Mystery Religions IV.1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, November 08, 2001
Abstract
Christian Concerns
The New Testament teaching about Jesus’s death and resurrection, the New Birth and the Christian practices of baptism and the Lord’s Supper seemed to have had parallels in the Pagan mystery religions. Of particular concern to Christians is the implication that the New Testament doctrine of salvation is a theme found in the mystery religions. The saviour dies violently for those he will deliver, then is restored to life.
Christianity, at the hands of Paul, became a mystical system of redemption, much like the cult of Isis, and the other sacramental or mystery religions of the day. Three influential French scholars, M Goguel, C Guignebert and A Loisy agree, interpreting Christianity as a syncretistic religion formed under the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions. They say Christ was a saviour-god, after the manner of Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Asia Minor, Osiris in Egypt and Mithras in the Roman Empire. Like these gods he had died a violent death, and like them he had returned to life.
Previously Sir James Frazer had gathered in twelve large volumes a mass of parallels in his monumental work The Golden Bough, all pointing to dying and rising fertility gods worshipped before Christianity was thought of. Despite the mass of evidence brought forward Christians say that this view has only “fragile foundations” typically failing to see the astonishingly fragile foundations of the religion they defend fanatically, while persistently muddying scholarly water.
Desperately they seek to prove that no mystery cult influenced Christianity. Indeed, although honest Christians accept that syncretism proceeded from the second to the fourth century to merge, by cross identification, the religions of the different peoples of the Empire—including Christianity—they claim that the process had hardly begun in the first century when Christianity was invented. Furthermore, they claim that only the mysteries of Eleusis and those of the divine brothers, the Kabeiroi (popular among sailors), one of whom murdered the other had anything other than a local significance.
The cults of Phrygian Attis, Egyptian Osiris, Syrian Adonis, Phoenician Esmun and Babylonian Tammuz were not mysteries, they say, but simply had secret rites! All these held festivals, usually in spring or at the harvest, commemorating the death and resurrection of the god. Christians like the learned Reverend Rawlinson cannot bring themselves to write “resurrection” in this context. Rawlinson, in his book of lectures, disparagingly writes instead of resurrection: “restoration to some kind of life.” He is plainly so deeply embarrassed by the implications of this for Christianity that he has to make a dispaging distinction—God’s truth issuing directly from the pen of a learned divine of the church.
Each god is scheduled to die again at the same time the following year and so must have been resurrected to his actual life but, refusing to see the connexion between a tree and a cross or a cross as a symbolic phallus, they claim the god Attis, for example, was only resurrected as a pine tree. Or in the Osiris myth, Isis saves the god’s penis and he is resurrected only as god of the dead.
Christians plead, the death and resurrection of these various mythological figures, however attested, simply typified the annual death and rebirth of vegetation. This significance cannot be attributed to the death and resurrection of Jesus. Plainly Christians find distasteful these examples of seasonal vegetative gods, as though the Christian legend had nothing at all in common. A D Nock choses a different contrast between Pagan and Christian notions of “resurrection”:
In Christianity everything is made to turn on a dated experience of a historical person; it can be seen from 1 Corinthians 15:3 that the statement of the story early assumed the form of a statement in a Creed. There is nothing in the parallel cases which points to any attempt to give such a basis of historical evidence to belief.
Once the vegetative gods are accepted as dying and resurrected gods, even if they were only ears of corn, their resurrection can be interpreted in a more refined sense as a parable of life out of death. Plainly these gods were personified, implying that devotees saw them as people whether historical ones or not. Nock tells us Jesus was a historical person. Perhaps he was, but he was not the person that Nock gullibly wants him to be—the vegetation gods had more credentials.
Another Christian critical tack is to claim there was no agreement over interpretation of the Pagan rituals because there were a half a dozen different ones. They turn to Plutarch to help them on this, though everything else that Plutarch says about the nature of Paganism they distrust as drawing on Christianity! And besides, there are more than half a dozen different interpretations of Christianity. Does that prove that Christianity is nonsense? Not for Christians.
In fact, Plutarch gets precisely to the point: that these gods should not be thought of simply as Nature gods. Isis and Osiris should be considered as representing goodness and order while, Typhon (Set) should be seen as responsible for excess and defects. He even speaks of good being the “logon,” the word, of Osiris showing that the concept of the word as an image of god’s goodness preceded Christianity in the world.
