Was Christ just a fabrication from earlier myths about the Persian god Mithra and the Roman mystery religion of Mithras?  Here is a lis of how Mithra is supposedly similar to Christ.

• Mithra was born on December 25th.
• He was a great traveling teacher and master.
• He had 12 companions or disciples.
• He performed miracles.
• He was buried in a tomb
• He was resurrected three days later. 
• His resurrection is celebrated every year.
• He is called “the Good Shepherd.”
• He was considered “the Way, the Truth, the Light, the Redeemer, Savior, Messiah.”
• He was identified with the lion and the lamb.
• His sacred day was Sunday.
• His primary festival was Easter, the time of his resurrection.
• He had a Eucharist or Lord’s Supper.
• His story pre-dates the Christian fable by 600 years.

First, we must realize that these “similarities” are taken from at least six different religious traditions.  Mithra was widely known throughout the ancient world and incorporated into the various pantheons of several religions in very different ways.  The volume of mythology concerning Mithra is therefore huge, evolving, disjointed, and even contradictory.  A “similarity” to Christianity here and another “parallel” there adds up to a patchwork of unrelated myths that the Christmyth theorists have distorted, reworded into Christian language, and erroneously packaged into one religion out of six.  When talking about Mithra, does one mean the Indo-Aryan god of contracts, the Vedic sun chariot god, the Zoroastrian angel, the Hellenist sun god, the Roman mystery cult, or the Armenian troglodyte?

• Mithra’s B-Day was December 25, like Jesus.

            There must be a firm distinction drawn between Roman Mithras and the Persian god Mithra, because they are not related to the same religion.  The Persian god’s history goes back to the early 2nd millennium BC or before, and comes from the Indo-Aryan tribes before they invaded India around 1500 BC.  The Roman god’s history can only be traced to around 90 AD – which is after large sections of the New Testament were already completed.  Thus it is improvable to say that the Christians derived the Christmyth from Roman Mithras’ mythology.  Persian Mithra’s birthday was celebrated on the 16th of each month, not on Christmas.  (Clauss-Gordon, 3-7,21) (McCormack-Cumont, 8-9)  It was Roman Mithras who had the December 25th birthday and whose day of worship was Sunday.  It is a matter of historical fact that the Christians took the December 25th holiday and made it their own as a protest against all the pagan festivities which normally took place that season.  Christians back then and knowledgeable Christians today are well aware that the Bible never said when Jesus was born, and that December 25th is probably not his birthday.  According to one ancient Syrian source, “It was in fact customary among the pagans to celebrate the festival of the sun’s birthday on 25th December and to light bonfires in honor of the day.  They even used to invite the Christian population to these rites.  But when the teachers of the church realized that Christians were allowing themselves to take part, they decided to observe the Feast of the true Birth on the same day.”  Epiphany arose similarly from the god Aion’s birthday.  When some in the 300’s AD identified Christ with the sun-god, Christians responded with pamphlets aimed at distancing their religion from sun worship. (Clauss-Gordon, 66, 165, 170)  Hence, Christians did not derive the christmyth from Christmas and sun worship, but rather held their own party on purpose to detract from everyone else’s party.  In any case, Christ attended the Sabbath and Jewish holy days, not Sundays and Christmas (Luke 13:10, Mark 14:14). 

• Mithras was resurrected in three days.
• Mithras’ resurrection is celebrated every year.

12)  Mithras’ primary feast was Easter, the time of his resurrection.

The Zoroastrian religion taught that the souls of the dead lingered on earth for three days before passing into the afterlife.  Bodies were burned or torn apart by scavengers, and then bones were buried.  Then came a resurrection when the dead were judged.  They were placed on a scale and if their good deeds outweighed their bad deeds, they went to heaven; if not, they went to hell.  At the last day of every year, the dead come up from the underworld and wander the earth – much like on Halloween. (http://www.persianoutpost.com/htdocs/RitualsOfDeath.html)  In all my reading, I have not found anything saying that the Persian version of the god Mithra died and was resurrected, or that his resurrection is celebrated every year.  Instead, it is mortals who die and are resurrected for judgment.  The ideas of afterlife in Zoroastrian tradition are similar to those in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  However, Jewish belief in the resurrection dates before the Persian conquest and the possible influence of Zoroastrianism.  (see Daniel 12:2, Ezekiel 37:1, Psalm 16:10, 49:15, Hosea 13:14, Isaiah 26:19)  The book of Ezekiel is one of the easiest books to date in the Old Testament, and is precisely dated to 593-571 BC.  Hosea and Isaiah were written before 700 AD, well before Zoroastrian influence in Judaism. (Zondervan, 1565, 1686)  Zoroaster, or Zarathustra as he is more properly called, was most likely born in 628 BC or 588 BC in Bactra, which is modern day eastern Iran / western Afghanistan.  Tradition and scholarship agree on this.      

