Chapter 26. Mithras and Christ: Parallels, Polemics and the Question of Borrowing

The relation of Mithraism to early Christianity is the most argued question in the study of the Roman cult. The ancient Christian writers did not deny the likeness of the rites. They explained it as demonic forgery, and in the fourth century their communities defaced and buried the sanctuaries where those rites had been performed. Modern authors have drawn up long lists of parallels: a sacred meal, a baptism-like washing, a “confirmation”, a birth in a rock or cave, shepherds, 25 December, salvation through blood, and the day of the Sun. Their conclusions run from cautious analogy to the claim that Christianity is a renamed Mithraism. This chapter presents the ancient polemic in the Fathers’ own words, then the modern claims, then the scholarly cautions, and finally the account of Mehran Keshe, who holds that the rulers of Rome reshaped the story of Jesus to fit Mithraism.

The Fathers’ charge: demonic imitation

The earliest testimony comes from Justin Martyr, about AD 150: “Accordingly in the mysteries of Mithra also we have heard that evil spirits practise mimicry. For at the initiatory rites bread and a cup of water are set out accompanied by certain formulae, as you know or may ascertain” (1 Apology 66). In the Dialogue with Trypho (70, 78) Justin applies the same reasoning to the myth. When the Mithraists “relate that Mithra was born of a rock, and name the place where his followers receive initiation a cave”, they are “perverting the saying of Daniel that ‘a stone was hewn without hands from a great mountain'” (Daniel 2:34) and the words of Isaiah (33:16). The cave itself is “a device of the evil one”. Geden’s summary is that “Justin argues that the Mithraic rites are a parody of the Christian” [Geden, Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism, #38272, “Justin Martyr” (a)-(c)].

Tertullian, a generation later at Carthage, adds the fullest list. “In certain rites also of an Isis or Mithra initiation is by means of baptismal water” (De baptismo 5). The devil, “who with idolatrous mysteries endeavours to imitate the realities of the divine sacraments … promises forgiveness of sins through baptism; and if my memory does not fail me marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithra on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown”. He even “forbade a second marriage to the supreme priest” and “maintains also his virgins and his celibates” (De praescriptione haereticorum 40). In De corona 15 Tertullian holds up the Mithraic soldier as a reproach to lax Christians. At initiation in “a cavern, a veritable home of darkness, a crown is offered on a naked sword, as if in parody of martyrdom”. The initiate moves it to his shoulder, “declaring that Mithra is his crown. Thereafter he is never crowned”. Tertullian concludes: “We may recognise the craft of the devil, who counterfeits divine things” [Geden, #38272, “Tertullian” (a)-(e)]. Vermaseren cites this signing of the soldiers as evidence for the grade of Miles [Vermaseren, Mithras the Secret God, #38300, p. 144].

The later Fathers keep the same frame. Firmicus Maternus, urging Constantius and Constans to destroy paganism, protests that the Mithraic password “god from the rock” transfers to “unclean superstitions” the title of the Stone that is Christ [Geden, #38272, “Firmicus Maternus” (b)]. Augustine (or Ambrosiaster) says that the counterfeiting spirit “would fain redeem by blood his own image, since he knew that by precious blood the human race was redeemed”. He reports that “the priest of that mitred god was accustomed to say, ‘the mitred god himself also was a Christian'” (Cumont, Geden notes, thought Attis rather than Mithras was meant). The same source describes initiates who “flap their wings imitating the raven’s cry; others roar like lions”, bound with entrails and freed by a “Liberator” with a sword [Geden, #38272, “Augustine” (a)-(b)]. Paulinus of Nola asks what the god hidden in “a gloomy cavern” who is nevertheless called the sun can be, “but the author of evil?” [Geden, #38272, “Paul of Nola”]. Nock places all this in context: “It is small wonder if Justin Martyr and Tertullian regarded it as a diabolic copy of Christianity” [Nock, The Development of Paganism in the Roman Empire (CAH XII ch. 12), #60218, p. 430]. He also notes more generally that Justin Martyr and others, struck by “baptismal and communion ceremonies in various pagan cults, argued that the Devil had in advance counterfeited Christianity” [Nock, #60218].