To deny that Christianity began as a mystery religion, Christians say that Paul’s use of the word “mysterion,” mysteries or secrets, in the New Testament meant the exact opposite—revelations. When Paul says in 1 Corinthians 4:1 that he and his companions were “stewards of the mysteries of God,” Christians tell us he did not mean he held secrets but revealed truths. But even if that were true, Paul was being his usual opportunistic self in using such expressions in an environment which gave them a technical religious meaning. In any case, the point of all mystery religions was to reveal truths—to the mystai. The priest who did so was called the Hierophant—the Revealer of Holy Things!
Christians say it is irrelevant that the church came to call the sacraments “the mysteria” because it was a later development. Quite, but it was a development that came out of the long held popular belief that the sacraments of Christianity were the mysteries of that mystery religion, just as the revelation of an ear of corn was at Eleusis.
They have always resorted to the argument that critics read into the mystery religions Christian motives then describe the “supposed” doctrines and rites in Christian terms thereby ensuring that they look Christian. Even first century Christians willing to be burnt for their exclusive belief in the Hebrew God did this, modern Christian apologists tell us!
Primarily modern Christians are concerned about resurrection, which for them is central to their belief and unique to Christianity as a sign of God’s revelation, and so its uniqueness must be defended. Therefore, Pagan religions could not have had the same idea and, if anyone finds evidence that they had, then they must have been projecting Christian ideas into Paganism. Christianity is the only God-given religion so the others could not possibly imitate what God himself has given Christians as His sign.
The Meaning of the Myth
When a new religion appears in the first century with a story of a slain and resurrected god, and stories of slain and resurrected gods were common all over the world for centuries before, that the new religion had nothing to do with the old ones is a bigger miracle than the resurrection.
The Christian’s claim that his story was quite independent cannot be accepted because the New Testament counts it out. The story of the resurrection as we have it in the gospels seems to have been elaborated out of the older legends. Which precise ones, if any, might be impossible to say. The precise ones might have been totally lost to history, particularly if they were Jewish. The Christians have expunged them to rid the world of any suggestion that Christianity evolved, and the Jews have expunged it to rid the world of any suggestions that Judaism embraced similar beliefs to the Christians at one time.
Since Christianity arose in the Jewish milieu, the source of it ought to be there, but Judaism at the turn of the era was not just rabbinic. Its Persian origins were much more obvious, and the links with Mithras in some Jewish sects were doubtless clearer than we can now discern. The influence of Tammuz is admitted in the scriptures, so nothing can easily be disregarded, but the theme had diffused far and wide so nothing can be easily accepted either. What is certain is that there was a strong inclination to syncretism of the ancient relgions, and it was officially sponsored by the Roman authorities.
The various cults were not centrally administered and local groups varied ritual and mythology to suit themselves, taking from longer established local gods when it was expedient. Paul, a worldly man, saw this happening and saw an opportunity. Whether Asian Judaism had a hero that could be seen as a dying and rising god, or whether it was known only to the Hellenized Jews does not matter. Paul was appealing to Hellenized Jews and gentiles, and they were undoubtedly familiar with the concept of a god dying and rising. There might then have been no precise source if Paul had, in fact, created a new synthesis. Though it proved to have an enduring attraction, it is not what Christians want to hear.
The elements of the Christian story of the resurrection are identifiable elsewhere. Rising on the third day was common. For Pagan religions, to die is to go to Hades, and so the dead descend into Hell, as Christians renamed it. The descent into Hell is pagan. According to 1 Peter, if nowhere else, Jesus actually did “preach to the spirits in prison,” a reference that can hardly be anything other than descending into Hell. Certainly Christian tradition has it, even if it is not well documented. The weeping women too are like those of Tammuz. The ascent into heaven in a cloud is like Herakles, and others. As these do not appear in the Christian story until after or about the end of the first century, there was plenty of time for the legend to pick up these bits of earlier stories. Early Christian who knew, for instance, that Herakles had risen to heaven in a cloud from the top of a high pyre in full view of his disciples would not mind. ”The devil has his Christs,” they would say.
