Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 07/07/2026 7:55:34 AM PDT by week 71
Ancient inscriptions written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, have revealed a forgotten chapter of early Christianity's rise across the Roman Empire.
Etched into stone, the text mentions both Jesus Christ and Mithras, the deity worshipped by a mysterious all-male religion once popular among Roman soldiers and merchants.
The inscriptions were discovered at the entrance to an underground Mithras temple in southeastern Turkey, where researchers say it records the sanctuary's symbolic closure by early Christians around 1,700 years ago.
Located at Zerzevan Castle, the remarkably preserved temple still contains four sacrificial hangers, a basin believed to have collected the blood of sacrificial bulls, and three wall niches used in the cult's secret ceremonies.
The inscriptions date to roughly 300 years after Jesus' crucifixion, during a period when Christianity was rapidly spreading across the Roman Empire.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.com ...
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Interesting to say the Least.
.
Recently I’ve seen the split between
the “Holy Roman Church” and the
Apostles of Jesus moving in the opposite directions at This particular time
In History.
.
Any takers on Expanding this occurrence?
Perhaps (I’m speculating) inspired by Julian the apostate. Emperor Julian, about 300 years after Jesus, worked to infuse the old paganism into Christianity. He didn’t outright ban Christianity. But he worked a lot to undermine it, often from within. Much like the leftists today infiltrating churches and pushing modern hedonism.
Almost sounds like Mithras is a early version of Muslims before becoming a murderous cult .
different animal.
mithrus had to do with the recession of the equinox.
People of that time and place were multilingual. Aramaic was the common street language. Koine Greek was the language of the educated and it is what the New Testament was written in.
Hebrew had become a dead language. Jewish scholars had translated the OT into Greek after the conquests of Alexander the Great.
When I first read the article I saw Mithril not Mithras. So I was thinking of Frodo from LOTR. Grin.
Mithraism was a Roman mystery cult centered on the god Mithras, flourishing roughly from the late 1st through 4th centuries CE. Though the name derives from the older Iranian/Zoroastrian deity Mithra, the Roman cult that took shape around the tauroctony (bull-slaying) iconography appears to have been substantially a product of the Roman world itself — scholars remain divided on how much genuine continuity exists with the Persian original beyond the borrowed name and some imagery.The cult was exclusively male, organized into small congregations (mithraea, often built underground or cave-like, holding perhaps 20–30 initiates), and drew heavily from soldiers, merchants, freedmen, and imperial bureaucrats — populations with the mobility to carry the cult across the empire's frontiers. It received support at points from emperors including Commodus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, and Diocletian, and left substantial archaeological remains: dozens of temples in Rome and Ostia alone, and installations as far afield as Britain and eastern Anatolia.
2. The Tauroctony
Every mithraeum centered on a depiction of Mithras killing a bull. The standard composition: Mithras kneels on the bull, pulling its head back by the nostrils while stabbing it; a dog and snake lick the wound while a scorpion grips the bull's testicles; the bull's tail terminates in a sheaf of wheat. Flanking torch-bearers (Cautes, torch up; Cautopates, torch down) frame the scene, with Sol and Luna above. The oldest known example (CIMRM 593, Rome) dates to the early 2nd century CE.
Basic structure of the tauroctony
- Mithras (center), kneeling on the bull, holding it by the nostrils with his left hand, stabbing it with his right hand, and looking towards us.
- The bull bleeds. A dog and a snake jump up to lick the blood. A scorpion grabs the bull's testicles.
- The bull's tail is a sheaf of corn.
- On either side of the scene are the "torch-bearers", or dadophoroi, Cautes (torch pointing up) and Cautopates (torch pointing down).4
- All this takes place in a cave, whose roof is above Mithras. Woodland scenes take place above the roof.
- Top left is the sun, Sol, with a crown of rays. A long ray streaks down to light on Mithras. A raven sits nearby.
- Top right is the moon, Luna.
- Side-panels depicting events from the mythological life of Mithras appear on either side. The contents of these vary.5
- In some cases busts appear at all four corners, which represent the four winds.
Despite its ubiquity, no surviving Mithraic text explains the scene's meaning. Interpretations range from creation/salvation allegory to a purely astronomical/astrological reading of the soul's descent and ascent through the planetary spheres (notably argued by Roger Beck and, earlier, John Ulansey).
A persistent popular misconception ties Mithraism to the taurobolium — the blood-bath bull sacrifice described by Prudentius. Careful review of the epigraphic evidence (Duthoy) shows the taurobolium belonged to the cult of Cybele, not Mithras; the association appears to trace to an editorial gap in Franz Cumont's early-20th-century English abridgment, which implied a link his fuller French text explicitly denied.
