What scholars say

The teaching

As the historians' answer to astrotheology teaches it.

The test of a parallel

The historian's answer to astrotheology is a method before it is a verdict, and anyone can learn it. A claimed parallel, between a sacred story and the sky or between two religions, is asked four things. Where is it written: which ancient text or image says so, and can it be read? When: is that source older than the story it is said to explain? In what language: does the likeness survive in the original words? And how particular is it: a likeness that would fit any hero, a birth, a death, a return, proves little, while one that matches in details no one would invent is worth keeping.

A parallel that passes all four is evidence. One that fails them is a coincidence, or a construction of the author who offers it.

A method that proves too much

The first answer was a joke that is also a proof. Jean-Baptiste Pérès took Dupuis's method and applied it to Napoleon, dead only six years and remembered by millions, to show that he had never lived. Napoleon, he wrote, is Apollo, the Sun: his mother Letizia is Leto, the mother of Apollo; his three sisters are the three Graces; his four brothers are the four seasons; his twelve marshals are the twelve signs; and he rose in the east, in Egypt, and set in the western sea.

Every step uses Dupuis's own moves, and the conclusion is false. A method that can turn a recent emperor into the Sun cannot by itself show that anyone else was the Sun. Later a clergyman did the same to Max Müller, the great scholar of solar myths, and proved him a sun myth from his own name and writings.

The date of Christmas

The Gospels give no date for the birth of Jesus. The first Christians did not agree on one, and Clement of Alexandria, about the year 200, reports dates in the spring. The oldest record of 25 December as the feast of the Nativity is a Roman calendar of 354, which marks the birthday of the Unconquered Sun on the same day.

Two explanations are given. One holds that the church set its feast against the Sun's festival, to give its people a Christian day in place of a pagan one. The other holds that the date was reckoned: an old tradition put the death of Jesus on 25 March and his conception on the same date, so that his birth falls nine months later, on 25 December. The question is still open, and neither answer turns the Gospel story into a calendar of the Sun.

Horus, Mithras and the others

The parallels are tested against their own sources one by one. In the Egyptian texts Isis conceives Horus from Osiris after his death, when she has gathered and restored his body; they give Horus no birth on 25 December, no twelve disciples and no crucifixion. Mithras, in the Roman mysteries, is born from a rock as a youth, and his monuments, which begin late in the first century, show no twelve followers; the twelve figures that ring some of his carvings are the signs of the zodiac.

Krishna is the eighth child of Devaki, born in a prison at Mathura, and his birthday falls in the late summer. Each case is plainer in its own sources than in the lists that are copied from book to book.

The sky's own facts

The astronomy, checked, corrects the readings too. The Sun reaches its lowest point on 21 or 22 December, and its noon height changes so little for some days on either side that the eye cannot tell the difference; there is no three-day halt and no new start on the 25th. The Southern Cross, said in some lectures to hold the Sun at the solstice, lies far from the Sun's path, and the ancient astronomers counted its stars as part of the Centaur; it became a figure of its own only in the sixteenth century.

Sun and son

The pun on sun and son, on which many lectures turn, works only in English. In the Greek of the Gospels the sun is helios and the son is huios; in Hebrew they are shemesh and ben. A likeness found only in a language that did not yet exist when the texts were written cannot have shaped them.

What the critics grant

The historians grant a good deal. The Bible uses the imagery of the sky and calls God's coming justice a rising sun. Israel's festivals keep the calendar of the Moon, with Passover at the full moon of spring, and the Christian Easter is still reckoned from the equinox and the full moon. Synagogues of late antiquity in the land of Israel laid zodiac wheels in their floors, with the Sun's chariot at the centre and the four seasons in the corners.

Christians early on prayed facing the east, where the sun rises, and called Christ the Sun of righteousness; in a third-century tomb beneath St Peter's in Rome a mosaic shows him driving the Sun's chariot. Justin Martyr writes that Christians gather on the day called the day of the Sun, because on it God, changing darkness and matter, made the world, and on it Christ rose from the dead.

The weight of a likeness

The difference between the two sides is the weight a likeness can bear. For the historian the imagery of the sky is the language ancient people used for what they held highest, as poets still do; it shows that the writers looked up at the heavens, not that their stories were made from them. For astrotheology the same imagery is the key to the stories' origin. A reader who has learned the four questions can weigh each case for themselves, and will find that most of the lists fall away while a few true likenesses remain.