What of the crucifixion? Christian apologists like to offer facetious skeptical explanations of this, but only fools are distracted by jokes. Crucifixion is obviously historical. Nothing therefore stops “the Crucifixion” from being historical. A determined mythmaker could have picked any specific one, or none, just using the punishment generically. Paul mentions crucifying only eleven times in his letters and often they are references to a glorious crucifixion or are part of the title “Christ Crucified.” While he might have taken his inspiration from the Essene religious martyr, Jesus, he immediately glorified him in heaven and gave the impression that he was speaking of a an event like the solar crossing of the heavenly equator—a cosmic event. The gospel accounts of the passion are expanded with mythical elements, but the campaign in Galilee and the march on Jerusalem all sounds like possible history, but partly erased and confused to hide the truth—that Jesus was crucified in fact as a rebel against Rome, as the gospel stories relate. The Jews, in their early conflict with the Christians, never questioned the historical reality of Jesus.
It does not do, as Christians are wont to do, to claim all the time that the followers of Jesus were stupid and ignorant. They were stupid and ignorant of Judaism because they were indeed uneducated Palestinian Jews or, for most, they were Hellenized Jews, and probably reasonably, or even well educated, but in Greek traditions not Jewish ones. These Hellenized Jews must have known about the dying and rising gods, even if Palestinian Aramaic speaking Jews did not. Since the Persian language of choice in the later Persian empire was Aramaic, it is inconceivanble that Aramaic speaking Jews did not know of the traditions of dying and rising gods in the ancient near east.
How far such idea were current in Judaea is still unclear, but because the rabbis rejected them and cleared them from Rabbinic Judaism does not mean Judaism was then clear of it. Scriptural passages suggest the opposite. Since for long the ancient near east had been saturated with a resurrection myth, it seems doubtful that even Jewish day labourers knew nothing about it. Some messianic school, influenced from the Persian period, might have held that the Messiah would rise from the dead. The Dead Sea Scrolls have tantalizing hints of such beliefs, and even perhaps the personification of them.
The gospels unanimously represent the disciples as dejected and scattered after the execution of their leader, and unwilling to believe in his resurrection. Mythmakers would not have allowed such dejection. It favours a historical interpretation in terms of what is obvious—Jesus died after a failed rebellion. His followers had been defeated and could have been nothing other than dejected. Even if they had believed that Jesus was right about God’s miracle, the defeat was not in the plan. The elevation on the third day presupposed victory. It was the disappearance of the corpse that led them to think otherwise, and begin to wait for forty years for their leader to return as the archangel Michael—Mithras by another name—to bring in God’s kingdom on earth.
The fact that they thought Jesus had arisen did not mean to them that he was God. It meant he was the first of the saints to be lifted up into God’s kingdom. Others would follow, but first the cosmic battle of Good and Evil had to be engaged for forty years.
The disciples thought that Jesus was the Messiah, and did not anticipate defeat. But they had no thought about the messiah being divine. Told that the corpse had vanished, they thought their leader must have arisen, and some might have had hysterical visions of him, like Paul. Even more likely is that another leader of the Essenes inherited Jesus’s role and the followers unfamiliar with the Essene hierarchy confused a man with the same title and general appearance with the man himself. This would be even more likely if we can assume that the post-resurrection events did not all occur so quickly, but happened over months or years. The two walking to Emmaus is presented as happening on the day of the resurrection, but perhaps it happened several months later, and another Essene leader broke bread in just the eay that Jesus had—the ritual way of the Essenes. The men could not have recognized him because he was not Jesus, but the Essene way of breaking and blessing bread that they knew through Jesus made them think it was he.
There is a well documented charades effect whereby stories change in the telling. Christians will tell us that Jews then were like modern Moslems and had been trained to remember things accurately by rote. Perhaps Palestinian Jews were indeed so trained, but Hellenized Jews can not have been, and the story emerged into the Roman world via Hellenized Jews. There is no good reason therefore to suppose that the gospel sources, putting down the story when the expected forty years had passed and the Jewish War ahd been lost, were at all precise in their recollections. Nor is there any good reson to think that ordinary gossip about the exploits of a late leader would have been treated with the same reverence as acknowledged holy books, even among pious Jews. Supporters in their excitement would have been inclined to exalt events, while skeptics or more cautious people would have tried to play certain aspects down in the context of a major war.
The belief in itself is explained by the missing body in the context of an expected general resurrection. Hellenized Christians could add mythical details, but whether the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus knew of Mithras or Osiris is a moot point. What we do not know is the mythology associated with the archangel Michael, but that will be a possible source.
