The Da Vinci Code (Pt 6)

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5

“Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian God Mithras — called the Son of God and the Light of the World — was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December 25 is also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Even Christianity’s weekly holy day was stolen from the pagans” (p.232).

First of all, are you ready for this? Please, if you have any interest at all in Brown’s Mithras claim, make time and go H E R E. This is an excellent explanation of the Mithratic cult. Makes perfect sense to me. A most worthy READ — “The Cosmic Mysteries of Mithras”, by David Ulansey, which came to me via Huw Raphael.

Secondly, any Catholic school girl knows that December 25th is not commemorated as Jesus’s “Birthday”. Here Brown sounds like a back-woods anti-Catholic hick. For a very interesting & different history of the Feast of the Nativity, go HERE.

As to the Mithraism & Krishna references, Brown seems to have gotten his “info” from a notorious 19th century source, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors or Christianity Before Christ. This book, by Kersey Graves, is “a work of pseudo-scholarship and anti-Christian polemics that is so shoddy that even atheists and agnostics disavow it” (Envoy).

Graves conveniently provides no sources or citations, which is one of many reasons his book has been long discredited by scholars working in the field of comparative religion. But that doesn’t keep this popular idea from appearing on numerous websites–none providing sources or citations (and rarely mentioning Graves’ book). There’s good reason for this absence of evidence. The Bhagavad-Gita (first century A.D.) doesn’t mention Krishna’s childhood, and the stories of Krishna’s childhood recorded in the Harivamsa Purana (c. 300 A.D.) and the Bhagavata Purana (c. 800-900 A.D.) don’t mention the gifts at all. Even if they did, those works were written well after the birth of Christ, making such a claim absurd” (Envoy).

“Originally … Christianity honored the Jewish Sabbath of Saturday, but Constantine shifted it to coincide with the pagan’s veneration day of the sun.” He paused, grinning. “To this day, most churchgoers attend services on Sunday morning with no idea that they are there on account of the pagan sun god’s weekly tribute — Sunday” (p.233).

Ever since the day of the Lord’s Resurrection, those who believed Him to be the Messiah, the Christ, have kept the day of His rising — Sunday — as holy.

“Brown apparently thinks that since the observance of Sunday as a day of rest wasn’t sanctioned by civil authorities until the fourth century than it must not been observed prior to that time. But over one hundred years earlier, around 200, Tertullian writes about Sunday as a day of rest: “We, however (just as tradition has taught us), on the day of the Lord’s Resurrection ought to guard not only against kneeling, but every posture and office of solicitude, deferring even our businesses lest we give any place to the devil” (De orat., xxiii; cf. Ad nation., I, xiii; Apolog., xvi). The Council of Elvira, a local Spanish council that convened around 303, decreed that Sunday was to be a special day of worship and rest, stating, “If anyone in the city neglects to come to church for three Sundays, let him be excommunicated for a short time so that he may be corrected” (Canon xxi). Two decades later, in 321., Constantine officially declared Sunday a day of rest in the Roman Empire, “commanding abstention from work, including legal business, for townspeople, though permitting farm labour” (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1558). Since Christians considered Jesus to be the “Sun of Righteousness” (Mal 4:2) spoken of in the Old Testament and “the light of the world” (Jn 812; 9:5) in the New Testament, they thought it fitting that the true God would supercede the old Roman Sun-god. St Jerome (c. 345-420) wrote, “The Lord’s day, the day of Resurrection, the day of Christians, is our day. It is called the Lord’s day because on it the Lord rose victorious to the Father. If pagans call it the ‘day of the sun,’ we willingly agree, for today the light of the world is raised, today is revealed the sun of justice with healing in his rays” [St. Jerome, Pasch.: CCL 78, 550. Quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church, par. 1166]” (Envoy)

Next time, we head back to the Council of Nicea — where, according to Dan Brown, Jesus was VOTED IN as Son of God …