Free The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction by Robert M. Price

deathbed. This anxiety would eventually lead to the separate sacraments of repeated penance and extreme unction (deathbed anointing). But this solution did not yet exist.
    How could this Christian emperor have served as Pontifex Maximus of Sol Invictus? He did so serve but simply because it was incumbent upon him as emperor of Rome, since the state religion, as Brown/Teabing says, was that of the Unconquerable Sun. Constantine managed to declare Christianity a religio licitas , a legal cult like Judaism or many of the mystery cults. He certainly did not even try to unify Roman society under a single religious canopy. And this is why he had to wear both religions’ hats. It was his successor, Theodosius, who elevated Christianity to the position of the single state religion.
    As for the assimilation of foreign, pagan elements into Christianity, this certainly did occur and on a scale pretty much comparable to that envisioned by Brown/Teabing. “Nothing in Christianity is original” is probably true. One can find all the maxims of Jesus in the literature of contemporary philosophy as well as among the rabbis. This fact should surprise no one except ultraorthodox Christians, who seem to imagine the world was under a blanket of moral darkness before Jesus. Beyond this, the notion of Jesus as a dying and rising savior god, the Gnostic idea of a heavenly being descending into this dark world to redeem his elect, the use of saving sacraments of bread and wine and baptism—all this was held in common with earlier mystery cults and was probably borrowed from them centuries before Constantine. The evidence is overwhelming, though conservative Christians remain stubborn in their refusal to admit it, at least publicly. How and why did such syncretism, such mixing of traditions and myths, take place? It is all part of the natural process of religious evolution in an environment, like that of the cosmopolitan world of antiquity, in which competing religions exist close together and trade adherents. An individual might belong to several of the current religions at the same time. That was common, and Constantine himself, as we have seen, was a prime example. In such a context, it would be impossible to stop each religion from rubbing off on the others. In the same way, we can trace, for example, Mithraic influence on the Attis cult. The cult of Sabazius seems to have been a fusion of Judaism and Dionysus worship.
    Eventually (already in 1 Cor. 8-10) there is an attempt to prevent Christians from continuing easy participation in other religions’ sacraments. This restriction of Christians to a single religious membership resulted in a more dedicated (if also more intolerant) membership. But ironically, it also meant that now you had a single direction of influence: If there were only pagans becoming Christians, which way is the interreligious influence going to go? Pagan converts to Christianity are going to bring with them their favorite elements of their old faith. It is all natural, inevitable, inescapable. To imagine that Constantine sat down with a focus group and a panel of advertising executives to cook the whole thing up is fully as arbitrary as to say, with traditional Christians, that Christianity as we know it emerged full-blown from the teaching of the historical Jesus.
    This is not to deny that there were later attempts to conquer paganism by seizing and co-opting some of their features. For instance, you can find saints’ healing shrines built over the healing shrines of Asclepius. You have to wonder if the bishops chose December 25 to celebrate Jesus’s birth (no one had kept any record of it) just because Romans already celebrated Brumalia, the nativity of Mithras, on that day. It was an easy way of getting the flock to stop attending a fun pagan party: rather like the First Night program to provide nonalcoholic diversions on New Year’s Eve. The widespread statues of Mary suckling or cradling the infant Jesus certainly