Astrotheology in general is not bullshit. Many ancient religions used it. But astrotheological explanations of the origins of Christianity, or the content of the Gospels, are bullshit. I denounced one such in a recent book review of Varieties of Jesus Mythicism (linked yesterday in The Problem with Varieties of Jesus Mythicism), another crank attempt, this time by Unitarian minister Bill Darlison. I generally avoid the subject because it’s so badly argued it’s tedious to bother fisking. But I’ve criticized advocates of it before (see Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology and That Luxor Thing Again). My usual rule is: get it published under peer review, then I’ll pay attention. Otherwise, I have no reason to believe it’s not just another bucket of garbage. And if you can’t be bothered, then neither can I. Move on.

But Varieties included a chapter on it, and I’ve composed critical responses to the other chapters, so I may as well tackle this one—at the very least, to show you what I am sick of dealing with. I already outline the basics of what’s wrong with it, and why, in my review for SHERM, which you can affordably buy access to here. In the present article I shall simply pick up where that leaves off: with specific examples. The general idea though is that somehow the Gospels “encode” a journey through the zodiac and this somehow means Jesus is a cypher and not a person and (hand wave, hand wave, hand wave) that somehow (?) explains the real origin of Christianity, despite the existence of documents prior to the Gospels lacking any of this. (And then this or that author might claim this secret has been suppressed by a Global Vatican Conspiracy spanning thousands of years; but thankfully Darlison doesn’t go there.)

No, Carrington Did Not Argue for Astrotheology

I will assume it is an editing error that failed to proof Darlison’s footnotes; for it has many entries like “Carrington, p. 52.” Carrington what? No first name, book title, date. I happen to know this means Phillip Carrington’s The Primitive Christian Calendar: A Study in the Making of the Marcan Gospel (Cambridge University Press 1952). But the average reader might struggle to figure that out. Carrington’s liturgical thesis (the idea that Mark composed his Gospel to provide convenient units of reading for every Sunday of a given year) is a known and respected thesis in the field, but hasn’t persuaded many. I am personally on the fence. W.D. Davies’ critique can be found in his anthology The Background of the New Testament and Its Eschatology (Cambridge 1956, pp. 124-52). Carrington’s attempt at a reply is scattered across his later work, According to Mark: A Running Commentary on the Oldest Gospel (Cambridge 1960). Anyone keen on assessing the debate should read all three. But Carrington doesn’t argue the astrological thesis—the idea that astrology caused Christianity or was in any way an intended point of the Gospels, that Christianity is fundamentally astrotheological (like, we know, Mithraism actually was). Carrington maintained no such thing; he just argued that Mark employed calendrical markers to signal which sections to read on Sunday. That hardly informs the debate over the historicity of Jesus.

Darlison wants to argue something more in the direction of Dorothy Murdock’s crank astrotheological theory of Christianity. For instance, he thinks the late Valentinian astrological allegorization of the Gospels somehow informs the Gospel authors and the origin of the religion, which is not plausible, and thus requires extensive defense, not mere assertion. Carrington, for example, correctly deemed this a later aberration that was only fueled by Mark’s completely unrelated intention to use the Jewish calendar to signpost a liturgical use of his book—a point made on the very same page Darlison cites but doesn’t tell us about, which is bad form. It’s worse when Darlison implies Clement of Alexandria endorsed Valentinian astrological theories with his remark that “the path for souls to ascension lies through the twelve signs of the zodiac” (Stromata 5.14). I will be charitable and assume Darlison isn’t lying to us, but merely, incompetently, didn’t check the context of this quote so as to confirm Clement was talking about Christianity. He wasn’t. He was explaining Plato’s paraphrase of Zoroastrian teachings about resurrection, so as to demonstrate “the plagiarism of the Greeks from the Barbarian philosophy.” For himself, Clement only knows the zodiac as a symbol of the entirety of creation and its governance, not any code in the Gospels or allegory for Jesus.

This “not checking the context” of quotations and “not telling us what a cited source” actually argued are a behavior common to cranks. Darlison is probably sincere, but that means he just doesn’t know he’s supposed to do things like this. And this renders his chapter completely unusable. The reader would have to re-fact-check everything in it and issue countless corrections, many of which would simply destroy this thesis. If you have to re-do someone’s entire work—and worse, this will expose their thesis as untenable—their work is a waste of time for anyone even to read. We can be rightly harsh toward cranks whose egos and dishonest and disingenuous (and frankly, insane) behavior warrants censure. They are a plague on academic progress that gatekeepers are right to expel. But we also need to be stern with sincere amateurs who think they can be scholars yet fail at every fundamental requirement of a scholarly methodology. That Darlison didn’t even check so as to know the context of his quote of Clement, and then confidently misused it to give a false impression of the ancient evidence, signifies he has no business submitting chapters to anthologies. And, in my opinion, editors have no business accepting chapters like this for publication.

