In the past two parts of this series, I’ve debunked the claims that Jesus is a copy of the Egyptian god Horus or the Greek god Dionysus. Now for the first of these claims I ever heard: Jesus copied the Mithras cult.
Mithras was a Persian god who supposedly was born of a virgin. Nope. Wrong. Most sources do not say virgin birth. There were three versions of Mithras, but since most of the claims are based on the Roman version of him, we’re sticking to that one. That virgin of Mithras came AFTER Jesus. If anything, they were the copycats, not the other way around.
Jesus was born of a virgin. Mithras was born of a rock. “OK, you can’t have sex with a rock, so the rock’s still a virgin.” No. Try again. Did Mithras do miracles? Of course, he was a god. And yes, the Mithras Cult did have a ritual similar to the Last Supper, but Mithras never became an actual flesh and blood human. And besides, this came after Jesus.
But what about the claim that Mithras had twelve “disciples”? This references the picture below.
The squares that are surrounding Mithras slaying the bull are supposed to be his disciples. You can’t see the images because the cuniform found here is centuries old, so it’s aged over time. But those are not Mithras’s disciples. They are the 12 signs of the Zodiac. And the ritual that involved the spilling of blood was not Mithras’s own blood, but the blood of a bull.
So why is this going around. Well, I first heard of it because of the so-called comedian Bill Maher and his so-called documentary Religulous, where he referenced a YouTube video called Zeitgeist, which went through several deities the Jesus supposedly copied from. What I’ve gone through are the top 3 most common claims. There’s more, but I need to do more research on those before I talk about them. Basically, people are going after the miniscule (at best) similarities and saying they imply descent, whether they predate Jesus or not. But even if these were true, they prove nothing. The burden of proof is not in the stories themselves, but in the people who wrote them down. And they were eyewitnesses. That is the key. These falsehoods crumble as soon as you scrutinize them, and yet the lies persist. “Because if they do not believe the prophets, they will not believe the Son of Man, even if He rises from the dead.”
Aspie Catholic 