The meal, the hammer and the buried caves

Vermaseren’s reading of the sacred meal shows why the charge was felt so sharply. In the Aventine (Santa Prisca) mithraeum, a painting of about AD 220 shows Sol and Mithras reclining at table, served by a Raven and by Lions carrying bread, a mixing-bowl, a cock and tapers. In the rite the Father and the Heliodromus took the places of the two gods. Justin, Vermaseren notes, “is careful to use the word ‘water’ and not ‘wine’, although there is certain evidence for the use of wine”, including the meat-and-wine accounts scratched on the walls at Dura-Europos. “It is precisely this scene of the sacred meal which suffered most at the hands of the Christian iconoclasts at the end of the fourth century; the other wall was left untouched. The reason for such vehement hatred is not hard to find.” Tertullian had called the meal a “devilish imitation of the Eucharist” [Vermaseren, #38300, pp. 99-103]. Elsewhere Vermaseren says the Christians “hacked at the paintings with axes”, because the images “portrayed the Christians’ most hated rival”, especially “the sacred meal of Mithras and Sol with its affinities to the Eucharist” [Vermaseren, #38300, ch. 7, Santa Prisca].

Vermaseren also cites “a mediaeval text, published by Cumont, in which the word of Christ is set beside the sayings of Zarathustra”. In it Zardusht says: “He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be made one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation”. He sets this beside John’s “He who eats of my body and drinks of my blood shall have eternal life”. In Vermaseren’s view the text, “though of later date … seems to confirm Justin’s assertion” [Vermaseren, #38300, pp. 103-104]. He is careful about how far the comparison goes. Kristensen and Loisy concluded that the bull was Mithras himself, offered and eaten as in the Dionysiac mysteries, “but neither the temples nor the inscriptions give any definite evidence to support this view” [Vermaseren, #38300, p. 103]. Vermaseren does identify one direct borrowing in art, running from Mithraism to Christianity. Christian sarcophagi showing Elijah’s fiery chariot drew their inspiration from “the extant representations of Mithras’s ascent to heaven in a sun-chariot”, with Oceanus replaced by the Jordan [Vermaseren, #38300, p. 105].

The physical fate of the sanctuaries is part of the record. Jerome praises the prefect Gracchus for destroying “the cave of Mithra with all the monstrous crew that give names to the initiates in their grades” [Geden, #38272, “Jerome” (a)]. Fideler writes that “after Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire, many churches were constructed atop sanctuaries formerly sacred to Mithras, including St. Peter’s in Rome”, while “in other instances, the Mithraic sanctuaries were destroyed or ritually polluted so that they were unfit for use”. He adds that Christians “refused to send their children to pagan schools and, during the fourth century and most of the fifth, pagan literature and science were banned”. He quotes Augustine’s principle: “Nothing is to be accepted except on the authority of Scripture” [Fideler, Jesus Christ, Sun of God, #69295, Mithras chapter and later chapter]. Chulev speaks of “furious attacks by Christian worshipers and of brutally destroyed Mitraic sanctuaries, which are to be found among early Christian temples” [Chulev, The Continuity Paradigm within the Mysteries of Mitra, #38297, n. 19].

The modern catalogue of parallels

Modern authors build on these patristic admissions. Fideler gives the popular summary: Mithras’ “birthday was celebrated on December 25, the shortest day of the year, marking the return of Sol Invictus”. He “was born on December 25 in a cave and his birth was witnessed by shepherds”. “Initiates into the mysteries were baptized, and the initiates enacted a resurrection scene”, and, following Justin, they “partook of a eucharist” [Fideler, #69295, Mithras chapter]. Autran sets out a sacramental system: “il y avait sept sacrements mithriaques sur lesquels nous sommes assez mal au clair”. Among them was “une sorte de baptême, rite lustratoire hérité d’une vieille tradition qui, par-delà l’Iran, se maintient encore associé au culte archaïque de Durgâ au cap Comorin”, and “une sorte de « confirmation » où l’on « signait au front le soldat »”. He also lists “une communion même, où le vin, l’eau et le pain constituent l’objet essentiel d’un banquet mystique destiné à procurer à l’initié le salut et la vie éternelle” [Autran, Mithra, Zoroastre et la préhistoire aryenne du christianisme, #60164, ch. VI]. Autran’s wider thesis, given in his title, is an “Aryan prehistory” of Christianity, in which the Mithraic sacraments come from a pre-Christian Indo-Iranian inheritance.

