by Lee Strobel
Gary Lease, professor of religious studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz and long-time executive secretary of the North American Association for the Study of Religion, noted in an academic article that such eminent scholars as Adolf von Harnack, Arthur Darby Nock, S. G. F. Brandon, William R. Halliday, and Ernst Benz “have seen little evidence to support claims of such influence and mutual borrowing” between Mithraism and Christianity.42
Lease, who earned his doctorate at the University of Munich and later occupied its renowned Romano Guardini Chair for Theory of Culture and Religion, added:
After almost 100 years of unremitting labor, the conclusion appears inescapable that neither Mithraism nor Christianity proved to be an obvious and direct influence upon the other in the development and demise or survival of either religion. Their beliefs and practices are well accounted for by their most obvious origins and there is no need to explain one in terms of the other.43
The weight of the evidence was heavy: the claim that Christianity borrowed its central ideas from Mithraism has been thoroughly demolished by a close examination of the dates for when it took root in the West. But what about the numerous parallels between Mithraism and Christianity that popular writers, including novelist Dan Brown, have touted as evidence of Christianity’s plagiarism? I was anxious to see how Yamauchi would handle those specific charges.
MITHRAS VERSUS JESUS
I pulled out a list of parallels between Jesus and Mithras. “First, popular writers claim that Mithras was born of a virgin,” I said. “Is that true that this was what Mithraism taught?”
Yamauchi looked pained. “No, that’s definitely not true,” he insisted. “He was born out of a rock.”
“A rock?”
“Yes, the rock birth is commonly depicted in Mithraic reliefs,” he explained. “Mithras emerges fully grown and naked except for a Phrygian cap, and he’s holding a dagger and torch. In some variations, flames shoot out from the rock, or he’s holding a globe in his hand.”
I chuckled. “So unless the rock is considered a virgin, this parallel with Jesus evaporates,” I said.
“Entirely correct,” he said.
“And that means he wasn’t born in a cave, which some writers claim is a second parallel to Christianity.”
“Well, it is true that Mithraic sanctuaries were designed to look like caves,” Yamauchi said. “Gary Lease discusses that in his chapter on Mithraism and Christianity.”
I later examined Lease’s work. He makes the important observation that nowhere in the New Testament is Jesus described as having been born in a cave. This idea is first mentioned in the letter of Barnabas at the beginning of the second century.
Justin Martyr said in the second century that Mithras’s cave was a demoniacal imitation of the tradition that Jesus was born in a cave. Lease pointed out, however, that scholar Ernst Benz “has shown conclusively that this Christian tradition does not come from a dependency on Mithraism, but rather from an ages old tradition in Palestine itself of holy shrines in caves.” Concluded Lease: “There is no doubt that the Christian tradition does not stem from the Mithraic account.”44
Returning to my list, I said to Yamauchi: “The third supposed parallel with Jesus is that Mithras was born on December 25.”
“Again, that’s not a parallel,” he replied.
“Why not?”
“Because we don’t know the date Jesus was born,” he said. “The earliest date celebrated by Christians was January 6—in fact, it’s still celebrated by many churches in the East. Of course, December 25 is very close to the winter solstice. This was the date chosen by the emperor Aurelian for the dedication of his temple to Sol Invictus, the god called the ‘Unconquerable Sun.’ Mithras was closely associated with Sol Invictus; sometimes they’re depicted shaking hands. This is apparently how Mithras became associated with December 25.”
“When did that date become Christmas for Christians?”
“That seems to be in 336, a year before the death of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity. We know that before his conversion, he worshiped Sol Invictus. We know for sure that Constantine made Sunday, or the Lord’s Day, an official holiday, even though Christians had already been observing it as the day on which Jesus was resurrected. So it’s conceivable Constantine also may have appropriated December 25 for the birthday of Christ. We know that Christian emperors and popes suggested that instead of simply banning pagan ceremonies that they appropriate them for Christianity.”45
“What about the fourth parallel that Mithras was a great traveler or master with twelve disciples?”