The universal belief in a slain and resurrected god throws light upon the Christian belief by showing us a universal frame of mind which quite easily, in many places, made a resurrection myth. Other messiahs in Jewish history might have had similar objectives and stories told of them. Only Jesus had a Saul of Tarsus to spread his cult. He is the true founder of Christianity.
Paul gave the new gospel its characteristic features. Jesus, an embodiment of God, died to save men from sin. The modern preacher says the Christian story is a spiritual story. The very bases of it are repugnant. The death of Christ does not atone for a man’s personal sins. If Jesus died to save men from sin, it was, as Paul says, from Adam’s sin. Only stupid Christians can see anything spiritual in the idea that God condemned billions of human beings to eternal torment for the sin of one man. It is not spiritual, but Satanic.
Modern Christians see nothing sacrosanct in the teachings of Paul or even Jesus—especially Jesus!. They were wrong but the modern Christian is right about everything. Above all, Christianity is moral, but non-Christians, atheists and Pagans are not moral. The cult of Isis and Osiris, the Greek Mysteries, and the cult of Mithras had by the turn of the era the same moral message. Their celebrations were a rebuke to sin, an exhortation to purity, a promise of personal resurrection. There is nothing unique in Christianity, except that it has destroyed more than countless centuries of Paganism ever did. What is unique is that, of all the cults of the age, Christianity alone survived. It did not survive by goodness!
The decay and restoration of the sun and the decay and restoration of vegetation could hardly have not been noticed in agricultural societies, and nor could they have not been connected, perhaps especially in some of the near eastern countries where the unproductive phase is the heat of the summer when the sun burns. The death and resurrection of Herakles has to be a solar myth. The story of Demeter and her daughter refers to vegetation.
The phenomena of nature’s annual pageant are very different in different countries. To the northerner or the dweller on an elevated and temperate region the annual slaying, or at least mortal illness, of the sun, which leads to the rigors of winter, is much more striking than the slow dying and slow rebirth of nature. To the southerner the waning of the sun in winter is a relief, while most of the vegetation is dead during the greater part of the year, and it is the sudden and glorious burst of flowers and corn that impresses. So we get both solar and vegetation myths, and combinations of the two, and, as the season of rain and growth varies considerably, the celebration occurs at different times of the year.
Mother earth and father sky never die, but the spirit of the sun and the spirit of the corn and tree die every year, passing for a season to the underworld, and rise again. Paul likened the resurrection to a seed which drops to the ground and dies before it springs into new growth. Man weaves a mythical tapestry of nature’s moods. The son of God or the daughter or lover of earth is slain, or dies, or is dragged to the underworld every year. We mourn with mother earth, we rejoice in the restoration.
Then the ideas of sin and virtue enter. They come to be regarded as conditions of one’s immortal lot. The life beyond had at first been conceived merely as an eternal duplicate of this one. The death and resurrection festivals were more or less in the nature of religious magic. They were to promote fertility, and love and feasting promote fertility. Now the drama becomes ethical. The next world is purely spiritual, and you must not go into it with sin on your soul. The robust and wicked old celebrations become “mysteries.” Finally, an old Sumerian myth of a fall of man is found as a justification. The god really dies to atone for humanity, and for two thousand years everyone shudders in the shadow of the cross.
Scholarship or Apologetics?
The study of early Christianity is not scholarship, it is Christian apologetics, as J Z Smith (Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity) readily admits. In this scientific age, a scholar ought to try to be objective but modern biblical scholars are still trying to distance apostolic Christianity from the Mystery Cults, Gnosticism and the Qumran New Covenanters. They call themselves scholars but they have an agenda and it does not necessarily include truth.
Their strategy is to uphold the Jewishness of the New Testament whenever something is considered Hellenistic. Anything Jewish is preferable to anything Hellenistic. Even a vague Jewish parallel is preferable to a close parallel with a Gnostic or Mystery Religion. The reason is the desire to have the New Testament grow out of the Old by revelation not evolution or hybridisation.
