At 12:47 Eastern Time or 17:47* Z time, formerly Greenwich Mean Time, the earth reached its furthest tilt away from the sun, which rises only to the Tropic of Capricorn. As everyone knows, the earth’s axis of rotation is tilted away from the plane of its revolution around the sun by about 23.27 degrees. On the winter solstice, the that axis is pointed directly away from the sun. The north polar regions are in darkness and get very cold, spilling their cold air down over Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia. At the same time, the earth is relatively close to the sun, showing that spreading the sunlight over a large area has much more effect than a small change in distance. The southern polar regions get almost continuous daylight and the tropics have their summer, made even hotter by closeness to the sun.

In spring and fall, the sun shines towards the sides of the axis and sunlight falls evenly on north and south. In the summer, the earth’s axis tilts towards the sun. The North has its summer and long days, while the South has its winter and short days, made even cooler by distance from the sun.

In Northern Europe, the short, cold days and long, depressing nights, so soon after the late harvest and autumn slaughter of animals for winter food, made a cheering feast when the sun began to rise higher in the sky and the days began to lengthen. This festival has come down to us as Yule.

*Correction: 17:47, not 16:47. I can never get that “Spring forward, Fall back” rule reliably correct.

P.S. See “Keep Han in Hanukkah.”

A previous post discussed how unreliable is Kersey Graves’ book, “The Worlds’ Sixteen Crucified Saviors, using as reference a review by Richard Carrier, assembled from his comments on the book in 2003.

In the course of this review, Carrier points out that almost any history book written before 1950 is of dubious value, simply because methods of scholarship and new research have made so much historical study obsolete

Graves’ scholarship is obsolete, having been vastly improved upon by new methods, materials, discoveries, and textual criticism in the century since he worked. In fact, almost every historical work written before 1950 is regarded as outdated and untrustworthy by historians today.

Richard Carrier is the author of Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism.

In 1875, Kersey Graves wrote a book about mythical parallels to the Christian story of Christ. No one has yet produced a comprehensive review of his argument. A good, but brief, review of the book is here, by Richard Carrier: “Kersey Graves and the World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” Basically, Carrier reports that Kersey Graves was very sure of himself; but he cites few references, makes assumptions, and blurs distinctions. Myths of journeys to the Underworld are not similar enough to count. Sometimes his parallels are from well after the time of Christ and could be based on the Christ story. He also uses the parallel of Christ’s solstice birthday being the same as for many sun gods. But we know that Christ was given that birthday around 300 A.D. for cultural and political reasons. So the book is not reliable. See the review for other problems with Graves’ methods and conclusions.

However, there are two early early examples of death and resurrection that Kersey Graves did not mention.  the Thracian God Zalmoxis and the Sumerian Goddess Innana.

Carrier describes them as follows:

The only pre-Christian man to be buried and resurrected and deified in his own lifetime, that I know of, is the Thracian god Zalmoxis (also called Salmoxis or Gebele’izis), who is described in the mid-5th-century B.C.E. by Herodotus (4.94-96), and also mentioned in Plato’s Charmides (156d-158b) in the early-4th-century B.C.E. According to the hostile account of Greek informants, Zalmoxis buried himself alive, telling his followers he would be resurrected in three years, but he merely resided in a hidden dwelling all that time. His inevitable “resurrection” led to his deification, and a religion surrounding him, which preached heavenly immortality for believers, persisted for centuries.

The only case, that I know, of a pre-Christian god actually being crucified and then resurrected is Inanna (also known as Ishtar), a Sumerian goddess whose crucifixion, resurrection and escape from the underworld is told in cuneiform tablets inscribed c. 1500 B.C.E., attesting to a very old tradition. The best account and translation of the text is to be found in Samuel Kramer’s History Begins at Sumer, pp. 154ff., but be sure to use the third revised edition (1981), since the text was significantly revised after new discoveries were made. For instance, the tablet was once believed to describe the resurrection of Inanna’s lover, Tammuz (also known as Dumuzi). Graves thus mistakenly lists Tammuz as one of his “Sixteen Crucified Saviors.” Of course, Graves cannot be discredited for this particular error, since in his day scholars still thought the tablet referred to that god (Kramer explains how this mistake happened).

