Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 08 August 2003

The Pre-Gospel Christ

The Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi, in 1945, but known earlier in three papyrus fragments, consists of 114 sayings of Jesus, 68 of which can be identified with sayings in the New Testament. B Hudson McLean (The Cursed Christ, 1996) convinces us that the Gospel of Thomas precedes the canonical gospels.

The presumed second source of the gospels of Luke and Matthew is denoted by the letter “Q” and it has 40 of the 68 Thomas parallels that occur in the New Testament gospels. That “Q” and the New Testament fragment of Thomas have 60% in common suggests that “Q” was Thomas, and the second source of the gospels of Matthew and Luke was the Gospel of Thomas. The authors of Matthew and Luke will have selected some examples from Thomas independently and so they cannot have appeared in “Q” which is common material to both.

“Q” has a few apocalyptic sayings which do not appear in Thomas. An editor, conscious of the times being, in his view, apocalyptic, has subordinated some sayings selected from Thomas to an apocalyptic theme. Before then, the Gospel of Thomas had been of the genre of wisdom literature, and presumably Jesus was seen as a wisdom teacher or teachers, for whom there was no tradition of a death and resurrection. The Gospel of Thomas refers to a “living Jesus” suggesting that he was still alive, if it referred to a single man, or, like the modern “Jesus Lives” of the Christians, he was even then considered to be alive in some supernatural way.

It seems that a Jesus had a following as a wise man, if nothing more, before any legend arose about his death. These people seem unlikely to have been Christians, but who, then, were they?

Graydon Snyder has sought evidence of Christian beliefs in the first four centuries, independent of the New Testament, by using only archaeology. He has concluded that some early Christian iconography indicate a popular Christianity which differs from what it became officially and is now.

Artistic analogies of self-giving, suffering, sacrifice or incarnation are totally missing. The suffering Christ on the cross first appeared in the fifth century, and then not very convincingly.

Snyder concludes that the popular early Christianity of the first three centuries had no place…

for a crucified Christ or a symbol of divine death. Only when Christ was all powerful as in the iconography of the emperor could that strength be used for redemption and salvation as well as deliverance.

Christians should note there are no primary sources about Paul outside of the New Testament. The Christian’s knowledge of Paul is entirely what the church has chosen to publish, and the most exacting scholars admit only Romans, Galatians, and 1 and 2 Corinthians as being genuine Pauline epistles, though most also admit 1 Thessalonians, Philippians, and Philemon. 2 Thessalonians is more questionable though many admit it. Most scholars reject 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus and the others from the “Pauline” corpus.

Old Testament citations are a powerful criterion for separating Paul’s genuine letters from later imitations. There are 87 scriptural quotations in Romans, Galatians and the two Corinthains. There are none in 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Philippians, Philemon, Colossians and Ephesians. There are just six in the rest. Of the 93 citations, 25 are from Isaiah, 19 from Psalms, and 33 from the five books of the Pentateuch.

Arguments about Paul’s views and their evolution are better based on the seven accepted letters and perhaps 2 Thessalonians with a little more caution, all letters thought to have been written between 49 AD and 64 AD, and so before the gospels were written and broadly contemporary with the epistle of James.

Thessalonians

The earliest of Paul’s recognized epistles is 2 Thessalonians. Paul’s letters cannot be dated absolutely but they can be dated reasonably accurately relative to each other from internal clues. It turns out that the one with the simplest and most apocalyptic theology is also the earliest in the sequence.

Apocalyptic literature is often called a literature of hope, and so it is, but it reflects the deepest despair and misery in real life. The apocalyptic hope is that God will end misery by ending the world itself—as it is—and replacing it with an altogether better and more just one, inhabited only by the righteous people who had suffered. Meanwhile, the wicked will have been judged as wicked and destroyed forever in a lake of molten metal. It is “pie in the sky when you die” as modern spirtualist Christianity still is, except that it all comes in one go for everyone, not immediately that you cease to be in life.

B Hudson McLean is, like many commentators, confused by apparently contradictory ideas about the post mortem life in apocalyptic literature, but we have no right to imagine that the writers of these works were consistent. Even so, the evidence we have is not as inconsistent as is made out. McLean highlights:

• The soul is immortal in Greek fashion (4 Ezra 7:78,89)
• The living body is resurrected after death (4 Ezra 7:32)
• The righteous people are gloriously transformed (4 Ezra 7:96-98)
• Both the righteous and the wicked are resurrected (1 Enoch 22:9-11)
• The soul is again immortal (1 Enoch 100:4; 103:4)
• The righteous are awakened by God from death which is no more than a profound sleep (1 Enoch 91:10; 92:3; 100:5).

