The number of the twelve apostles, which formed the retinue of Jesus during his mission, is that of the signs, and of the secondary genii, the tutelary gods of the Zodiacal signs which the sun passes through in his annual revolution. It is that of the twelve gods of the Romans, each of whom presided over a month. The Greeks, the Egyptians, the Persians, each had their twelve gods, as the Christian followers of Mithra had their twelve apostles. The chief of the twelve Genii of the annual revolution had the barque and the keys of time, the same as the chief of the secondary gods of the Romans or Janus, after whom St. Peter, Bar-Jona, with his barque and keys, is modelled.
Higgins doesn't appear to give any citation for the above information.
Thank you.
Is it possible that this is really the root of the tree? That the sentence originally ran "the Christians had their twelve apostles" and was then clumsily edited to insert "(followers of Mithra)" or something of the kind?
I suspect that this might really be the origin point!
“Mithra had 12 disciples.” — This is based on the carving above which shows Mithras surrounded by 12 signs of the Zodiac. There is no reason to conclude that signs of the Zodiac are “disciples.” Remember, there is no written record of Mithra’s existence from the 1st to 4th centuries when the cult thrived. The earliest writings are from outsiders recording their observations. So most of the wild assertions of Zeitgeist are just being based on this piece of art. Franz Cumont, considered the first great researcher of Mithras claimed that the disciples in the relief were actually people dressed up as Zodiac signs, showing how ludicrous the effort to link Mithras to Jesus can get.
Remain to know who was the first to "interpret" 12 disciples from that carving.
Until today I would have said Acharya S. But open to better ideas. The mention of Cumont in that quote is interesting - I wonder where that is? Will start to look now. (It's bound to be in the online "Mysteries of Mithra")
Btw Mithras is depicted in various reliefs with the stars, planets, and, of course, the zodiac.
the evil Mr. Hindley wrote:According to Martin Larson, The Story of Christian Origins (1977), page 678 (chapter XII, endnote 15), the source for many of the claims is Texts et Monuments figures relatifs aux Mysteries de Mithra, by Franz Cumont (2 vols, 1896-99). I think there was a 2nd edition entitled Die Mysterien des Mithra ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (1900, I think). As far as I can tell, the 2nd revised edition of the French translation was entitled Les mystères de Mithra (about 1902). There was an English translation by Thomas J. McCormack entitled The mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont. Tr. from the second revised French edition (1903).
Maybe Die Mysterien des Mithra ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit has nothing to do with Die Mysterien des Mithra ein Beitrag zur Religionsgeschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit. I have to return to work, but I have to assume that the ET is available as an OCR scanned PDF through archive.org.
The book The mysteries of Mithra, by Franz Cumont. Tr. from the second revised French edition says:
The following pages reproduce the "Conclusions" printed at the end of the first volume of my large work, Texts et Monuments figures relatifs aux Mysteries de Mithra (Brussels: H. Lamertin).* Stripped of the notes and references which there served to establish them, they are confined to epitomizing and co-ordinating the sum-total of the knowledge we possess concerning the origin and the characteristic features of the Mithraic religion. They will furnish, in fact, all the material necessary for readers desirous of general information on this subject.
*Large octavo, 931 pages, 507 illustrations and 9 photo gravure plates. This work, which is a monument of scholarship
and industry, is a complete descriptive and critical collection of all the Mithraic texts, inscriptions, references, and monuments that have been recovered from antiquity. T. J. McC.
So, probably ALL English authors who cite Mithra parallels get it from this ET. I guess we're out of luck on specifics unless we all agree to learn French. or at least pretend to.
DCH
Last edited by DCHindley on Fri May 02, 2014 7:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Roger, it is libel and calumny to falsely accuse Acharya of making stuff up and your obsession with constantly smearing her ruins your own credibility in the process. It appears to me that your agenda is only to shore up your Christian faith and euphoria at all costs.
Besides, you should've learned that lesson by now after the Bart Ehrman fiasco of falsely accusing her making stuff up, which even R. Carrier and Dr. Price defended her on.
Acharya cited Higgins, Cumont, Ulansey and more so, you do owe her an apology for the libel and calumny and yet, you wonder why she is disgusted by you when you're always out to smear her or trash her in any way you can, for example:
My own experience at this forum proves to me that it's impossible to have an objective and adult conversation on Acharya's work here, which is why Roger, Godfrey and others get a free pass to trash her and her work however they wish. It's disgusting but, my own experience is if you call them out on it the mods will remove your posts.