Moreover, the feast associated with Persian Mithra called No Ruz is on the vernal equinox on March 21, which does not coincide with Easter.  Easter can be as much as a month away in the last half of April.  Hence, one cannot rightly say that Mithra’s primary festival was “Easter.”  (Jafarey-Hinnells, 59)

As if this weren’t enough, No Ruz is not even the primary feast of Persian Mithra, but rather the autumn harvest festival of Mihragan is his primary feast.  It roughly coincides with the autumnal equinox.  The Zoroastrian religion celebrates Mihragan with life-blood sacrifice, in which sheep or goats are sacrificed as an offering in order to ensure a good harvest the following growing season.  Mihragan is sometimes called a feast of resurrection because life will be “resurrected” next spring.  At this point, the “resurrection” is really just another example of sacrifice to vegetation deities in order to get a good harvest – something that was very common in the ancient world and without parallel in either Christianity or Judaism.  Christianity does not believe that sacrifice is required to bring a good harvest.  The “resurrection” is not connected to atonement for sin, but to seasonal vegetation.  Unlike the somber festival of Easter which solemnly recognizes the sacrifice of a man, Mihragan is a joyful feast that lasts for five days, with much laughter and light-hearted socializing.  The blood and the head of the sheep or goat are eaten because they are ceremonially unclean, further removing Mihragan from Judeo-Christian doctrine, since consumption of an animal’s blood is forbidden. (Genesis 9:4, Acts 15:20) The sacrifice of the sheep or goat is only part of the festivities, and the sacrifice is recurring year after year.  Every year another animal must be sacrificed to bring a good harvest.  This is very different from the sacrifice of Christ, which happened only once and will never happen again.  “Nor did he (Christ) enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the high priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own… he has appeared once for all,”(Hebrews 9:25-26)  Mihragan was probably celebrated on the vernal equinox (springtime) starting sometime around 150 BC or before.  This was because the Zoroastrian calendar started the new-year six months off from what it used to be, and therefore No Ruz and Mihragan were temporarily inverted – resulting in some aspects of each holiday being intertwined.  Mihragan is currently celebrated in early February.  It is important to note that Iranian tradition contains nothing about a sacrifice by Mithra.  (Boyce-Hinnells, 106-118)

Concerning the ancient Persian Achaemenid Empire, it was once thought that the Persian king celebrated No Ruz with lion and bull icons and festivities, but the very scholar who proposed this hypothesis later rejected it, saying that it was probably in celebration of Mithrakana – an ancient variant of Mihragan.  (Bivar-Hinnells, 97)  Hence, Mithra’s major holiday appears to have always been in the autumn.

13) The Eucharist

It was Roman Mithras not Persian Mithra, who had the sacred bread, wine, and supper that is similar to the Christian Eucharist.  Again, there is no conclusive evidence that the Roman mystery religion of Mithras started before 90 AD, and thus Christian borrowing is unlikely.  The Eucharist is not borrowed from Mithras, but rather comes straight from the Torah / Old Testament, which again, pre-dates the Roman deity.  The Lord’s Supper along with the bread and wine of Communion was actually the Jewish Passover, as is stated multiple times in the synoptic gospels. (Mark 14:1-2, Mark 14:14-26, Luke 22:11-20, Matthew 26:17-29)  The bread and the wine of the Christian communion is clearly taken from Genesis 14:18, where Abraham shared bread and wine with the high priest Melchizedek, and it is interpreted that way by the New Testament in Hebrews 7.  Melchizedek is also mentioned in Psalm 110, and many Christians see him as a pre-Jesus appearance of the Logos.  Given the obvious self-proclaimed fact that Communion and the Lord’s Supper is a wholesale borrowing or fulfillment of very ancient Hebrew religion, there is simply no room to argue the Christians borrowed from Roman Mithras.

• Mithra had twelve disciples or companions.
• Mithra was buried in a tomb.