McLean concludes:

This genre of literature manifests no singular position on resurrection versus immortality, on general resurrection versus resurrection of the righteous alone, on the messianic kingdom on earth versus life in the heavenly abode.

It is true that the position is not clear but there is a singular position nevertheless. It all happens when the archangel Michael comes to earth with the armies of heaven to conquer evil for good and all. On the third day after this event which initiates the kingdom of God on earth, is the general resurrection when everyone who is dead is resurrected for judgement. Death is indeed conceived of as sleep, not a permanent state, and everyone—good and bad—are awakened from it to be judged, though only the righteous enjoy a further life. Those judged as righteous are clothed in incorruptible bodies and live forever in the new world because it is now free of corruption. The wicked are destroyed forever in the molten lake of hell. The kingdom of God on earth is uncorruptible because the victory over evil allows heaven and earth to unite.

So, the disparate elements listed above are not really disparate at all. Immortality and resurrection are not incompatible beliefs. The whole of the kingdom of God on earth and its inhabitants are immortal because they cannot decay. Heaven is no longer distinguishable from earth. The general resurrection is equivalent to the resurrection only of the righteous because the wicked are immediately punished with absolute death. Only the righteous are permanently resurrected. The wicked are permanently killed in the “second death”, but the false idea that they were resurrected then punished led to the false idea that their punishment in the molten lake must have been a permanent punishment. Even so, the idea of people being burnt forever was too good a threat for the Church to want to correct.

These are the ideas that Paul had at the outset of his self-appointed mission to the gentiles, and 2 Thessalonians reflects them except that Jesus at his second coming was the Christ, the role of the archangel Michael in the unadulterated myth.

Seeing it is a righteous thing with God to recompense tribulation to them that trouble you, and to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power, when he shall come to be glorified in his saints, and to be admired in all them that believe (because our testimony among you was believed) in that day.

2 Thes 1:6-10

What is doubtful is whether what Paul taught at first differed from the teaching of the Essenes, except that he was among the faction of them, later called the Jerusalem Church, that had elevated their erstwhile and now crucified leader to the role of the archangel Michael. Certainly nothing in this early letter refers to the popular Pauline themes of the later epistles like the cross, resurrection and atonement. He was expecting the second coming, the parousia, “soon”!

Paul was convinced that all Christians could expect to experience the coming of Christ and the end of the world. The cataclysm would be “soon”! He did not think it necessary to talk about the fate of dead Christians to his converts. They were all still alive. This was about 40 or so AD. “Soon”, however, was not “soon” enough, and 1 Thessalonians, a letter written later than 2 Thessalonians, had to be written because some of the converts had now died, and he had to explain what would happen to those who had. To reassure their relatives that they would still be all right—provision had been made for them. They ought “not to grieve” about it. The righteous dead would first be resurrected, then the living and dead would unite with Christ and the hosts of heaven in mid air as they arrived.

But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord. Wherefore comfort one another with these words.

1 Thes 4:13-18

Paul’s introductory sentence shows that he had not taught his audience this before. Christ is identified with an unnamed archangel, but it is Michael. Moreover, to Jews, “the Lord” was God only, and would have been here, originally. The word “parousia” really means an epiphany of God. If Paul was deliberately identifying Christ and God, then he was already changing the original apocalyptic beliefs he had been taught as a Jew. In fact, the dead were not to be raised until the third day of the kingdom, but that must be presumed to have been on the third day when Jesus himself rose from the dead. In a general resurrection, all of the dead should have been awakened, but plainly none had been—though Matthew contrived to have some of them resurrected along with Jesus, not one stepped forward to be an evangelist.

So, Paul was having to improvise. The Christian belief had to be that the kingdom of God began with the resurrection of Jesus, then the others would follow. Jesus had to go to heaven to make his preparations for the ultimate battle when the kingdom would fully arrive with a trump, and at that moment the dead would be raised. The third day had long passed, so the dead could be raised straight away. No problem! Paul was still not making anything special about the resurrection other than it let Jesus get back alive to heaven, and showed the way for the righteous, meaning his converts.

