Mystery Cults and Christianity

[Meander_Z]

An interesting conversation came up on another forum, and I thought I would start a new thread here to explore it further.

I am personally fascinated by some of the commonalities between early Christianity, particularly Gnosticism and the Greek/Roman Mystery religions. I've read some interesting speculation that Jesus had a first hand knowledge of some of these religions and may have intentionally woven aspects of those mystery religions into his teachings.

Gnosticism was very different from Catholicism. Catholics actively persecuted the Gnostics as heretics, but it seems that in the early days of the church the distinction was much less cut and dried. I'm not an expert on Gnosticism by any means, but I do know a fair amount about ancient Mystery Cults and I welcome any debates or new information on the subject.

Do you think Jesus may have been inspired by Osiris, Mithra, or Dionysus?
Is this an offensive idea?
Does current scholarship support any connection or correlation, or is the commonality completely coincidental?

 

[Augustus]

Do you think Jesus may have been inspired by Osiris, Mithra, or Dionysus?

I doubt it. He was a lower class Jew and unlikely versed in diverse religious traditions.

Does current scholarship support any connection or correlation, or is the commonality completely coincidental?

Which teachings do you think are relevant? The Bible likely only has limited connection to Jesus' actual teachings, but what in your opinion are the commonalities?

 

[Meander_Z]

The mystery cults reflect on the birth, death and resurrection of a sacrificial god. Initiates often enacted their own symbolic death, purification and rebirth, as a way of reflecting on their own inner divinity, and considered themselves to achieve immortality as a result. They included the notion of a separation between earthy body and heavenly spirit and considered humanity to contain both aspects, although the heavenly aspect was often considered dormant until after initiation.

Christianity embraces this same motif in Jesus's birth death and resurrection. Immortality is not gained through a symbolic reenactment by the initiate but through the literal death sacrifice of Christ that resulted directly in the purification of all believers. Death becomes not an ending but rather a right of passage, with true life existing beyond the veil of death, with a shedding of the earthly (inferior) body, and the liberation of the (superior) soul.

I feel like this is a poor presentation of only the most surface level similarities, but it's the best I can do without digging through my library and citing specific sources.

 

[Jayhawker Soule]

I am personally fascinated by some of the commonalities between early Christianity, particularly Gnosticism and the Greek/Roman Mystery religions. I've read some interesting speculation that Jesus had a first hand knowledge of some of these religions and may have intentionally woven aspects of those mystery religions into his teachings.

One can find speculation on any number of wholly worthless claims. Can you share some examples of interesting speculation that you find credible?

 

[Meander_Z]

I'm linking a chapter from Eliza Burt Gamble's God-Idea of the ancients. Unfortunately this is not a stand alone chapter but rather a small part of a greater argument. The chapter itself is aimed less at similarities between specific gods of previous religions since she outlines those similarities throughout the book and focuses more on showing how the church developed away from its similarities with ancient pagan religions over time. The preceding chapter outlines a number of similarities between the Christ birth story and birth stories associated with Krishna and Zarathustra.

I was thinking the comprehensive comparison I had read was in Carl Kerenyi's "Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life" but I must have been mistaken, or at least I'm not finding it easily. Although I find that to be an excellent discussion on Mystery religions in general. What I'm thinking of may have been in "The Cult of the Black Virgin" by Ean Begg or possibly "The God Who Comes: Dionysian Mysteries Revisited" by Rosemarie Taylor-Perry, but I don't have those books immediately at hand. I would also like to nod to "The Passion of the Western Mind" by Richard Tarnas. He makes some mention of Greek religious and philosophical influences on early Christianity, but the focus of the book is to show the development of western thought from ancient Greece to modern day, so he doesn't make an exhaustive exploration of that idea.

This is really just a handful of sources and each certainly contains its own specific flaws no doubt, but I think they provide enough evidence for commonality to at least make for interesting discussion. Some of these works (particularly the Eliza Burt Gamble work) are quite dated. I actually find it fascinating that some scholars were exploring these subjects so early on.

 

[GoodbyeDave]

Jesus was an observant and devout Jew. He would have no more sought out pagan initiation than any modern Jew would!

The idea that Christianity was influenced by the Mysteries was put about in the 19th century, often by scholars who wanted to discredit Christianity, but it's not very plausible. The Mysteries were about deepening the worshiper's relationship with the gods — Demeter, Isis, the Cabiri, etc — which would hardly attract Christians. It's also unlikely that any initiate would convert to Christianity. We can see today that those who convert are those who were never fully committed to their birth religion. Undergoing initiation into the Mysteries was like a Christian joining a religious order as a tertiary (lay member). Would someone who'd become a Franciscan be likely to convert to Islam, Baha'i, or Wicca? That explains why we have no account of the Mysteries: the initiates observed the law of silence because they remained Pagan.