These aspects of Mithraism are apparently a very late addition to the evolving mythos of the deity, and have weak connections to the Iranian deity who was worshipped before Christ.  The “twelve disciples or companions” are really the twelve figures of the zodiac that circle the walls and ceilings of the mithraeum.  It is known that the Roman mystery cult used the signs of the zodiac in their mithraeums.  (Cumont-Hinnells, 182)  Mithraeums were places of worship for members of the mystery religion, and they resembled the dimly lit cavern (aka – tomb) into which Mithra supposedly descended.  The mithraeum contained an image of the stary firmament on the ceiling and the zodiac.  (McCormack-Cumont, 163-164, 166)  This “tomb” was really more like a temple-cavern for hibernation; for Mithra was not really dead, as evidenced by the fact he stored food inside the cavern to keep himself nourished.  An Armenian legend has him disappearing into the cave on horseback and being “reborn” every year.  (Gershevitch-Hinnells, 86-87)
It should be noted that the birth of Roman Mithras is entirely different from that of Christ.  The legend says that Mithra is born out of solid rock - not a cave or a “manger” – but solid rock.  A variant is that Mithras had sex with a rock and had a son with which he is identified.  The two torchbearers that sometimes accompany the iconography of the rock born god have sometimes been erroneously compared to the shepherds at Christ’s birth.  (Clauss-Gordon, 62, 69)

• He was considered “the Way, the Truth, the Light, the Redeemer, Savior, Messiah.”

As a sun god, the Vedic Mitra was obviously associated with light.  Phraseology such as “the Way, the Truth, and the Messiah” are too general to warrant discussion.  Messiah just means anointed king, which could apply to hundreds of different mythological characters.  None of the material I read called him any of these three titles.  The Mithras of the Roman mystery cult was considered a redeemer or savior, but not in the sense of atonement for sin.  “Salvation” meant anything a human yearns for.  Salvation was in part salvation from death and union with a transcendent deity, but it was also earthly – in terms of material desires.  (Clauss-Gordon, 14)  This “similarity” is also too general.  It should also be noted that the Roman mystery religion of Mithras believed the sacrifice of the bull to be the start of perfecting creation.  Mithra himself is not sacrificed.

• Mithra was a great traveling teacher and master.
• Mithra performed miracles.

I have never seen anything saying Mithra was ever an incarnated human who walked the earth doing such things.  In Indo-Aryan and Zoroastrian religion, he was always a god or an angel, not a god-man.

• Mithra’s sacred day was Sunday.

Persian Mithra’s sacred day was the sixteenth of every month and the vernal and autumnal equinox. 

10)  Mithra is identified with lions and lambs.
8)  Mithra is called the “Good Shepherd.”

• Mithra’s story predates Christ by 600 years.

Actually, Mithra predates Christ by about 1500 years at least if not more.  He is a very ancient god of the Indo-Aryan people before the Aryan invasion of India – back when the Indians and the Iranians were still the same people with a common language.  In his earliest form, he was a god of contracts and peace treaties between the various tribes.  He was a peace-loving god.  He was also a pastoral god who is called “Mithra of the Wide Grasslands.”  (McCormack-Cumont, 3)  The Indo-Aryan word for shepherd is pusan, which can also mean goatherd, cowherd, horseherd, etc.  (Bailey-Hinnells, 12) The horse cult was very important to the Indo-Aryans, as is evidenced by its early connection with the Indian god Vishnu.  Mithra was something of a rain god, but Indra later took his place as such.  (Theime-Hinnells, 30-31)  Later, Mithra emerged as a warrior god in a fancy chariot, which contrasted sharply with his previous identification with peace.  (Jafarey-Hinnells, 58)  In early Vedic India, Mitra and Varuna go together in a chariot across the sky with the sun.  They were not a “sun-god” per se, but they could see everything with their many eyes.  The connection was not so much with the sun as it was with omniscience – because the “eye of the sun” and its light allowed them to see everything.  Despite their early prominence in Vedic India, they were overshadowed by four other gods - Indra, Agni, Soma, and Vishnu - in the later Vedic period.  (Gonda-Hinnells, 40-52)  In the Zoroastrian Gathas, Mithra becomes associated with farming.  (Jafarey-Hinnells, 57) 

