Interesting. What about the following historical accounts -
I suppose jas3 can answer for themselves, but I took a look at what you call historical accounts.
But before getting into that, let's look at the message you were responding to:
No, you point to fraudulent histories of Rome subscribing to Mithraism and Constantine merging sun worship with Christianity, then when called out on the errors in the texts you've copied, try to redirect the discussion.
The quotes you go on to offer do not really address the specific thing jas3 was talking about, namely someone else's copy/pasted essay that made a bunch of errors, and then when those errors were pointed out, the poster tried to redirect the discussion. Your quotes do not actually address the errors that were pointed out (e.g. the incorrect claim that Mithraism was the official religion of the Roman Empire). However, that was all done by someone other than you, so perhaps you are not trying to defend the original essay's problems that were pointed out and are referring specifically to the more specific "fraudulent histories of Rome subscribing to Mithraism and Constantine merging sun worship with Christianity" claim and you are trying to claim they were not fraudulent. Thus, we will look specifically as to whether the "merging sun worship and Christianity" is supported by your (possibly copy/pasted) quotes.
The text of Constantine's Sunday Law of 321 A.D. is :
"One the venerable day of the Sun let the magistrates and people residing in cities rest, and let all workshops be closed. In the country however persons engaged in agriculture may freely and lawfully continue their pursuits because it often happens that another day is not suitable for gain-sowing or vine planting; lest by neglecting the proper moment for such operations the bounty of heaven should be lost. (Given the 7th day of March, Crispus and Constantine being consuls each of them the second time." Codex Justinianus, lib. 3, tit. 12, 3; translated in History of the Christian Church, Philip Schaff, D.D., (7-vol.ed.) Vol. III, p.380. New York, 1884
This is just the text of the decree he gave, which by itself means little. But presumably it was the subsequent ones you meant to support the claim.
Dr. A.Chr. Bang says regarding this Law :
"This Sunday law constituted no real favoratism to Christianity..... It is evident from all his statuatory provisions that the Emperor during the time 313-323 with full consciousness has sought the realisation of his religeous aim: the amalgamation of heathenism and Christianity." Kirken og Romerstaten (The Church and the Roman State) p.256. Christiania, 1879
This work is not in English, but Norwegian. Still, I was able to access it, and while I don't know Norwegian, the wonders of modern automated translations are good enough for me to get a grasp of what was going on.
The issue with this one is, looking at it in more context, its references to "amalgamation" was not of specifically having their beliefs combine, but trying to make things more neutral. Thus the decree on Sunday he passed, while most likely for the benefit of Christians, was phrased in a way to avoid offending others, and allowing various others to see it as being done due to their own sun worshiping beliefs. Immediately after the quote you offer, the work says (please note this is an automated translation):
"This is also evident in the prayer formula that all soldiers, pagan and Christian, had to learn by heart and recite with uplifted hands on Sundays. "You alone we acknowledge as God and King. We call on you as our Helper. We have gained victory through you. We have overcome our enemies. We owe you all the good we have received from you so far. We hope for all the good for the future. We all pray and supplicate to you that you grant our Emperor Constantine and his God-loving sons a long life and grant them victory." – a prayer of the kind that both Christians and sun worshippers could recite in their own way, a prayer to the neutral deity of the realm."
Thus what it is talking about in "amalgamation" is really more a case of neutrality, sort of like how the phrase "In God We Trust" on US coins is largely religiously neutral as it makes no indication of
which idea of God is in view; even a polytheist like a Hindu could accept such a statement. So the "amalgamation" is not referring to an actual merging of Christian or pagan beliefs, but an attempt at neutrality that both Christian and non-Christian could accept.
In A.D. 321, to please the bishops of the Catholic Church, he issued an edict commanding judges, townspeople, and mechanics to rest on Sunday. Yet in this also his paganism was still manifest, as the edict required rest on "the venerable day of the sun," and "enjoined the observance, or rather forbade the public desecration, of Sunday, not under the name of Sabbatum, or Dies Domini, but under its old astrological and heathen title, Dies Solis , familiar to all his subjects, so that the law was as applicable to the worshipers of Hercules, Apollo, and Mithras, as to the Christians." (History of the Christian Church, Vol. 3, sec. 75, par. 5.-Schaff.) ( The Great Empires of Prophecy by Alonzo Jones page 391 )
Like above, all this is saying is that Constantine used the generic name "Dies Solis" (Day of the Sun) to use it in order to make it applicable to all--even Christians would use this term, much like how in the present people say "Sunday"--rather than the more specifically Christian term of Dies Domini (Day of the Lord).