No, Gnosticism Is Not Astrotheology

Indeed, Darlison fills his chapter with false claim after false claim, all confidently asserted as if he verified each. He didn’t. Otherwise, he’d know they were false (or at best unprovable, and thus unusable as premises). For example, he asserts that the Nag Hammadi find disproved “the conventionally held view that Gnostic works are invariably later than the canonical Gospels.” This is false. By reasonable (not contentious) estimates, the earliest texts recovered from Hammadi date to the early 3rd or possibly late 2nd century; whereas the canonical Gospels were all completed before mid-2nd century (in fact Mark and Matthew most likely date to the late 1st century). At most one might attempt to place the Gospel of Thomas nearer the canon, but as it used the Synoptics as a source text, as well proved now by Mark Goodacre in Thomas and the Gospels: The Case for Thomas’s Familiarity with the Synoptics (Eerdmans 2012), and arguably used even the Diatessaron, which would mean Thomas post-dates even our redaction of the Gospel of John (Nicholas Perrin, “Thomas: The Fifth Gospel?” Journal of The Evangelical Theological Society 49, March 2006: 66–80), the Gospel of Thomas is still post-canonical. And there is no astrotheology in it, so it’s of no use to anything Darlison wants to argue anyway. 

Darlison also didn’t know that by the time of his writing, the growing mainstream consensus is that the idea of “Gnosticism” he relies on didn’t exist (see Gnosticism Didn’t Exist (Say What Now?)). You can find a formal summary by Hal Taussig, “Christianity Seminar: A Report on the 2014 Fall Meeting [of the Westar Institute],” in The Fourth R (March-April 2015); but the full write-up is now available in After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements (eds. Erin Vearncombe et al.; Harper One 2021: pp. 216-31). This is more excusable. Because amateurs, and even some experts, often fail to notice recent developments in the field and rely on older publications. But it’s still relevant to note because the demonstration that Gnosticism is a modern construct undermines many key points in Darlison’s case—as well as that of many amateur Mythicists. So readers of this book should be aware of this development. Even before the Westar report I had come to the same conclusion on my own; consequently, one may be surprised to learn, the concept of “Gnosticism” does not exist anywhere in On the Historicity of Jesus. Many of the ideas behind what modern scholars erroneously started calling Gnosticism did exist in antiquity, but not as an organized construct or in any common distinction to nascent Orthodoxy; and rarely in any sense provably helpful for reconstructing the origins of Christianity or the canonical Gospels.

Returning to Darlison’s case, we find all three rules of my Grand Unified Theory of Crankery (or GUTC: see my outline yesterday) being followed; though I suspect by incompetence rather than grift. Ignoring evidence against him—because he literally doesn’t know it exists, having done no competent research to check; cherry-picking and distorting evidence for his case—because he actually thinks this is how scholarship proceeds to a conclusion; conflating mere possibility with a demonstration of a warranting probability—because he doesn’t understand the difference; and relying on obsolete scholarship (like his citing on p. 158 a book by Franz Cumont published in 1912, without backing up its key point in more recent peer-reviewed publications)—because he doesn’t know why this is a problem.

For example, after citing Cumont claiming astrology had something to do with originating Christianity, Darlison cites more recent scholarship on the elite status of astrology in antiquity—as if this corroborated that. It doesn’t. They aren’t making at all the same point. Though this creates the false impression that Cumont’s claim has been validated, as if in perfect demonstration of Rule One of the GUTC; I think Darlison is just too incompetent to realize this. Just as he doesn’t even attempt to find any such corroboration of the crank claims of Edward Maunder (Cumont’s contemporary) that even the book of Genesis is an astrotheological treatise (p. 159); because there isn’t any. Yet he just asserts it as an established fact anyway. The effect is the same. Sincere or not, this is crank. It does not belong in print. It would be better to use it as kindling to heat your home.

No, Tea-Leaf Reading Is Not a Method

The bulk of Darlison’s chapter is random tea-leaf reading, finding anything that can in any way be thought similar to an astrological sign, in some cases without any sensible order or logic, and never with any disciplined methodology. For example, never once does he research (so as to even discuss) what the best alternative explanations of the same evidence are in the literature, and then compare evidence to ascertain if his theory can even be asserted as likely, much less more so. He also conflates all the Gospels together (even conflating with “the Gospels” what are actually post-canon interpolations, like Mark 16:9-20), forgetting for instance that Mark, the original Gospel, has no Nativity and thus no “virgin” to signify Virgo in the zodiac. And never mind that Virgo is an autumn sign, not a spring sign, so it doesn’t belong at the start of the story if the intent was to have Jesus journey across the zodiac from beginning to end of the solar year, as Darlison maintains (p. 155). In all, we get Rule One: antiquated crank scholars said it, yet are backed by no reliable recent work, therefore it’s true; Rule Two: if it’s possible, it’s probable; Rule Three: ignore evidence against your thesis and cherry-pick and distort evidence for your thesis instead. 

