mapping the annual seasonal framework onto a bigger temporal cycle of twelve cosmic months within a Great Year.

·         The astronomer priests who wrote the New Testament were well aware of the astrological associations with Pisces and Aquarius.  Modern astrology describes the themes of Pisces as mystical compassionate belief, and of Aquarius as innovative humanitarian knowledge. It is entirely possible that the authors of the Gospels imagined the messianic agenda in these terms, since these thematic ideas correlate well to the imagined focal agendas of the successive ages of Pisces and Aquarius.

·         The key point here is that the Age of Aquarius is a physical time from around 2000 AD to 4000 AD when the spring equinox occurs with the sun in Aquarius.  This emerging planetary time period has a whole range of scientific, cultural and mythological meanings that we can analyse.

·         Jesus said “"When you enter the city, a man carrying a jug of water will meet you. Follow him to the house he enters.”

·         The symbolism of this verse is profound.  The city of Jerusalem stands for the visible heavens.  The man with the water jug is the symbol of Aquarius.  The house he enters, and especially the upper room for the Last Supper, stands for the reconciliation of spirit and nature in the redemptive recognition of humanity’s natural identity in union with the visible heavens, the new heaven and new earth when God makes all things new.

·         Overall, this verse is about planning ahead to triumph over the worldly evil symbolised by crucifixion.  It indicates early understanding that this triumph would not be immediate but would need to wait until the end of the age of Pisces and the dawn of a new age of Aquarius.

·         Looking again at this chapter http://biblehub.com/esv/luke/22.htm it is intriguing that the stated purpose is to prepare the sacrificial lamb, symbol of the end of the Age of Aries.

 

·         This cryptic instruction for the last supper makes perfect sense as allegory for the structure of time, reflecting ancient knowledge of precession of the equinox.

Many thanks Josh for your engagement here, I appreciate it.  My focus at the moment is preparing my talk on the Big Picture for the Kepler Conference on Evidence Based Astrology.  The conference will be held online this year as the venue in Florida was wrecked by the hurricanes.  My focus is the physics of the Age of Aquarius.  I am particularly interested in how the zodiac age can be defined physically as the resonance between the earth and the sun.  I can explain that to anyone with ears to hear.