Vaknin’s Romanian essay, which draws on Cumont and on Ruck, Hoffman and González Celdrán, states that “Mitra s-a născut pe 25 decembrie” and that “Papa Liberius” put Jesus’ birth on the same date. He also cites a Persian tradition that Mitra was born of the immaculate virgin Anahita from the seed of Zarathustra. He sets this inside his own thesis that the rock-birth symbolizes a virion [Vaknin, Zeul Mitra si virusul, #60323, sections 1-2]. Koster, from a Hebrew-roots standpoint, counts “Serapis, Mithras and Attis” among the gods identified with the Sun. He calls Sunday, Easter and Christmas the three great Christian days of sun-worship origin, and lists Mithra among sun-deities “all born on 25 December, according to their legends” (after Titcomb) [Koster, Come Out of Her My People, #86909, nn. 23, 80-85]. Julia Lawless’s Christmas book repeats the popular form: “The ancient Persian festival of Mithras, ‘the day of the birth of the unconquered sun,’ also fell in late December” [Lawless, Heaven Scent, #67495].

The scholarly cautions

Nock gives the strongest structural objection. Unlike the cults of Isis, Attis or Adonis, “in Mithraism the initiatory ceremonies were in the foreground … and there was no annual rite of a dramatic kind. Mithras was not born annually and did not die and he had a complete Vita”. There was “no ceremony which could be made into a public rite, and Mithras never became a civic god” [Nock, #60218, “Mithraism”, pp. 428-429]. He then gives the social limits: Mithraism “omitted vast areas of the Empire: above all, it was weak in those very regions in which Christianity spread with particular strength”. In addition, “the absence of women deprived it of the support of what was in antiquity, as it is to-day, the sex more interested in religious practices” [Nock, #60218, p. 430]. In general, he says, “the Oriental cults were symptomatic of change rather than productive of it” [Nock, #60218, p. 435]. Christianity escaped absorption into Graeco-Roman religion through “the principle of authority and a binding code of conduct, largely taken from the Old Testament” [Nock, #60218, “Christianity and Hellenism”, pp. 444-445].

Geden, though he calls Mithraism “the most serious rival of Christianity”, argues that contact was limited. Christianity “was … a religion of the cities”, while “Mithraism was the religion of the army and followed the troops in the garrison towns”. Hence “the contact between the two religions was therefore, at least in the earlier period, not so intimate as has sometimes been represented” [Geden, #38272, Introduction, pp. 1-2]. He doubts several alleged echoes, among them Prudentius’ “cleft rock”, which “is probably sufficiently explained by Matt. xvi. 18, I Cor. x. 4”. On Augustine’s “mitred god” he concludes that “it is likely that rites and customs were borrowed on both sides” [Geden, #38272, “Prudentius”, “Augustine”]. Vermaseren handles the most famous dictum the same way. Ernest Renan wrote: “Si le christianisme eût été arrêté dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eût été mithraïste.” Vermaseren calls this “too sweeping”, since “it is impossible to tell whether … Mithraism could ever have achieved complete dominance” [Vermaseren, #38300, p. 188]. Radu Sergiu Ruba quotes the same sentence from Renan’s Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique and agrees that the strongest rivalry to Christianity in the first centuries came “not from the polytheistic religions, but from the cult of Mithra” [Ruba, Dialoguri și eseuri, #20487, “Un centru al lumii”].

The strong theses

Against these cautions stand authors for whom the identity is substantive. Chulev writes that “the supposed death and resurrection of this universal deity, a god of many names but of essentially one nature (today refurnished as Jesus Christ), was the same indistinguishable subject of the Mitraic cult” [Chulev, #38297, n. 19]. Koster holds that Constantine “syncretized and reconciled” Mithraists, Manichaeans and Christians “even if it meant the latter’s surrender of most vital Scriptural truths, especially its Hebrew roots” [Koster, #86909, n. 80]. Fideler reads the shared solar symbolism as a common Logos theology rather than a theft. Christ as “Sun of God” and Mithras as Sol Invictus are, for him, expressions of the same cosmological imagery [Fideler, #69295]. Autran derives both from the Aryan religious substrate [Autran, #60164, ch. VI].