From the perspective of competent scholarship, there are much better explanations for why Mary is made to be a virgin—once the Nativity came later to be invented—than that she symbolizes an astrological sign (see Virgin Birth: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). Likewise that John the Baptist calls Jesus the Lamb and why Thomas gets renamed Didymus (both words mean “Twin,” so we have “Twin Twin,” a double double)—and why these happen only in the Gospel of John (neither occurs in any of the Synoptics). John of course is coloring his Gospel with Jewish lamb theology so faithfully that he even changes the calendar date of Jesus’s crucifixion to match it. This isn’t astrology. It’s Judaism. And John’s invention of Twin Twin to draw significance out of the name is more likely an apologetic evolution of the disciples “of two minds,” ἐδίστασαν, i.e. “who doubted,” at Jesus’s resurrection in Matthew—in case you didn’t notice that δίδυμος is cognate with διστάζω. Likewise that Matthew adds magi (which does not mean astrologer as Darlison implies, though as Zoroastrian mages they would have practiced astrology), and yet every other Gospel author dumped that detail. Because Matthew is the only Gospel emulating the book of Daniel and thus importing both magi at the beginning and a lion’s den metaphor at the end (see Proving History, pp. 199-204).

Even examples Darlison cites that lack any other good explanation don’t get us to his thesis. Consider, for example, that Mark (followed by Luke) has someone carrying a jar of water (yet Matthew and John eliminate him; admittedly, in Matthew this may be a scribal error). Sure, any explanation then, like that this is supposed to signify in some way “following the sign of Gemini,” is equally likely. But that isn’t enough to get it to be probable. This is Rule Two thinking, which is crank, not scholarly. There is a whole literature on possible meanings here (drawing on references and symbolism in Paul and the Scriptures, and in Jewish ritual practice and its symbolic significance), which unlike the astrotheological theory have a well-established basis in prior probability: they are the kinds of intended meanings the Gospel authors have already been proven to produce a lot. We don’t have this for any astrological symbolism (crankery notwithstanding). 

Myself, I suspect that whole scene is a metaphor for Pauline eschatology: the pitcher of water is the body of Jesus whose fate you must follow, the master of the house is God, and the upper Room “already furnished” is Heaven (Jesus as being or containing the water of life is a theme in the Gospels, even in Mark: see The Empty Tomb, p. 161; and in Mark’s key text, Paul: 1 Corinthians 10:2-5). Can I prove it? No. But it fits type more than Darlison’s. So do many other theories in the literature. The merits of my alternative are that it creates a coherent explanation for every part of the story, rather than just a random cherry-picked piece of it, which is disconnected from everything else, and conveys no discernible lesson about anything. And my theory requires only one level of metaphorical interpretation (rather than several), and that based on analog texts and thoughts demonstrably well-known in early Christian literature. So it has a more favorable probability—maybe not enough to be certain it’s correct (many other explanations share a respectable chunk of the entire probability-space); but more so than Darlison can claim. And certainly at least as much, which is enough to nix his claim as the more probable.

These same kinds of analysis follow for all of Darlison’s hundreds of other random tea-leaf reads of supposed astro-symbolism in the Gospels. None of it makes any coherent sense; and no disciplined method is used to ascertain if the patterns are real or just semantic pareidolia. Obsolete crank notions that no modern scholar has validated are automatically confirmed facts. Possibilities are always magically probabilities—no evidence required. Evidence against the thesis need not be looked for or addressed. Anything that can be made to fit the hypothesis by any device becomes evidence for it. Alternative theories can be ignored, rather than researched and tested to see if they have equal or greater explanatory power, or equal or greater prior probability. 

No, You Can’t Just Make Shit Up

Darlison will also make wild claims, like that in Mark “about half” of the known 48 constellations of that time “appear in the precise order that they are found in the sky” (p. 162), without giving any evidence that that’s even true (or what, in this case, he means by “order,” given that constellations are in a full three dimensional spherical arrangement and one can trace them in literally any direction—indeed, he must not have ever heard of circumpolar constellations). He doesn’t even list them, or what passages he thinks refer to them. Similarly, he’ll show us a table supposedly showing how the zodiac is replicated in Mark’s narrative (p. 168)—yet the table is patent nonsense, with its column of passages indicated from Mark containing no references whatever to the corresponding zodiac signs. When he gets to justifying this nevertheless, he makes a bunch of nonsensical assertions about supposed disparities in the number of “references” to a given sign one can find in sweeping sections of the text, but with no method of explaining why we are supposed to believe that. 

