We hear that now and then from the more aggressive “new atheists.” Still, remember that we’re reacting to two thousand years of Christians telling us how bad we are. (Sometimes with racks and thumbscrews.)
When I was in grade school, I got the shit beat out of me for voicing doubts about Christianity and the Bible. I’m mostly forgiving of people being a bit too smug about their non-religion.
(Still, smugness is not pretty. I prefer a more balanced form of atheism.)
There are two parts to any religion - the inspired text part, which supposedly comes in some way from a deity, and the commentary and interpretation part. If there was no inspired part, then religion would be just a bunch of people making stuff up, i.e. philosophy, which while important does not tend to inspire missionaries or forced conversion.
Now, for the inspired part, assuming that holy books have a mix of inspired stuff and stuff the writer just threw in, how can we tell the difference? Slavery is a good example, but so is gay marriage.
Clearly what parts are considered inspired and what parts aren’t have changed over time. So, the hypothesis that the whole thing is made up, and none of it is inspired, matches history pretty well.
When I was a kid the Founding Fathers were treated as near-deities - and some conservatives still seem to think they are. Arguments like the above were really useful in making them real people and showing their weaknesses and hypocrisy.
A historical study of the Bible tries to find out why passages are in there, and does not end with “God inspired them.” If I were going to test the Bible, I’d look for passages which only a supreme being would have been able to write. Genesis accurately reflecting how the universe and the Earth began would be a good example. A secondary one would be a morality which most of us can accept and not consider barbaric. Or, are we more moral than God?
They are, even if (and I have no idea) he got a few things wrong.
Not a Bible-Radio talk show jerk here, but the other deities cited as having been “born of virgins” were not conceived without sexual intercourse, but were simply the product of another god, such as Zeus, seducing a virgin. That’s not quite a “virgin birth”. If your mother or my mother was a virgin on her wedding night, it wouldn’t be accurate to claim that either of us were the product of a “virgin birth.”
We also don’t have any primary textual sources that Mithras, or any other deity, was born on December 25. That claim originated with a spiritualist named Kersey Graves who wrote a weird little piece of pseudo-scholarship in 1875 titled “The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors”. He claimed numerous deities were said to have been born on December 25, but no scholar has ever been able to find his sources, and some of the gods he claimed had that birthdate are apparently unknown to anyone but Graves. Graves’ claims were picked up and repurposed by generations of atheists, none of whom apparently have any background in classical studies.
The earliest textual sources for Nordic religious belief are long after Christianity was well established in Scandinavia, so the probability of cross-cultural contamination is probably the other way than you suppose - Christian beliefs being adopted and adapted into an existing cultural template. The same thing happened with the Neo-Platonists in Rome as a response to the increasing popularity of the Christian movement - existing deities like Apollo and Dionysius were rebooted (or retconned, if you will) to adopt some of the attributes of the Christ - death and rebirth as a savior of mankind, etc.
This also happened with dates. We have no evidence that a “Feast of Sol Invictus” was celebrated on December 25 until after the Christian celebration on that date had begun - and there’s even doubt among scholars that the celebration noted on the Roman calendar was a religious ceremony.
1 Samuel 15:3
Yes, we are more moral than God.
You might have a case with regard to Europa and Leda, but not with respect to Danaë.
I’d like to see a serious cite defending that proposition. Frankly, I doubt this very, very much, but I’m willing to examine a serious scholarly citation.
I’m having trouble respecting your scholarship, given that you have just “corrected” me and told me I have it “the other way than you suppose” – and your point is exactly the one I, myself, made.
Danaë is actually a very apt example. Zeus had sex with her by appearing in the form of a golden rain which entered the chamber in which she was locked and ran down into her womb, impregnating her. Another Zeus seduction in disguise.
As you are likely aware, Christians do not believe God had sex with Mary. Well, I think the Mormons do, but they are not considered Christians by most Christian sects.
Which proposition? That Graves wrote that? Or that he originated the claims? Or that no deity in the ancient world claimed a birthdate that corresponded to December 25 on the Julian calendar?
His book is out of copyright and is widely available online. Can you find an earlier source than him that makes the same claims? Or any primary textual sources for any deity, much less Mithra, having a birthdate of December 25?
My apologies, I speed-read that and should have paid closer attention to what you wrote. You did indeed make the same point.
That is only one interpretation of the shower of gold. You won’t find the part about “It ran down into her womb” in the original stories. In the original stories, the rain of gold was miraculous, and not any kind of ordinary vaginal penetration. Leda and Europa, damn right, but not Danaë.