Roger Pearse was proven wrong repeatedly at Acharya's forum but, here at this forum Roger pretends like it never happened: Mithra: The Pagan Christ
"See Exodus 39:9-14: "...they made the breastplate... And they set in it four rows of stones... And the stones were according to the names of the children of Israel, twelve...according to the twelve tribes."
As Josephus says (Antiquities, 3.8): "And for the twelve stones, whether we understand by them the months, or whether we understand the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the zodiac, we shall not be mistaken in their meaning." (Josephus/Whiston, 75.)
Earlier than Josephus, Philo ("On the Life of Moses," 12) had made the same comments regarding Moses: "Then the twelve stones on the breast, which are not like one another in colour, and which are divided into four rows of three stones in each, what else can they be emblems of, except of the circle of the zodiac?" (Philo/Duke, 99.)"
- Christ in Egypt, 261-2
Last edited by Maximos on Wed May 07, 2014 7:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
Roger Pearse has a link to a Google Books version (in other words, not OCR) of volume 1 (the Critical Introduction) of Cumont's Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (1899), the latter part of which was a summary of the source materials found in volume 2 (1896, and no that date is not a mistake).
This summary was later published separately as Mystères de Mithra in 1900, 2nd edition 1902, with some footnotes to the original sources, at least as found in volume 2 of Textes et monuments.
This was translated into German as Die Mysterien des Mithra (1903), which appears to preserve the footnotes of the French edition.
The English translation, The Mysteries of Mithra (also 1903) preserved absolutely NO footnotes, and just contains Cumonts interpretations asserted as fact. An OCR version can be found at archive.org:
This ET seems to be the source of pretty much all the Christ-Mithra parallels confidently cited as fact by popular English language writers (I will name no names). But you read the sources and decide.
the inscrutable DCHindley wrote:Roger Pearse has a link to a Google Books version (in other words, not OCR) of volume 1 (the Critical Introduction) of Cumont's Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux Mystères de Mithra (1899), the latter part of which was a summary of the source materials found in volume 2 (1896, and no that date is not a mistake).
I went ahead and OCR scanned all 415 pages of volume 1, and even set one of the recognition languages to be the one called French. I threw in Greek, Latin, German and English, which probably just gummed up the recognition process. I've saved the FineReader file so I can fix this if necessary.
Anyhow, since the English book, The Mysteries of Mithra, is based on the second half of volume 1 above, I hope to match the footnotes (in French) to the English book just mentioned and at least get a faint but detectable idea of WHAT THE HECK the evidence is supposed to be!
I can't believe the no one seems to have summarized this evidence in English, but I strongly suspect that it is because it is COMPLETE HOOEY! We common people call these parallels, how you say, "highly imaginative."
DCHindley wrote:So, probably ALL English authors who cite Mithra parallels get it from this ET. I guess we're out of luck on specifics unless we all agree to learn French. or at least pretend to.
.......
snip
...
Anyhow, since the English book, The Mysteries of Mithra, is based on the second half of volume 1 above, I hope to match the footnotes (in French) to the English book just mentioned and at least get a faint but detectable idea of WHAT THE HECK the evidence is supposed to be!
I can't believe the no one seems to have summarized this evidence in English, but I strongly suspect that it is because it is COMPLETE HOOEY! We common people call these parallels, how you say, "highly imaginative."
In view of the common denominator for most known Mithraic remains, I found this article on a Persian cave quite fascinating: http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/karafto-caves
Was it used for Mithraic practices? What do the Arabic scribbles explain?
I recommend the photographs of the Greek inscription on the caves' walls, from 3rd or 4th century BCE!!! Question in my mind, why would someone write a graffito dedicated to Herakles, (resembles the infamous graffito at Dura Europos), in Persia? Why not an inscription dedicated to Zoroaster? Why would it have been written in Greek, rather than Persian? Could this cave have been visited by Alexander's troops, marching through Persia, en route to Afghanistan? Doesn't the Greek inscription imply that someone earlier, had written something else on the cave wall, something that triggered the need to implore Herakles to protect the cave's contents? Perhaps those were wounded soldiers? Was this cave used as a field hospital for Alexander's army? Or, was the evil seeking entrance to the cave, evil from which Herakles had been summoned to offer protection, the practice of Mithraism?
I am curious now, not so much to learn about the enormous compendium of Cumont's accomplishments, culminating in his visit to Dura Europos, but, rather on studying Plutarch, to learn whether or not he addresses, in the late first century CE, or first decades of second century CE, some of these "Christian" features, (twelve disciples!) which have been elaborated above, and which have been identified as parameters ostensibly Christian, borrowed by subsequent authors and attributed, falsely one imagines, to a Mithraic belief system.
richard carrier and harry mcall seem to agree that their is something pagan about christianity.
quote:
Christian apologists strongly deny Greco-Roman pagan religious influence on the Jewish development of Jesus Christ, so any Christian apologist should have no trouble explaining the following paragraph from The Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 3 The Early Roman Period.