The apocalyptic mysticism of the Apostle Paul was thoroughly Jewish according to Schweitzer in Paul and His Interpreters. So he established Paul’s work as not being Hellenistic. Nevertheless, there is a Mystery Religion soteriology in the epistles not easily traced to the Pharisees. Indeed, little in the Pauline letters looks rabbinic. Similarly, the Dead Sea Scrolls are used by scholars to dismiss the striking parallels between the Gospel of John and various Gnostic and Mandaean sources, though the agreements between John and the Scrolls can hardly out-weigh the parallels with the Mandaica. The scholars will include Rabbinism, Qumran, and the Pseudepigrapha if necessary as long as they do not have to admit the New Testament had some non-Jewish roots. The path of the Judaizing scholars is the death of scholarship, but they are more concerned with the life in the Christian myth.
Yet they deprecate Judaism as merely the dirt of the earth from which God fashioned the revelation of Christianity and breathed into it true spirituality. Christianity was divinely revealed, and so could not have depended on either Judaism or Hellenism. So, the bent scholars of Christianity use Judaism to eliminate all arguments of Hellenistic influence, then protest the inferiority of Judaism compared with the revealed gospel. Any Christian dependence on the Mystery Religions is eliminated by spurious proof of dependence on Judaism, then the apologist deprecates the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
The study of any religion should begin with the study of its own claims, but honest scholars will realise that all religions are defended by their adherents as something special. Claims are therefore not necessarily true but intended to enhanced the cache of the religion. If scholars are adherents of a religion they will necessarily be bent scholars, they will be apologists for the religion they believe in. For some inexplicable reason, they think their god is happier with them defending the religion at all costs than being honest. When there are indisputable parallels between religions of cultures which are in contact, or have been, then one has to consider cross fertilisation as an explanation rather than indepndent invention (or revelation). Is there any reason why a scholar should not speculate that Mithraism took the depiction of Mithras with his Phrygian cap from the Attis cult, or that the Attis cult took the Taurobolium from Mithraism? No! Why then pretend that Christianity should be treated differently?
Christian scholars declare the pattern of the dying and rising god to be a modern myth. This is useful for Christian apologists because, if there was no such myth in ancient times, Christianity must have been unique. Attis became a resurrected god by the fourth century (Firmicus Maternus) but they maintain he was not one in the first century. Nor was Attis even then everywhere a risen saviour. Variants seem to have him die and remain dead, or survive his wounds, as well as being resurrected.
Christian scholars try too hard to stop the Pagan gods from rising, rehashing arguments of Bruce Metzger and Edwin Yamauchi that the Mysteries borrowed the death and resurrection motif from Christians. Yet few can deny that Attis, Tammuz, Adonis, Osiris and Mithras are older gods whose converts turned to Christianity with their familiar creeds in their hearts. Who therefore influenced who?
Early Christian writers explain most clearly the death and resurrection parallels between their own faith and the Mystery Religions. The conclusion is not that they reported clearly what they observed but that they projected their own faith onto their rivals’. It seems preposterous, and ought to be particularly so for a Christian. Early Christians were trying to deny the charge that Christian themes were copies of Pagan ones. For example, they had to argue that the virgin birth of Jesus was not just a poor copy of the birth of Theseus. Why then would they confuse issues that were clear by suggesting parallels where there were none? The only logic of them raising these points was to persuade Pagans that the new faith was not that far removed from their old ones but was simply an advance on them. Christian writers had this reason to accentuate aspects of rival religions parallel to their own.
Modern scholars dare not venture beyond the strictest interpretation of the evidence. They reject speculation even when it is necessry to fill lacunae. Today Mystery Religions are seen only in terms of what we can be certain of, ritual initiation, participation in the sacraments, moral or ascetical requirements, mutual aid among members, obedience to the leader and certain secret traditions. Such aspects as redemption and purification from sin, communion of the initiate with the saviour god, gnosis and the promise of rebirth and immortality are rejected as unproven. It sounds like prudent scholarship but it is false because, when Christianity, as a religion in its time, is admitted as one of the religions under consideration, the likelihood of those aspects pre-existing in these cults before Christianity, which inherited them from them, is overwhelming. Otherwise, we would have to accept there was little of substance in these religions.
