avi

Here's a different thought:

a. how does one define "the traditional Jesus"? Would that be the Lutheran Jesus? the Catholic Jesus? the Mormon Jesus?
the Eastern Orthodox Jesus? the 7th day Adventist Jesus?

Or, would that be the Jesus of Mark? or the Jesus of John?
Or, the Jesus of Paul, of course?

b. how does one claim the traditional anything? Don't we depend upon written documents to explain tradition?
Which gospel do you employ to define "the" (traditional Jesus)?
Upon which Greek version of that specific gospel does JonA rely?
Where contradiction exists, regarding "traditional" Jesus, how does one decide whether to accept the Byzantine version, or the Alexandrian version?

illustration of this problem:

The singular most event in the life of Jesus, traditionally, was his supposed resurrection, post mortem, after he had been crucified. It would seem very appropriate, in honoring the life of one compelled to undergo such a painful demise, to focus on the final days, or even, the final hours of this "traditional" Jesus.

So, we arrive at this simple point: The Lord's supper, his last meal prior to denunciation, arrest, torture, suffering and execution.

From where did this "traditional" story of the Lord's supper, emerge?

Is it not very clear, that this "traditional" final meal, 1Corinthians 11:23, of the "traditional Jesus" was a fictional event, an event transcribed, as Paul explained, upon receiving a private message from Jesus up in heaven?

What is the medical term employed to describe perception in the absence of sensation, i.e. as it relates to folks who "hear things", oh, yes, hallucinations......JonA suggests limiting discussion to "traditional" Jesus, in order to avoid the issue of whether or not one relies upon hallucinatory revelations to create this "traditional" Jesus.

But, wait, Paul was not psychotic, was he? No. He never heard any voices from Heaven or anywhere else. Paul was simply a plain vanilla, ordinary, run of the mill forger and intellectual property thief, wasn't he?

Doesn't the report we possess, of "the traditional" Jesus' final meal derive exclusively from Mithraism, a cult engaged in devotion, long before Jesus' nativity? Did not Paul simply purloin that passage from that cult?


http://www.farvardyn.com/mithras4.php

avi

Toto

Andrew Criddle and Roger Pearse spent some effort in trying to track down the source for this quote. It is not reliable. See this thread.

It is possible that the last supper was borrowed from Mithraism, but there is no evidence at this point.

Roger Pearse

There is a thread somewhere about this (not the one Toto posted), in which I investigated this at some length.

* Vermaseren never wrote this. The book is an English translation, made very badly by some publisher's translator, from the Dutch, which contains material not found in the Dutch.
* Vermaseren himself is only referencing a pair of articles by Franz Cumont (which Andrew Criddle located, and so sparked the whole thing off).
* Cumont referenced two Garshuni texts -- that is, medieval Arabic Christian texts.
* The texts do not refer to Mithras in any way, and Cumont knew this. His own phrasing attributed the saying to Zoroaster, and speculated that possibly these very late texts might have had, via Zoroastrianism, some information about Mithras.
* Vermaseren himself seems to have misunderstood "Le Zardusht" to mean the Persian Zardusht-nama (which does not contain any such material).
* But the supposed Zoroaster sayings in fact come from two medieval texts filled with supposed predictions of Christ by pagans. All of them are fictitious, as far as I know. Such collections of "sayings" attributed to famous people are known as gnomologia, in the jargon.
* I obtained copies of the texts (both in the Mingana library in Birmingham) and had them translated. One of them is here, the other here, so you can see for yourself what they say. Other Arabic Christian gnomologia texts are next to them on the index page, and worth a look, so you can see that we are dealing with a genre.
* Cumont himself only had access to an unpublished Italian translation of one of them, which I tracked down among his papers. So the book you've found consists of a bad English translator who can't understand a book in Dutch by Vermaseren, who didn't understand Cumont's French quite correctly, who himself was using an Italian translation of a Garshuni text made by someone else.

More details on request. From time to time I think of publishing formally this piece of research, for such it was; but the world doesn't really need more crappy papers from amateurs, and I probably won't get around to it.

The reason why the saying sounds like a Christian one, is because it undoubtedly is one, placed in the mouth of a pagan sometime after the 9th century.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

I did look for the thread, but the search does not bring it up. It must have been too long ago, and been deleted.

Toto

Nothing is deleted. I remember that thread - I'll try to find it.