J. Westbury-Jones, an English writer, speaks thus: “ How such a law would further the designs of Constantine it is not difficult to discover. It would confer a special honor upon the festival of the Christian church, and it would grant a slight boon to the pagans themselves. In fact there is nothing in this edict which might not have been written by a pagan. The law does honor to the pagan deity whom Constantine had adopted as his special patron god, Apollo or the sun [Constantine retained the motto “Soli Invicto” to the end of his life]. The very name of the day lent itself to this ambiguity. The term Sunday (dies Solis) was in use among Christians as well as heathen.” (Roman and Christian Imperialism, p. 210)
Again, same as above. This asserts simply that the usage of "day of the Sun" was done so that, while the law itself was a way to show "special honor" to the Christian Church (who had their gatherings on the day), it would not offend the non-Christians due to avoiding using any explicitly Christian phrases, like calling it day of the Lord.
The retention of the old pagan name of “dies Solis” or “Sunday”, for the weekly Christian festival, is in great measure owing to the union of pagan and Christian sentiment with which the first day of the week was recommended by Constantine to his subjects, pagan and Christian alike, as the “venerable day of the sun”. His decree regulating it’s observance has been justly called a new era in the history of the Lord’s day. It was his mode of harmonizing the discordant religions of the empire under one common institution. (A. P. Stanely, History of the Eastern Church, p. 184)
Yet again, this is just talking about how Constantine used the term day of the Sun rather than the Lord's Day. This "union of pagan and Christian sentiment" is merely saying that this was why Constantine used that name, so a pagan could interpret it in their own way and not see it as specifically favoring Christianity. It's not saying anything about beliefs being combined.
"Aurelian ... created a new cult of the 'Invincible Son.' Worshipped in a splendid temple, served by pontiffs who were raised to the level of the ancient pontiffs of Rome .... On establishing this new cult, Aurelian in reality proclaimed the dethronement of the old Roman idolatry and the accession of Semitic Sun-Worship." Franz Cumont, "Astrology and Religion Among the Greeks and Romans," p. 55, 56.
This doesn't say anything about Constantine or Christianity. Also, it would have been preferable had you specified this was from a reprint, as in the original printing this was on pages 97-98. Actually, I'm confused why it says "55, 56" when the entirety of the quote is found on page 55.
"The two opposed creeds [Christianity and Mithraism] moved in the same intellectual and moral sphere, and one could actually pass from one to the other without shock or interruption." Cumont, ibid. p. 210.
You claim "ibid" but the quote is not found anywhere in the prior work you cited. It is instead found in a completely different work by Franz Cumont, "Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism." Cumont does indeed make this statement in that work. However, it has little bearing on the current question, as the sentences immediately before show: "This religion was no longer like that of ancient Rome, a mere collection of propitiatory and expiatory rites performed by the citizen for the good of the state; it now pretended to offer to all men a world-conceptpon which gave rise to a rule of conduct and placed the end of existence in the future life. It was more unlike the worship that August had attempted to restore than the Christianity that fought against it." Given this content, Cumont seems to be talking about how the common religion of the Romans had been changing to be more
like Christianity, not that Christianity was takings things from it.
"Our observance of Sunday as the Lord's day is apparently derived from Mithraism. The argument that has sometimes been used against this claim, namely, that Sunday was chosen because of the resurrection on that day, is not well supported." Gordon J. Laing, "Survivals of Roman Religion," p. 148.
Laing cites no sources for his claims that it was derived from Mithraism. Now, this whole idea relies on the idea that Mithraists considered Sunday to be particularly sacred. This is a claim various people have made. However, I have never seen supported by any ancient text.
As this also concerns your next quote (who also offers no evidence), it is perhaps worthy to do an examination of this general claim. The main person to have popularized this idea appears to have been Franz Cumont (who you quoted from earlier). In the late 19th century, Franz Cumont wrote the work Les Mystères de Mithra, which was translated into English in the early 20th century as "Texts and Illustrated Monuments Relating to the Mysteries of Mithra", although the translation was rather frustratingly abridged (removing a lot of footnotes and only translating the first volume), so one has to actually look at the French to try to see what his sources for various ideas were. This was for a good time considered the standard work on Mithraism.