There is great need of new work in this area. There really is a huge gap in modern scholarship here–this is one of the few subjects untouched by the post-WWII historiographical revolution. Most scholars today consider the subject dead, largely for all the wrong reasons. And there is little hope. The subject is stuck in the no-man’s-land between history and religious studies, whose methods and academic cultures are so radically different they can barely communicate with each other, much less cooperate on a common project like this.

So it’s as well to skip this book: it will fill your head with factoids of dubious reliability. Check out some of the more modern authors that Carrier mentions and go on from there. If you are looking for a PhD subject in an unworked field, perhaps reurrected saviors before Christ is for you.

Carrier’s conclusion:

…you will never be able to tell what he has right from what he has wrong without totally redoing all his research and beyond, which makes him utterly useless to historians as a source.

I mean residential schools for aboriginal peoples. John Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts blogged about the Roman Catholic residential schools scandal in Ireland, and that reminded me that I hadn’t covered the Truth & Reconciliation Commission in Canada. In 2007, it Canada’s parliament formally apologized for the wrongs done and a compensation package of $1.9 billion was put in place. You can read about it on the CBC’s Residential Schools FAQ.

The main purpose of the schools was to separate children from their ancestral culture. This purpose is now considered to be genocidal, I suppose because to obliterate a culture has similar effects in history as obliterating a people.

Gerald Massey (1828 – 1907) was a very bright young man whose poems attracted attention and enabled him to further his education. Eventually, he became an Egyptologist. He discovered that the story of Christ had its fore-runners in the myths of Egypt, Greece, and Persia.

The lectures of Gerald Massey are precise, concise, and devastating to Christian theology. Some of them were published in 1900. You can read them here: lectures of Gerald Massey:

• The Historical (Jewish) Jesus and the Mythical (Egyptian) Christ
• Paul as a Gnostic Opponent of Peter, not the Apostle of Historic Christianity;
• The Logia of the Lord or Pre-Christian Sayings ascribed to Jesus the Christ
• Gnostic and Historic Christianity
• The Hebrew and other Creations fundamentally explained
• The Devil of Darkness or Evil in the Light of Evolution
• Luniolatry Ancient and Modern
• Man in search of his Soul, during Fifty Thousand Years, and how he found it
• The Seven Souls of Man and their Culmination in the Christ
• The Coming Religion

From “The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ”

The mythical Messiah was always born of a Virgin Mother–a factor unknown in natural phenomena, and one that cannot be historical…. The virgin mother has been represented in Egypt by the maiden Queen, Mut-em-ua, the future mother of Amenhept III some 16 centuries B.C., who impersonated the eternal virgin that produced the eternal child.

Four consecutive scenes reproduced in my book are found portrayed upon the innermost walls of the Holy of Holies in the Temple of Luxor, which was built by Amenhept III, a Pharaoh of the 17th dynasty. The first scene on the left hand shows the God Taht, the Lunar Mercury, the Annunciator of the Gods, in the act of hailing the Virgin Queen, and announcing to her that she is to give birth to the coming Son. In the next scene the God Kneph (in conjunction with Hathor) gives the new life. This is the Holy Ghost or Spirit that causes the Immaculate Conception, Kneph being the spirit by name in Egyptian. The natural effects are made apparent in the virgin’s swelling form.

Next the mother is seated on the mid-wife’s stool, and the newborn child is supported in the hands of one of the nurses. The fourth scene is that of the Adoration. Here the child is enthroned, receiving homage from the Gods and gifts from men. Behind the deity Kneph, on the right, three spirits–the Three Magi, or Kings of the Legend, are kneeling and offering presents with their right hand, and life with their left. The child thus announced, incarnated, born, and worshipped, was the Pharaonic representative of the Aten Sun in Egypt, the God Adon of Syria, and Hebrew Adonai; the child-Christ of the Aten Cult; the miraculous conception of the ever-virgin mother, personated by Mut-em-ua, as mother of the “only one,” and representative of the divine mother of the youthful Sun-God.

These scenes, which were mythical in Egypt, have been copied or reproduced as historical in the Canonical Gospels, where they stand like four corner-stones to the Historic Structure, and prove that the foundations are mythical.