“If the contribution of epigraphy is disappointing in the sphere of synagogal management, in other areas it has much to offer. For a start, it adds to our knowledge of the impact of Graeco-Roman culture upon Palestine Judaism. Among the Beth Shearim inscriptions, for instance, there is one extended metrical epitaph that makes clear use of both Homeric language and concepts – e.g. Moira krataie (Powerful Fate). And in the naves of several Galilean synagogues, most notably that at Hammath Tiberias, we find complex mosaic pavements, the iconography of which is purely pagan in origin. In the center of each pavement is depicted a male radiate figure looking suspiciously like the Greek sun-god, Apollo, around whom circle the Signs of the Zodiac and the Four Seasons, personified, in the normal Graeco-Roman fashion, as a young women. For each figure, except the Apollo-lookalike, a neat label in Hebrew is supplied, the assumption being, presumably, that not everyone in the congregation would be able to identify these alien figures. While these compositions must surely have been regarded as entirely compatible with Judaism, their presence in these synagogues is astonishing. That figural representation was tolerated by Diasporan Jews is shown by, inter alia, the reference to zographia in one of the donor inscriptions in the Sardis synagogue and the Roman epitah, mentioned above, of the zographos, Eudoxios. Nothing, however, in the literary sources of Palestinian Judaism prepares us for the appearance in the homeland’s ‘holy places’ of these rich arrays of captioned pagan figures.” (1)
Margaret Williams, “The Contribution of Jewish Inscriptions to the Study of Judaism” Pages 75 - 93 inThe Cambridge History of Judaism: Volume 3 The Early Roman Period. Editied by William Horbury, W.D. Davies and John Sturdy Cambridge University Press, 1999. Part II: Inscriptions from Judea / Palestine Relating to Judaism, p. 87 – 88.
It's truly odd (for Keith's apologetic point of view) that while the authors of the Gospels - who were very interested in religion and who could read and write in Greek - had strangely totally no knowledge, nor ever read of any Classical Greek religious literature (even though Jesus is called the Logos in the Gospel of John and the Early Church Fathers were heavily Neo-Platonism to from theology).
Inanna Wasn’t Crucified, She Was Just Nailed Up Dead
Casey only addresses one thing I have ever written relating to mythicism, ever. Seriously. In this entire book, he never mentions a single argument, claim, or passage in Proving History, or in any other book, article, or blog post I’ve ever written, pertaining to the topic of this book. Except one single small passage in Not the Impossible Faith: my discussion of the Innana death-and-resurrection narrative (NIF, pp. 18-19; Casey, 7-5983ff.). This is most strange, because in NIF there are a lot of refutations of assumptions he relies on in his book (such as that Luke is “an outstanding historian by ancient standards,” so true he had to say it twice, verbatim: 3-2619; 3-2683; see NIF, ch. 7, for a gut-check on that; OHJ, ch. 9, for a groin-check). Yet he never responds to those refutations or even seems to be aware of them. Likewise all my preemptive refutations of his arguments in PH, which I’ve noted already.
And then the one single thing of mine he does address, he gets wrong in almost every way.
First, I never argued in NIF that “Jesus cannot have been crucified” because Inanna was; in fact I there explicitly say I am not saying the crucifixion of Jesus was inspired by that. Yet Casey imputes to me the other argument. That’s worse than a straw man, because it actually misleads his readers, who will now think I made a ridiculous argument, which in fact I didn’t. Indeed, nowhere in NIF do I even argue that Jesus didn’t exist (to the contrary, NIF consistently assumes he did). He even tries to admit this, but characterizes it as “going back” on myself (7-5994), when in fact it was simply my position, not a retreat from some “other” position (which again basically makes him a liar).
In the passage in question I am explicitly responding to the argument that “no one would worship a crucified deity, therefore Jesus must have actually risen from the dead.” Casey surely rejects such fundamentalist balderdash as I do, yet he does not tell his readers that this is the only context in which I brought up the Inanna narrative. Inanna is an example of a humiliated, killed and crucified deity, who was nevertheless widely worshipped. I seriously doubt Casey can honestly have a problem with that. Because it being true has no bearing on whether Jesus existed–unless you argue that “no one would worship a crucified deity, therefore Jesus must have actually been crucified.” Fortunately Casey doesn’t appear to make that argument. (Because my argument in that case would be correct.) So why my treatment of Inanna concerns him in this book is hard to discern. And he never explains any of this to his readers, who are thus mislead into thinking I argue that Inanna’s tale is an argument against the historicity of Jesus. It’s not. I think it can bear on the subject, but not like that. And I didn’t even discuss that possibility in NIF.
