Freethought & Rationalism Archive

andrewcriddle · 04-20-2007, 09:56 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mithras

The Romans, Greeks and Persians had been trading goods, warfare and ideas from Cyrus et al. As we have evidence of silk from China in Rome, why also would not the concept of Mitra also have spread? Yes the pirates may have been one route but not the only one, Romans liked collecting gods!

The problem is that the worship of Mitra in Indo-Iranian religion, seems very different from Mithraism in the Roman empire (I say seems because we have only limited knowledge of either). There is clearly some connection, but it may well not be a straightforward one.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle · 04-20-2007, 10:40 AM

But the Romans deliberately made the connections!

Quote:

Its most frequent use, however, is in connexion with the religious development of antiquity, when it denotes the tendency, especially prominent from the 2nd to the 4th centuries of the Christian era, to simplify and unify the various pagan religions. During this period, as a result of the intimate knowledge of the world's religions made possible by the gathering of every known cult of importance into the religious system of the Roman Empire, belief in the identity of many deities which resembled each other, and indeed in the essential identity of all, received a special impulse. Not only were various forms of the same deity, such as, for example, Jupiter Capitolinus and Jupiter Latiaris, recognized as being really the same under different aspects, but even the gods of different nations were seen to be manifestations of a single great being. Roman Jupiter, Greek Zeus, Persian Mithras and Phrygian Attis were one.

What is fascinating are these claims that what mythicists are saying is new - it isn't!

The problem was xianity making a truth claim that Jesus is the way truth and life - contradicting the Roman eclectic approach - do what you like so long as you give obeisance to the Emperor - Pliny is about this issue, and transferring the one true god from Zeus Jupiter Mitra Attis to a xianised yhwh (what is the god of xianity - is it more platonic than hebrew?)

And the xians won and called all the true gods devil inspired.

As I understand it the Pope by condemning the HJ theory is reinstating the classic xian fully god fully man and both denying the links to Mitra Apollo Mary etc that the Romans explicitly made - in roughly the same way as Hinduism and modern theologians talk about faces of god.

And this fully god fully man position is by definition mythical.

So a more interesting question is why did this xian god win, or did it, has it just hidden its varied roots?

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