Declaring that a group of people “are not considered Christians” is an ugly kind of bigotry. Remember that some Protestants have claimed that Catholics “aren’t really Christians.” Do you really want to engage in that kind of labelling?
Some people have, in fact, said that God had sex with Mary. Some people have said that God sent the Archangel Gabriel to have sex with Mary. You can find all sorts of weird beliefs.
I asked you for a cite for what you claimed. Do you have one?
“In the past, most mainstream Christian denominations rejected Mormonism outright, frequently calling it a cult and characterizing it as “non-Christian.” Although mainstream Christian denominations still reject Mormons as being non-Christian…”
I think Arizona Mike’s statement is reasonable. Christianity is a faith involving a set of beliefs…
Jack Chick believes this and I know of a Christian teacher who was against his comics because of this. I guess he’s talking about whether they are “saved”. But officially Catholics are definitely part of Christianity.
See also Deuteronomy 20:10-17
In his segment about Horus almost EVERYTHING was misleading or untrue. I would have thought he’d check for accuracy in his $2 million documentary. On the other hand a lot of religious people have some evidence to back it up even if it just involves personal experiences or trusting the arguments of qualified Christian apologists.
Yeah, but you can’t let “facts” get in the way of a good documentary! Then the documentary might be true!
That’s exactly right. I have met people who think that every word of the bible is perfect and literal. And not just the bible, the King James version. I don’t confront people about religion but I do remember one conversation with a guy I worked with who refused to believe that Jesus wasn’t his real name and that it was a translation of his real name through Greek.
Really depends on how far back you went to go in the original stories.
Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 2. 26 & 34 (trans. Aldrich) (Greek mythographer C2nd A.D.) :
"To Akrisios and Eurydike, Lakedaimon’s daughter, was born a daughter Danae . . . While Akrisios was making oracular inquiry into the problem of fathering sons, the god informed him that a son born of his daughter would slay him. In fear Akrisios constructed a bronze chamber beneath the earth, where he kept Danae under guard. Now some say that Proitos [twin brother of Akrisios] seduced her, which led to the hard feelings between the brothers, but others say that Zeus had sex with her by changing himself into gold that streamed in through the ceiling and down into her womb. When Akrisios later learned that she had given birth to Perseus, not believing that Zeus seduced her, he cast his daughter out to sea with her son on an ark. The ark drifted ashore at Seriphos, where Diktys recovered the child and brought him up.”
Pindar, Pythian Ode 12. 16 ff (trans. Conway) (Greek lyric C5th B.C.) :
“[Perseus] that son of Danaë . . . he who, men tell, was from a flowing stream of gold betotten.”
Here’s a picture of a vase depicting the incident from circa 425 BC. Sure looks like the ancients considered the rain as pouring into her vaginal region to me: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/Danae_gold_shower_Louvre_CA925.jpg/800px-Danae_gold_shower_Louvre_CA925.jpg.
Just reporting the facts isn’t bigotry. Mormonism is a fairly recent belief system, and Mormon beliefs on Jesus aren’t part of mainstream Christianity, and to my best knowledge, most Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox theologians would not consider their beliefs on Jesus part of Trinitarian Christianity, Trinopus.
Sure. I’d consign beliefs about Mithra being born on December 25 to the same category. None of those claims are part of mainstream Christian theology.
And i asked which claim you wanted a cite for - That Graves wrote that? Or that he originated the claims? Or that no deity in the ancient world claimed a birthdate that corresponded to December 25 on the Julian calendar? Throw me a bone, here, and I’ll try to help you out.
I’m also not clear on why or how you think Mithras was born on December 25. We do not have any evidence of the Roman cult of Mithraism until well into the 1st century and after the beginning of the Christian movement, which makes any claim that Christianity copied aspects of Roman Mithraism suspect. (The claim that Roman Mithraism is a survival, or borrowing, of an earlier Persian god, Mitra, is also unlikely, given the etymological and archaeological evidence. Mitra was to the Persians the personification of contracts and honor-bonds, and had little to do with the Roman mystery religion other than a homophonic similarity. The hypothesis that Roman soldiers brought the Mithras cult back with them from Persia is just that, a hypothesis, with no primary textual corroboration.)
My best guess is that you are basing this on the links between Sol Invictus and the Roman Mithras - some of the artwork and votive candles in Mithraeum seem to show some kind of linkage between the two deities, although the nature of the link is unknown - hypotheses have been made that they were brothers, or lovers, or friends, or two aspects of the same god. The lack of textual evidence, though, means that these are at best, educated guesses on the part of Mithraic scholars.
