Argument 3: On Astrological Ages
One of the major claims of the movie is about the
astrological ages. The age of Taurus the Bull lasts from 4300-2150 BC; the age of Ares the Ram from 2150 BC - 1 AD, the age of Pisces the Fish from 1 AD to 2150 AD, and the age of Aquarius the water-bearer will begin in 2150 AD (well, at least according to some interpretations of the ages; other interpretations shift those dates by about 500 years, but the movie doesn't bother to let you know this.) The movie claims that Moses' smashing the golden calf/bull in
Exodus 32 is because Moses represents the start of the age of Ares the Ram (as evidenced by the modern Jews blowing a Ram's horn), and he's upset about the people are returning to the previous age. It further claims that Jesus ushers in the Age of Pisces (often symbolized by TWO fish), which is why he calls
two fishermen to be His disciples, and feeds people with bread and fish. It also claims that Jesus is telling people about a \"future passover\" in
Luke 22:10, involving a man carrying water, which is a reference to Aquarius.
As mentioned on the Astrological Ages wikipedia page above, the precession of the equinoxes was not discovered until about 127 BC by Hipparchus. Moses was around about 1400 years before that -- so how exactly did he know it was the age of the ram, if the concept hadn't even been invented yet? Also note that Moses is born about 700 years into the age of Ares, not any time near its start. Furthermore, Moses never gave any indication that ram worship was to replace bull worship. In the \"golden calf\" story, the issue is not that the people made a BULL, but that they made an IDOL -- he doesn't get angry and order them to build a ram; he gets angry and destroys the calf and tells them to turn back to
a God who is never given any animal representation. Throughout the writings of Moses and the Prophets in the Old Testament, we see continued references to idols as \"worthless\" and comments about how silly it is to worship \"man-made\" things, to carve a likeness of an animal out of wood and worship it while throwing the other half of the wood in the fire to keep warm (see
Isaiah 44:6-23.) Both bulls and rams play a significant part in the tabernacle/temple sacrifices instituted by Moses, along with lambs and birds; it's not as though one takes significance over the other. As for the Ram's horn, it's mentioned
seven times in the Bible (search the page for \"ram\"), but I don't see any significance to any of them -- it's a form of trumpet, but it doesn't seem to be any more than that.
This theory has almost no explanatory power -- it only tangentially explains the \"golden calf\" story, and there are a couple hundred more pages of Mosaic Law and history that don't fit into this framework. A single reference to a modern ram's horn, and a reference to a golden calf being destroyed, is not sufficient to back up the claim that Moses is ushering in the age of the Ram.
Jesus has several disciples, far more than 12 (the twelve in the innermost circle are called
\"apostles\".) Many of them are fishermen, including Simon Peter, Andrew, James, and John. He also calls tax collectors like
Levi and
Matthew (who is also an apostle), and several others whose occupations are unknown. The common theme does not seem to be fish, but rather, people who are \"low\" in society. Jesus does perform miraculous feedings involving loaves of bread and fish (once with
five loaves and 2 fish; another with
seven loaves and \"several\" fish) but He doesn't seem to place any emphasis on the fish; if anything, the emphasis is more on the bread. He doesn't even mention the fish when He
reminds the disciples of those miracles. And He performs other miracles involving
wine,
disease,
paralysis,
storms, and so on. Jesus spends a lot of time near lakes and rivers, but we don't see Him put a particularly large amount of effort into bringing \"fish\" into His teaching or miracles. His focus is on sin, repentance, healing, and forgiveness, none of which is even remotely related to Pisces. It's claimed that the early church symbolism of the fish (and the modern continuing of this) is also symbolic of Pisces, but this is far better explained by the acronym
Ichthys. As before, the explanatory power of this theory is nearly zero -- it's a poor explanation for the couple of symbols it claims to explain, and it leaves the other couple hundred pages about Jesus untouched. As with Moses, the small number of \"fish\" references aren't sufficient to back up the claim.
And what of the statement that Jesus was referring to where the \"next passover will be after he is gone\" in
Luke 22:10? Keep reading the rest of Luke 22 -- He's not referring to a far-future passover at the end of the age of Pisces and the beginning of the age of Aquarius (2150 AD); He's referring to a passover that evening, the famous \"last supper\". As Luke 22:13 says, \"they went and found things just as he had told them, and they prepared the passover.\" The movie explicitly lied here by saying the passover was \"after he is gone\".
The Bible is about 2,000 pages long, and out of the whole thing, the \"astrological age\" theory manages to pull only a few stories for support: Moses' anger at the bull, modern Jews using a ram's horn, Jesus' miracles involving fish, the church's use of Ichthys, and a man carrying water. None of these references hold up under scrutiny, and the rest of the Bible doesn't fit into the hypothesis. (My wife refers to this as the \"dredge fallacy\" -- they've dredged up a few points from a huge data set to support their claim, when the data taken as a whole does not.) Overall, this suggests to us that the theory espoused by the movie is wrong, and not even remotely credible. It's sad what's happened here --
some very smart people got suckered into believing astrology, because they wanted it to be true. Grendel, Blue, Bettina, Testicules, and others, I don't mean to insult you, but I do mean to shame and embarrass you -- you all got fooled by
astrology, because you wanted to believe it and you didn't do the research that was necessary. (Props to Genghis for recognizing he got fooled.)