3. The Seven Grades
Initiates progressed through seven ranks, each under a planetary patron: Corax (Raven/Mercury), Nymphus (Venus), Miles (Soldier/Mars), Leo (Lion/Jupiter), Perses (Persian/Moon), Heliodromus (Sun-Runner/Sol), and Pater (Father/Saturn).
The second grade, Nymphus, is of particular interest: the term is a masculine neologism built on nympha ("bride"), and multiple scholars render it as "male bride" rather than "bridegroom." Associated ritual items include a bridal veil, mirror, and lamp; iconography (e.g., a fresco near Ostia's Terme Marittime) depicts the Nymphus in feminine guise, and the rite apparently culminated in a symbolic unveiling ("new light"). Ancient Christian polemicists seized on this to characterize the rite as debauched — testimony that should be read as hostile rather than descriptive. The evidentiary base for what the grade actually involved remains thin, resting almost entirely on iconography and adversarial outside commentary.
4. The Absence of Internal Texts
A striking feature of Mithraism, given its three-century, empire-wide reach and periods of imperial favor, is that no internal theological texts survive — no scripture, hymn, or initiate's account in the cult's own words. Evidence is almost entirely archaeological: temple remains, inscriptions, and iconography. This contrasts with early Christianity, which — despite real losses of its own (Papias, Marcion's edited corpus, various non-canonical gospels and acts) — left a substantially larger and more continuous body of self-authored text, sustained by an institutional apparatus (bishops, councils, canon-formation) with active interest in copying and preservation.
Plausible contributing factors to Mithraism's textual silence include a preference for oral, grade-to-grade transmission consistent with mystery-cult secrecy; the destruction or repurposing of mithraea (which would have destroyed any perishable written material such as papyri or wax tablets); and, most fundamentally, the cult's lack of any central authority or canon-forming mechanism.
5. Why Mithraism Declined
The lack of surviving texts is better understood as a symptom than a root cause of the cult's disappearance. More structurally significant factors include:
- Fragmentation: no central hierarchy existed above the level of an individual Pater and his congregation, leaving no mechanism to coordinate belief or recover from local disruption.
- Non-exclusivity: initiation into Mithras did not preclude worshipping other gods, and the cult did not proselytize — a fundamentally different growth logic than Christianity's exclusive, missionary model.
- Gender exclusion: an all-male membership foreclosed both broader growth and the intergenerational, household-based transmission that helped sustain Christianity.
- State action: once Christianity became the imperial religion, mithraea were closed, destroyed, or converted as a matter of policy (formalized under Theodosius's late-4th-century decrees against paganism). A small-cell, non-textual, legally unprotected cult was poorly positioned to survive concerted state suppression.
6. The Zerzevan Castle Inscription (2026)
A recently deciphered discovery bears directly on point 5. An Aramaic inscription at the entrance to the well-preserved underground Mithras temple at Zerzevan Castle (Diyarbakır province, southeastern Turkey) — first found in 2017 but only translated after roughly a year's work by Professor Mehmet Sait Toprak (Mardin Artuklu University) — has been dated to the 3rd–4th century CE on the basis of letter forms compared against known Old Syriac/Aramaic inscriptions.
Positioned beside a carved cross at the temple's threshold, the text names both the "Invincible Sun God Mithras" and Jesus Christ, and invokes the Holy Cross. Toprak describes it as the first known Aramaic inscription documenting the formal closure of a Mithras temple, reflecting the religious transition underway as Christianity displaced Mithraism in the region.
This is significant for two reasons. First, it is a rare directly-dated textual artifact in a field otherwise reliant on iconography and outside polemic. Second — and more importantly for the question of decline — it reads not as evidence of gradual abandonment or neglect, but as a deliberate, dated, symbolic act of religious replacement inscribed at the site itself. That supports the "external suppression" account of Mithraism's end over any explanation centered on internal textual or doctrinal weakness. As with any single recently-decoded inscription, Toprak's reading should be treated as provisional pending further review by other Aramaic/Syriac epigraphers.
7. Freemasonry: A Structural Parallel, Not a Lineage
Freemasonry's documented origin lies in medieval English and Scottish stonemasons' guilds (the "operative" tradition), which transitioned into "speculative" Freemasonry — admitting non-stonemasons for moral and philosophical rather than trade purposes — culminating in the formal founding of the Grand Lodge of London in 1717. Its core degree structure (Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, Master Mason, with further degrees available in bodies such as the Scottish and York Rites) organizes initiates as a male-only fraternity built around graded, secretive advancement.
