Question: "Are you aware of the FACT that most of the stories and construction of the Bible is dirived from Astrology and the Science of the Zodiac?"


Answer: For this answer, I am going to consult a Christian apologist who spent eight years teaching Astrology. Her name is Marcia Montenegro and she has a ministry to those involved in New Age and the Occult. Her home page can be found here: Christian Answers for the New Age (CANA).

First off, this is a pretty vague challenge/question, and since it is being presented as factual, I would normally ask that the questioner to prove this (usually, the burden of proof rests upon the person making the claim), or qualify the statement. However because B.A.M. is here to deal primarily with the esoteric, I thought I would try to answer this without clarification...

One way to answer this question would be to address the idea that the 12 disciples each represent one of the zodiac signs. According to Marcia, this is a popular metaphysical view and can be found in the Metaphysical Bible Dictionary published by the Unity School of Christianity. This is not a Christian church although it has Christianity in its title. It is a new thought church that teaches Eastern/New Age beliefs.

Another avenue that could be possible taken in answering this question would be to address the "Gospel in the Stars" theory. It teaches that the 12 zodiac signs visibly display the Gospel message for all people to see. This theory was made popular by Miss Frances Rolleston, a 19th century English classicist and linguist. She popularized it with her book, Mazzaroth - The Constellations, published in 1863. It is still read widely today.

According to CRI, there are several problems with the Gospel in the Stars point of view that I will reproduce here:

  • There is no uniform zodiac constellation. Some claim there are twenty-four zodiac signs, while others count eight, ten, or fourteen.  The oldest Babylonian charts do not even contain the complete zodiac constellation. And unlike the popular Western view, the Chinese interpreted their constellation charts with characters such as the rabbit, mouse, and dog.  Moreover, the zodiac signs do not even appear above the Arctic Circle (66 degrees latitude) — which means that is there no “Gospel in the Stars” for many Eskimos, Siberians, Greenlanders, and Scandinavians. This, of course, poses a serious dilemma for GIS, according to which the stars serve as a witness to all people.

  • There is no uniform message behind the stars. As in the case of astrology, the star-formed zodiac signs can be assigned whatever meaning the interpreter decides upon; the purported messages behind the signs are completely arbitrary. In their interpretation of the constellations, for example, the Jews did not include any reference to the fall of Adam and Eve or their future seed who would become humankind’s Deliverer. They believed the sign of Scorpio represented Israel as a scorpion, drastically differing from Bullinger’s understanding of Scorpio as a sign depicting the conflict between the Deliverer and the serpent.

  • The message of the stars is out sequence. To take one example, the sign of Virgo (representing a virgin conceiving the Deliverer, the “seed of the woman”) comes before the sign of Libra (which symbolizes the fact that humankind has sinned). Yet, in the Book of Genesis the promise of the “seed of the woman” (Gen. 3:15) comes after humankind sinned (Gen. 3:1-14).

  • There is no biblical evidence to support GIS. Bullinger cites a number of Bible verses that have nothing to do with stars revealing the gospel. For instance, he interprets the word “constellation” (Mazzaroth in Hebrew and Lucifer in the Latin Vulgate) in Job 38:32 as the twelve signs of the zodiac when, in fact, the precise meaning of the term remains uncertain.  But even if this verse were undeniably proven to refer to the zodiac, it does not follow that Job understood there to be twelve signs in the zodiac, or that the twelve signs are the same twelve signs we know today, or that Job believed the star signs spelled out the gospel. Other passages offered as proof for GIS only demonstrate that some heavenly bodies had been given names and were used in calculating time (e.g., Gen. 1:14; Job 9:8-9), or else simply deal with inferring the existence of the invisible Creator from the existence of the visible creation, the universe (e.g., Ps. 19; Rom. 1:19; 10:18).

If there is another point of view that you would like to present concerning the 12 disciples as part of the zodiac or if you would like to clarify your question by providing some source material, please let me know.

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