The most renowned ancient historian of Israel was the Jewish general Josephus.

In The
Jewish War, Josephus explains that the holiest symbols of Judaism incorporate
astrological themes. Josephus says the seven branches of the Jewish candlestick represent
the sun, moon and planets, the twelve loaves of bread in the temple at the holiest festivals
represent the twelve months of the year, and the breastplate of the high priest has twelve
jewels that represent the twelve signs of the zodiac. ll this material shows we cannot
hope to understand the !hristian use of such symbols if we divorce them from their
original astrological meaning.
"ut that does not mean we should accept astrological speculation about use of the stars to
predict events on earth. #uch speculation is pre$scientific, and extensive scientific study
has failed to find any persuasive statistical evidence of correlation between star signs or
planetary positions and events on earth. %or example, no researchers have found any
measurable differences in personality traits based on sun signs, so it appears that
newspaper horoscopes are based on fantasy, not on facts.
&espite this lack of hard evidence for astrology, that does not mean we should simply
condemn astrology as baseless. Influences that are sub$statistical can still be real in some
way, even if very weak. %uture science may yet find some scientific basis for folk beliefs.
"ut this is not helped by the arrogant and ignorant condemnation of everything to do with
astrology that we see from scientific and religious 'uarters. %or example, the sun signs
are based on the seasons, not on some mystical emanation from distant stars. It may yet
be possible for more sensitive scientific tests to find evidence for a twelve$fold cycle of
the year matching the signs. (e should keep an open mind about such topics by
recognising their claims are often unproven but not refuted.
#o why the intense hostility to astrology) *odern astronomy grew out of astrology, for
example with great scientists such as +epler having a strong interest in the topic. "ut as
science developed, it compared the objective evidence of ,ewtonian mechanics against
the subjective speculation of astrologers, and found that astrology lacked scientific
method. #o astrology was banished from universities. %or religion, the condemnation
goes back to a strand in Jewish religion, with the book of &euteronomy condemning
worship of the sun and moon and stars. #uch reverence for nature is also regarded as
incompatible with the !hristian moral doctrine of the freedom of the will, through the
assumption that astrology involves a fatalistic view that our decisions are written in the
stars.
big part of the problem in reconstructing how natural observation may have informed
!hristian origins is that the church 'uite early formed a militant opposition to such
natural thinking, and explicitly sought to destroy all evidence of it. -erhaps that is why
we have no early !hristian texts, because they were unacceptable to the supernatural
dogma. #o rather than present Jesus !hrist as allegory for the sun, the church insisted he
was the supernatural miraculous #on of the creator of the universe. ny texts that differed
from the orthodox view were targeted for burning. Indeed, the only reason we have any
.nostic texts at all is that priests in a far$flung corner of the empire, at ,ag /ammadi in
#outhern 0gypt, secretly buried them in jars in the desert to save them from destruction
by an advancing 1oman army coming to burn them. These late texts were only found in
2345, and provide illuminating insight into the ferment of ideas of the ancient world.
"ut even these .nostic texts only provide fragmentary clues into a possible coherent
astral worldview that informed the .ospels. The biggest problem here is that ancient
mystery religions insisted on strict secrecy, with main teachings only conveyed by mouth
rather than in writing. #o we have almost nothing about the views of major ancient astral
religions such as *ithraism, just tantalising clues in their artwork such as the Tauroctony,
which is directly based on observation of the stars.
The scale of !hristian indifference and hostility to ancient learning is shown by the fact
that 0gyptian hieroglyphics were completely lost to understanding for more than a
thousand years. 6nly in the last two centuries have we begun to again recognise how the
0gyptians may have used the stars as the basis of their religion, a theme covered in some
depth by charya in Christ in Egypt. nd still, 0gyptian star lore remains highly
controversial, often rejected and ignored by academic 0gyptology, although studied in
depth by great scientists such as ,orman 7ockyer.
The scale of ancient war is another factor that makes this cosmic material hard to
reconstruct. (hen the 1omans destroyed Jerusalem in 89 &, they violently suppressed
cultural traditions that had strong astral elements. 0ven though the 1oman .ods give us
the names of our planets, it seems that the evolution of !hristianity in the common era
was traumatised by the conflicts with 1ome, and astral culture was a casualty of the
upheaval.
6ne of the big hidden themes of ancient religion is the astronomical movement known as
precession of the e'uinox, whereby the stars rotate slowly against the seasons by one
degree every 82.: years. The spring point enters a new zodiac constellation every ;24<
years, and the entire heavens rotate over a long time period known as the .reat =ear,
every ;5,8:5 years. The traditional estimate of the .reat =ear, ;53;9 years, is the longest
period in the sexagesimal sixty$based counting method for time that we have inherited
from ancient "abylon, with ;53;99 seconds making exactly three days.
There is considerable evidence that the creators of !hristianity used precession as their
template to understand the structure of time. %or example, the spring point moved against
the stars from ries to -isces in ;2&, providing the >as above? which !hristianity used
to invent the >so below? of the story of Jesus, whose mythology is redolent with -iscean
fish symbolism from this alpha$omega moment. s charya notes in !hrist in 0gypt,
Jesus has been seen as the avatar, or spiritual founder, of the ge of -isces, the two
thousand year period when the spring e'uinox has occurred each year with the sun in the
constellation of -isces.
(e do not need to accept any unproven astrological claims to see that this theme of
zodiac ages provides a coherent organising principle for the !hristian story of Jesus, and
indeed for the old eschatological end times vision of the history of the world as seven
thousand years from dam to the holy city. There are many threads at %ree Thought
,ation where the likely details of this original !hristian cosmology are analysed in depth,
primarily aimed at reconstructing the most probable story of how the ancients themselves
actually thought about these matters.
It is difficult to thread a path between scientific and religious hostility to natural theology
on the one hand, and the irrationality of magical folk traditions such as astrology on the
other hand. strotheology seeks to find this narrow path of the way of life in truth, not
through the comforting fantasy of a miraculous saviour, but through logical analysis of
evidence.