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Outline of History has assured us positively that the Christians 'borrowed Sunday from the Mithraists.'[1] Whether sober enquiry will establish all or many of these statements remains, I think, to be seen. But at any rate the wide diffusion of Mithraism in Europe, particularly in the army, is an interesting fact.
That Mithraism should adopt week-observance when it had become general elsewhere was clearly inevitable. A religion in which the supreme object of adoration was so closely connected if not identified with the Sun could hardly fail to pay special reverence to what even non-Mithraists hailed as the Sun's day, even if it did not pay the same regard to the other planets; and when the recurrence of one day in seven is observed, we have of course the week. Cumont's statement[2] therefore that the week and especially Sunday was observed by the Mithraists, is thoroughly credible, whatever we may think of the evidence which he gives. The real question for us is to what date we can trace the Mithraistic week. Mithraism, according to
- ↑ I presume that Mr Wells found this statement in some respectable authority. But he did not get it from Cumont, who, after remarking that the Mithraists like the Christians specially observed Sunday (though he gives no evidence for it), goes on: 'Mithraism cannot have had any influence on Christianity in this, for the substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath dates from apostolic times.'
- ↑ Textes et monuments figurés relatifs aux mystères de Mithra, I, pp. 119, 325, 339.