So if we make the considerable, and probably unsubstantiated leap to 1st century Mithras = Sol Invictus (The Unconquered Sun), then does Sol Invictus have a “birthday” of December 25?
The evidence for this seems to be based solely on a doubtful interpretation of the Chronography of A.D. 354 (The Calendar of Filocalus), a post-Christian Roman public calendar.
First off, the Romans, as a polytheistic people, had a whole shitload of holidays. It was hard to avoid a week without a holiday on the very, very, very busy Roman religious calendar. This alone causes problems for any claims that because the Feast of the Nativity came to be celebrated on December 25, that it must necessarily mean that the early Christians must have borrowed the date from an earlier Roman’s feast day for a deity. They had a pretty crowded calendar. On which date do you suggest Jesus should have been born to avoid a potential schedule conflict with a Feast for Jupiter or Mars or Pallas Athena or whomever?
Secondly, the primary textual evidence for the first celebration of Sol Invictus is actually later than the first textual evidence for the Christian celebration of the Feast of the Nativity on December 25.
Due to the increasing rate of conversions to Christianity, the Emperors Julian the Apostate and Aurelian saw a threat to existing Roman state power, which was tied to the Pagan religion and which he saw as acting as a cultural bond among Roman citizens during a time of internal and external threats to the security of Imperial Rome. This created the rise of the Neo-Platonist movement, which attempted to appropriate elements of the Christian narrative and incorporate them into the existing pagan religion - thus, messianic, compassionate elements were grafted into the offiical cults of Dionysius, Adonis, etc. The Cult of Sol Invictus was one such attempt to divert public affection from the rise of the Christian movement and back on to the state-supported pagan religion.
The lack of textual evidence in the Roman calendars for a “Feast of Sol Invictus” on December 25 until AFTER the beginning of the Christian celebration on this date shows this to be the case.
The greatest problem with the December 25/Mithras/Sol Invictus claim is that we only have a single solid historical primary source for December 25 as the feast of Sol Invictus - the Chronography of A.D. 354, where the day is marked as “N - INVICTI - CM - XXX” (“Birthday of the Unconquered - games ordered: thirty [chariot-races]”)
There is, in fact, good evidence that December 25 was only a minor holiday for the Sol Invictus cult (if indeed it was such an event), so it would make little sense for the Church to try to supplant that date instead of the dates with greater religious significance to the Sol Invictus cult, namely August, 8, 9, or 12, or December 11 - none of which correspond to any significant solar event. There is also NO evidence that the use of December 25 to celebrate the Sol Invictus feast existed BEFORE the Christian celebration of the Feast of the Nativity on December 25.
The evidence that Sol Invictus was even celebrated on December 25 is even debatable - unlike the other calendar entries for feasts of Sol Invictus, the name “Sol” is not included in the A.D. 354 calendar, only “Invictus” (“unconquerable”), leading some scholars to believe that it was a secular celebration for a military leader. Further evidence for this is the fact that all other references to celebratory chariot races for the gods at other times of the year were in multiples of 12 (for the 12 months), whereas this reference is to 30, for unknown reasons.
None of the other known feasts for Sol Invictus throughout the year fell on any astronomically significant dates, either, which would further discredit the idea that this date, or Solstice in general, was a religious holiday for the Romans, anymore than the Solstice will be a religious holiday for me because I recognize the Solstice and am kind of an astronomy geek.
We also have no existing documents from the early Church saying, “Hey, let’s take over this holiday!” What we do have are documents relating to the use of cosmic symbolism, as Jesus is frequently compared to the sun, the waning of the days before the solstice and the waxing of the days afterward is used as an analogy for the influence of Christ. We also have early evidence of Christians dating the birth from textual clues in the Gospel of Luke to the date of Jesus’ conception, and from there 9 months forward to December 25.
You can view the page in the 354 Calendar for Mensis December here: http://www.tertullian.org/fathers/chronography_images/06_december.png. Take a look at it. That’s it, man. That small notation on the calendar is pretty much the only tortured claim for December 25 being “The birthday of Mithras” - which can only be claimed AFTER making the substantial leaps of faith that Mithas is the same as Sol Invictus, that Sol Invictus was the actual entity being celebrated, that a heavenly deity would even have a birthday, that the far more important known dates for celebration of Sol Invictus in August or early December would not be considered a “birthday” of sorts, and that the only mention we have of some potential tie to Sol Invictus does not pop up until AFTER the Christian celebration on December 25 - a date for which the Christian church fathers had their own stated reasons for recognizing the celebration, none of which had nothing to do with Sol Invictus or other “pagan” deities.
