So, by that reasoning, there probably was a Mithra, upon whom the religion of Mithraism was founded. And there probably was an Orpheus, upon whom the Orphic religion was founded.

Wait a sec! These are all contradictory religions! They can't all be right.... Hmm.... Maybe none of them are.

      What Christianity is today is what Saul of Tarsus thought it was suppose to be.      He confused John the Baptist,  with Mithra of Zoastrianism and a few traveling preacher / rabbis with a real person he heard of as Yoshua Bar Yusuf b'nai adonai or in Greek (Sauls'language of choice) Jesu Christos.

      Jesus & Mithra  did not exist,   John the Baptiser did and Saul/Paul has been described variously has Bi-polar,  epileptic and/or schezophrenic;  in other words nuts!!!!!!!!!!!!

Where did the Synoptics come from, given that they run headlong into Paul's teaching? 

Then again, Jesus didn't have a religion named after him. Christianity was named after the title "Christ" or christos, meaning "anointed one". If I mumbled a prayer to a diety and put some olive oil on a chair (it might not mean as much as I don't have access to the cannabis loaded olive oil they had), that chair would be "christ". If I formed a religion about that chair, I could call it christianity. It is, after all, named after an anointed one.

Is it just me...I am not impressed by the work of John Loftus at all. The most fantastic thing about his new 2nd edition book is how he got so many well known atheists to write blurbs for it. Did he pay them to write those blurbs? Loftus's arguments for a historical Jesus are just plain bad - bordering on embarrassing.

natural, thanks for writing that. It says alot about why I post the way I do, as I struggle to understand the religious mind set. I need Lot's more practice. Never being a believer may be part of my problem. 

I still agree with my late mom who said,  everything that exists is simply god and in this sense we are all exactly the same as all others including any person such as jesus, buddha, etc  and certainly not the ridiculous jesus idol invention of the church.

actually, having majored in classical studies, i can tell you that that's exactly the reasoning many scholars follow.  there are lots of arguments for a historical odin, heracles, achilles, osiris, etc.  of course, no reputable scholar identifies them with their respective myths.  rather, the story goes that a warrior or king is made into a local legend, the stories seep through borders and become common currency, and thus take on their familiar, mythical forms.

thanks to the persians, the seleucids, the romans, etc., ancient gods and heroes were traded around like pokemon cards.  still, many scholars hypothesize, and i think reasonably so, that there had to be some concrete event that gave the impetus for creating a new deity, hero, or myth.  of course, they usually offer more evidence than that, but it's been a long time since i've been familiar with the literature.

shit, it's more plausible than jung's collective unconscious, anyhow.

Hi John,

When are you going to get out there on the debate circuit? I think it would be really interesting to see you debate people like Albert Mohler, for instance. See http://www.dts.edu/media/play/?MediaItemID=2c91a646-af23-4a26-99a0-8950c9501e5c.

Do you have any recent media appearances that might be of interest (radio, podcast, whatever)? I heard you on the Infidel Guy's YouTube channel, which is what prompted me to buy your book.

Actually, there is a good possibility that there was a figure in Persian history upon whom Mithra is based, a human figure whose history grew into mythic proportions and figured into a larger religious tapestry (Zoroastrianism) to which he never really belonged. Before there was the mythical figure Mithra there was the Vedic concept of mitra, which among other things represented a contract of honor (and, usually, of peace). Even in Persian lands (like its nearby Proto-Indian lands) one of the functions of some deities was that of king-maker, and considering the character Mithra became one of martial prowess as well as one based on honoring a covenant-- there are prayers to Mithra meant to bring or maintain prosperity by invoking a covenant to him-- it's not outside the realm of reason to speculate that the personification of the more ambiguous concept came about by basing the character on a human model (or models).

The mistake here is to assume that the Mithras religion sprang up separately from its Persian and Proto-Indian roots, where the character of Mithra (and Mithras to the Romans) was derived. We're talking two whole degrees of separation beyond a connection of Jesus to Christianity, mind you, so being able to provide any single historical character as a basis for Mithra would be ridiculously difficult to attempt. However, enough is known of the culture who originally worshipped (or, more accurately, revered) Mithra that it's not outside the realm of probability that the human characteristics attributed to the figure had some human template, most likely coming from known figures of authority who personified the concepts from which the etymology of the name is derived. That the Romans later imprinted the character of Mithra (named Mithras) into the Hellenistic/Roman pantheism is evident, but the probability of the original concept of Mithra having some terrestrial basis is about as high as that of the probability of the mythical character Agamemnon or Osiris, both of whom are (often) thought to have been based on heretofore unknown political characters from unrecorded (oral) history in their respective regions.

In other words, it's not as simple as you propose. History just isn't that binary in terms of certainty, espeially when going back to times and locations where writing wasn't nearly as common as it is today. Add to that the ability of religion to muddle and obfuscate historical data-- for example, while it may be clear to me that Joseph Smith was a fraud, attempts to present evidence of this assertion are remarkably difficult due to restrictions of access to many data sources held by the LDS church, which is a comparatively more recent religion-- and the chances of finding any real certainty on the subject are greatly lessened.

Part of the problem is indeed that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (though only a small part), but more importantly is the reality that confirmation bias and data corruption simply makes complete certainty more difficult when dealing with limited data sources in the first place. This is actually one of the reasons I look forward to reading the research that Rook has been engaged in, because I find the attempts to fill in a dearth of gaps, especially gaps so far removed by time and human intervention, to be fascinating and exciting. The fact that Rook seems to do so in a scholarly and self-checking manner makes for a reassuring likelihood that his work isn't just an exercise in confirmation bias.