Mithra’s identity as a sun god did not happen until the Hellenistic age (330 BC – 0), and this seems to be the result of direct Greco-Persian syncretism between Mithra, Apollo, Helios, and Hermes.  Moreover, nothing like the Roman mystery cult is found in Persia.  (Frye-Hinnells, 65, 67) Another form of syncretism comes into play when we consider the Babylonian influence on Mithra.  Mithra is loosely associated with the lion in a first century BC sculpture.  This is probably the result of the Babylonian idea that the constellation Leo is the house of the sun.  (Bivar-Hinnells, 92)  The Christmyth theorists associate Christ with the lion through Revelation 5:5, which addresses him as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah,” but the reference is merely to very ancient Hebrew scriptures that associate the lion with power – not with star constellations.  The reference in particular is to Genesis 49:9, where Judah is called a “lions whelp” because he is powerful and has his “hand on the neck of his enemies.”  See also Judges 14:6, I Samuel 17:34-37, and Psalms.  Moreover, the New Testament also associates the Devil with the lion in I Peter 5:8.  There is no link between Christ and lions and sun worship.

I have included only a small portion of the mythology of Mithra – just enough to cover the supposed “similarities” between Christ and Mithra.  There are many other aspects to Mithraism that bear no similarity to Christianity whatsoever, and I have not mentioned more than a small fraction of these.  As anyone can see, the mythology is derived from very diverse religious traditions.  The shear volume of material virtually ensures that there will be at least a few faint parallels.  However, these parallels are weak and have been distorted and reworded in order to deceive people into thinking that a christmyth evolved from earlier mythology.

Roman Mithras vs. Christianity

It is often said that the mystery religions were very similar to Christianity.  Some even say that the only reason Christianity outlived the “other mysteries” is because Constantine chose it.  However, it is becoming increasingly clear that Christianity differed from the Roman mystery religion of Mithras in many defining ways. 

• Christianity was exclusivist and anti syncretism, while Roman Mithraism was inclusive of many other religions.  The Roman mystery religion accepted emperor worship along with the worship of many other gods who were popular in the empire.  The mysteries were a mix of religion and secret order, somewhat like Freemasonry is today.  You could be a member without having to give up your other religious affiliations.  This was very different from Christianity, which insisted that its way was the only way.  (Clauss-Gordon, 14) 
• The membership in the mystery cult was comprised mostly of soldiers, ex-slaves, and government bureaucrats. No women were allowed into the cult.  (Clauss-Gordon, 33)  Christianity did not exclude women and consisted of a more broad based membership.
• In Mithraism, a member climbed a hierarchical ladder to different degrees of enlightenment, knowledge, and harmony with the divine.
• Mithraism had a tendency to ally itself with some of the most ruthless tyrants in all of Roman history, such as Commodus, who reigned as emperor from 180-192 AD and is the bad guy in the movie Gladiator in which his historical personality is accurately portrayed.  Mithraism achieved its golden years around 200 AD, and they praised Commodus more than other emperors – thus building their alliance with the imperial cult.  Diocletian, who persecuted Christians intensely, dedicated an alter to Mithras.  (Clauss-Gordon, 23, 28)
• Unlike Christianity, Mithraism did not endure persecution.  Within a quarter century after the Christians solidified their power over the Roman Empire around 375 AD, Mithraism was extinct.  The Christians exacted revenge on Mithraism by completely destroying it by 400 AD.  Most of its membership simply deserted their mystery cult rather than stand by it.  (Clauss-Gordon, 31, 32, 172)

Bibliography

Clauss, Manfred.  English translation by Richard Gordon.  The Roman Cult of Mithras, the God and his Mysteries.  Routledge, NY. 2000

Hinnells, John R, editor.  Mithraic Studies, Volume I.  Manchester University Press, Rowman and Littlefield. Totowa, NJ.  1975
The following were separate articles from Hinnells’ book.

            Bailey, H. W.  The second stratum of the Indo-Iranian gods.

Bivar, A.D.H.  Religious subjects on Achaemenid seals.

Boyce, M.  Mihragan among the Irani Zoroastrians.

Cumont, Franz.  The Dura Mithraeum.

Frye, Richard N.  Mithra in Iranian istory.

Gershevitch, Ilya.  Die Sonne das Beste. 

Gonda, J.  Mitra in India.

Jafarey, A. A.  Mithra, Lord of Lands.

Thieme, P.  The concept of Mithra in Aryan belief.

McCormack, Thomas J.  English translation by Franz Cumont.  The Mysteries of Mithra.  Dover Publications, Inc. NY.  1956.

http://www.persianoutpost.com/htdocs/RitualsOfDeath.html

Zondervan.  Kenneth Barker, editor.  The NIV Study Bible, Introduction to Ezekiel.  Zondervan Publishing House.  1985.