The Magi and Mithras: what 557 stones naming the god show

The theory, put to the test

What would have to be true#

The theory has a simple logic: in the first two centuries a large part of the Roman world served Mithras, a god with a Persian name; the Magi are Persian priests; so someone put them into the birth story to make the new faith look acceptable to those who were “not yet convinced”.

Three things follow that can be checked. First: in the years the story was written, followers of Mithras had to be a crowd. Second: they had to be where the story was told. Third: the Magi had to look like priests of Mithras from the start.

At the bottom corner the curve shows how many of the 464 dated stones naming Mithras can exist by each year; the small stars mark the years the story of the Magi is on record in writing.

First test: the crowd

By the year 100: between four and 15 Latin stones naming Mithras#

The Gospel of Matthew is usually dated between 70 and 100, most likely 80–95 (Davies and Allison), and Antioch in Syria is the city proposed most often, without excluding others.

In those years, in the largest open database of Latin inscriptions (Greek ones are not in it), four stones naming Mithras have a date range that ends by 100; another 11 have a range that begins before 100 but runs on into the second or third century. On the map they are the few lights that come on in Italy, on the Danube, on the Rhine and in Britain. The literary traces are from the same time or a little older, and thin: Statius (written about 80–92) mentions Mithras in a cave he calls “Persean”, and Plutarch writes, about 100, that the rites of Mithras of the Cilician pirates “continue to the present time”. Cilicia is next to Syria; neither speaks of followers at Antioch.

The datings of these stones are not equally well founded. The Carnuntum altar is dated from the legion’s presence there, before 114 at the latest; for the Mainz altar EDH gives 71–100 and EDCS 201–250; for the Aquileia and Tortona fragments the basis could not be verified. With EDCS’s own dating the stones that end by 100 are three and those that begin by then 13. The altar of Hyginus, an imperial freedman in Rome, with a dedication in Latin and in Greek, is usually dated between 68 and 117. The scholar who re-examined the evidence in 2016 writes that no monument of the Roman cult can be persuasively dated before 75, and that the evidence stays “relatively negligible” until the second half of the 2nd century.

A century later

By 160 Justin retells the story; the stones are still few#

One of the earliest authors to repeat the story of the Magi is Justin, before 161: they came “from Arabia”, he says (Dialogue with Trypho 77–78). Writing around 150, he also gives the earliest surviving Christian reference to Mithras, and calls the mysteries a demonic imitation of the Eucharist (First Apology 66).

By this point the map holds at least 14 stones naming the god; the estimate is 65 of the 464 dated ones. By 250 there will be between 222 and 426.

The theory therefore needs the Magi to have been written into a text that was already circulating in the 80s or 90s, for an audience that at the time had barely begun to carve in stone.

When the crowd arrives

The stones become numerous between 150 and 250#

In the second half of the 2nd century and the first of the next, the lights come on along the Danube and the Rhine, in Rome and in Ostia: by 150 there were between 12 and 103 stones, by 250 there are between 222 and 426 of the 464 dated ones. 69 of the 557 carry the database label “soldiers”, and many name freedmen, slaves and customs men.

This is the time when the story of the Magi is already quoted at Lyon, at Alexandria, at Carthage. The stones of Mithras become numerous after the story of the Magi was written.

Roman Dacia

In Dacia, the evidence for Mithras comes after the Gospel#

Dacia was conquered in 106; no Roman altar of Mithras is known there earlier. The database holds 52 stones naming the god in the province: 23 at Apulum and 10 at Sarmizegetusa. The earliest mithraeum in Dacia is of the time of Hadrian (117–138), according to Sicoe’s catalogue as cited by Szabó.

As a local illustration: in Dacia the evidence for the cult of Mithras is later than the Gospel, and the earliest known mithraeum comes more than twenty years after the story of the Magi was written.