1 Corinthians

Paul makes no more in 1 Thessalonians of the death of Jesus than of the prophets (1 Thes 2:15). He seems almost to have regarded Jesus’s life and even resurrection as hardly relevant, as if the true coming was the second coming. It is in 1 Corinthians that he develops his resurrection theology, notably in 1 Corinthians 15. The letter as a whole addresses itself to a series of questions that seem to have been raised by the Corinthians. Concerning the resurrection, he begins with “what he had received”, namely that:

• Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures and was buried
• He was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures
• He appeared to various apostles.

For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures. And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve. After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep. After that, he was seen of James, then of all the apostles. And last of all he was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time.

1 Cor 15:3-8

On tenuous grounds, McLean argues that this early tradition is gentile not Jewish. Thus, here Christ is used as if it were a name, not a title (the Christ, meaning the messiah). It seems incredible that a man who was supposedly a Pharisee would simply have repeated what he had heard from gentiles including the errors.

In fact, Paul did not show any discipline in how he used the word “Christ”, and the perpetual assumption that the word was understood as a translation of the word “messiah” based on the Greek verb “crio”, to “anoint”, perhaps ought to be questioned. That is what it was originally, when the Jewish scriptures were translated into Greek, beginning 300 years before, but it seems unlikely that the Hellenized Jews and the Godfearers who used the Septuagint at the time of Paul understood it as that. It is more likely that the word Christ was seen as a name, not a title, of Septuagint saviours long before Christianity was invented.

The associations which it will have generated in the Greek speaker’s mind are of rejoicing, thankfulness and joy at God’s gift for these are the connotations on the words “chairo” (used as the very symbol, “Chi” and “Rho”, of Christianity in the early years), meaning to be glad and joyful, “chara”, meaning joy and gladness, “charis”, meaning favour or a gift, and appearing in the Christian word “eucharist” in which they give thanks for the gift of the body of Christ, and finally the word “chrestos” meaning “willing”, and often given to willing slaves.

So, Paul, being an opportunist, as he admitted, will have used the word “Christ” in the way that his hearers heard it, and it did not have to mean that the tradition itself was gentile. In fact, the last element of it might have been gentile because it seems to be setting up Peter as superior to James. Paul would not have liked either, and although he did prefer Peter to James, the real head of the Jerusalem Church, it seems more likely that this was a later addition. What is particularly suspicious is the use of the expression “The Twelve”, which is Mark’s convenient description of the apostles and is never used anywhere else by Paul. It shows that the insertion was made after Mark’s gospel had become popular. The prominent biblicist, R H Fuller, considers it added, so perhaps Paul wrote something much shorter, possibly just “After that, he was seen by James and the apostles”, since he was still nominally bound to the leadership of James.

Paul concludes with the appearance of Christ to him, but he makes no attempt to pretend that it was in the flesh. It was an illusion, but was sufficient for Paul to believe he had been commissioned directly as an apostle by it. The post mortem appearance of Christ was Paul’s criterion of apostleship. McLean attributes the appearance stories to the Hellenistic tradition of the divine man, thus continuing to maintain that these appearances were not in the Jewish Christian tradition.

McLean says it was the delay of the parousia that led to the need for the appearance stories to encourage the flock. They proved that the hero had genuinely risen and that ordinary people had seen him, and could confirm he had been translated to heaven where he was obviously simply taking some time preparing for the end of the world. Evidently, the flock were willing to accept that such a cataclysm even takes a god some time to prepare. They were therefore reassured.

Since the Hellenists were familiar with stories like that told by Herodotus (Histories 4:14-15), 500 years before, about Aristeas, they had precedence for believing these tales. It is like the story of the appearance of Christ on the road to Emmaus (Lk 24:13-53), but not listed here by Paul. Aristeas of Proconnesus died locked in a room in a textile shop. Relatives went there to prepare the body for burial, and found it had disappeared from the sealed room. Word of the death got around and a man came forward saying Aristeas could not have been dead as reported because he had met him and spoken to him on the road to Cyzicus. The interesting aspect of all this is that the first Christians saw nothing unique in the appearances but they were ready even so to accept them as the common evidence of the divinity possible in a man. Nowadays, Christians regard the appearances as the unique proof of the divinity of Christ. It seems to be proof of regression.