The structural resemblance to Mithraism is genuine: both feature a fixed sequence of named ranks; secrecy around each degree's content, disclosed only upon advancement; symbolic objects, signs, and passwords tied to each grade; explicit moral or spiritual meaning attached to progression; restriction to men, organized outside the household or state; and a capstone rank (Pater; Master Mason and beyond) conferring authority to preside over others.
The differences are equally real. Masonic ritual is built around moral allegory tied to the construction of Solomon's Temple and the legendary figure of Hiram Abiff, oriented toward ethical instruction and civic virtue. Mithraic ritual was cosmological and astrological, organized around planetary spheres and the soul's celestial ascent, embedded in a specific pagan religious cosmology rather than a moral-allegorical building narrative. Masonry also emerged as a voluntary civic and philosophical fraternity operating openly within a Christian society; Mithraism was a fully religious cult, one of many competing pagan mystery religions, ultimately suppressed by state action.
Critically, there is no evidence of direct historical continuity between the two. Mithraism was effectively extinct by the late 4th–5th century CE; Freemasonry's documented emergence is roughly 1,300 years later, with no archaeological, textual, or institutional chain bridging the gap. The connection that does exist is largely Masonic self-mythology: 18th- and 19th-century Masonic writers, part of a broader Romantic-era fascination with "ancient mysteries," constructed narratives casting Freemasonry as heir to Mithraism, the Eleusinian mysteries, Egyptian mystery religion, and Solomon's Temple itself. Modern historians of Freemasonry generally treat these claims as constructed origin myths serving the fraternity's sense of ancient legitimacy, not as documented history.
The more defensible reading is convergent structure rather than descent: graded, secretive, all-male initiatory brotherhoods recur across very different eras — Mithraism, medieval guilds, Freemasonry, 19th-century fraternal orders such as the Odd Fellows and Elks — because that structure performs useful social functions (bonding, hierarchy, controlled transmission of status and trust) independent of any specific religious content, rather than because later organizations inherited earlier ritual.
8. Summary
Mithraism presents a paradox: an empire-wide, sometimes imperially-favored cult that left almost no trace of its own theology in writing, reconstructed today almost entirely from stone, mosaic, and hostile outside testimony. Its structural features — decentralization, non-exclusivity, and male-only membership — better explain both its historical fragility and its eventual disappearance than its oral/non-textual character alone. The Zerzevan inscription offers a rare, concrete, dated data point suggesting that the cult's end was not simply organic decline but, at least in some locations, a deliberate and documented act of closure.
“Hebrew ceased to be a regular spoken language sometime between 200 and 400 CE, as it declined in the aftermath of the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt, which was carried out against the Roman Empire by the Jews of Judaea.[21][22][note 4] Aramaic and, to a lesser extent, Greek were already in use as international languages, especially among societal elites and immigrants.[24] Hebrew survived into the medieval period as the language of Jewish liturgy, rabbinic literature, intra-Jewish commerce, and Jewish poetic literature.”
Wiki
Also: https://unpacked.media/hebrew-a-dead-language-revived/
https://www.jesusfilm.org/blog/what-language-did-jesus-speak/
“The Greek New Testament does preserve some Hebrew and Aramaic words, but they were written in Greek letters that preserve the approximate sounds of the original Hebrew or Aramaic words, (i.e., they’re transliterated). There is uncertainty on whether some of these transliterated words reflect an Aramaic or a Hebrew origin. This is common for languages in the same family.
The use of Hebrew & Aramaic words in the original Greek of the New Testament reflects normal practice in multicultural, multilingual contexts. For example, Paul is recorded as seamlessly switching from Greek to Aramaic in Acts 21:37-22:2, depending on the audience he is addressing. This entire passage is written in Greek in the Book of Acts, but Paul’s linguistic dexterity reflects the normal code-switching practices of bilingual people.”
https://bibtheo.com/2020/02/04/aramaicgnt/
Very informative find you discovered for this reply. Thanks for posting it!
This article is about Zernaki Tepe - in what is now Turkey, but 1700 years ago was on the borderland between the Roman Empire and Parthia/Sassanid Persia.
Mithra is a Indo-Iranian god.
HOWEVER, Mithraism in the Roman empire was different from the Indic or even the Iranic worship of the same named god - in many ways it was a different religion.
In the Roman empire, the Mithraem was basically a man’s club (think of the Flintstone’s warthog club) - so we don’t know the exact details of this, but it was mostly guys hanging together. it also wasn’t inspiring per se, which is why it died out.
