Mithra? Attis? Really, Rob Bell?

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I don't remember how long it was now, but someone forwarded me a link to a video by Rob Bell.

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It was one of the NUMA series. I will confess, I'm a Reformed Baptist.

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I do have a semi -cool pair of glasses, at least I think they're sort of semi -cool.

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My daughter thinks they are. They're transitions lenses, which I think is very cool. But, Reformed Baptists really, you know, all the emergent church stuff just doesn't really do much for us, and so, you know,

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I don't even remember why I watched it. But I did, and I ended up downloading it.

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In fact, I know I've downloaded it at least twice. Can't find them, but I know I downloaded it at least twice.

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Because it just so happened that the subject of the video really struck me, and I was very taken aback by it.

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I was disturbed by it, and I wanted to do a response to it, but as with many things, there are lots of things

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I'd like to do, and can't always find the time to do it when I'm keeping up with the things

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I'm supposed to be doing as far as debate preparation and things like that goes. But what caught my attention specifically about it was the utter naivete of Rob Bell in regards to accepting,

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I realize, very commonly accepted assertions, but not even seeming to show any recognition of the fact that the assertions that are made about Christianity borrowing from and creating their terminology based upon other religions and things like that.

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The whole context of the early church was just incredibly naive, and if it wasn't responded to, then once again,

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Christians would be going around accepting the idea that, for example, Mithraism was this big, huge, major religion that we have to look at as a source for what early

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Christians believed. When that's utterly bogus, that Attis is at all relevant, anything like that.

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And the whole assertion being made that, in essence, the

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Christian faith defined itself by being reactionary against imperial Rome. There are people who believe that.

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There isn't really any reason to believe that, but there are people who believe that. John Dominic Crossan believes that. That's central to his entire paradigm and understanding.

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And so I wanted to respond to it, like I said, I didn't get around to it. Well, Rob Bell's all over the place now with an upcoming book that I haven't seen and not going to comment on,

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Charges of Universalism and all sorts of stuff like that. Not going to be touching on that in this video because I don't know anything about it.

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But given that this type of interest has been generated, I felt it would be worthwhile, it would be important and useful to folks to once again point out that we don't have to look outside of the context that the

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Bible itself provides for us to look for Jesus and a proper explanation of who

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Jesus was and what he did. We don't have to look to Mithraism or Attis or Dionysus or Osiris or any of the rest of this stuff.

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The context that makes sense about Jesus is the one the New Testament gives us. Second Temple Judaism, the

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Judaism of the days of Jesus. Jesus was, believe it or not, the Jewish Messiah.

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Now that messianic role goes way beyond just the Jews, but that's who he was.

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And that's the context that gives rise to an understanding of who he was. And I did want to comment on how the video then plays out and basically ends up by saying you are the gospel.

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No, I'm not the gospel. You're not the gospel. The gospel is what the triune

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God has done to glorify himself in the redemption of a particular people. That's what the gospel is.

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I may be called to live that out, that is live in light of its reality in my life and all those other things, but that doesn't make me the gospel.

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There is some really squishy thinking that ends up coming out at the end of this particular video.

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So let's look at what Rob Bell has to say and then respond to it and hopefully in the process clarify and edify folks so that we might give an answer for the hope that lies within us, yet with gentleness and reverence.

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So let's take a look at what he had to say. Sometime in the first century, around the year 30, a movement was started by a group of Jews who insisted that their rabbi, a man named

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Jesus from the Galilee region in Israel, had risen from the dead after being crucified by the

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Roman Empire. They claimed that after his resurrection, they had seen him and that they had had conversations with him and eaten meals with him.

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And then they said that he had ascended to heaven and that someday he would return.

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Now the world at this time was ruled by the Roman Empire, this giant military global superpower.

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From England to India, the Roman Empire ruled the world and one of the most popular gods of the

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Roman Empire was the god Mithra. Mithra's followers believed that Mithra had been born of a virgin, that he was a mediator between God and humans, and that Mithra had ascended to heaven.

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Another popular religion at this time centered around the god Attis. The followers of Attis believed that Attis had been born of a virgin and each spring they gathered to celebrate the resurrection of Attis.