That Graves originated the claim, and that there was no prior reference to Mithras and (I’m going to broaden my claim a little) his birth either on December 25 or the Winter Solstice.
Hard to find a cite to show a negative, as the way to deal with this is simply to find an earlier claim that Graves. Hislop, maybe? I’ll check.
Kersey Graves’ abominable scholarship has been noted by numerous sources. Even the Jesus Mythicist theorist Richard Carrier has decried it, although Carrier is a little unclear on Mithraic scholarship. You can read the article Carrier wrote about it on an atheist website here: Richard Carrier Graves » Internet Infidels
The easiest way to show I’m wrong would be to show me an earlier claim than 1875 A.D. that Mithras was born on December 25.
Manfred Clauss has made the claim that Mithras had a December 25th birthday, but Clauss wasn’t even born until 1945. Probably the first scholar to make that claim, independently of Graves’ crank-scholarship was Franz Cumont, who was a well-respected figure in Mithraic studies (and not a crank, simply wrong) at the beginning of the 20th century, and the one who pushed the Mitra > Mithra > Sol Invictus theory.
Roger Beck, Professor Emeritus in Historical Studies at the University of Torontoand probably the preeminent living scholar in Mithraic studies, challenged the claims of both Cumont and Clauss, called Cumont’s speculations “that hoariest of ‘facts’” and stated (as I have told you), "“In truth, the only evidence for it is the celebration of the birthday of Invictus on that date in the Calendar of Philocalus. ‘Invictus’ is of course Sol Invictus, Aurelian’s sun god [a neoplatonist post-Christian invention - AZM]. It does not follow that a different, earlier, and unofficial sun god, Sol Invictus Mithras, was necessarily or even probably, born on that day too.” (See Beck’s excellent study, *The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire: Mysteries of the Unconquered Sun. * Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.) It’s well worth reading.
In response, Clauss backed off on his earlier assertions and now says "“the Mithraic Mysteries had no public ceremonies of its own. The festival of natalis Invicti [Birth of the Unconquerable (Sun)], held on 25 December, was a general festival of the Sun, and by no means specific to the Mysteries of Mithras.” (Clauss, Manfred. Mithras: Kult und Mysterien. München: Beck, 1990, p. 70: “… erwähnenswert wäre dass das Mithras-Kult keine öffentlichen Zeremonien kannte. Das Fest der natalis Invicti, der 25. Dezember, war ein allgemeines Sonnenfest und somit keineswegs auf die Mithras-Mysterien beschränkt. Es gab also im Mithras-Kult nichts vergleichbares zu den großen Feiern und Festlichkeiten anderer Kulte …”)
Roger Pearse has a good analysis of Cumont’s theories, which modern scholarship largely discounts, here: http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2011/06/03/mithras-and-25th-december-in-franz-cumont-english-and-french/
Stephen Hijmans, Associate Professor in Roman Art and Archaeology at the University of Ottawa, is the other source you should look to for scholarship specifically on Sol Invictus (he is probably the historian who is best known in this small field). See his monograph “Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas”, Mouseion, Number 47/3 (2003), 277-298. You can read the entire work here: (PDF) "Sol Invictus, the Winter Solstice, and the Origins of Christmas", Mouseion, Number 47/3 (2003), 377-398 | Steven Hijmans - Academia.edu.
And of course, we still have the problem that the first Sol Invictus (or Invictus) chariot races described in the calendar postdate the rise of Christianity and the Christian use of December 25 as a festival for the Nativity…
So, can we agree that neither Mitra nor Mithras were likely “born” on December 25; or if we choose to connect the Neoplatonic deity Sol Invictus to Mithras, that such a supposition originated after the Christian use of December 25?
I noted you also broadened your claim to the possibility that the Winter Solstice could also have been a birthday for the Roman 1st century deity Mithras.
I could be wrong, but I’ve not seen that theory raised before. What are you basing it on?
The Romans observed the Winter Solstice, of course, just as most other cultures do, but it held no particular religious significance for them. It was an astronomical event that was useful in time-keeping, calendar-keeping, and agriculture.