“No—he was a god, not a teacher,” Yamauchi replied, sounding a bit impatient.
“The fifth parallel is that his followers were promised immortality.”
“Well, that can be inferred, but certainly that was the hope of most followers of any religion,” he said. “So that’s not surprising.”
“How about the sixth claim, which says that Mithras sacrificed himself for world peace?”
Yamauchi sighed. “That’s reading Christian theology into what’s not there. He didn’t sacrifice himself—he killed a bull.”
“The seventh parallel—and one of the most important—is that Mithras was buried in a tomb and rose after three days,” I said. “Is there any truth to that?”
“We don’t know anything about the death of Mithras,” Yamauchi said firmly. “We have a lot of monuments, but we have almost no textual evidence, because this was a secret religion. But I know of no references to a supposed death and resurrection.” Indeed, Richard Gordon declared in his book Image and Value in the Greco-Roman World that there is “no death of Mithras”—and thus, there cannot be a resurrection.46
I went on, though I had a feeling I could guess his replies. “Eight, Mithras was considered the Good Shepherd, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Logos, the Redeemer, the Savior.”
“No, again that’s reading Christian theology into this.”
“Ninth, there was a sacramental meal in Mithraism that paralleled the Lord’s Supper.”
“Common meals are found in almost all religious communities,” he replied. “What is noteworthy is that the Christian apologists Justin Martyr and Tertullian point out the similarities to the Lord’s Supper, but they wrote in the second century, long after the Lord’s Supper was instituted in Christianity. They claimed the Mithraic meal was a satanic imitation. Clearly, the Christian meal was based on the Passover, not on a mystery religion.”
Yamauchi referred me to Clauss’s book The Roman Cult of Mithras. “This earthly meal is a ritual reproduction of the celebration of his victory [over the bull] which Mithras performed with the sun-god before their joint ascension in the Sun’s chariot,” he said.47 “The ritual meal was probably simply a component of regular common meals. Such meals have always been an essential part of religious assembly; eating and drinking together creates community and renders visible the fact that those who take part are members of one and the same group.”48
Oxford’s Yarnold said that Cumont’s systematic description of Mithraic liturgy in Christian terms—particularly referring to the Mithraic meal as communion—“is now seen to be misleading, not to say mischievous.”49
Lease agrees there is no connection between the Christian and Mithraic ceremonies. “Nothing in any of the sources we have leads to a viable theory that the origin of the Christian meal is to be found in Mithraism, nor for that matter may one derive the Mithraic meal from the Christian.”50
He noted that the Christian sacrament “is centered in the Jewish tradition of the Passover feast and the specifically historical recollection of Jesus’s last acts,” while the Mithraic feast “has its origins in Mazdean [that is, Persian] ceremonies.”51 He concluded: “There is simply no need to link these two events together in terms of derivation or direct influence.”52
I tossed my list of now-discredited parallels on the table. Amazingly, despite so many writers who have tried
to discredit Christianity with such charges of plagiarism, the allegations merely evaporated under scrutiny. Still, one related issue remained: whether a gory Mithraic ritual was the source for the apostle Paul’s teaching of redemption through the blood of Jesus.
THE BLOOD OF BULLS
Following the lead of Reitzenstein, French theologian Alfred Loisy, who died in 1940, believed that a Mithraic rite called the taurobolium was the basis for the Christian belief that people are saved “through the blood” of Jesus. He specifically linked this ritual to Paul’s imagery in Romans 6, where the apostle talks about “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.”53
To bolster his thesis, Loisy presented evidence of a taurobolic inscription that says in aeternum renatus—or “reborn for eternity”—which he said parallels the Christian concept of spiritual rebirth.54
I asked Yamauchi to describe the taurobolium, which he had written about in Persia and the Bible.