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Which takes us back to the Roman Empire, which was ruled by a succession of emperors called the

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Caesars. The first one, Julius Caesar, when he died, a comet appeared in the sky and people said,

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Well, of course, that's Julius Caesar, the son of God, ascending to the right hand of the gods in heaven.

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Soon after this, Julius Caesar's adopted son, Caesar Augustus, came to power. And Caesar Augustus believed that he was the son of God, sent by the gods to earth to bring about a universal reign of peace and prosperity.

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One of his popular propaganda slogans was, More people can be saved than that of Caesar.

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Caesar inaugurated a 12 -day celebration of his birth called the

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Advent of Caesar. Another popular phrase at the time, people would literally greet each other on the street by saying,

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And so in the first century, to claim that your god had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, well, it just wasn't that unique.

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The claims of these first Christians weren't really anything new. Everybody's god had risen from the dead.

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What makes yours so special? Okay, so much for the uniqueness of the

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Christian message. Everybody had a dying and rising god in those days.

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Or did they? Some of the things that Rob Bell claims there,

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I've just simply not been able to track down anything. In fact, in looking around, all I've found on the net for certain things is

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Rob Bell saying that. But I want to look specifically at the things that we can definitely address.

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And then maybe that will give us a basis for looking at the things that seem to have a little less than a solid foundation as well.

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So let's go back through what we just heard and let's look at it part by part and we'll break it up and respond to it.

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The world at this time was ruled by the Roman Empire, this giant military global superpower.

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From England to India, the Roman Empire ruled the world and one of the most popular gods of the

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Roman Empire was the god Mithra. Mithra's followers believed that Mithra had been born of a virgin, that he was a mediator between God and humans, and that Mithra had ascended to heaven.

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Now, very common claims, very often repeated in classrooms across the

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Western world, completely bogus, but very common.

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It's just simply not true. Mithraism did not have a meaningful presence in the

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Roman Empire until about the 6th decade of the 1st century, way too late to have been formative for Christianity.

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And even then, it was limited in its popularity.

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And even then, it took time to grow. And even then, you would have to then find some evidence of its popularity in the same area where Christianity was being formed for any of that to be even slightly relevant.

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The claims made about Mithra, for example, Mithra is a god. He is not a mediator between God and men.

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He's not virgin -born. He came out of a rock, for crying out loud. There's so many sources. One excellent source, honestly,

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Lee Strobel's little book, The Case for the Real Jesus, his interview with Edwin Yamauchi, this is

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Yamauchi's work on pre -Christian Gnosticism. Yamauchi is not a scintillating writer, okay?

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It's pure scholarship, and it's lots and lots of footnotes, and you, okay.

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But at least Strobel makes Yamauchi a little more understandable. But Yamauchi just tears that apart, and he's not the only one to have done so.

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Ronald Nash had done that. The two most accessible are Strobel and Ron Nash's work.

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But I've got a whole shelf in the other room. Here's the Roman cult of Mithras and Mettinger's The Riddle of the

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Resurrection. There's all sorts of stuff in there that's relevant that you can look at, and all sorts of documentation.

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And yeah, there are a lot of books out there, and there are a lot of bad books out there, too, to be honest with you.

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You can sort of find out which one's which by looking at the references, because a lot of the stuff that's out there, it's just designed to promote a very narrow perspective, and it's not meant to pass any type of truth test.

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Check out the sources that are being used, and check out the references, and you'll see that these sources will show themselves to have that kind of a problem.

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So the whole Mithra thing, even best -case scenario, is after the time of Christianity.

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Its greatest flourishing is long after the apostolic period, and hence is irrelevant to any type of biblical.

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I mean, it might have relevance to what Christianity was reacting against, but even when you get to what later on were supposed connections between later pagan religions and later forms of Mithraism and Christianity, which is more likely?

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That a religion that really isn't rooted in history would borrow from a rising popular

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Christianity, or that Christianity, based upon its rejection of pagan gods and things like that, would borrow from pagan religions?

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It's just never made sense to me why people assume that the early Christians were just looking around going, hell, we don't really have anything to say, so let's grab something from over here, and oh, here's another religion over here, and we'll cobble all this stuff together.