The Romans, like most ancient peoples (including the Christian converts), were aware that the date varied from year to year but was not usually on December 25 (the inadequacies of the Imperial Roman Julian calendar system made it even more difficult). It was surprisingly not linked by the Romans to worship of a solar deity, and was not “owned” by the pagans any more than by the Christians, who certainly did recognize its symbolic nature, as St. Augustine noted early on.
In a Christmas Day sermon, St. Augustine proclaimed the idea, common among early Christians, that the date of December 25 was chosen by Jesus as His date to be born for its symbolic astronomical significance as well as to supplant (not assume or “baptize”) demonic pagan celebrations:
*"Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was with the Father before he was born of his mother, chose not only the mother of whom he would be born, but also the day on which he would be born. Fallible human beings often choose days, one for planting, another for building, another for setting out, and sometimes even for marrying a wife. When people do this, the reason they do it is in order that something already born, so to say, may grow up or turn out well. Nobody, however, can choose the day on which actually to be born. But he was able to choose both, because he was able to create both. Nor did he choose the day in the same way that people do, who vainly hang the fates of individuals on the dispositions of the stars. I mean, in this case the one who was born was not made lucky by the day, but he gave good luck to the day on which he was graciously pleased to be born.
"Because even the day of his birth contains the mystery of his light. That, you see, is what the apostle says: The night is far advanced, while the day has drawn near; let us throw off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us walk decently as in the day (Rom 13:12-13). Let us recognize the day, and let us be the day. We were night, you see, when we were living as unbelievers. And this unbelief, which had covered the whole world as a kind of night, was to be diminished by the growth of faith; that’s why, on the day we celebrate the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the night begins to be encroached upon, and the day to grow longer.
“So, brothers and sisters, let us keep this day as a festival; not, like the unbelievers, because of that sun up there in the sky, but because of the one who made that sun. That which was the Word, you see, became flesh, in order to be able for our sakes to be under the sun. Under the sun, indeed, in the flesh; but in divine greatness over the entire universe, in which he placed the sun. Now, though, he is also over that sun even in the flesh, the sun which people worship instead of God, because in their mental blindness they cannot see the true sun of justice.”
*
What’s interesting about Augustine’s Christmas-Day sermons is that when he wrote them, the solstice occurred December 21st. The Julian calendar fixed the solar year at precisely 365 ¼ days. We now know that the actual length of the solar year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds, just under eleven minutes shorter than the Julian year.
This means that in the space of 131 years, the Julian year fell behind the solar year by one day, and the solstices and equinoxes were occurring a day before their civil date in the calendar.
By A.D. 325, the solstice and equinox anticipated their civil dates by four days. Hence, to establish the uniform observance of Easter (Pasche), which is determined by the vernal equinox, the Council of Nicaea fixed the ecclesiastical date of the spring equinox at March 21st to coincide with the actual astronomical event. But since the four points of the year stand in fixed relation to one another, the winter solstice had occured four days earlier, at December 21st .
This means that when Augustine preached his Christmas sermons, actual connection between December 25th and the winter solstice had ceased to exist as much as four hundred years earlier. Selden (Theanthropos) took this as evidence that belief in the December 25th birth of Christ must have originated very early on, in apostolic times, while the association of the solstice with December 25th was still popularly retained, long before Nicaea when the distance between these events was widely known and understood.
So, no textual attestation that the solstice was a religious celebration for the imperial Romans, but early corroboration that the Winter Solstice was recognized for its symbolic (or per Augustine, intentional and sacred) association with the Nativity. No Mithraic connection that i can see there.
That’s easy, because I think that Mithras was a fictional character. (Not like Jesus, but more like Perseus.)
But I’ve always been taught that the Romans celebrated Mithras’ birthday on December 25, and if this was something someone made up in 1875, I think this would already have been well-known to us all.
You’re pretty up on the Greek stuff: a friend of mine claims that Persephone’s season in Hades is actually summer, when the land is barren – hot and parched – not winter, as we are taught. He claims that English translators switched the season from summer to winter, to match English views of what the barren season is.
Have you ever heard this one? I think it’s jack cracked, and stupid, and we all would have known about it by now. Also, it contradicts the living experience of at least one SDMB member, who says that, yes, winters in Greece are barren, and summer is the season for growing crops. It also appears to contradict Hesiod’s Works and Days, which tells when to plant.
I’ve been trying to track down this one for years now; I’ve written to several University classics professors, and all I’ve ever gotten from them was the traditional orthodoxy: Persephone goes to Hades during the winter, and returns in the spring, when all the world comes back to life again as Demeter honors her.
Any help you can give me here would be mighty appreciated!