In 1 Corinthians 8:1-13, Paul is engaged with the Gnostic beliefs of the Corinthians, possibly the essential beliefs of the first Christians that Paul sought to refute. The later, established Church took the Pauline line, but Christians at the grass roots remained unpersuaded by their betters. Gnostic Christians did not believe that Jesus had been resurrected at all. A good angel, like the archangel Michael, was incompatible with wicked flesh, so could not have been incarnated in the first place. At best it was an illusion, but it could have been an illusion of the Devil, and later heretical Christians were convinced it was.

Paul’s aim was to satisfy his followers that the resurrection happened, but he seemed influenced by Gnostics, to judge by his use of the word “gnosis”—ten times in 1 Corinthians and six times in 2 Corinthians out of 29 occurrences in the New Testament as a whole. Knowing god was implied in later Judaism in the wisdom literature and is met in the Odes of Solomon, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Mandaean writings—those of the followers of John the Baptist, also called Nazarenes, implying a close connexion at their root to the first followers of Jesus. Jesus was a Nazarene because he was a follower of John the Baptist.

Christians, who cannot bear the thought that their obsession could be related to religions they have always preferred to disparage, dispute any connexions. They can dismiss them by claiming that they are all too early to be gnostic, including the traditions that Paul seemed to be arguing against. Well, Quakers and Catholics seem quite different, but both stick by their claims to be equally Christian. Ideas evolve, even Christian ones, and gnostic ones too. The gnostic ideas of Marcion are not all the same gnostic ideas of Paul, the Essenes or John the Baptist’s followers, but they were all swimming in the same pond nevertheless, and cross fertilisation of ideas in such circumstances are inevitable. Hudson McLean accepts this. The Corinthians were Gnostics in refusing to believe in a resurrection. Paul asks them:

Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?

Paul had hitherto concentrated on the parousia, when all Christians (now identified with God’s righteous ones) would be given eternal life in a perfect world. The resurrection had merely showed that Christ was not dead but had ascended to heaven to complete his preparation to return. Paul had placed no great emphasis on the resurrection in itself being significant to Christians because it was the “return” that was. Some Christians still place their emphasis on the “return”, now renamed the “rapture”, but Paul has no such concept because it all happens in “the twinkling of an eye” (1 Cor 15:52), and rapture has to have time to be enjoyed.

It seems likely that Paul’s conflict is the same as the one evident elsewhere in the New Testament. The original Jewish Christians, as proved by the epistle of James the Just, felt that what anyone did in their lives determined whether they were righteous or not, and therefore whether they would enjoy immortality. For Jews, they had to conform with the law. The Hellenized Jews and gentiles did not know and could not be bothered with the Jewish law, but even so those who converted to Christianity felt that people should lead exemplary lives on the model of Jesus Christ. Such people would, like Christ, ascend to heaven and join with the Lord, meaning God. Christ would return as a vengeful angel to judge humanity, condemning the wicked, and would be accompanied not just by angels but by the saints, the perfectly righteous people who had already gone to heaven.

There were contending beliefs. Paul now wanted people to believe the resurrection and identify with it as what would happen to them, but the Gnostic Christians could not accept it. Paul is still with Jewish apocalyptic theory, but his Hellenized converts were effectively rejecting Judaism. He argues that if nobody was resurrected then Christ could not have been, but, if Christ was resurrected then all righteous people must be. He equated Christ with Adam—obviously believing the Adam was historical—who introduced death into the world through his disobedience. Christ, however, removed death as the “first fruits of those who sleep” (1 Cor 15:20).

But Paul distinguishes the earthly body of the soul from the raised body of the spirit. The first is corrupt and decays, but the second is perfect and immortal. The body is continuous but changes its nature. The “soul body” is comprised of flesh, but the “spiritual body” is comprised of glory. Paul also continues with the apocalyptic explanation of the wait for the parousia. The resurrection was only the beginning of the final cosmic war with evil. The parousia was the final triumphant battle in it (1 Cor 15:23-28). Among the wicked enemies defeated in the final triumph was death, and Christ eventually handed his conquered kingdom to God the Father (1 Cor 15:24), allowing heaven and earth to become one. So, those who were concerned at the apparent delay in the second coming had to realise the importance of the resurrection and the war that since then had been in progress.

