Clivedurdle

http://shakespeare.mit.edu/macbeth/full.html

Clivedurdle

Oh, by the way, when and where exactly is this xian mystery play/religion set?

At the centre of the universe, the Holy City of God Jerusalem?

When

At the point where god becomes a man!

why?

To save us all!

Superb story, deserving all that year's Oscars!

gurugeorge

Well we do have the term "Mysteries" in Greek religion itself, don't we?

I think Doherty suggests that it's not any single feature of overt ritual or storyline that's shared that makes the Mystery religions, or the dying/rising god idea a recognisable family, it's the functional similarity for the participants. People got comfort in this life, and regarding what happens after death, by in some sense sympathetically participating in the death and resurrection of the god. This is distinct from placating a god, or offering things to a god, or ritually keeping the machinery of the universe going by sacrifice, or any of the other numerous types of religious "angle" - it's to do with having some kind of personal relationship with the Divine that gives comfort and hope and some degree of intellectual and emotional rest, some coming to terms with the fact of mortality and the inexorability of death.

andrewcriddle

Hi grugeorge

Relating Christianity to the mysteries primarily via the 'dying/rising element' in the mysteries is not without problems.

I posted earlier a comment on the very distinctive sense in which Osiris is resurrected after his murder and dismemberment. http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=210938
This seems to have little or no connection with Christian ideas about the resurrection of Christ.

Other mysteries may fare even worse. It is doubtful whether there was any sort of idea of the resurrection of either Adonis or Attis until after 100 CE.

You specifically mention the myths about Baal. IMHO the Baal of the Ras-Shamra texts who is defeated by Mot and then overcomes Mot probably is a genuinely dying and rising God, despite the ambiguity of the texts. However direct influence from late 2nd millenium BCE Canaanite religion on early Christianity seems impossible.

If you mean that the Jewish scriptures had, long before Christianity, adopted ideas deriving ultimately from ancient Canaanite religion and that these ideas influenced early Christianity, then, whether right or wrong, this is rather different from what is usually meant by the question of the relation of the pagan mysteries to early Christianity.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_religion

I would argue with this article and definitely put xianity as a mystery religion using the words of Paul for example about glass darkly and his many references that are taken as gnostic but may be better taken as mystery - Paul is allegedly from Asia Minor and the letters are to Greek Cities!

Collosians 1 26 and many more!

The difference is a simple one - Paul is democratising mysteries to the masses! It is a replay of the argument about priesthood of all believers - the Greek idea in contrast to the Persian heirarchical priesthood. He has not made his mind up on this as he uses both metaphors - Christ head of Church and freedom of all to approach the holy of holies.

gurugeorge

I think Price mentions somewhere that Baal was still being worshipped in the region roundabout the time required, and not only that, with rites in which women mourned the dead god in a way reminiscent of the ending of Mark.

As to the philosophical differences between the dying/rebirth mytheme in the Mysteries and Christianity, yes there are differfences, with Mysteries' use of the idea being more related to continuity through nature's changes, while Christianity's use of it is catastrophic in one way or another, but this just fits in with the Jewish linear sense of time rather than the cyclic common in other cultures.

It's going to be completely fruitless for people to argue that the Mysteries were later so long as we have Christians of the time doing the dinosaur fossil thing (saying god had "planted" them to decieve). That is sufficient evidence that the Mysteries were both earlier, and had a similarity strong enough to Christianity for it to cause a problem for Christians.

As to the details - it's not even necessary to show the connection to the Mysteries per se. The dying/rising mytheme was also connected to heroes, philosophers, etc. (There's a Hercules myth that's definitely much earlier than Christianity iirc, Price twits NT Wright in a review for mentioning it and then passing over it as though it wasn't a problem, something he accuses Wright of doing wrt the whole Mysteries problem.) It was also, obviously, in the Greek novels (IIRC Chaireas and Callirhoe is roughly contemporary with 0 BCE, and indeed may itself utilise Mysteries symbolism - a cute novelistic trick, especially if many literary people were in on the secret, as many were).

But the main point is, as Clive points out, in the earliest texts we have, if you look at them without any preconceptions, it's just a "once upon a time" thing, like any other myth.

The ordinary Jewish Messiah myth was the idea of a hero coming in the future to usher in Utopia.

The Joshua Messiah myth is simply a time inversion of that idea, putting the saviour in the past, with a hint of dying/rising about it, also a myth, and he has ushered in a spiritual Utopia. A cute idea, seen in a vision first by the Cephas fellow, then grokked by his fellow visionaries, later grokked by Paul and universalised.

No reason to think Joshua Messiah isn't as mythical as the Jewish Messiah - especially, there's nothing in Paul that would make you think it wasn't a myth on exactly the same level, just a novel twist on the Messiah myth.

andrewcriddle

Could you give a source for this ?

