On 03-28-98 Fredric Rice wrote to Day Brown... 
 FR> What do you think about the times that Paul/Saul, the Terrorist of 
 FR> Tarsus, denied publically that he was in fact from Tarsus?  I can't 
 FR> help 
 FR> but wonder if he was embarrassed by the Mithra religion that he grew 
 FR> up in. 
I was not aware of that, nor that Tarsus was Mithraic.  The Ionian 
cities were I thought, rather hostile to Persian culture and thus, 
cosmologies or religion.  At that time, the region was part of the 
Roman hegemony, which was rather lightly laid on Greek culture, as 
we have been with the British. 
 
While the Romans were tolerant, even admiring of Greek paganism, I 
thought they were intolerant of anything from the Persia, where on 
several occasions they had had military disasters- e.g. Crassus. 
 
My perception is that Paul pandered to the sensibilities of Romans 
in many ways, and would have, if he had had a Mithraic background, 
tried to keep it quiet.  In Romans 13, *he* established the divine 
right of kings [emperors], and in Philemon, established the rights 
of slave owners- neither of which, was in keeping with the ancient 
Greek concepts of self determination and republican traditions. 
 
I wish I knew more about Zoroaster and Mithras.  Joseph Campbell's 
book on occidental mythology reports that when Mithras was born, a 
group of shepards, 'watching their flocks by night' witnessed this 
event with a 'heavenly host of angels'.  It rather looks like Rome 
regarded the eastern mythology as ludicrous. 
 
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire suggests that, while 
the government and the population regarded pagan belief as equally 
true, the philosophers regarded it as equally false, and the Roman 
emperors as equally useful.  St. Paul's succeess with Christianity 
was in making it a little *more* useful. 
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