“This rite was practiced by Mithraists only in exceptional cases. It was associated almost entirely with the cult of Attis, which was another mystery religion,” he said. “In its developed form, the initiate was placed in a pit and a bull was slaughtered on a grate above him, drenching him in the bull’s blood.”
He paused before adding a bit of understatement: “It was a very vivid rite.”
This, of course, seemed totally alien to the practices of the Jewish sacrificial system and its foreshadowing of Jesus’ death as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.”55
Yamauchi continued. “Again, the dating of practices like this are the Achilles’ heel of these comparative studies—they don’t pay attention to the dates of the sources and they’re used anachronistically.”
“When was the taurobolium instituted?” I asked.
“This rite is reported in the second century AD,” he said, gesturing toward a quote from Swiss scholar Günter Wagner in an article Yamauchi had written:
The taurobolium of the Attis cult is first attested in the time of Antoninus Pius or AD 160. As far as we can see at present it only became a personal consecration at the beginning of the third century AD. The idea of a rebirth through the instrumentality of the taurobolium only emerges in isolated instances towards the end of the fourth century AD.56
“So there’s no way this rite could have influenced Christianity’s theology about redemption,” Yamauchi stressed.
“What about the inscription that mentions being ‘reborn for eternity’?” I asked.
“Ah, that’s an interesting tale,” he said with a small grin. “It turns out the renatus inscription was dated after AD 375. There’s another inscription from about the same time period that says this rite was only efficacious for twenty years. Bruce Metzger from Princeton suggested this may be an example of Christianity influencing Mithraism. That is, Christianity promised its adherents eternal life, and so perhaps in response the efficacy of the blood bath was raised in the Mithraic cult from twenty years to eternity.”57
One by one, the grandiose claims that Christianity copied itself after Mithraism had been convincingly swept away by solid scholarship. It was staggering to me that writers could so irresponsibly—or maliciously—make claims about parallels that simply are not accurate.
“Do you see any evidence that Christianity borrowed any of its beliefs from Mithraism?” I asked Yamauchi.
“Not really,” he said. “They were rivals in the second century and later. Sometimes a Mithraic temple was right next to a Christian sanctuary in Rome. When Christianity became the official religion, sometimes the Christians destroyed the mithraeum.”
“In his book The Mysteries of Mithras, Payam Nabarz quotes a historian he identifies as Joseph Renan as saying, ‘If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic,’” I said. “Do you think that’s true?”
Yamauchi shook his head. “First of all, he has the name wrong. It’s Ernest Renan, an anti-Catholic French scholar who wrote a sensationalistic work called Vie de Jesus, or Life of Jesus, in 1863—one of the works Albert Schweitzer criticized in his famous indictment of biographies of Jesus by liberal scholars.”
Yamauchi provided additional background that further discredited Renan, pointing to comments by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright in a book published by Oxford University Press: “Renan confuses rhetoric with profundity…. Professing to work as an historian, he does not pursue with the needed seriousness the historical problems of the life of Jesus.”58
“Needless to say,” continued Yamauchi, “Renan’s work, published nearly 150 years ago, has no value as a source. He knew very little about Mithraism, and besides, we know a lot more about it today. Yet this is a quote that’s commonly used by people who don’t understand the context. It’s simply far-fetched.”
I consulted my notes for another quotation I’d read. “In his book, Nabarz claims: ‘The assimilation of Mithraism by its rival Christianity resulted in the early decline and loss of true meaning in both religions. The peace-loving message of Christianity, as taught by Christ, was diminished and replaced by the warrior mind-set of Mithraism.’”
Yamauchi wasn’t buying it. “Nabarz is a practicing Dervish and Druid who’s a member of the Golden Dawn Occult Society and a revivalist of the Temple of Mithras. Though he has a Ph.D. from Oxford, it’s in science. He lacks credibility as a historian of Christianity,” Yamauchi said.