We have a lowest common denominator that obscures rather than reveals the distinctiveness of the Mystery Religions because the modern scholar will not dare to venture a model based on what then emerged. A model is neither a union of all of them and therefore too diffuse to be useful nor a minimal list of features too narrow to be useful, like this. A model is an idealisation from diverse phenomena yielding a family resemblance without implying any absolute conformity. It is a concept like the concept of a chair or a bird. Our present concept of Mystery Religions is quite imperfect because we are forbidden to include in it anything that might be construed to be Christian. Let us have a proper model. The way any particular Mystery Religion does not conform with it is a way of understanding its special features, just as the presence of rockers or wheels on a chair lets us see its special function as a chair.
Bent scholars will not admit a model for the theme of the dying-and-rising god. They must all conform precisely or they are rejected. This is why these scholars say, today, that there was no general myth of a dying and rising god. We have a gaggle of mad taxonomists. It is like saying mammals are all different, so there is no such thing as a mammal. Without everything in common, they have nothing in common.
Old religions have libraries full of parallels to the miraculous birth of Jesus, but Christian scholars reject them piecemeal and so there are no parallels. Here a god fathered the divine child on a married woman, so she was not a virgin. There the god penetrated the mortal woman in the form of a swan, or elsewhere, the god took on the form of a snake, so the mortal woman was not overshadowed by the Holy Spirit, and there is nothing in common. How close is parallel? Is it a parallel if the mother is Myrrha instead of Mary? Is it a parallel if the mother was miraculously restored to virginity every time she had the god’s seven older brothers? At the very least, all of them were born in an unusual fashion whereas mortals are typically born of a mother out of intercourse by their human father. Christian scholars nit-pick about the precise method, when the point of the myth is to prove the infant could not have been human, and so must be a god.
The same piecemeal approach is used in the examination of the dying and rising gods. We have no description that a god died but he is no longer performing his godly functions. He is not a dying god but a disappearing god. We have no existing proof that the god was reborn or resurrected, so he must have stayed dead. Attis is depicted early on (BC) as dancing, his characteristic resurrection posture in later iconography, yet we cannot believe that resurrection entered his religion until they pinched it from the Christians.
We cannot find descriptions of Adonis dying but simply dividing his time between his two wives, Aphrodite and Persephone. Aphrodite has the summer place and Persephone the winter one—she lives in Hades. What is the state of Adonis meant to be when he dwells with the dead in Hades? The underworld has been described since the earliest religions as “the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back (Gilgamesh).” Pausanias tells of a myth of Theseus: “He was tied up in the netherworld until Herakles should bring him back to life.” To dwell in the land of the dead was to be dead, even if a god found a way of returning.
Scholars early speculated from the fragmentary Tammuz texts that he was a dying and rising god, though the evidence was arguable. Then more texts turned up, vindicating their theories. Why is a Christian scholar so quick to assert that speculations of a god dead and risen are automatically suspect? New material unambiguously makes Ishtar herself die and rise, but Christians pass it by quickly. For Tammuz, having risen, death again beckons six months on. It is not permanent resurrection. Yet it is still a resurrection, isn’t it? And perhaps all the more remarkable that it happens every year, not just once.
Osiris, even in very ancient records, was dismembered, reassembled by Isis, and rejuvenated, to father Horus on Isis. Osiris reigned thenceforth in the realm of the dead. This is not a return to earthly life, and so not a resurrection, Christians declare. Yet, albeit in a different direction of travel, it is uncannily like Jesus dying and rising to reign thereafter as judge of the dead, like Osiris, but at the right hand of God in Paradise. The apparently long endurance of the theme should suggest that Christian-era, mentions of the resurrections of Adonis, Attis and the others are not late inventions. It is no innovation in the religion of Osiris. Why assume it was in the other religions?
Christian scholars seem to be defending the old apologetic line that there was no Pagan prototype for the Christian resurrection myth, with the implication that it wasn’t a myth! But they simply want to refute Frazer’s hypothesis in favour of Christian tradition. It is not objective but special pleading.
If we are obliged to believe that there was no ancient model for the mystery cults, can we be sure that all early communities believed in the same Jesus, or even in a resurrected one? Perhaps some did and some didn’t. Tthe historical Jesus seemed unimportant for the communities of the Pauline epistles who seemed interested only in a god, Jesus. Today there are many Christian cults and the Jesus of them seems fairly uniform, but we could probably find a scholar willing to find proof that they are quite different.
A Catholic View
Everywhere Christianity spread, the slain and resurrected god and the annual celebration of his death and resurrection were familiar. It was Tammuz from the plains of Mesopotamia to Jerusalem. It was Attis to the north and northwest of Palestine from Syria to Asia Minor. It was Adonis in Phoenicia, then Greece then in Rome.