Second test: place and text

What Matthew’s text says#

The Greek says “magoi from the east” (Matthew 2:1), who saw a star (2:2): their number is not given, they are not called kings and they have no names. The word comes from Persian: in Matthew’s day a magus was a Persian priest, an astrologer, sometimes a sorcerer.

A reader in the 80s could recall a recent event on hearing of “Magi from the East”: in AD 66 King Tiridates of Armenia had come to Rome with magi, and Pliny writes that he had initiated Nero in “magical suppers”, though Nero could not take the magi’s art from him (Natural History 30.16–17). Dio, writing later, has Tiridates tell Nero that he has come to worship him “as I do Mithras” (63.5.2). Another source close at hand: the story of Balaam, who sees a star come out of Jacob (Numbers 24:17).

As most readers take them, the Magi are the first people from outside the Jewish people to worship in the book (“they worshipped”, 2:11); at the end the disciples are sent to “all nations” (28:19). The Gospel therefore has a motive of its own for the Magi, without Mithras. Elsewhere the same Matthew speaks critically of the pagans (5:47; 6:7; 18:17) and tells the disciples earlier not to go “on the way of the Gentiles” (10:5): the Gospel’s attitude to them is not a simple one.

Third test: how the Magi look

How the Magi became three kings#

If the Magi had been put into the Gospel as priests of Mithras, they would have to be described so from the oldest texts on. The surviving texts show otherwise: the features are added one by one, in the centuries that follow.

• c. 80–95Matthew: magoi from the east. No number, no king, no names.
• before 161Justin: the Magi come from Arabia; Damascus, he notes, lies in Arabia.
• c. 200Clement of Alexandria: “the Magi of the Persians”, the earliest mention found of the Magi as Persians.
• c. 207Tertullian: the East generally regarded magi as kings, he says; he also brings them from Arabia.
• c. 248Origen reads the three gifts as king, mortal and God; in this passage the number of the Magi is not stated.
• 3rd c.The Priscilla catacomb, Rome: three figures in short tunics and pointed caps, one of the earliest images; the dating is stylistic, mid-3rd century or later.
• 5th c.Leo the Great says plainly that there are three men, as there are three gifts.
• 5th–6th c.The oldest surviving names: Bithisarea, Melichior, Gathaspa (Excerpta Latina Barbari).

The costume in Christian painting, tunic, cloak and Phrygian cap, is the conventional dress of figures from the East in Roman art: Paris, Orpheus and captive barbarians wear it, and Mithras is often shown in it. The likeness is real, and it comes from the same conventions for depicting the East. The Magi are called Persian around 200, in the years when the stones of Mithras are at their most numerous.

What is left of the theory

Where the theory is right#

Four things are true. The Magi are, by the word itself, Persian priests; Strabo lists among those the Persians worship the Sun, “whom they call Mithras”. In 66 Rome saw a king with magi who, according to Dio, said he worshipped Nero as he did Mithras: magi and Mithras were therefore linked, as part of Parthian-Armenian kingship. The cult of Mithras is old in the east: at Nemrut in Commagene a king of the 1st century BC placed on his funerary sanctuary a representation of “Apollo-Mithras-Helios-Hermes”. And at Caesarea Maritima in Judea there is a mithraeum whose date is disputed: from the end of the 1st century (the first proposal, from pottery) to the 3rd (coins), no earlier than the end of the 2nd century in the most recent analysis.

None of these facts shows that the Magi were added for the followers of Mithras; the second shows only that the link existed. The Commagene representation is of another kind than the Roman mysteries. The Caesarea mithraeum is a single one, in a provincial port. And none of the 557 stones naming Mithras uses the word “magus”.

Two Christian authors of the 2nd and 3rd centuries who describe the mysteries of Mithras, Justin (First Apology 66; Dialogue 70) and Tertullian (Prescription against Heretics 40), take them for devilish imitations of Christian rites; Origen reports Celsus’s account without that charge (Against Celsus 6.22). None speaks of the followers of Mithras as an audience to be won.