Why did Paul introduce Mithraic theology into Christianity, and did he create Christianity as we know it by merging the story of Jesus with the cult of Mithra?
The mystery cult of Mithra had seven degrees of initiation (Corax, Nymphus, Miles, Leo, Perses, Heliodromus and Pater), and these are the same as the seven ordinary degrees of the Illuminati (which additionally has three mystery degrees). Those members of the Illuminati who were directly involved with Mithraism also had a secret eighth grade called Chryfii, meaning "hidden ones", hence the reference to it being a 'mysteries' religion. Paul's intimate knowledge of all levels of the Mithran cult, including the 'mysteries' of Chryfii, is reflected in the many sayings lifted word for word from all eight levels that are scattered throughout his letters. That Paul knew the secrets of the eighth grade of Chryfii indicates that either he was a priest of Mithra, a member of the Illuminati, or had acquired his insight into the mysteries from someone who was, and broke their vow of silence about the mysteries. His ability to relate spiritual things to people and his organisational skills indicate he may well have been a priest, but any of these scenarios would not be surprising, given that he grew up in the cosmopolitan environment of the city of Tarsus.
A child of a Jewish family, Paul would have been exposed throughout his childhood and teenage years to the dominant religion of the city of Tarusus: the mystery cult of Mithra. The reason why Mithra, an Indo-Persian god, had continued to prosper under the Greeks and Macedonians was that he could be readily identified with Greek deities such as Apollo, Helios and Perseus. Roman soldiers rapidly fell under the spell of Mithra too, and for 500 years (from 100 BCE to 400 CE) he was their main god. Knowing the sort of mind Paul had, it is highly likely that he would not have studied everything there was to know about Mithra. However, born as a Jew, he would have retained an interest in Jewish affairs and when he heard strange and miraculous tales about a charismatic, wandering Jewish preacher who was said to have been crucified and then risen from the dead, it would have intrigued him, and made him determined to find out more.
Many who have studied the connection between Paul and Mithraism theorise that the more Paul learnt about Jesus from his contacts in Jerusalem, the more amazed he would have become at certain similarities between Mithra and Jesus. At first, Paul may have been outraged at what he perceived as blasphemy. He spoke out against these "Christians" and issued threats against them, acquiring the reputation of being a persecutor of Christians. But, famously, on the road to Damascus, he had a life-changing epiphany. His mind made an astonishing leap: what if this Jesus the Nazarene was an avatar of Mithra? Perhaps Mithra had descended to earth in human form to save humanity by sacrificing himself. Such an act was already the centrepiece of the Mithraic teachings. Was it not the logical culmination of Mithraism for it to happen in reality?
Paul took himself off into the desert to study and get to the bottom of this revelation, emerging three years later, having formulated the gospel he then preached that is documented in his letters to his followers in the churches he founded. Declaring himself as God's chosen messenger to the Gentiles (in spite of the fact that Jesus had nominated Peter to this task), Paul was convinced he had been given a divine mission to do something close to his heart: to combine Messianic Judaism with Mithraism, thereby uniting the religion of his birth with the religion of which he was now a priest. It made perfect sense to him. He could conceive of nothing more noble and inspiring.
If this theory is correct, Paul totally abandoned conventional Mithraism and dedicated his life to his new mission: proclaiming that Mithraism was realised in the person of the Jewish Messiah Jesus Christ. He knew he would never be able to publicly identify Jesus with Mithra because it would be unacceptable to the followers of Jesus (perhaps his attempts to do that led to his fall-out with Peter, James, John in Jerusalem, and his doctrine being rejected by the Christian church at Ephesis, and then all the churches in Asia). Paul gave Jesus a Greek title - Christ, meaning the annointed one - a word commonly used in the Gentile world to describe a divine prophet, that would be palatable to Messianic Judaism and accepted in the Greek speaking world, from which would come the majority of his followers.
Just as The Tauroctony (the slaying of a bull performed by Mithra) was the centrepiece of Mithraism, Paul made Jesus' death on the cross the centrepiece of his Christianity. The bull's blood was the Milky Way, the starry path via which souls ascended to heaven from earth, or descended from heaven to earth. Jesus' shed blood became became Paul's stairway to heaven. In Mithraism, the "inner", spiritual significance was that the bull represented the human ego mired in the things of the world and in humanity's bestial nature that had no interest in spiritual transformation, nor any interest in freeing the divine spark. By slaying the bull and by shedding its blood, Mithra was saving humanity from the infernal empire of Satan. In Paul's Christianity, the slaying of Jesus and the shedding of his blood was Jesus saving humanity from the infernal empire of Satan. That Jesus never gave the slightest hint in his teaching that his death on the cross was an act of atonement for the sins of the world was of no consequence to Paul. Like Mithra, Paul's Jesus was liberating us, redeeming us, assuming the mantle of our Saviour.
Mithra, in the form of the slain bull, laid in a tomb for three days. By the end of the three days, the Lower Self was said to be ready to enter into union with the Higher Self, and the Higher Self, now freed from attachment to a primitive Lower Self, could enter into union with the True God, called Abraxas by the Illuminati. Paul therefore had Jesus lay in the tomb for three days (even though the gospels indicate it was less than 48 hours), then rise again and ascend into Heaven, where he reigns forever on the throne, seated at the right hand of God, The Father, to intercede on our behalf.
Mithra's followers symbolically ate his body (bread) and drank his blood (wine) to show that they accepted that Mithra was the source of all the spiritual and physical sustenance that a person required. The words attributed to Mithra at this ceremony were: "He who will not eat of my body and drink of my blood, so that he will be one with me and I with him, the same shall not know salvation." 1 Corinthans 11 indicates that Paul introduced the same ritual into the Christian church, only now it was the body of Jesus that was broken (disregarding the significance of the breaking of bread in the Jewish Passover celebrated at the Last Supper, on which Paul had based his ceremony) and the blood of Jesus that was shed for the remission of sins. By partaking, Christians "show (identify with) the Lord's death until he comes".