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Where does that come from? What logic does that even appeal to? It's amazing how people would just so glibly make these kinds of statements.

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Rob Bell isn't making that kind of statement, but he's clearly in error about Mithraism if it is his intention, and it clearly is his intention, to build this,

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Christianity is a counter -cultural, counter -Roman, counter -imperial movement that continues on to this day.

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But especially those atheists and others who try to use this kind of information, it just does not make a lick of sense when you actually look at the original context of the early church itself.

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And that is likewise the case when we look at the subject of Attis, which is the next one.

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Popular religion at this time centered around the god Attis. The followers of Attis believed that Attis had been born of a virgin, and each spring they gathered to celebrate the resurrection of Attis.

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Well, that sounds pretty important, until you actually find out something about Attis.

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And of course there are so many different stories, and so many different mythologies that develop over the centuries.

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You know, grandson of Zeus, because Zeus dropped some of his seed on a mountain, and these creatures come forth, and it's almost too disgusting to even talk about how all this works.

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There's a lot of emasculation, and genitals, and blood, and all sorts of stuff. But to make a long story short,

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Attis' mother eats some fruit, but the fruit came from this creature that was the result of Zeus, and so she becomes pregnant and has

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Attis. Parallel to the virgin birth, not unless you're insane, but that's what people say.

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And resurrection of Attis, depends on which story you're talking about, in one he becomes so despondent that he sits under a tree and emasculates himself, and a tree grows out of the blood that comes from his emasculation.

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On another one, he is kept from, he's sort of resurrected, his hair continues to grow, and his little finger moves all the time.

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And that's a parallel to resurrection. The real problem with all this is that the only reason we know about most of this silliness is because centuries later

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Christian writers are talking about what people believed at that time. In other words, all this is anachronistic again.

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It's way after the time of the New Testament, hence it's utterly irrelevant. Nobody was running around saying these things when the apostles were preaching the gospel, and most importantly for our purposes, defining the gospel.

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Now so here you have two, and we could go with Dionysus, and we can go with Osiris, and all this stuff that atheists and others just love to throw out there.

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It's been debunked for decades, but the internet keeps it all alive. We need to know these things.

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We need to teach our kids these things, because wherever they go to school, you know, we may school them at home, but they're still going to end up out there in the world, they're still going to go to university someplace, and they're going to run into people who are just going to mindlessly repeat this stuff, and we need to be aware that it's just simply untrue.

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And it's untrue whether an atheist is saying it, or whether Rob Bell is saying it, trying to create this counter -cultural, counter -Roman imperial emergent kind of,

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I don't know, view of the gospel that he's cooking up here.

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So far we have to go, wow, the historical facts here just don't work. The Roman Empire, which was ruled by a succession of emperors called the

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Caesars, the first one, Julius Caesar, when he died, a comet appeared in the sky, and people said, well, of course, that's

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Julius Caesar, the son of God, ascending to the right hand of the gods in heaven.

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Now we have to be really careful when you have quotes like this, especially when no sources are given. I've found no sources for this.

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I mean, the story of a comet being associated with Julius Caesar's death is well known.

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But notice the specific language that's being used there. I've not been able to find anything even remotely like that.

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But I did find this from Ovid in the

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Metamorphoses from 8 AD. I think it's relevant. Then Jupiter the father spoke, take up Caesar's spirit from his murdered corpse and change it into a star, so the deified

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Julius may always look down from his high temple on our capital and forum. He had barely finished when gentle Venus stood in the midst of the

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Senate, seen by no one, and took up the newly freed spirit of her Caesar from his body, and preventing it from vanishing into the air, carried it towards the glorious stars.

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As she carried it, she felt it glow and take fire, and loosed it from her breast. It climbed higher than the moon, and drawing behind it a fiery tail, shone as a star.

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Um, I don't know, when I read that, I don't make the connections that a lot of people try to make, as if there was some connection to the

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Christian story. Even when you talk about the right hand of the gods, isn't the pantheistic

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Roman belief so completely different than the Christian belief? Venus and all these others here, how do you make a connection there?