At 1 Corinthians 15:3, Paul says Christ died for our sins, introducing for Christians, the idea of atonement—the death really seems to have been apotropaeic. Paul seems to make the arising from death what lifts sin from people (1 Cor 15:17), but, at any rate, the death and resurrection between them have done it. Paul thinks this is the role of the new bookend, Christ, whose image is sinless, unlike that of the other bookend, Adam, who introduced sin.

2 Corinthians

The crisis in Corinth is more open in 2 Corinthians where Paul has to face up to “superior apostles” telling his converts a different story. Needless to say, Paul calls them “false apostles” (2 Cor 11:13) and “servants of Satan” (2 Cor 11:14-15), and this serves for Christians to condemn them, even though, as “superior apostles”, they were likely to have been Jesus’s direct chums. In reply, Paul says he will not boast (2 Cor 10:12), then sets off boasting at length about his apostolic credentials. The superior apostles are proclaiming another Jesus that the Corinthians were too ready to accept.

For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ. And no marvel, for Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness, whose end shall be according to their works.

2 Cor 11:13-16

This is a revealing passage. The final sentence can only be a jibe at the teaching of the false apostles who thought salvation was by works. They were therefore of the Church of James the Just—the Jerusalem Church. The central sentence is even more revealing because it says that the Christ they taught was an angel of light, literally the phrase is “aggelon photos”. The metaphor of light and dark was most popular among the Essenes, coming as it does from Zoroastrianism. Light was identified particularly by the Essenes as pure goodness. The Essenes specifically had the angel Michael fighting Satan in the cosmic war they describe in the War Scroll, so the angel of light is none other than Michael. The angel of light brought light as goodness and purity to the wicked world, and so had the name “Phosphoros” meaning “Light Bringer”. In Latin, the same name is “Lucifer”! Christ, who is Michael, turns out to be Lucifer! When the primitive Christians of a later time used the name Lucifer for their Christ, the established Church would turn to this passage in Paul’s writings and say that Lucifer is the Devil.

Earlier (2 Cor 5:16), Paul had said, “though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth know we him no more”. The plain implication is that anyone who claimed once to have actually known the flesh and blood Christ in life were claiming too much. It no longer mattered. It ties in with the superior apostles actually being some of the apostles of Christ—his companions in life—sent by the Jerusalem Church to correct Paul’s false teaching. This is when Paul describes the death of Jesus as an atonement, that is, an apotropaeic or a pharmakos victim:

For he hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

2 Cor 5:21

This is the essential summary of Paul’s message and those who accept it are “in Christ”. Plainly, there is a schism here, Paul rejecting those Corinthians who accepted the teachings of the “superior” apostles, implying they had accepted “the grace of God in vain” (where “grace” is “charis”, practically “Christ”), and were no longer a part of the New Creation. His appeal to them is to return to the fold, to be “reconciled in God” by submitting to his authority as an “ambassador” for Christ.

His boasting is such that he has no compunction about comparing his own suffering with that of Christ (2 Cor 1:5), and says also that he carries the death of Jesus around in “the body” to reveal his life. Many have seen Paul as typical of those religious leaders who sought deification themselves as the incarnation of a God like Alexander of Abonotichus who claimed to be Asklepios. Paul sets himself up as the model Christian being transformed into the likeness of Christ (2 Cor 3:18), another belief of the heretics. He dropped or marginalized his original apocalyptic belief as the years passed with no sign of the clouds splitting to make way for the hosts of heaven. His alternative was the glorious transformation into Christ.

Galatians

Paul faced a similar opposition in his letter to the Galatians as that he faced in his letter, 2 Corinthians. Here the faithful are opposed by the “doers of the law” (Gal 3:10), a description that some think translates the word “Essenes”. Christians call them Judaizers, though the mother Church in Jerusalem had not even split from Judaism. Only Paul had—in practice. B Hudson McLean naïvely says these people cannot have been Jewish missionaries because Paul speaks of them preaching “another gospel” (Gal 1:6-9), though he has just recognized that there were Jewish Christians. Jewish Christians evidently were not Jewish so could not have been Jewish missionaries teaching a Christian gospel.