“There’s no evidence of Mithraism influencing first-century Christianity. Far from assimilating Mithraism, the church fathers—from Justin Martyr to Tertullian—denounced Mithraism as a satanic imitation. Some scholars have suggested Christianity may have consciously or unconsciously borrowed minor practices much later, which could be true. This has no impact on Christianity’s foundational beliefs, however.”
Along those lines, Yarnold suggests Mithraism may have influenced a fourth-century Christian practice of having converts renounce Satan in a special ceremony that’s no longer practiced. But Yarnold warned against reading too much into the scant remnants of Mithraism. “The modern Mithraic scholar,” he said, “is often seduced by apparent lack of evidence to grasp at straws which offer little or no support to his argument.”59
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
I turned our conversation to the issue of whether any other gods in antiquity might have provided the prototype for the resurrection stories about Jesus. Essentially, I wanted to see whether Yamauchi would agree with what Licona told me about the matter.
Yamauchi went down the list of the “usual suspects” who appear in popular literature. “First of all,” he said, “there’s no resurrection of Marduk or Dionysus. There is a resurrection that had been alleged for Tammuz, a fertility god of Mesopotamia, known in Sumerian as Dumuzi, but it turns out there was no real resurrection.”
I was confused. “What do you mean?”
“His resurrection by the goddess Inanna-Ishtar had been assumed even though the end of the texts about the myth were missing. Then in 1960, S. N. Kramer published a newly discovered poem that proves that Inanna didn’t rescue Damuzi from the underworld but sent him there as her substitute.60 There’s also an obscure and fragmentary text indicating Dumuzi might have had his sister take his place in the underworld for six months of the year.61 Again, this is tied to the seasons and the vegetation cycles. It’s not a resurrection.”62
“And Adonis?” I asked.
“Tammuz was identified by later writers with Adonis, who was loved by Aphrodite. The worship of Adonis was never very important and was restricted to women. Pierre Lambrechts has shown that there are no indications of a resurrection in the early information we have about Adonis. While there are four texts that speak of his resurrection, they date from the second to the fourth centuries AD—long after Jesus.”63
“What about Cybele and Attis?” I asked.
“Attis was a young man who was loved by Cybele, also known as the Great Mother goddess. Attis was unfaithful, s
o Cybele drove him mad; he castrated himself and died. That’s why the priests of Cybele were eunuchs,” Yamauchi noted. “But Lambrechts has demonstrated that the supposed ‘resurrection’ of Attis doesn’t appear until after AD 150—more than a century later than Jesus.”64
Again, this myth is tied to the vegetation cycle. “Many worshipers of Cybele believed that an annual rehearsal of the Attis myth was a way of guaranteeing a good crop,” Nash said.65 He pointed out that “Cybele could only preserve Attis’s dead body. Beyond this, there is mention of the body’s hair continuing to grow, along with some movement of his little finger. In some versions of the myth, Attis’s return to life took the form of his being changed into an evergreen tree.”66
I brought up the topic of Osiris, whose body was cut into fourteen pieces and then reassembled—minus one part—by his sister Isis, as Licona described earlier.
“Actually,” said Yamauchi, “there also was an earlier incident where his brother Seth murders Osiris and sinks his coffin in the Nile. It’s after Isis revives him that the dismemberment occurs.”
“Do these accounts pre-date Christianity?”
“They’re found in Plutarch, who wrote in the second century AD, but they seem consistent with statements made in early Egyptian texts—so, yes. It’s misleading, however, to equate the Egyptian concept of the afterlife with a resurrection in the Christian tradition. The Egyptians believed that to attain immortality, the body had to be mummified, nourishment had to be provided, and magical spells had to be used. The Egyptian concept didn’t entail rising from the dead; instead, separate entities of the individual’s personality—called the Ba and the Ka—hover around his body.”
“So this isn’t a resurrection?”
“Not in the same sense that Jesus was resurrected,” he emphasized. “Osiris was brought to life but he’s the king of the underworld.”67