The central wordplay of the astrotheology movement.
Interesting claims
The sun is the son
Jordan Maxwell built his career on the claim that Christianity retells the sun's journey: the risen son is the risen sun, the light of the world is daylight itself. The English homophone sun and son is presented as the surviving clue.
Assessment: The pun is real and impossible: it exists only in English, which did not exist when the gospels were written. New Testament Greek uses huios for son and helios for sun, which sound nothing alike. As evidence of authorship, it fails; as evidence that solar imagery clings to religion, it was never needed.
Documented
The coincidence has a real ancestor
Strangely, English sun and son were already near-twins in Proto-Germanic: sunnon and sunuz, unrelated words that drifted into rhyme over 2,500 years. The pun is a linguistic accident with a documented paper trail.
Assessment: Documented in Germanic philology. An accident so tidy it keeps getting mistaken for a signature.
Stories
The stolen birthday
The story told every December: Christians set Jesus's birth on December 25th to absorb Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, and the Saturnalia crowds. The holiday is the sun's, the story goes, and the son moved in later.
Assessment: Partially documented and hotly argued: the feast's date may also derive from an early calculation placing the conception on the crucifixion's anniversary. The appropriation story is at least as old as the 12th century and far older than the internet version. Both accounts may be true at once.
Sources and further reading
OED, sun (OE sunne) and son (OE sunu), convergent homophones
Malachi 4:2, the sun of righteousness
Worth asking
If a claim only works in a language younger than the events it describes, what exactly does it prove, and why does it still feel like evidence?