 

[Meander_Z]

Jesus was an observant and devout Jew. He would have no more sought out pagan initiation than any modern Jew would!

The idea that Christianity was influenced by the Mysteries was put about in the 19th century, often by scholars who wanted to discredit Christianity, but it's not very plausible. The Mysteries were about deepening the worshiper's relationship with the gods — Demeter, Isis, the Cabiri, etc — which would hardly attract Christians. It's also unlikely that any initiate would convert to Christianity. We can see today that those who convert are those who were never fully committed to their birth religion. Undergoing initiation into the Mysteries was like a Christian joining a religious order as a tertiary (lay member). Would someone who'd become a Franciscan be likely to convert to Islam, Baha'i, or Wicca? That explains why we have no account of the Mysteries: the initiates observed the law of silence because they remained Pagan.

If Jesus had been a truly devout Jew, which is to say someone who had more respect for the authority of earthly Jewish leaders and teachers than for his own unique understanding of God, he never would have included gentiles as worthy members of his group, he never would have challenged the Pharisees, and would have never been associated with a unique religion called Christianity. Jesus didn't start a revival of orthodox Judaism. He started a new religion.

Of course none of that proves any connection or understanding of ancient paganism on Jesus's part, but it seems fairly clear to me that whatever Jesus was doing, it does not seem to be in line with what one would expect of a well behaved Jewish man.

I would also like to point out that little was understood about ancient paganism until after the 19th century because scholarship was largely dominated by Christianity until that time. It was considered ridiculous by scholars to consider any historical angle that wasn't consistent with Biblical accounts, not because the Bible did such a good job of explaining archeological findings, but because the scholars themselves were devout Christians, who naturally attempted to fit those findings into the narrative of history that they believed to be absolutely true. Scholarship did not begin to challenge Biblical assumptions until a critical mass of evidence began to well up, the largest breakthrough being the acknowledgement of a Great Goddess figure that was prolific across the ancient world. Why doesn't the Bible talk about her? Ishtar who is understood by modern scholarship to be entirely female, is referred to in all modern translations of the Bible as masculine. Scholarship took a long time before coming around to recognize the validity of powerful Goddess figures in the ancient world, because such an idea challenged the notion that the Bible is a reliable historical reference.

There was certainly a conflict between Jewish tradition and the Mystery cults, but I don't think there is any obvious indication on where Jesus fell in relationship with that conflict. He would have had some access to the basic ideas of the mystery cults even without being a formal initiate, and the mystery cults are full of mythological figures who did precisely what Jesus was said to have done in reality... which is to be born as human, suffer human indignities while being conscious of his true identity as a divine being, willingly embrace his own sacrifice, thereby becoming purified of his earthly human form, and returning to earth as a purely divine immortal spirit capable of ascending and descending at will. This mythological motif as far as I know was not a part of orthodox Judaism, but did exist during Jesus's life time. Is this purely coincidence? Is it possible that God instructed Jesus to follow this course as a means of unifying pagans and Jews in a new church? Or did Jesus make a decision to utilize this pagan formula in order to catalyze his own ascension from man into God?

 

[blue taylor]

The decline of Hellenistic Judaism and the rise of Christianity happened at exactly the same time. It's very easy to see where most of Christianity's converts came from. Greek speaking non-Hebrew Jews.

 

[Meander_Z]

The decline of Hellenistic Judaism and the rise of Christianity happened at exactly the same time. It's very easy to see where most of Christianity's converts came from. Greek speaking non-Hebrew Jews.

In "The Passion of the Western Mind," Richard Tarnas points out, "Significantly, it was not the Galilean Jews who had been closest to Jesus, but Paul, the Roman citizen of Greek cultural background, who effectively turned Christianity toward its universal mission. Although virtually all of the earliest Christians were Jewish, only a relatively small fraction of Jews eventually become Christian. In the long run, the new religion appealed much more broadly and successfully to the larger Hellenistic world. The Jews had long awaited a messiah, but had expected either a political monarch, like their ancient king David, who would assert Israel's sovereignty in the world, or a manifestly spiritual prince-- the "Son of man" --who would arrive from the heavens in angelic glory at the dramatic end of time. They did not expect the apolitical, unmilitant, manifestly human, suffering and dying Jesus."

Food for thought.