Arthurian Britain · Jesus and Edessa

Astrology,King Jesus and King Arthur

The zodiac, the Nazarene church, and the Round Table

Ralph Ellis15 May 2014, the date of the file

Extract from Cleopatra to Christ, King Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, Princess of Orange. No composition date is printed.

A Nazarene use of the zodiac is traced into Arthurian legend, and read in the Round Table.

The passage he quotes

He quotes Josephus, Antiquities 3:7:7, on the vestments of the high priest. In the English he prints, the two sardonyx stones can be read as the sun and the moon, and the twelve stones as the months or as the circle the Greeks call the zodiac. He marks his own brackets. That is Josephus, as Ellis gives him. The Greek edition is not named.

His reading

He writes that veneration of the astrological Great Months was central to the Nazarene church of Jesus and James, the group also called Ebionites or Jewish Christians. He says that church was persecuted, and that its teaching survived more readily in Graeco-Roman myth than in the church he calls Sauline. Arthurian legend, in his account, is one of those survivals. The evidence he chooses is the Round Table.

A shorter file catalogued as The Round Table and the Last Supper begins at this same zodiac section and carries his further claim, from the Vulgate Cycle, that Arthur’s table was the table of the Last Supper. The two files were not collated line by line. They are not presented as two articles. His notes also cite William of Malmesbury, On the Antiquity of Glastonbury, section 5. The edition is not given.

Read the full article

This page is the introduction. The full article is on its own page, and the PDF remains there. A shorter file on this site opens with the same title and is the same article, not a second one. The PDF says it may not be reproduced without written permission. The HTML is that file, already hosted here.

Evidence library

Josephus, Antiquities 3.7.7

Sources

Ralph Ellis, “Astrology, King Jesus & King Arthur,” the 11-page file dated 15 May 2014.
Josephus, Antiquities 3:7:7, his note 2. The Greek edition is not named.
The Vulgate Cycle, also called the Lancelot-Grail, his note 15. The passage is in H. Oskar Sommer, The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances, volume 1, Lestoire del Saint Graal (1909), pages 15–18. There Joseph thinks he has been in prison from Friday until that day, and he is told it has been forty-three years. The text does not say he slept.
William of Malmesbury, On the Antiquity of Glastonbury 5, his note 16. No edition.