For example, Darlison claims the “Gemini” section, Mark 4:35-6:29, contains “twenty” indications of that zodiac sign in the text (p. 169), and later attempts to prove this (pp. 176-78). But what we get there instead is lunacy. A typical mad-as-a-hatter discourse from this bit (emphasis added):

The section opens with the Calming of the Windstorm (Mark 4:35-42). This passage is obviously inspired by Psalm 107, and may owe something to Homer’s story of Aeolus’ bag of winds in the Odyssey, but it is placed here to reflect the mythology of Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini, considered the patrons of seafarers [by saving ships from stormy seas].

This is crazy town. Speculation on top of speculation leading to leap after leap producing six degrees of separation from the text to even get to any possible symbolism that could relate to “Gemini.” This is how psychics con their audiences, by finding endless connections until they light upon the one that matches their preformed conclusion. With procedures like this, we could get any zodiac sign out of any passage in the Gospels; we just need to find Kevin Bacon. Real scholars will observe: this story is simply a derivation of the Psalms (and maybe Homeric myth); there is no reference to Castor and Pollux here. Darlison has simply conjured that. “Well, there were poems about Castor and Pollux keeping ships afloat in storms, even though Mark never alludes to nor emulates any of them here (nor anywhere), but that’s kind of like calming a storm, so obviously Mark wants us to realize this is a reference to Castor and Pollux” is not logical reasoning. It’s crank. 

Likewise when Darlison resorts to another common practice of cranks: bogus etymologies. This employs a similar “six degrees of separation” fallacy, where any etymology we can contrive or find in the whole galaxy of ancient linguistics automatically becomes evidence for our specific thesis. For instance, “Mark,” Darlison reminds us, “gives the actual word” Jesus used to calm the storm (though for some unexplained reason no other Gospel thought it worth repeating): siôpa (Mark 4:39), “which means ‘Quiet!’ or ‘Be still!’,” which “echoes the Doric Greek name for Gemini to siô which is the dual form of the word for ‘god’” (p. 177). Why we are now expecting Mark to know, and expect his readers to know, lost Doric dialects Darlison never explains; but more importantly, there were dozens of ancient dialects of Greek—if we get to just rummage through any of them for anything we can sell as a vague connection (since there is no actual etymological link between the Doric diô and the Koine siôpa), how can we fail to find one? We even get to pretend half the letters of a word can be ignored in order to generate the needed connection, and that we can pick any dialect of Greek we want (for no intelligible reason), and that we can pick any pattern we want—anything referring to Gemini, Castor, Pollux, twins, twos, or anything remotely close. For example, did you know the star identified as Castor in Attic Greek is identified as Apollo in Doric, and Apollo often signified the sign of Sagittarius? So using Darlison’s own logic I can get this same passage to refer to Sagittarius rather than Gemini. He could not object without admitting his own method is invalid.

I could go on, fisking every one of Darlison’s hundreds of wild claims, but it’s tedious and I don’t see the point. You get the picture. I’ve done enough.

Conclusion

This kind of argumentation needs to stop being taken seriously. It is tainting real scholarship with its grandiose claims backed only by bogus, even lunatic, methodologies, which then becomes “the face” of Mythicism, discrediting it. We need to disavow this, and make entirely clear that serious Mythicist work does not operate this way and embraces no such ridiculous assertions or methods. People will complain that these bogus methods almost “look like” real ones (there are valid etymological and analogical and allegorical and mimetic arguments in literary history). But the difference is the real ones have disciplined criteria and established comparative models; they have been honed over half a century to be reliable indicators of probability rather than random grabs at possibility, and even when they can’t achieve probability, their employers admit this, and fully accept its consequences to any argument.

In other words, real methods are employed by trained experts following developed professional standards or established models of logic. Cranks aren’t trained, aren’t even studying what the standards are or what the logic is, and just try to mimic the real thing with undisciplined, illogical, and bogus caricatures of those methods. The difference comes down to asking, “Are there any controls on this?” Is their employer taking tests for falsification into serious account? How would we know this is false? Not just the conclusion, but also the specific logic of whatever method is being used to reach it. Which is why asking “Has it passed peer review?” is a legitimate question. There can be good arguments that haven’t (peer review has biases and blind spots; and not everyone has the time to placate its sometimes excessive standards). But is that really the reason here? Once you ascertain it isn’t, you can ignore it.