I'm wondering whether there is a confusion here between the rites of Tammuz/Adonis and those of Baal. (Baal was certainly still worshipped in the area at the relevant time but there is little evidence that this involved rites of mourning. The mourning for Hadath-Rimmon in Zechariah might count as evidence but it is a very obscure passage.)
Justin Martyr appears to have regarded the Mysteries of Mithras as pre-Christian. Writing after 150 CE he is not really evidence for what proto-Mithraists before 50 CE were doing.

Maybe more importantly the parallels quoted by the 2nd century Apologists do not seem to involve the resurrection of the God.
Hercules consuming his mortal body in the fire in order to ascend to heaven is not really a myth of death then burial/mourning followed by resurrection.

Although the dates for the Greek novels are uncertain your date seems rather early. For example there is some evidence that Chaireas and Callirhoe was writted by someone who had read Plutarch.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

?

Please see article by Martin Luther King. Proto - Mithraist is a propaganda term - I think I will start writing "that mystery religion xianity" probably with some academic force - xianity does look like an evolution of primarily pagan ideas and not that Abrahamic at all!

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/p...ristianity.htm

andrewcriddle

Hadath-Rimmon should be Hadad-Rimmon.

Sorry

Andrew Criddle

gurugeorge

You are right I had them mixed up. The essay I was thinking about is Price's review of Drudgery Divine.


As to the Zechariah passage, it doesn't look particularly obscure:

9: And on that day I will seek to destroy all the nations that come against Jerusalem.
10: "And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a first-born.
11: On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadadrim'mon in the plain of Megid'do.

As Price says in that review:

Baal's variant self, Hadad, is even less prone to dying according to Smith, since he is merely said to sink into a bog for seven years. He is only sick, but when he reemerges, languishing nature renews itself. For Smith, "There is no suggestion of death and resurrection." Nor any hint of ritual reenactment of the myth. What about Zechariah 12:11, where we read of inconsolable ritual mourning for Hadad-Rimmon? What are they mourning?

What I mean is things like this:

When we say that Jesus Christ was produced without sexual union, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call the sons of Jupiter.

For when they tell that Bacchus, son of Jupiter, was begotten by [Jupiter’s] intercourse with Semele, and that he was the discoverer of the vine; and when they relate, that being torn in pieces, and having died, he rose again, and ascended to heaven; and when they introduce wine into his mysteries, do I not perceive that [the devil] has imitated the prophecy announced by the patriarch Jacob, and recorded by Moses?

The devils, accordingly, when they heard these prophetic words, said that Bacchus was the son of Jupiter, and gave out that he was the discoverer of the vine, and they number wine [or, the ass] among his mysteries; and they taught that, having been torn in pieces, he ascended into heaven.

Here, Justin seems to be talking about the mysteries of these various deities. There's some folderol about tying it to Biblical prophecies (to give Christianity some ancient depth), so he has a timeline: 1) Jewish prophecies about the Christ 2) Devilish counterfeits thereof amongst the pagans and 3) the real thing, Christ, as prophesied.

But the salient point is that Justin himself is tying the Mysteries to Christianity.

Well Justin Martyr seems to have done:

When we say that Jesus Christ was produced without sexual union, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call the sons of Jupiter.

Nor is the idea that Christ will ascend to heaven or into the afterworld upon his death, but that's the earlier Christian idea!

Doherty:

Not only do Paul and other epistle writers fail to tell us that Jesus rose from the dead in flesh, or returned to earth after his resurrection (the "seeings" of 1 Cor. 15:5-8 are better understood as visions, all of them like Paul's own), the early Christian writings tell us explicitly where Jesus went immediately after his rising from death: to Heaven, to take his place at the right hand of God. 1 Peter 3:18-22, Ephesians 1:20, Hebrews 10:12, the hymns of Philippians 2 and 1 Timothy 3:16, exclude any period on earth. (Can we really believe that if there was such a thing, not a single epistle would make mention of it?) In other words, Jesus after his death (which to judge by the early writers is in myth, not history) is resurrected to the afterworld, there to receive his devotees. That is the resurrection which is the "firstfruits," with the resurrection of believers to follow into the same place. This is all that Paul presents to us. Christ's is a resurrection just like that of Osiris and Attis.


Again, I go back to my earlier point: we don't need to have a point-for-point similarity with any particular Mysteries myth (nor did Justin, apparently - he's quite happy to see the parallel piecemeal between what Christians propose and the biographies of the sons of Jupiter!) The Mysteries are as different from each other as they are from Christianity, but they are all recognisably of the same "family", as is Christianity.