Cofty your point about the identity of
God and Jesus and their relationship is fundamental to Christian belief and yet
as you point out it presents a striking ambiguity.
This
fact is at the heart of Christian theology, for more than sixteen hundred years
it has distracted the minds of honest people seeking truth but the father / son paradox presents us
with the clear signature of something other than truth.
Only in myth can the irreconcilable be
harmonized. Only in myth can contradictory, impossible or illogical tales be
presented without an assault on the intellect.
I have been thinking about this for
some time and conclude that the only answer is that the Biblical account is
merely an extension and re-writing of older folk tales.
The oldest rustic wisdom comes from
a vast repository of story-lines which gave the needed explanation for "the meaning of life" through the movements of
the literal heavens as seen on a night with a clear sky. Humans always
want an explanation.
Before writing was invented the
description of the heavenly bodies served as the universal book and the tales
of the heavenly gods were told again and again. They were drawn from the pattern of the constellations (formed
only by the human imagination) and the daily rotation of the Earth and the
annual movements of the Sun. Heavenly activity, it was thought, determined events on Earth in the form of natural
effects of wind, storm, flood, drought, darkness, success or failure etc. Light and darkness were key indicators.
These tales transcend nation and continents
and variants of them are to be found from Mexico to Siberia to India. The common
factor being that the stellar objects are universal and the mnemonics for
repeating their stories to the next generation became the foundations of
universal religious belief.
This is a large subject deliberately
hidden and condemned as pagan by fourth century Roman Christianity but to cut
to the chase, the ambiguity of the father and son in the astronomical myth; is central
to the solar myth element and is demonstrated at the spring equinox alias Easter.
The Solar hero “born in the Virgin” of
astrology with oxen (Taurus) present, became the teacher and healer assembling
his twelve helpers (zodiacal houses) as he travelled through them in the solar
year. He was destined every year to
be born on the shortest day and die a sacrificial death at Easter whereby he
would as the Solar God return to his heavenly father who was also a Solar God.
The two ruling together each year in heaven was explained by the increased strength
of the sunlight in the northern hemisphere at this time of year.
Incidentally it was only from about 390
BCE that it was understood that the sun at Easter appeared to cross over or “passover”
from the southern dominance to the northern. In technical speech the plane of
the ecliptic i.e. the natural plane at which the centre of the Earth travels
around the sun crosses over the line of the equator, making equal day and night time...which is the meaning of "equinox" and happens twice each year in spring and autumn. (It
is necessary to have a clear mental image of why the seasons arise to grasp
this.)
As the armillary sphere demonstrates this “pass
over” forms a "cross" where the two lines converge (the plane of the ecliptic and the equator) and this saltire shape or St
Andrews cross became the symbol on which the Saviour Mithra stood. So being
sacrificed at the spring equinox on a cross was the mnemonic or symbol for the solar
event. By this central belief we can connect the Jewish Passover with the
Mithraic cross and all the solar- Gods such as Jesus, Dionysus, Attis, Osiris and
Horus et al.
No self respecting saviour figure would be seen without his cross at Easter!
The confounding and persistent detail of the myth is
that father of the sacrificed Solar God was himself a Sun God.
