Towerwatchman, thank you for a long reply. The natural reaction
of Christians is to defend to the hilt the position of Jesus as redeemer
because if this hope was flawed it would destroy the very thing which gives
meaning and value to their lives.
Please note, (and you still prevaricate by giving special meanings to certain words) the idea of
cheating death is a fundamental driver of religious belief and yet; no one has credibly benefitted from Jesus’ supposed
life and sacrificial death. Apart that is from the false security in grasping
the illusory straw, in hoping for eternal life.
I was in the Ryland Library in Manchester last year and enjoyed
looking at the fragment of John, one of the earliest pieces of NT text dated
around the third quarter of the second century, a tiny scrap of papyrus with a
few lines of smudgy Greek but important nevertheless. This is representative of
the reality of the early NT texts not the thousands of documents you infer. The
bigger mistake is to believe they are divine. It is hardly surprising that
manuscripts which were authorised and funded by Imperial Rome became common and
the evidence is that it is after the fourth century that their number
proliferates. However the most widely distributed Christian literature of the
first two centuries was “The Sherperd of Hermas”, which is ‘scripture’ by
Paul’s definition and never uses the name Jesus but just calls the saviour
figure “Lord”.
You miss the significance of the resemblance of Christianity to
Mithraism. Of course they are different, otherwise we would call Christianity Mithraism!
However, Jesus Christianity palpably did derive many things from the secret
cult of Mithras but by no means exclusively. Noteworthy is the borrowed
eschatology, atonement by much of the Apocalypse and outstandingly the last supper, the
memorial of Mithra which the Romans had been celebrating once each year with small cakes for centuries
before Jesus was thought of. The home of Roman Mithraism was on the Vatican stone
promontory on the very spot where St Peters stands today. Yes the Roman
Catholic Church was built on the Rock of Peter; Mithraism. The last Mithraic
Pope,(PAter PAtris or Papa) Vettius Agorius Praetextatus died in 384 CE well
after the death of Constantine and hence the Mithraic Papal role was tolerated by him. The
cult of Mithras had a celibate clergy, they worshipped on the holy day of
Sunday since all pagan saviours including Jesus, are sons of Sun Gods born to
die “on the cross” i.e at the spring equinox, and thence to heaven.
But as you rightly said Christianity did not come from the Good
Sheperd Mithra, he was only a part of the story. The Catholic faith was the
result of politically motivated synchretism, absorbing all the major Jesus
cults including the Pauline, the Johannine community as well as the cults of
Attis, Dionysus, Serapis, Cybele etc.
Whatever defence modern
Christians claim in an attempt to deny this unwelcome origin, usually by
protesting the differences; the historical fact is that the beliefs, rituals
and words found in Christianity had already been practiced for centuries before the first century CE. Only about
sixteen percent of Bible text is without precedent in secular or ‘pagan’ texts.
There is irony that the city centred Roman religion which after absorbing and sacralizing every kind of peasant faith, later pontificated that this same folk belief of the villagers
(pagus/pagans) and the heath-dwellers was to be condemned as “pagan” or “heathen”. . .
And so the sentiment remains today.
The gospel’s promise of saving or gaining life has proved to be a spurious superstition.
Jesus got it all wrong, (Mark 9:1).