Second, Casey suffers from concrete thinking (see next section), so badly that he thinks Inanna can’t be a crucified deity because she was a vegetation goddess (7-5994). That is a non sequitur. That’s like saying she can’t be a crucified deity because she’s a woman. Or not Jewish. The differences are irrelevant. We unmistakably have a god descending from heaven, into another supernatural realm below (the underworld), being tried, executed, humiliated, and crucified (her naked corpse nailed up), and then rising from the dead three days later and ascending back to heaven (it also has this whole thing being her plan from the start). Scholars therefore cannot claim such narratives did not predate Christianity. They most certainly did. Whether they had any influence on Christianity is a separate question. But it should certainly be relevant that this narrative was part of a major cult in the Middle East still practiced in Christian times and known to the Jews of Judea (as I show in NIF, a fact Casey does not mention).
Third, Casey is such a concrete thinker he cannot fathom that killing someone and nailing them up was ideologically comparable to Roman crucifixion. Thus he declares, absurdly, “It should be obvious that this has nothing to do with the Roman penalty of crucifixion” (7-5994). Not that it should have to (no one argues that Inanna was crucified by Romans). But even so, Casey does not cite or even seem to be aware of any of the scholarship establishing that in fact all the words for “crucifixion” were so variable as to definitely include exactly this sequence of events, that the Romans even highly varied their practice of crucifixion enough to include it, and that Jews also crucified their dead in exactly this way (execution, then hanging on a post). I document this from primary sources and cite the peer reviewed scholarship that agrees with me in my chapter on the burial of Jesus in The Empty Tomb. I add even more in OHJ.
And Inanna is not alone. Romulus, Zalmoxis, and Osiris provide similar narratives of deaths and resurrections (Casey never once mentions these, even though I survey them extensively in NIF), and we know there were many more. Casey’s treatment of the dying-and-rising gods mytheme as a whole is muddled and confused and doesn’t really go anywhere (Ehrman tried harder, though fell harder in result). Compare it with what I have already written here and here and here, and you’ll see why it’s wholly inadequate. My treatment in OHJ just makes that all the clearer.
GakuseiDon wrote:Higgins doesn't appear to give any citation for the above information.
Thank you.
Is it possible that this is really the root of the tree? That the sentence originally ran "the Christians had their twelve apostles" and was then clumsily edited to insert "(followers of Mithra)" or something of the kind?
I suspect that this might really be the origin point!
I'm not sure what Higgins means by "Christian followers of Mithra had their twelve apostles". I scanned through several pages of his book in Google books, but I wasn't able to connect it to any of his other ideas on Mithraism or Christianity. Acharya S simply repeats Higgins here (in the section of "The Christ Conspiracy" called "The Disciples are the Signs of the Zodiac") without further comment. Perhaps Maximos or Robert Tulip can help out with further information on what "Christian followers of Mithra had their twelve apostles" mean? Is it a typo by Higgins, or does Acharya S accurately reproduce Higgins' views there?
I also checked Freke and Gandy's "The Jesus Mysteries", another popularizer of parallels between Mithras and many other gods with Jesus. They write on page 42:
During the initiation ceremony in the Mysteries of Mithras, 12 disciples surrounded the godman, just as the 12 disciples surrounded Jesus. The Mithraic disciples were dressed up to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac and circled the initiate, who represented Mithras himself. (121)
[Note: Footnote 121 reads: "121. See Goodwin, J.(1981). Godwin has collected numerous depictions of mystery gods encircled by the zodiac." No further information supplied by Freke and Gandy on how they know of the Mithraic initiation ceremony.]
I think that once the idea of hunting for parallels takes hold, then anything associated with "12" for any god becomes fair game. Indeed, Acharya S writes in the same section as mentioned above, before the Higgins quote:
In reality, it is no accident that there are 12 patriarchs, 12 tribes of Israel and 12 disciples, 12 being the number of the astrological signs, as well as the 12 “houses” through which the sun passes each day and the 12 hours of day and night. Indeed, like the 12 Herculean tasks, the 12 “helpers” of Horus, and the 12 “generals” of Ahura-Mazda, Jesus’s 12 “disciples” are symbolic for the zodiacal signs and do not depict any literal figures who played out a drama upon the earth circa 30 CE. The twelve disciples are thus the “sun’s librarians, the treasure-scribes.”
It is really important, in life, to concentrate our minds on our enthusiasms, not on our dislikes. -- Roger Pearse