I should note at this point, this argument doesn't fit very well with the first two arguments anyway. If Moses and Jesus signified changing astrological ages, why would they be copied from other figures like Sargon, Minos, or Horus, who didn't signify changing astrological ages?
Argument 1: On the History of Moses
The movie gives a series of claims regarding Moses: that the story of his birth is copied directly from the story of Sargon of Akkad, that his being a lawgiver is similar to Manou of India, Minos of Crete, and Mises of Egypt, and that the Ten Commandments are derived directly from the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Regarding his birth, there is a story about
Sargon of Akkad that sounds somewhat similar to the story of Moses from Exodus
1 and
2: hidden in a basket, carried down a river, raised by someone powerful, became a ruler. The movie is right on this point. What they don't tell you is, the text that describes Sargon's birth is a neo-Assyrian scroll from 700 BC -- eight centuries after the time of Moses, at a time when the story of Moses was fairly well known in that part of the world. They also don't mention the legend of Sargon is significantly less detailed than the story of Moses -- it doesn't explain why he was in a basket in the river, it says he didn't know his father (though other stories do name his father)... it's a stripped down version of Moses' story. The scroll, by the way, happens to be from about the time of Sargon II, who was at war with the northern kingdom of Israel. As snoopy asked, who copied who here? Which way does the river flow? We can't really prove it either way, since both Sargon and Moses lived hundreds of years before the oldest manuscripts we have describing either. One legend they don't bring up is of Horus, the Egyptian god who was hidden by his mother in the Nile Delta. But, since Moses led the Hebrew people out of Egypt, it should come as no surprise that Egypt should have a myth about a Moses-like figure.
The movie makes a big deal out of Moses' name (which, in the above story, is derived from \"drawn out of water\") being similar to other names like
Manou of India (which is really a title),
Minos of Crete, and Mises of Egypt (who does not appear on wikipedia;
this poem seems to associate the name with Bacchus, aka
Dionysus. They may also be referring to
Menes of Egypt.) At this point, I was surprised they didn't repeat the statement about the glyph \"M\" and Virgo ;) The movie spoke of these figures all as lawgivers, but that's not how the entries read to me. If anything, Manu is a Noah-esque figure. Minos created a constitution, but he's also a Greek mythological figure, and Greek mythology was mostly developed several hundred years after Moses. Menes could be an alternate name for Horus, or possibly just an allusion; in either case, the Pharaoh named Menes does not appear to be any sort of law-giver. And Dionysus doesn't fit at all. Overall, this is a really weak argument -- Moses' name sounds kinda like some other mythological names, one of which he predates, and the other two of which don't really match up with the story the movie tells about \"lawgivers\". (It's kinda like saying, my mom is named Zora, and there was this swordsman named Zorro and this Greek god named Zeus and this Japanese fighter airplane named Zero. Uh, OK, sure.)
The movie goes on to argue that the Ten Commandments \"are taken outright from
Spell 125 in the Egyptian book of the dead\". (As the movie does several times, they scroll a page by so fast that you can't read what it says without pausing.) Essentially, their observation is thus: the
Ten Commandments say such things as \"do not steal\", \"do not give false testimony\", \"do not murder\", and \"do not commit adultery\". The Egyptian Book of the Dead, among its many confessions, says things like \"I have not stolen\", \"I have not cheated\", \"I have not fornicated\", etc. We are, of course, supposed to take this as solid evidence that the Ten Commandments are a copy of the book of the dead. The Book of the Dead expresses similar concepts to some of the Ten Commandments, but it misses the first commandment (monotheism), the second (no idols -- the one the \"astrological age\" argument forgot about when it was talking about the golden calf), the fifth (honor your parents), and the tenth (do not covet). It has comments about holy feasts that could be taken to parallel the fourth commandment (the Sabbath), and comments about scorning gods that could be taken to parallel the third commandment (don't blaspheme). So it definitely covers 4 commandments, partly parallels 2, and misses 4. And the four it matches are often considered to be \"obvious\". (The same people who argue \"I don't need the Bible to tell me not to steal or kill\" seem to think Moses needed to copy from Egyptian sources because \"don't steal\" and \"don't kill\" are such revolutionary concepts.) And then we have 3 and a half more books covering the Law of Moses (it doesn't end until the end of Deuteronomy), which cover a lot more ground. Maybe Spell 126 covers those :P
Overall, Moses is significantly different from all of the historical figures he supposedly mirrors, and the Law is significantly different from the historical documents it's supposedly copied from. The story of Sargon was likely copied from Moses; other law-givers with M-names aren't really law-givers at all; the Ten Commandments and the other 3 and a half books of Moses are mirrored by other ancient codes precisely in those areas where it's most commonly stated \"I don't need a religious book to tell me that.\" Again, some very smart people got fooled by the movie's propaganda, because they wanted it to be true.
The movie's comments about Noah and the flood don't really fit anywhere in my post, so I'll make a brief statement here: if there really was a massive, world- or area- wide flood, we'd expect it to be reported in a lot of mythology. It is. I don't see why I'm supposed to be impressed by this.
) Your excellent rebuttal deserves a page of its own, actually. I have not yet found any site that presents this kind of material fairly. (I am just using DescentiaPedia temporarily, it's easier to post links there.)