The idea of a Son of God is amongst the oldest cults of the patriarchal god worshippers. The sun is the son of heaven in all primitive faiths. The firmament is personified as the Father on High and the sun becomes the Son of God. Then, because no wrongdoing is missed by the sun in its travels around the heavens, it becomes the Son of Righteousness. The sun in its annual course around the zodiac and its regular daily periodicity typified the ever present, everlasting, ever faithful qualities that reassured people.

For Christian clergy who are always scared that one of these days their flocks will catch on and be outraged at the confidence trick they have been subject to, the Jesus of the New Testament bears an uncomfortable resemblance to other mythical figures. Many of the patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings of the bible are sun gods allegoricized as men by ancient poets. They can be recognized because there is negligible historical evidence for them. Many scholars agree that the patriarchs of the bible and even Saul, David, Solomon and Samson are ancient gods whose myths have been ludicrously accepted as history even by the most scholarly of men. The ancients saw in the sun’s annual course round the heavens an image of human experience—conception, birth, growth, victory, death and resurrection. In the dramas of the mystery religions the central character was the initiate in the role of the sun god.

Christians have confounded pre-Christian Persian and Hellenistic cosmic principles with Jesus, a historical human being, a national hero of the Jewish nation fighting repression. The Jesus of the gospels was given the characteristics of a solar god. The Jews too then connived in the deception by rejecting their hero as a Pagan sun god and nothing more!

When the cruel summer sun of the ancient near east died at the autumn equinox, by a miracle the sun rose in the constellation of Virgo—the sun was born of a Virgin. When the bounteous winter sun was crucified at the spring equinox, the sun rose in the constellation of the lamb, and the crucified god was the sacrificed lamb of god. Light imagery is widespread in descriptions of Jesus. He is the “Light of the World” (Jn 8:12) but the only proper “Light of the World” is the sun.

Behold, he cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him, and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him.

Revelation 1:7

is a description of the sun as the god, Tammuz. The sun, in the form of its reflexion as it rises and sets, walks on water. Jesus is the saviour of mankind, but truly the proper saviour of mankind and all life on earth is the sun—without it we should be unable to survive.

The sun’s corona is traditionally depicted by a halo, a sunburst or a crown of thorns, and indeed the halo can be taken as an indication of a sun god in pre-Christian art. Sun gods such as Horus, Buddha and Krishna are shown with haloes before it became a Christian convention. Often Jesus is depicted surrounded by a sunburst of rays. The horns of the older deities and the rays of light radiating from the heads of Hindu and Pagan gods show that gods were often given the attributes of the sun. The halo, that originally indicated a solar god, was transferred to other divine people in Christian art. The halo became the symbol of a god and then a holy person because it is a characteristic of the holy sun.

The sun has 12 aspects being the 12 signs of the zodiac or constellations, through which it must pass in its yearly journey. It is born in the sign of the goat, the Augean stable of the Greeks, then has an adventure as it enters each different sign during the course of a year. Finally it dies and is reborn or resurrected after three days on the twenty-fifth of December in the same sign of the celestial goat. From ancient times the year was partitioned into the 12 segments based on the constellation that the sun was in at the time, and from this the sun itself was given the aspects of the imagined signs in the heavens or friends or foes were given these imagined characteristics.

The magic number 12 is usually derived from this source and so it is with the twelve Labours of Hercules and the tribes of Israel. The rationalisation of the number twelve of the apostles is that they were to rule over the twelve tribes, but the origin of the twelve is then still solar. In fact, there were not twelve tribes and the number is only chosen to meet the requirements of a sun god.

People in agrarian societies appreciated the importance of the sun in agriculture. Farmers noted that the sun descended in altitude in the sky as it moved southwards until 21 or 22 December, the winter solstice, when it stopped declining for three days and thereafter started to ascend and move north again. The sun seemed to die for three days on 22 December when it ceased its heavenly motion and was born again on 25 December, when it resumes its heavenly motion. The punter worried that the sun might really die and not begin its annual ascent again, just as primitive peoples worried that the night might not end when the sun had set.

Ancient astronomer–priests knew of the annual cycles of the sun and told the punters that they could influence it in its journeys—if they were rewarded for their skills. Priests always were frauds—modern ones are no different in claiming they can help people get eternal life—and pretended they had rituals to revive the sun each winter. Each year on 25 December, when it was born again, people celebrated its birthday. Sons of god are born on 25 December because the sun is. Jesus has no known birthdate but he was given the birthdate of the Unconquerable Sun because he was perceived by the Romans and the Greeks as a sun god.

Early Christians, like Minucius Felix, repudiated the cross because it was Pagan. The first images of Jesus show him as an androgynous youth, the Good Shepherd, carrying a lamb. The original occupant of the cross was this lamb. A man was not shown hanging on a cross until long after the invasions of the barbarian whose traditional sun symbol was the cross.

That Christians worship on Sunday shows the origins of their god. The sun has been viewed consistently throughout history as the saviour of mankind for reasons that are obvious. Without the sun, life on the planet would die. The Eucharistic host, meant to be the body of Christ is kept and displayed for worship in a monstrance, having the shape of a radiating sun!

The ancients had no “only-begotten” son of the Christian type because the term they used was in Greek “monogenes”, and in Latin “unigenitus”, and did not mean “only-begotten”, but “that which was begotten of one parent”, the father, alone. The ancients meant by the term to designate the projection into matter by God of the force of life, not the sole and unique product of the union of spirit and matter, or a male god and a female human.

What can the Christian honestly make of the story of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ? It is a stolen legend. The Indian chief Red Jacket is reported to have replied to the Christian missionaries:

Brethren, if you white men murdered the son of the Great Spirit, we Indians have nothing to do with it, and it is none of our affair. If he had come among us, we would not have killed him. We would have treated him well. You must make amends for that crime yourselves.

This view of the crucifixion, from the viewpoint of a people regarded as savage, is more sensible and rational than that of Christians, who make it meritorious and a moral necessity. If the act were a moral necessity then Judas as well as Jesus was a saviour, because, without him in the Christian story, the act which saved the world could not have happened. If it was necessary for Christ to suffer death upon the cross as an atonement for sin, then the act of crucifixion was right, and a monument should be erected to the memory of Judas for bringing it about. Only Christian logic can find a flaw in this argument. They say that even though it was God’s fore-ordained plan, Judas could only have played his part because he was wicked! So the Christians finish up believing that the means justify the end, because their own Father would use a wicked man to achieve the salvation of the world. It is hardly any surprise that the Christian world remains so wicked despite being saved.

If the inhabitants of this planet required the murderous death of a god as an atonement, we must presume that all other inhabited worlds need a divine atonement. If there are millions of world inhabited by intelligent beings in the universe then they all need a saviour. Presumably, there is only one Most High and it is He who has to be incarnated in each case. He begins to look a bit like a fetishist getting a kick out of slumming it in the worlds of the mortals. Or rather, it begins to make the whole concept look ludicrous.

The idea of gods coming down from heaven, being born of virgins and dying a violent death for the moral blunders of the people originated in an age of the world when mankind was savage and blood was the requisition for every offence. In those days no one had any idea of other possible worlds besides our own and the realms of the gods themselves. So the idea of the supreme god playing his tricks seemed reasonable. Today it does not, to anyone with a remaining brain cell.