A citizen of Tarsus in Asia Minor in the days of Jesus could not fail to have known the annual celebration, famous all over the Greco-Roman world, of the resurrection of Attis. The same is true of the festival of the resurrection of Adonis at Byblus and Paphos, both a short journey from Tarsus. Educated citizens would know of Tammuz of Babylon in the same sense, and Jews would know from their scriptures that Tammuz was known and mourned in Jerusalem. Paul was an educated Jew of Tarsus.
Even the Catholic Encyclopedaia of 1913, tells us the Pagan Mysteries powerfully and vividly impressed notions, like immortality, on to the imagination. Initiation into the mystery was seen as ensuring a happy afterlife, and atoned for sins that otherwise had to be punished, if not in this life, in some place of expiation—an idea that came from Zoroastrianism.
The mysteries began with the selection of the initiates, their preliminary baptism, fasting, and confession (Samothrace). The mysteries proper were celebrated with a mimetic dance, or “tableaux,” showing, Apuleius (Metamorphoses) tells us for the Isis mysteries, heaven, hell, purgatory, the soul’s destiny and the gods. The “passion” of Osiris was seen, the rape and return of Kore and the sorrows of Demeter at Eleusis, the sacred marriage such as that of Hera at Cnossus, or divine births (Zeus and Brimos), or incidents in the local myth. Symbolic objects—statues usually kept veiled, mysterious fruits or emblems (Dionysos), an ear of corn (upheld when Brimos was born)—were revealed. Finally there was usually the meal of mystic foods—grains of all sorts at Eleusis, bread and water in the cult of Mithras, wine (Dionysos), milk and honey (Attis), raw bull’s flesh in the Orphic Dionysos-Zagreus cult.
In the Isis and Osiris of Plutarch, a pure mysticism and sublimity of emotion barely to be surpassed had been achieved. In the Metamorphoses of Apuleius the syncretistic cult of the Egyptian goddess expresses itself in terms of tenderness and majesty that would fit the highest worship, and, in the concluding prayer of the Apuleian Hermes, an ecstatic adoration of God is manifested in [inspired] language and thought.
Having accepted all this, the Catholic Encyclopedia tells us it is “inadmissible,” to trace a close connexion between these rites and Christianity. The reason offered is that Christianity was ruthlessly exclusive, and its apologists (Justin, Tertullian, Clement) inveighed loudest against the mysteries and their myths. This they did, but it is quite impossible for anyone let alone unsophisticated people to abandon so easily the habits of a lifetime, and the gentile converts to Christianity had all been lifetime Pagans. The Catholic Encyclopedia reminds us the origin of the Christian rites are historically known from documents, meaning the New Testament, and the implication presumably has to be that is true! Christian baptism is “essentially” unique, and alien to the repeated dippings of the initiates, and even to the taurobolium, whence the dipped emerged “renatus in æternum.”
The meaning of the sacred meal by which worshippers communed with the god and with one another is scarcely distinguishable from the Christian Eucharist, so even if they were not directly related, as the Catholic Encyclopedia maintains, they both had a common ancestor. The sacred fish of Atergatis might have had nothing to do with the Eucharist, or with the Ichthys anagram of the catacombs but the propagation of the symbol was helped by the popularity of the Syrian fish-cult. That Paul, Ignatius, Origen, Clement and others used the terminology of the mysteries is certain, admits the Catholic author.
Always the Church has forcefully moulded words, and even concepts (soter, epiphanes, baptismos, photismos, teletes, logos) to suit her own dogma and its expression.
The liturgy, especially of baptism, organization of the catechumens and secret training were probably influenced by them.
The Catholic author concludes by saying all the efforts of Pagan religious philosophy “died into the miserable systems of Gnosticism, Manichaeism, and the later neo-Platonism” because they were committed nearly always to a rigid “Dualism.” The Church has always managed to square the circle in claiming that it is not dualistic, yet these beliefs were no more so than Christianity. But there were other reasons for failure. They were “entangled in mechanical and magic practices,” “tricked out in false mythology,” “risking and losing psychical balance by the use of a nihilist asceticism of sense and thought.” He does not mean Christianity!
Moses and Exodus