However, while Cumont made some important steps forward in Mithraic studies, various things he asserted in his work--which were then repeated by others, even some scholarly sources--is now regarded as erroneous. A particular issue is his conflation of the earlier Persian Mithra and the later Roman Mithra, assuming a strong link between the two and that a belief or practice regarding one would apply to the other, an approach now abandoned with the two being seen as rather distinct from one another. A major turning point in Mithraic studies, as I understand, was the 1971 First International Congress of Mithraic Studies, which moved studies forward and rejected various ideas of Cumont, especially those of the strong connection between the two Mithra versions. One should be cautious trusting statements about Mithraism prior to the 1970's for this reason; they so frequently simply go back to Cumont's outdated work (obviously, plenty of claims about Mithraism even after this point simply go back to Cumont's ideas, but the scholarly information is more updated). Cumont by all appearances got a lot of things right about Mithraism, but he's simply out of date, as are those who simply repeats his ideas.
For our purposes, however, the question is the association of Mithraism with Sunday rather than any of the other claims he made that are now seen as questionable. The idea that Mithraists considered Sunday to be particularly sacred
is a claim made by Cumont in his work, and got repeated by various other people, such as the source you quoted. The abridged English translation of Cumont's work, while including the claim, says nothing about his rationale, but it is found in the French, and from what I can make out it looks like it's basically a guess on his part; he appeals to no text explicitly saying anything of the sort. Thus, the whole repeatedly claimed idea of Mithraists considering Sunday to be the most important day of worship appears to not actually rely on anything concrete, and instead is speculative.
More modern scholarly works on Mithraism I have looked at make no reference to this idea of Cumont, most likely given the apparent lack of evidence. The proceedings of the aforementioned first annual conference of Mithraic Studies contain two volumes of essays (
here and
here). Searching for "Sunday" and "Sundays" turns up zero matches that they regarded it as a holy day. The major 1984 work
"Mithras" by Reinhold Merkelbach is in German so it's harder for me to look into things, but I can still do a search. The German word for Sunday is "Sonntag" and plural "Sonntage" so I can search for that. "Sonntag" shows up only once, in a list of days of the week in different languages. No apparent mention of it being their big day of worship that I see. Roger Beck, considered an expert on Mithraism, mentions Sunday zero times in his 2006 work
"The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire".
Thus based on the evidence people have provided--or, perhaps I should say, the evidence they
have not provided--it appears that the claim of Mithraism considering Sunday to be of any particular importance does not rest on anything concrete and is just a speculation.
"As a solar festival, Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra; and it is interesting to notice that since Mithra was addressed as Dominus, 'Lord,' Sunday must have been the 'Lord's Day’ long before the Christian times." A. Weigall, "The Paganism in Our Christianity," p. 145.
No sources or citations are given for these claims, continuing the fact, as I've noted, that people make this claim without actual evidence. Most likely this traces back to Cumont and falls into the problems discussed earlier.
In fact, Weigall is also an odd choice to appeal to given he makes all sorts of other claims about things in Christianity--and this includes the Bible itself--being filled with pagan influences. For example, on pages 230-231, he declares:
"And though the Jewish Sabbath cannot be directly traced to Babylonian usage, the institution is obviously derived from moon-worship and from the concomitant recognition of the number seven as calendrically sacred. The Jews attributed the holiness of the seventh day to the fact that God was supposed to have rested from His six-days' creative labours on that day; but this was itself a legend derived from Babylonian mythology, and was not the original reason why the seventh day was a day of rest."
So, should we accept his claim that the Jewish Sabbath is "obviously derived from moon-worship"? Or what of his claim on page 60 that
the account of the virgin birth in the Bible "is derived from pagan sources"? Or any of the other various accounts in the Bible he asserts are from paganism, which (much like his Sunday claims) are generally given with either no evidence or highly speculative evidence?
I do understand that it is possible to cite someone's work as evidence without agreeing with everything in it, but given Weigall's lack of evidence offered for his "Sunday was the sacred day of Mithra" claim (which even if true, would apply only to the Roman Mithra and would not have been "long before the Christian times"), it means to appeal to him is to appeal to his authority--but then should not that authority be accepted for his various other claims? His contention that Christianity and the Bible are strongly influenced by paganism is a major claim of his work.
So I do not think these quotes actually refute jas3's statement.
