Thoughts on Antiquity, Patristics, putting things online, information access, and more
Today I read online that: Mithras, the Persian divinity, was also given this title of “Unconquered”; and as one of the very earliest Christian writers tells Justin Martyr (Dialog with Trypho, p. 305) Mithras was mystically said to have been born in a cave or grotto, as was also Jesus, according to very early and […]
The great French scholar Pierre Petitmengin has kindly sent me an off-print of the new Chronica Tertullianea et Cyprianea (CTC 2008). This is a list of new publications about Tertullian, Cyprian, and the other ante-Nicene Latin Fathers, with a short review of each. It has long been essential reading for Tertullianists (at whom it was […]
Every year at Christmas time the web is filled with people jeering at Christians. Such is the society we live in. A common jeer is to shout exultantly that Christmas is really a pagan festival. In years gone past these people mocked that it was really the birthday of Mithras. It looks as if my […]
The silly season is well underway, and daft stories about Christian origins being really pagan — all told with glee — are circulated uncritically and believed unquestioningly by those so inclined. We might reasonably wonder, however, just why every major Christian holiday is subjected to this ritual of debunking, with the evident approval of those […]
I was experimenting with the new Microsoft Bing image search, which gave me quite different results to Google image search. One of these caught my eye, on a Dutch forum, here. A better version of the image, this time with real data attached, here. It looks as if both have been scanned from a book, the first not […]
While working over the Wikipedia Mithras article, I found mention of syncretism with the Orphic deity Phanes. It seems that we learn of this from inscriptions; but also that there is literary evidence of the syncretism of Mithras and Phanes, in the proverbs of Zenobius. The reference is: ”Proverbia” 5.78 (in Corpus paroemiographorum Graecorum vol. […]
Last night I sat down and spent several hours working on the Mithras article on Wikipedia. The effort is probably futile, but the article has been one of the worst on Wikipedia, and a constant source of misinformation online. My principle was to ensure that there was either a reference to a primary source, or […]
A strange Jewish anti-Christian site here has the following claim: Plutarch (Pompey, 24, 7) and Servilius (Georgics, 4, 127) say Pompey imported Mithraism into Rome after defeating the Cilician pirates around 70 BCEE. This is starting to circulate around the web, and caught my eye. We all know the Plutarch reference, and it says only […]