Keshe: Rome patched the story to Mithraism

Mehran Tavakoli Keshe takes the borrowing thesis furthest and assigns it a political author. On 16 October 2025 he said: “When we talk about the way he was put on the cross by Romans, was for a physical behavior … What we hear, what we’ve seen in the literatures, of the three days, and the ascension, and the rest of it, is what was added to, by the, what we call, the rulers of Rome, to bring it to Mithraism. To see, to understand the whole structure of return, you have to read, understand the life of Mitra and Zoroaster”. Believers should “be aware how it was patched together”: “Physically hanging is from the Christians, resurrection in the three days from Mitra from the Emperors”. He calls Christianity a “Roman Persian Empire” religion, with “religions – same story of Mitra – told differently – keep separate”. He describes the crucifixion as “a punishment of his adulterous life” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 612, #378324, section 1]. In the same session Keshe made claims about Judaism and Israel: that “90% of them are not Jews”, being “a tribe which came from Northern Europe” who adopted Judaism after a lost war, so that Israeli Jewry is “business, it’s not religion”. He also claims that the rituals at the Western Wall are a “sexual behavior” going “back again to Mithraism” [Keshe, KSW 612, #378324, sections 1-2]. Against this he sets “the Ethos of Mitra, which is, ‘Talk good, Think good and Act good'”: “the guideline for humanity is set by Mitra, and in different names. And Mitra is the Soul of the Man (STM)” [Keshe, KSW 612, #378324, section 2]. In section 7 he calls religious tithing “tax by Man – not God”, comparable to Roman building taxes [Keshe, KSW 612, #378324, section 7].

In an earlier workshop Keshe gives the institutional version. According to the session’s study guide, early Roman soldiers adopted “Persian Mithraism’s concept of an internal deity, which later merged with the crucifixion narrative to form Christianity and the cross symbol”. The guide says St. Peter’s Basilica was built over a former Mithraic temple “to unify Roman power with public belief”, and that communion was adapted from Mithraic energy-drinking practice with wine. The same session sets out a model in which Creator, Earth (Mitra) and physicality together create man [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 386, #378098, section 8]. On St. Peter’s, Keshe’s claim agrees with Fideler’s statement quoted above.

Key points

• Justin (c. 150) and Tertullian (c. 200) admit the likeness of Mithraic rites (bread and water with formulae, baptismal washing, forehead-signing, an “image of resurrection”, rock-birth in a cave) and explain it as demonic counterfeit. Nock: they “regarded it as a diabolic copy of Christianity”.
• According to Vermaseren, the meal scene at Santa Prisca suffered most from late-fourth-century Christian iconoclasts because Tertullian had branded it an imitation of the Eucharist. He cites a medieval text, published by Cumont, that puts eucharistic words in Zarathustra’s mouth.
• Fideler, Autran, Koster, Vaknin and Lawless list parallels: 25 December, shepherds, baptism, “confirmation”, communion, resurrection. Fideler adds that churches, St. Peter’s among them, were built over mithraea.
• Nock objects that Mithras “was not born annually and did not die”, that the cult had no public drama, and that it was weak where Christianity was strong and excluded women.
• Geden argues that army religion and city religion had limited early contact and that borrowing ran “on both sides”. Vermaseren calls Renan’s “le monde eût été mithraïste” “too sweeping”; Ruba endorses its spirit.
• Chulev sees the dying-and-rising universal god “refurnished as Jesus Christ”. Autran derives both religions from an Aryan prehistory.
• Keshe teaches that Rome’s rulers added the three days, resurrection and ascension “to bring it to Mithraism”, that Mitra is the Soul of the Man, and that all religions retell Mitra’s story. The same session contains his claims about Jewish and Israeli identity and the Western Wall.