This article is a nothingburger - nothing really new. the site was abandoned by the Mithra-ites long long before Christians met in this place
In 300 AD the Apostles were long dead.
However we have the writings of the Apostles students - like Ignatius of antioch or Irenaeus of Lyon - and we see that there was direct continuity between the Jerusalem church in 33 AD and Christianity in 300 AD -- note that this was the time of the Diocletian persecutions of Christianity, so we have a lot of text from Christians AND their detractors from this time about what Christians believed in and the rituals they followed -- hint they were all the same as that recorded in the 1st century Didache and the same as what you have in the Catholic/Orthodox/Oriental Orthodox/Assyrian church
My pleasure. The several hundred years after Christ’s birth were such a fascinating period of human history.
“the site was abandoned by the Mithra-ites long long before Christians met in this place”
That’s not what I read. The ascending Christians and the Roman Emperors who made it the official religion intentionally buried old pagan worship sites.
Julian the Apostate was around 360 AD.
worked to infuse the old paganism into Christianity -- this is incorrect, very very incorrect -- Julian 361–363 CE) sought to eliminate Christianity completely. Raised a Christian, he converted to Hellenic paganism
the ironic thing is that he saw that Christianity had charities, hospitals etc. while the pagans didn't have it, so he tried to borrow the church hierarchy - he tried to institute a structured, top-down hierarchy for paganism, modeling the role of a pagan high priest after Christian bishops and Church administration AND on observing that early Christians effectively grew their faith through philanthropy (feeding the poor, hosting love feasts, offering hospitality), Julian established similar welfare programs and hospices funded through pagan temples. He demanded high moral and philanthropic standards for pagan priests, threatening removal for bad behavior in an effort to rival the perceived righteousness of the Christian clergy
you can read about this in detail in Tom Holland's book "Dominion: the Making of the western Mind" -- basically all these ideas of charity, equality of man, high morality for clergy, etc is ALIEN to non-Christian religions (even to pre-Christian Judaism, leave alone Islam, Hinduism etc.) - and he tried to make paganism to copy Christianity, but failed as it could not take on the core of Christianity without utterly changing itsefl)
This is also incorrect, very very incorrect -- Julian 361–363 CE) sought to eliminate Christianity completely.
Julian’s most devastating measure was the School Edict of 362 CE, which prohibited Christians from teaching classical Greek literature, rhetoric, and philosophy
This was a massive blow because ever since the days of Justin Martyr, Christian scholars knew BOTH the classics and the Judaic/Christian texts -->btw, tell-it-right, have you read justin Martyr's works? If not, I highly recommend them -- I highly recommend reading his Apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho -- you can find them at -- https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/
anyhoo - so julian argued that because classical texts (like Homer or Virgil) were inherently tied to pagan gods, Christian teachers who ridiculed those gods were hypocrites and lacked integrity. This law effectively forced Christian intellectuals out of the education system. Since mastery of classical texts was required to hold high office or participate in elite Roman society, the law aimed to render future generations of Christians uneducated and unfit for government
He tried to weaponize theological differences to make the Church destroy itself from within.
Julian wrote against the Galileans -- he refused to call them "Christians," choosing the regional term "Galileans" to strip the movement of its universal claims and reduce it to a provincial cult. He routinely mocked Christian scripture as unphilosophical and unrefined.
Julian funded a massive project to rebuild the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD
He did this specifically to invalidate Jesus's prophecy in the Gospels that "not one stone here will be left on another."
Julian calculated that if the third temple were successfully rebuilt, it would deal a fatal ideological blow to Christian theology. (The project eventually failed due to a sudden, catastrophic earthquake)
Not really.
the surprising thing about Islam is that it started only in the 700s.
in the 500s and 600s you have a heretical sect half-way between Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity who consider Jesus a prophet whom they called the praiseworthy one - the Muhammad. This is the core of what later became Islam - in the earliest parts of the Quran.
then, in the years around 600 to 640 the Roman and Persian empires entered into a decade long war with each other that was utterly devastating - think WwI+II combined but for decades. They were utterly exhausted.
they both used Arab tributaries to fight, but couldn’t pay them. So the Arabs took over.
The Arabs were in amazement that this just fell into their laps so basically thought ‘we must be great, let’s take this half-baked heresy of ours and make it a religion’
That only got realy going after the first Arab rulers - the Ummayyyads were chucked out by the Abbassids who fused together Zoroastrianism with the Gnostic-Christian-Jewish mix and together this mix created Islam in the 750s AD
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
