lycanthrope

any other reasons why the gnostic went extinct?

Toto

I don't think it is dishonest if you are clear about what you are doing. A birth from a rock may be sufficiently close to a virgin birth for the purposes of comparative religion.

Roger Pearse

Well, if someone can't tell the difference between a rock and a virgin, perhaps they'd better be chaperoned to parties. Otherwise they may be found trying to chat up the doorstep!

Toto

Lots of people could do with a chaperone.

I understand that the ancients thought that rocks had a spirit in side of them, because a spark came out when the rock was struck. This is probably enough basis for a comparative mythologist to tie together Mithras, Peter, and a host of other themes. If you are just looking for broad patterns, this is significant. If you are looking for specific evidence that one religion was influenced or copied another, it is not.

JohnG

Plutarch indicates the Cilician pirates of the 1st century BCE were Mithras worshippers. After their defeat they were brought to Rome. There is a gap between them and the artifacts from later periods, but I highly doubt it disappeared and then reappeared again, it was likely a very underground type of thing. That is a fact about Mithraism.

As far as being born of a rock, born of a virgin, born of the dirt, whatever, all these god figures of the time enjoyed births that were supernatural. What better way to start a story of a super-person. It was a popular theme in story telling.

JohnG

Either date, no matter (and I thought I was being generous to the Christian POV) there is still enough evidence from Plutarch that Mithra worshippers were in the area before the advent of Christianity. Considering our limited knowledge of foundational Christianity, and Mithra secrecy, both are foggy, but based on what we do know it would seem that Mithra worship was seeded before Jesus worship. Again (repeating myself), getting back to the OP, the tektonics argument states that because the ancient Persian Mithra and the Roman Mithra are two different superheroes, the Cumont theory of them being connected (which is only disputed through opinion based on lack of artifact) is false, and therefore Christianity wins.That's so weird because it seems very likely that even the later Roman Mithra worship still predates Christian gospels.

If there were pirates in the area that worshipped Mithra in the first century BCE then there was Mithra worship in the area before the 1st century BCE. Simple.

To a religious person, I would expect them to fight tooth and nail to cut any links between the two, but to a historian, it really doesnt matter. A historian sees a common cultural mythology. Nothing out of the ordinary. There are oodles of examples of borrowed cultural symbolism in Judeo/Christian mythology...gods, angels, demons, prayer, souls, heaven, hell, supernatural births, commandments, sin, sacrifice...and on and on...

gstafleu

Correct, I pointed out that a virgin is not a rock in my posting. You seem to have missed that--reading is hard, I know :devil1:.

So, to repeat and perhaps clarify, in both cases, Mithras and Jesus, we have a miraculous birth. That, I would say, is beyond controversy. Also in both cases we seem to have a birth without a (human) male involved. Unfortunately we don't have a word in English for that idea (birth/conception without male involvement), and something like "virgin birth," which is one example of such a dysandrous birth, may be the closest we can colloquially come.

Not all miraculous births are dysandrous . Consider Athena's birth, which--Athena popping out of Zeus' head--happened without female participation. Aphrodite's birth was also of the miraculous kind: Aphrodite was born of the sea foam after Cronus cut off Ouranos' genitals and threw them behind him into the sea [thus Wikipedia]. Here there was male and female participation, although not of the human kind.

All of which goes to show that one can have an intelligent look at various kinds of miraculous birth, and compare the similarities and differences between them.

Gerard Stafleu

andrewcriddle

The problem is how reliable is Plutarch (writing c 100 CE) about the actual religious practices of people before 50 BCE.

Prima Facie this is a late first century CE legend about the origins of Mithraism. It has IMO a probable basis in two real facts.
a/ Mithraism did at some time prior to Plutarch spread from the general area of Cilicia into the wider Roman Empire.
b/ Pompey did resettle pirates from the general area of Cilicia into the wider Roman Empire.
However the absence of any evidence of the practice of Mithraism in the Roman Empire between 50 BCE and 50 CE makes it likely that the spread of Mithraism from Cilicia to Italy was well after Pompey's time.

Even in Cilicia and Commagene, Mithraism (in the form known in the Roman Empire) probably did not develop until a number of years after Pompey's campaign against the pirates.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

I share some of your reservations about the reliance placed by the tektonics article on David Ulansey's speculations about the origins of Mithraism, and I agree that making Mithraism post-Hipparchus is quite compatible with Mithraism being pre-Christian.

However, I can't see anything in the tektonics article claiming that Mithraism is later than Christianity (it does claim, correctly, that our evidence for Mithraism is later than the origins of Christianity but that is another matter). The article is primarily claiming that Christianity did not borrow from Mithraism because there are simply too few real similarities to suggest otherwise.

Andrew Criddle

figuer

Wasn't Judaism itself developed during the period of the Babilonian exile when there was a direct contact with the Medo-Persian conquerors?