Minimalist wrote:P.s. - I really hate it when that happens.
So do I. This used to happen to me a lot, so now, if I'm doing a longish one, I type it on a Word doc first and then copy and paste over.
Anyway, back to the topic:
First of all, on the 'diisappearance' of the sun. I think I may have got this wrong. I don't have any written material on this yet and I'm trying to get it all from a video. But looking at the video again, it seems to me that the sun doesn't actually disappear, but hangs really low on the horizon.
Secondly, according to Acharya, how the ancients worked out where it would start to rise again is by following the trajectory created by the alignment of the Three Kings behind (following) Sirius (the star). I think it would be interesting to find out the derivation of the Three Kings name for those stars.
Thirdly, about whether these astronomical phenomena could be perceived from Jerusalam. I've realised that they wouldn't need to be. The Jesus story is based on old Egyptian mythological stories such as that at Horus, and Osiris as well as Dionysus. So we would need to be looking at whether this story would work as as astrological allegory from Egypt and Mespotamia and possibly even India.
This is Wikipedia on the subject:
The term Osiris-Dionysus is used by some historians of religion to refer to a group of deities worshipped around the Mediterranean in the centuries prior to the emergence of Jesus. It has been argued that these deities were closely related and shared many characteristics, most notably being male, partly-human, born of virgins, life-death-rebirth deities and other similar characteristics.
The Egyptian god Osiris and the Greek god Dionysus had been equated as long ago as the 5th century BC by the historian Herodotus (see interpretatio graeca). By Late Antiquity, some Gnostic and Neoplatonist thinkers had expanded this syncretic equation to include Aion, Adonis, Attis, Mithras and other gods of the mystery religions. The composite term Osiris-Dionysus is found around the start of the first century BC, for example in Aegyptiaca by Hecateus of Abdera, and in works by Leon of Pella.
With the growth of Christianity, some pagan polemicists (notably Celsus) charged that the Gospels' narrative of Jesus's death and resurrection was in fact a bastardized reworking of the sufferings of Dionysus and other similar gods. Christian apologists like Justin Martyr charged in turn that the pagan mystery-cults were degenerate adaptations of vague Biblical prophecies about the Jewish Messiah - although neither Osiris nor Dionysus show many similarities to the actual prophecies. The Pagan and Christian practices are strikingly similar: bread and wine as the body and blood, resurrection on the third day, virgin birth to a father who is a god, etc.
Christian apologists charged the devil of copying Jesus' life into the past. Jews like Philo of Alexandria also observed similarities and postulated that the pagan religions had borrowed from Jewish scriptures.
In the 19th century, the idea of a pan-Mediterranean cult of the dying-and-rising demigod was used by Alexander Hislop in his anti-Roman Catholicism treatise The Two Babylons. Hislop argued that Roman Catholicism was based not upon Biblical Christianity, but upon pagan cults of the divine mother goddess and her suffering son (e.g. Cybele and Attis, etc.).
Later authors, such as Peter Gandy and Timothy Freke, have expanded this line of reasoning to encompass not merely Roman Catholicism, but Christianity more generally. Their book, The Jesus Mysteries, contends that Jesus was not a historical figure, but rather a mythic product of the same pan-Mediterranean mythic complex that also yielded Osiris, Dionysus and other similar figures.
Such arguments have not won over many mainstream Christian scholars. However, secular historians specializing in the cultures and civilizations of the region do accept the phenomena of pagan-to-Christian borrowings, such as iconographic characteristics of Orpheus and Mithras applied to Christ in early Christian art.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osiris-Dionysus