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I don't know, I mean, obviously there were deified men, and if you're saying that Jesus is just a deified man, then

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I guess anybody could make that kind of a connection, of course. It's the uniqueness of Jesus as the son of God that so many people seem to miss.

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That's what's so amazing about the Incarnation, is this is coming from a belief that God is transcendent, that God is not connected to his universe in the sense of a necessary connection.

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He's the creator of it. He sustains it. All these other gods that we've heard about, they come forth from the creation.

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Massive difference, but for some reason, a lot of folks don't seem to realize it's a fundamental difference.

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After this, Julius Caesar's adopted son, Caesar Augustus, came to power, and Caesar Augustus believed that he was the son of God, sent by the gods to earth to bring about a universal reign of peace and prosperity.

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One of his popular propaganda slogans was, there is no other name under heaven by which people can be saved than that of Caesar.

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Now, once again, the closest I've been able to come to tracking anything about this down is a statement that R .J.

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Rushtuni quoted another scholar who quoted this. That's as close as I've been able to come in the brief amount of time

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I've had to prepare for this video. I don't know. In light of what has come before,

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I just once again raise the question, if the insinuation is being made that Peter knew of that kind of statement, that Peter knew the content of Augustus' decrees from decades before his life, or maybe at least from his youth if Peter was a little older, from his childhood, that somehow a

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Galilean fisherman knew the content of decrees from Caesar Augustus in the sense of having read them and then hence would borrow from them, and hence was making a point in specifically going against Caesar.

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Because in the next one, he's going to be talking about Caesar as Lord. And we know

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Kaiser Kurios does come after Jesus Kurios. We know that later in church history, you had to profess

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Caesar as Lord. To obtain your libelous, you had to make the offering, and it was part of the persecution of the church.

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But if that's the assertion, that's an awfully big assertion to make. It seems like a big stretch.

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You have to assume that Peter would be aware of this, and he's specifically borrowing imperial language.

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Now, would his audience have understood that? The people he was writing to in his context?

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These are the things you'd have to establish if you really wanted to make a serious argument that this is where some type of borrowing has taken place, or that there is a purposeful attempt on the part of the scripture writers to be modeling their language after what was going on in the

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Roman Empire specifically. He created a 12 -day celebration of his birth called the

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Advent of Caesar. Another popular phrase at the time, people would literally greet each other on the street by saying,

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Caesar is Lord. The only use of Caesar is

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Lord that I'm familiar with from historical sources is, as I mentioned in the previous section, that use of Kaiser Kurios as a part of the profession that had to be made to obtain what was called the libelous.

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This does trace back into the first century, but it becomes more popular as a means of persecuting

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Christianity, because Christians and Jews together could not say, Caesar is

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Lord. Christians, specifically because they said, Kurios, Jesus Kurios, Jesus is

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Lord. So again, the idea that the Christian confession was somehow modeled after, or meant to be a replacement to the

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Roman just doesn't make any sense. Neither does any concept of a 12 -day

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Advent, which again, I have no evidence of. It does seem, as I was doing some looking around, that Bell seems to be relying a lot upon a book called

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Christ and the Caesars by Ethelbert Stauffer. Now, some people might find this to be interesting because Ethelbert Stauffer is called a

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Christian universalist, and some of the particular criticisms of this particular book have included making grand claims without providing the specific references to back it up.

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That is a real problem, I'm afraid, in a lot of this material, and it seems to be the case here as well.

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So in the first century, to claim that your God had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven, well, it just wasn't that unique.

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The claims of these first Christians weren't really anything new. Everybody's God had risen from the dead.

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What makes yours so special? I would say that was the worst part of the video. Well, maybe the end.

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We'll get to that one in a moment. Dying and rising gods, who?

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I'm sorry, trees growing out of blood on ground is not resurrection.

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There are no parallels to Jesus in the mystery religions. Everyone has been tried and everyone requires you to check your brain at the door to believe it.

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A monotheistic religion that affirms that there is one God who is the creator and sustainer of all things, who at one time takes on human nature to give himself as a sacrifice for the sins of God's people.

