Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

to Zindler, the cult figure of the Mithraists, the Persian god Mithras, was said to have been born on December 25 to a virgin; his cult was headed by a ruler who was known as a pope, located on the Vatican hill; the leaders of the religion wore miters and celebrated a sacred meal to commemorate the atoning death of their savior God, who was said to have been raised from the dead on a Sunday. Sound familiar?

The cult was centered, Zindler claims, in Tarsus (the hometown of the apostle Paul). But then the astrologers involved with the cult came to realize that the zodiacal age of Mithra was drawing to a close since the equinox was moving into Pisces. And so they “left their cult centers in Phrygia and Cilicia…to go to Palestine to see if they could locate not just the King of the Jews but the new Time Lord” (that is, they invented Jesus).25 Zindler says this in all sincerity, and so far as I can tell, he really believes it. What evidence does he give for his claim that the Mithraists moved their religion to Palestine to help them find the king of the Jews? None at all. And so we might ask: what evidence could he have cited, had he wanted to do so? It’s the same answer. There is no evidence. This is made up.

Scholars of the Mithraic mysteries readily admit that, as with most mystery religions, we do not know a good deal about Mithraism—or at least nearly as much as we would like to know. The Mithraists left no books behind to explain what they did in their religion and what they believed. Almost all of our evidence is archaeological, as a large number of the cult’s sacred shrines (called mithraea) have been uncovered that include a bull-slaying statue (called a tauroctony). These statues portray what was evidently the central act within the mythology of the group. The cult figure Mithras is astride a kneeling bull, his bent knee on its back, pulling its head toward him while he himself looks away and plunges a knife into its neck. A dog is shown lapping up the blood from the wound, which has an ear of wheat coming out with it; also present is a snake, and a scorpion is seen biting the bull’s scrotum. On either side of the statue is a human torchbearer, one holding his torch upward in the normal position, the other holding his downward.

There are enormous debates among Mithraic scholars about what all this means. It clearly involves the study of the zodiac, and a number of interesting theories have been propounded. Unfortunately, we do not have Mithraic texts that explain it all to us, let alone texts that indicate that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25 and that he died to atone for sins only to be raised on a Sunday.26

As I pointed out earlier, the reason a religion like Mithraism is called a mystery cult by scholars is that the followers of the religion were bound by a vow of secrecy and so never revealed the mysteries of their religion, either their practices or their beliefs.27 It is true that later writers sometimes indicated what, in their opinion, took place in the religion. But these later writers were not involved personally in the cult, and historians are highly reluctant to take them at their word as if they had real sources of information. They, like their modern counterparts, were often simply speculating.

This is true as well of some of our Christian sources who claim that there were similarities between their own religion and the mystery religions. These later authors, such as the church father Tertullian, started making such claims for very specific reasons. It was not that they had done research and interviewed followers of these religions. It was because they wanted pagans to realize that Christianity was not all that different from what other pagans said and did in their religions so that there would be no grounds for singling out Christians and persecuting them. The Christian sources that claim to know something about these mysteries, in other words, had a vested interest in making others think that the pagan religions were in many ways like Christianity. For that reason—plus the fact that they would not have had reliable sources of information—they generally cannot be trusted.

Many mythicists, however, take what these later sources say at face value and stress the obvious: Christian claims about Jesus were a lot like those of other cult figures, down to the details. But they have derived the details from sources that—in the judgment of the scholars who are actually experts in this material—simply cannot be relied upon.

Other Problems with the Parallels

There are other problems with the mythicists’ claims that Jesus was simply invented as another one of the ancient divine men. In many instances, for example, the alleged parallels between the stories of Jesus and those of pagan gods or divine men are not actually close. When Christians said that Jesus was born of a virgin, for instance, they came to mean that Jesus’s mother had never had sex. In most of the cases of the divine men, when the father is a god and the mother is a mortal, sex is definitely involved. The child is literally part human and part deity. The mortal woman is no virgin; she has had divine sex.

In other cases the parallels are simply made up. Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin? So far as I know, there are no parallels to this central Christian claim. What has been invented here is not the Christian Jesus but the mythicist claims about Jesus. I am not saying that I think Jesus really did die to atone for the sins of the world. I am saying that the Christian claims about Jesus’s atoning sacrifice were not lifted