Fun With Bulls
(including paraphrased extracts from the essay: "The Virgin Birth and Childhood Mysteries of Jesus" by James Still)

Scholars, and people who read around, know this stuff already. But you won't hear it from the pulpit too often. I was never made aware of this in all my 25 years in the pews!

A couple of things I wish I'd known as a Christian:

1. We have records and artefacts about mythologies dating back thousands of years.

2. These records show clearly the evolution of the Christian religion. In other words, you can easily see where various elements of the religion had their beginnings.

I will try to explain how bull-worship played a huge part in the development of Christianity. Here goes:

Ancient people used to think the Earth was stationary, and that the Sun, the Moon, planets and stars, all moved around us. They thought these were celestial beings. (Religious people then, just as now, often assumed that things they didn't understand were caused by celestial beings. I used to fall into the same trap!)

The Sun was thought to be the most important of these heavenly gods, so it was given extra-special attention and worship. The winter solstice was a very important celebration, because it marked the moment when the Sun began to get higher again in the sky after its long descent through Autumn. The people believed that the Sun was being "reborn" after its death. (The solstice was celebrated on December 25th as this was the first date when the sun got noticeably higher in the sky).

You know that the Earth goes around the Sun in one year. As it does so, our bright star appears to move slowly through the sky, passing through 12 constellations, known as the Zodiac. The constellations were originally just helpful pictures made of stars, useful for people who wanted to get to know the skies. But the pictures took on lives of their own, as good stories habitually do.

The ancients thought that the Sun gave birth to, or was the "father" of these 12 zodiac gods.

Now it so happened that every Spring ("equinox") the Sun used to be found in the constellation of Taurus the Bull. This was a predictable event, and a very important one since the Spring Equinox was the time when the resurrection of the Sun-God was celebrated.

In 128 BC, the astronomers of the day made an astounding discovery: the constellations were drifting very slowly backwards, so that the Sun was no longer in Taurus at the Equinox. Catastrophe! The astronomer/astrologers interpreted this as follows: the Bull has been slain! There had been an apparent movement of the entire Universe, so there had to be a powerful force at work. Being of a religious frame of mind, they could only attribute this to yet another celestial being - whom they called MITHRAS, the BULL-SLAYER.

Mithras became the celestial force who was strong enough to slay the bull and was able to command the very heavens to do his bidding. Mithras represented the divine son of the sun-god and the saviour of good against darkness. He battled against evil to bring good to mankind.

Let's pause a second. We are talking about myths and stories here, but we are also talking about facts: we know that the ancients believed these things. You can find temples to Mithras all over the ancient world, I have even visited one with my wife in Northumbria, UK. They are called "Mithraeums". Mithras was commonly worshipped by Roman soldiers who travelled to the very frontiers of their Empire.

Mithras was usually painted/carved as a "bull-slayer", plunging a knife into the neck of a great bull, while the blood spilled down to the ground.

Roman citizens would also celebrate bull-sacrifices by arranging for an actual bull to be butchered on top of a platform. The blood would pour down through the boards on to the head of the person below, who had paid for this to happen. They would consider themselves "washed" clean by the blood and would take the opportunity to make prayers/requests to Mithras. (Note, the city of Tarsus was a centre for Mithras-worship - this is something Paul would have witnessed very often indeed. It was later Paul who mythologised the death of Jesus into a once-for-all sacrifice.)

This whole grotesque sacrifice was common and we know about it. In fact it was vividly portrayed in an episode of the recent BBC television series "Rome".

Now, here are some things Christians need to know - (remember, my good Christian friends, I was a Christian too for 25 years, no-one told me this; how I wish I had been told it!) -

Mithras was said to have had a virgin-birth on the 25th December (the Winter solstice). Roman and Greek deities were commonly said to be born of virgins. This was a very non-Jewish concept - the whole idea was repellant to the Jewish mind.
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With the dawn of light on Mithras' birth "the priest emerged from the temple to announce triumphantly: The God is born!" The Winter Solstice was celebrated as the birth of Mithras the Saviour.
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Mithras was sent by a "father-god" to bring new light, new life to men, vanquishing darkness and evil in the world.
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Mithras' birth was witnessed only by shepherds. He was born out of the "womb of the Earth", in a cave. The only people present when he emerged were shepherds.
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Mithras was described variously as The Way, The Truth, The Light, The Word, The Son of God, the Good Shepherd; he was often shown carrying a lamb on his shoulders.
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Followers of Mithras celebrated by lighting candles, ringing bells, singing hymns, giving gifts and joining in a sacrament of bread and water.
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Between December 25th and Easter ("Eostre" is the Latin for earth goddess) came the 40 days search for Osiris, a god of justice and love.
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The cult also observed Black Friday, commemorating the act of bull-slaying which had blessed the earth.
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Worn out by the battle, Mithras is symbolically represented as a corpse and is placed in a sacred rock-tomb from which he is removed after three days in a festival of rejoicing.
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Do you see all the similarities? You have to face up to these facts. These are things that were actually believed and practised, and Christianity absorbed the Mithras stories into its own myths.

Mithraism was declared heretical by Christians in the 5th Century and ruthlessly wiped out.

And what of the motion in the stars that gave rise to the whole myth in the first place? Well, after some non-religious, painstaking work by scientists, we now know this movement is due to the precession of the Earth's axis, a kind of wobble in its rotation, similar to the slow wobble of a gyroscope as it spins. Knowledge was found by employing Reason and good, honest hard work. Not by giving up and blaming supernatural, invisible beings.