Because of its links to Persian Zoroastrianism, Mithraism incorporated Zoroastrian ideas such as heaven and hell, an apocalypse, a day of judgement, a resurrection of the dead and a second coming (where Mithra would destroy the Evil One). Paul included those concepts in his gospel, even prophesying that during his lifetime, Christ would return to establish an earthly Kingdom (1 Thess 4). Paul ignored the fact that Jesus had stated categorically that his kingdom was spiritual and "not of this world". Though Paul was proved to be a false prophet when his prediction of the eminent return of Christ in his own lifetime didn't happen, Christians today still quote Paul's prediction of a rapture and resurrection of the dead, claiming it to be futuristic, even though Paul spoke of it in the present tense, identifying himself and the people to whom he was writing as actual participants in the rapture ("we who live and remain").
It was Paul's melding of Messianic Judaism with the traditional pagan religions of his day that was an astonishing, and disastrous, innovation. Paul never met Jesus and didn't bother to converse with Jesus' apostles before starting his own mission to convert the world. His radical, mystical version of Christianity had virtually nothing in common with anything Jesus said. In all probability, Paul knew next to nothing about the man Jesus and what He said and taught. Paul quotes from the eight degrees of Mithraism, he quotes Plato, Philo, Aratus, Socrates and other Greek philosphers, he even quotes the Old Testament, but amazingly never once does he quote Jesus, the person his doctrines are about!
As far as we can ascertain, little if anything about Jesus had been written down and circulated when Paul began preaching his new gospel, Paul hadn't met any eyewitnesses, so he was getting all of his information via hearsay, gossip, possibly travellers' tales and "revelation". But he didn't need anything else, and he certainly didn't need the truth. All he was doing was preaching Mithraism, with a Messianic Jew playing the part of Mithra. Simple. Most people who had known Jesus had no idea what planet Paul was on. What he claimed Jesus was about bore no resemblance to what Jesus actually said. James, the leader of the Church in Jerusalem, was quick to attempt to pull Paul into line. The book in the New Testament bearing his name is in fact a line-for-line rebuttal of the doctrines Paul had documented in his epistles.
Paul's epistles are the oldest part of the New Testament, written around 50 AD while the gospels were written around 70-100 AD, no doubt to counteract Paul's teachings, and put the record straight about the story of the life of Jesus. Paul's famous letters received little or no acceptance by the early church in Jerusalem. The Apostles never mentioned Paul in their writings, though there is reference to communication between them in the book of Acts. They never acknowledged his self-proclaimed apostleship. Their writings indicate they regarded him as a strange pagan trying to distort Jesus' message. Paul's so-called fanatical Judaism might well have been a complete fabrication. Alternatively, he may have found it impossible to live up to Jewish Mosaic Law - something he alluded to often in his writings - and so he spent three years re-working Jewish scripture with the religions of his day into a new theology that circumvented the Mosaic Law. Either way, Paul couldn't wait to announce the end of Mosaic Law and all the customs of Judaism. Furthermore, no one was better suited to appeal to the Gentiles than Paul because, to all intents and purposes, he was a Gentile.
Paul's version of Christianity succeeded largely because the original faction, based in Jerusalem, was effectively wiped out when Titus destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE, following a failed Jewish insurrection against the Roman occupation. Paul's Christians were based in many places outside Palestine, hence survived the destruction wrought by the Romans. However, after the non-return of Jesus to establish an earthly kingdom as Paul had prophesied, Paul's teachings began to lose their appeal and credibility. The fulfillment of Jesus' prophesy about the destruction ofr the temple in Jerusalem, followed by the circulation of the Revelation of Jesus to John (The Book of Revelation) which seems to commend the Church of Ephesis for rejecting Paul and his gospel, saw continued growth in churches following the teachings of the early church at Jerusalem.
Around the year 144 AD, Paul's teachings were revived and championed by Marcion of Sinope at Rome. Marcion believed Jesus Christ was the saviour sent by God and Paul of Tarsus was his chief apostle, but he rejected the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and the God of Israel (YHWH Elohim). Marcionists believed that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament. This belief was in some ways similar to Gnostic Christian theology. Marcionism was denounced by its opponents as heresy, and written against, notably by Tertullian.
Marcion was the first person known in recorded history to collect Paul's writings as a canon, the Pauline epistles. His role in the formation of the New Testament canon is pivotal to Paul's epistles having been included in The Bible. There were many early Christian groups, such as the Ebionites, that did not accept Paul's writings as part of their canon. The New Testament Canon was mainly set at the council at Carthage in 387 A.D. but they appear to have simply followed Marcion's Canon.
Paul's gospel of salvation though faith alone was never taught as doctrine by the Roman Catholic Church and it largely died out with the demise of Marcionism around the 5th century, and was largely forgotten until the Reformation. Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German priest, professor of theology, was an iconic figure of the Protestant Reformation. Luther strongly disputed the Roman Catholic Church's claim that freedom from God's punishment for sin could be purchased with money via indulgences. He argued that salvation is not earned by good deeds but received only as a free gift of God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ as redeemer from sin, and used Paul's long forgotten doctrine of salvation by faith to support his argument. This doctrine became the cornerstone of the Protestant movement. Interestingly, Luther did not deem the two books of the Bible that seem to criticise Paul and his beliefs - the Epistle of James and the Book of Revelation - to be divinely inspired, and attempted to have them removed from the Biblical Canon.
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