Jesus the astronomer

The fuss made by churchmen of all denominations over the past centuries about astrology has usually been focussed on what's said on the subject in the Bible – which turns out, but when you actually study the good book, to be nothing - zilch. There is no specific mention of astrology in either the New or Old Testament; what appear to be allusions to the subject turn out to be the result of bad translation. Numerology on the other hand has resulted in the twelve zodiac signs being related to the twelve Apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve stones in the breastplate of the High Priest; but it’s difficult to discover any real significance in this. The Apocrypha on the other hand – those books of the Bible regarded as having been written by good and religious men, but for some reason are not accepted as being (like the major books of the New Testament) the word of God, have a number of distinct references to astrology: Enoch refers to the stars and their relationship to herbs, gems and numbers, and claims that in the sixth heaven angels attend the phases of the Moon and the revolutions of the stars and the Sun. In the ASrabic Gospel of the Infancy, attributed to St James, Jesus appears as an astronomer, lecturing the priests in the temple on ‘the number of the spheres and heavenly bodies, as also their triangular, square are sextile aspect; their progressive and retrograde motion; their twenty-fourths and sixtieths of the twenty-fourths and other things which the reason of man has never discovered . . .’ and Clement of Rome, a friend of St James, called the twelve Apostles the Twelve Months of Christ. We do well to be pretty relaxed on the subject.

-          from Parkers’ Encyclopaedia of Astrology (Watkins, ISBN 978-1-905857-71-5

-          and read Julia’s forecasts for your day at  www.parkeriters.com