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There are no parallels to that. I mean, there's a lot of liars out there, I'm not talking about Rob Bell right now, but there are a lot of liars out there that create things out of whole cloth.

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But there's just no parallel. On any level, worldview levels, logical levels, historical levels, you just have to make so many category errors that you can't possibly think logically to come up with these kinds of things.

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It's just not there. So, while there were vegetation gods, you know, the crop cycle and stuff like that, that was the normative worldview of the people to whom the

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New Testament was written? No, it wasn't. It wasn't. In fact, we've got biblical evidence.

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We've got the Greek New Testament here, and if you turn to Acts chapter 17, Paul is preaching at the

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Areopagus. And if everybody had dying and rising gods, then can someone explain to me why in verse 31,

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Paul makes this proclamation that God has established a day in which he is going to judge the entire inhabitant earth in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, having provided evidence to all men.

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And how did he do this? Anastasos altan ek nekron, having raised him from the dead.

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And then you look at verse 32. As soon as they heard resurrection from the dead, anastasos altan ek nekron, they scoff.

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That's, no, no, no, Paul. You got to be nuts, Paul, because you see, what is relevant is the dualism of the

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Greeks and their belief that that which is physical is evil, that which is spiritual is good, and so salvation was basically getting freed from this physical body.

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So we can tell they knew exactly what Paul meant when he said anastasos. They knew exactly what he meant.

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He meant that which died coming to life again. Now that's very important, that's very relevant, but doesn't that give the lie to this idea that there's nothing unique, everybody had dying and rising gods.

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Doesn't seem the Greeks had that common ground, does it? It doesn't.

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So I understand what Rob Bell's trying to do, it's a common argument that Protestant liberals make.

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I don't think it has any meaningful ground, basis, but a common argument, it's out there.

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Anybody who went to Fuller Seminary like I did knows all about it, been there, done that, got the t -shirt and the diploma.

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Nothing new, it's packaged much more nicely. Really cool glasses, but nothing new.

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But I guess what really becomes dangerous is what's at the very end of this video, which we'll real quickly look at right now.

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To the question, has Jesus risen from the dead? And may you come to see, may you understand that you are the good news.

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You are the gospel. You are the gospel.

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That sounds so wonderful. What does it mean? What does it mean?

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I mean, if the gospel is the very central self -glorifying act of the triune

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God, where from eternity past the Father, Son, and Spirit covenanted together to glorify

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God, the Trinity, through the amazing act of self -giving in the

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Incarnation, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, creating a redeemed people in Christ, so that all of the attributes of God will be demonstrated to creation,

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His holiness, His justice, His love, His mercy, in exactly the way that He chooses to do so.

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How do I become the gospel? How am I the gospel if I choose to believe that Jesus rose from the dead?

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Jesus rose from the dead whether I believe it or not. Now, the only way that I can benefit from that act is if I believe that, but that doesn't make me the gospel, does it?

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What is the penchant with this modern movement to just find absolutely no contentment with the clarity of the past?

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I understand that in Western culture. I understand how people today have just this modernist, anybody from the past just couldn't be nearly as smart as us because they didn't have an iPhone or a

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Droid or whatever. I understand that very modern arrogance, but I would think

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Christians especially would realize that that doesn't make any sense, that we stand on the backs of giants, that we are part of a much larger picture that Christ has been building

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His church for a long, long time. So why play with theology like this?

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Why play with language? It just leads to confusion, doesn't it? You're not the gospel.

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You need to believe the gospel. You need to embrace the gospel.

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As a Christian, you live in light of the gospel. The gospel is a precious possession.

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It's something that we live for and we should be willing to die for, but it doesn't make me the gospel.

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And when we tell people, you're the gospel, I think you end up really promoting a man -centered understanding of what

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God is about in this world. So I finally got around to it. It took me a long time,

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I apologize, but I felt there were some things that needed to be addressed. There are other things that could be said all through the video, but hopefully this has been helpful to you, and especially to those of you who run into those people in the community colleges that it seems the only reason they have in life is to try to attack 18 -year -old freshmen and destroy their faith.

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Realize that those folks, there are answers to everything they have to say. And hopefully you've been edified to hear at least some of those answers given here.