It seems most likely that the first Christians in the Jerusalem Church of James were Essenes who adhered firmly to the law while teaching their belief that Christ had appeared, and their lay followers, perhaps called village Essenes or Nazarenes. McLean uses Paul’s claim that these “doers of the law” “do not themselves keep the law”, in which case Paul’s name for them is wrong or ironic, as evidence that they were not Jews.

In fact, Jews could not agree on how the law was meant, and interpreted it in many different ways, causing the spread of sectarianism and division of society. Any Jew could with good reason have accused any other in a different sect of not keeping the law. In a sense, Essenes had a free interpretation of the law in the sense that they did not prescribe it in fine measures, but they applied it strictly. Thus, a fixed measure of water was not prescribed for ritual bathing, but merely that it should be sufficient for total immersion. Pharisees specified a measure, and quickly the measure became the whole point of the law. Pharisees were considered to be building a wall around the law, by adding to it and specifying it, with the aim of ensuring that the pious knew precisely how to avoid transgression, and this was what was becoming unworkable and intolerable. So, from the Pharisaic viewpoint that Paul always boasted, Essenic opponents could have been represented as slack observers of the law.

As usual, Christians have come up with a whole gamut of plausible but unlikely explanations to bury the most plausible and probable explanation that Paul was opposed by the former companions of Jesus in Jerusalem led by James the Just.

The “doers of the law” taught a gospel of Christ, so were Christians, but also required circumcision, so were Jews (Gal 6:12). More about these “doers” can be inferred from Paul’s arguments in Galatians by assuming that his aim is to refute them. What is certainly true, though, is that the whole argument is a rejection of Torah observance, so it is refuting the beliefs of the Jerusalem Church. For Paul, the law had become a curse, and Christians were freed of it. It had been achieved by the death of Christ as a pharmakos victim. He has taken on to himself the burden of the curse of the law, and, through his death, had freed all Christians of the curse. For Paul, not to believe this and so continue to accept the law was to render Christ’s death purposeless. This it was that abrogated the law, not any statement of Jesus (Mk 7:19b). Paul was not interested in the living Jesus or what he had taught, and disparaged those who had known him. The gospels had not been written when Paul was writing these letters, and when they were, they reveal that Jesus had been a firm believer in God’s law, as an good Jew, and paticularly God’s own son would have been! Christians have never been bothered about this fundamental contradiction in their religion. Established Christianity has followed Paul, and whatever the Son of God himself thought is irrelevant.

Paul envisaged a communion with Christ as the central Christian ritual. People were “in” or “with” Christ, or were “baptised into Christ”, and so on and so forth, all descriptions of the communions of the mystery religions. He did not need to have any particular one in mind, though he was likely to have been familiar with the rites of Mithras, and Attis and Cybele from is hometown. It was simply that the growing popularity of the mysteries with their communion ceremonies with the deity meant that people thought and expressed their relationship with their deity in this way, and Paul was adopting the common practice. Moeover, in the mystery religions, an initiatory baptism and a participatory meal were among the identifying rituals. Paul accepted both as signifying the mingling of the person of the devotee and their god, Christ (Rom 6:3-6; 1 Cor 10:14-16). This mystical union assurred Christians that the resurrection of Christ from death was relevant to them. Christ was the “first fruits” but they would follow in like wise.

In the Bacchanalian myth and ritual, Pentheus is made a victim by the God, Dionysos. The Maenads tear him apart. The Christian scholar, E R Dodds has noted that this myth served the same purpose as the myth and ritual of the Eucharist. Pentheus is actually a pharmakos victim, presumably because he brought the curse of Dionysus on to the town for refusing to believe in him as a god. He is sent outside the town and there killed by the crazed Maenads who consume his remains. The town is thereby saved of the curse and converted to believe in Dionysus. The ritual was notionally to consume the victim, by eating morsels of raw flesh for the Orphics, and by drinking the blood as wine and eating the flesh as bread for the Christians. Thus they magically united with the god, in each case, in a communion.

For the Orphics, the ritual was a one off one. Having consumed the raw flesh, they renounced flesh as food forever and became vegetarians. Christians had little faith in the effectiveness of the magic and felt it necessary to renew it as often as possible, perhaps several times a week, but preferably every Sunday, and at least once a year for Catholics. Despite all this eating of a god, Christians do not seem to be much better than those who find the notional cannibalism revolting just to think about. At any rate, this parallel shows that Paul was introducing nothing unknown in Hellenistic society.

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