Toto

Check the archives:

M. J. VERMASEREN, Mithras de geheimzinnige god, (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1959)

Mithras Quote

avi

Hi Roger!!!

Many thanks to you, Toto, and Andrew Criddle, for clarifying the situation.

I have undoubtedly erred by performing insufficient research on this topic. I believe that you have hit the nail on the head with your succinct assertion, that my claim of Paul's theft of Mithraic traditions to give a boost to the legend of Jesus, is based on a false assumption regarding the original sources.

Most likely, you are correct on this issue. For sure, I am uninformed, at a minimum. Here is another reference, which I omitted yesterday, thinking it redundant, but in retrospect, I can see that I require much more investigation on this question of the original traditions of Mithraism, including this business of eating wafers but calling it human flesh, and drinking wine, but calling it human blood. The other aspects, virgin birth, dying on the cross, birth on 25 December, do seem rather more than mere coincidence. One does wonder, at this point, whether Paul absconded with written, rather than mere oral traditions, or, alternatively, as you have pointed out, Roger, the sources we possess for Mithra, as for Mani, are simply rewrites issued by medieval Christian scribes....

Thanks again for having introduced a clear perspective on this issue related to traditional views of Jesus.

Here is a summary from a Persian source, with a slightly different slant:
regards,

avi

Roger Pearse

Glad to learn those threads are still around!

Roger Pearse

Not your fault, in any way. It required a LOT of research of unpublished sources to get to the bottom of that one.

That part is derived entirely from Vermaseren, as you have already seen, and in turn, therefore, from the medieval Arabic Christian sayings sources rather than from ancient sources about Mithras.

Mithras was born from a rock, wearing a hat and carrying a dagger in one hand and a naked flame in the other.

No ancient source associates Mithras with 25 Dec. The idea of a connection goes back to some careless writing by Franz Cumont, who, if read closely, merely supposes that the solar festival on 25 Dec. 'must' have included Mithras.

Mithras is not recorded as dying at all in any ancient source. He was a god, you see.

The cult of Mithras was a private cult, never a state cult.

True. Most of the material is in Rome itself.

Largely true, but there is more literature than we might think, and Julian the Apostate is not a Christian source.

There is no actual evidence of a connection, unfortunately. The origins of the Roman cult are shrouded in mystery, but the archaeology points to an origin in Rome ca. 50 AD. Pseudo-oriental cults were not unknown in the Roman world; and the mass of literature which the Greeks attributed to Zoroaster has no actual connection to Zoroastrianism at all. Think of Lobsang Rhampa for a modern analogy.

Indeed I sometimes wonder, if Mithras had been called Freddius instead, whether anyone would connect the ancient Persian cult of Mitra with the Roman cult of Freddius.

No ancient source says so, and the limited material in the literature hardly suggests this. What lies behind this claim, I think, is the old claim of Ernest Renan that the world would have become Mithraist if Christianity had failed. But Renan lived before Cumont had collected the sources, and he knew almost nothing about Mithras.

This is what is called misrepresentation by selective quotation, mixed with falsehoods.

* Mithras was not born of a virgin, but of a rock.
* The question of being celibate is raised in no ancient source, so is someone's imagination.
* Many cults, ancient and modern, involve ritual washings. To call it "baptism" is to mislead.
* Mithras had seven different ritual meals, one of which was bread and water (not wine). I don't recall that "marked with a cross" thing, tho.
* No ancient source talks about wine as the blood of Mithras.
* No ancient source says Mithras held Sunday sacred.
* No ancient source associates Mithras with 25 Dec.
* I don't recall the term "brother". Priests were certainly called "Pater", however. The term is not specific to Christianity or Mithras.
* I don't recall the list of items for the pater.

What is not present, in any of this, is the real mythos of Mithras, which is about killing the cosmic bull, shaking hands with the sun, etc.

No ancient source says so.

The early writers actually say that the devil looked at the prophecies of the messiah in the bible and set up cults to emulate them.

The cult of Mithras had ceased to exist by the end of the 4th century. Mithraea do have destruction damage; but the archaeology says the cult was on its way out at the start of the 4th century.

Churches did not tend to be built on top of temples in this period, but rather reused secular buildings like basilicas, according to R. Lanciani. Whether that is so I do not know.

Beware: there is a great quantity of rubbish around on the web about Mithras. It does none of us any good to get the raw facts wrong.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Roger Pearse

Toto,

This thread seems to have vanished from the list of threads in BC&H.

Roger