andrewcriddle

Earl Doherty recently published an interesting set of pages about mystery religions at http://home.ca.inter.net/~oblio/supp13A.htm I'm going to give some brief comments about some of the major issues.

To keep this as brief as possible I'm going to respond to what I understand Doherty to be saying without quoting from the article. I apologise in advance to Earl if I end up discussing positions which I have wrongly attributed to him. I'm also going to present some positions which are IMO solid without much argument. If anyone thinks I'm wrong on these points I will attempt to give my reasons more fully.

The Ancient Mystery Religions cover a very broad area and the resemblances and differences between Christianity and the Mysteries vary from one mystery religion to another. There are significant resemblances between Mithraism and Christianity which are not part of any resemblance between the mysteries in general and Christianity. I'm not going to discuss Mithraism further in this post because Doherty's analysis is based very much on Ulansey's improbable ideas, it is quite likely that the argument could be successfully rewritten to emphasise the centrality of heavenly events in Mithraism while avoiding the dependence on Ulansey, but that is not the argument as Doherty presents it. (Some of what I say later about the mysteries should strictly speaking be about the mysteries with the probable exception of Mithraism.)

I'm not going in this post to discuss the possible links between the sacraments in the mysteries and the sacraments in Christianity a/ because it would require a very long and technical discussion and b/ because it seems to be a matter either i/ of very basic parallels such as sacred meals or purification by washing or ii/ of development of the Christian sacraments rather than their origins.

Earl Doherty presents several arguments why the mysteries are more closely related to Christianity than scholars such as Rahner, Wagner and J Z Smith have held.

One argument is the overt apologetic interest of some of these writers an apologetic interest intended not simply to defend Christianity but to defend one version of Christianity against others. A lot of this is valid IMO although it is IMHO a little less prominent in the works of writers such as Wagner than Doherty's account would suggest. However, the (IMO valid) claim that there are major differences between the mysteries and Christianity is not invalidated because some scholars have overstated the differences.

Doherty argues that any major differences between the mysteries and Christianity are to the disadavantage of Christianity. I don't agree but in any case it seems irrelevant to the main argument. The mysteries were optional additions to Pagan religion, Christianity was an exclusive sect. Disapproval of Christianities exclusiveness is not an answer to the claim that this sort of difference is a problem in deriving Christianity from the mysteries.

Doherty suggests that the myths underlying the mysteries were thought to refer to events occurring somewhere other than our earth. If true this would link the mysteries to Paul as Doherty understands him.However he presents little evidence for this claim, which is IMO unlikely. (I agree that the myths underlying the mysteries were thought to have happened outside of historical time but this is not the same thing and seems to be a point of contrast not resemblance with early Christianity.)

Doherty says that some of the claimed differences between the mysteries and Christianity presume a historicist model of early Christianity and hence beg the question. The problem is that if you see early Christianity as operating within the belief structure Doherty holds underlies the original form of the Ascension of Isaiah, (A heavenly being descending to the sublunar sphere dying and returning to the heavenly realm), then this becomes if anything more distinct from the Pagan mysteries than is the account in the Gospels.

IMO it is more fruitful to compare Christianity and the mysteries in terms of the way religions developed in the early Empire in response to the spiritual needs of that time (J Z Smith's position) than to suggest major direct borrowing of early Christianity from the mysteries.

Andrew Criddle

gurugeorge

Nice post, and I sort of agree with the above actually. However, I think Doherty isn't necessarily imputing Mystery borrowing to early Christianity specifically, he just seems to me to be defending the idea that there are parallels, and that those ideas were "in the air". The crux of Doherty's line of argument seems to me to be that while there are certainly significant differences between Christianity and the Mysteries, there are as significant differences between Mystery religions themselves, yet that doesn't stop us categorising them as Mystery religions. They all still recognisably belong to the same "family", and by any reasonable application of the same loose criteria, so does Christianity.

When I say I partly agree with what you are saying above it's in this respect: I think the Mystery element in Christianity was at first very small, probably more an inspiration from the dying/rising deities of the region, (esp. Baal) and not even so much from the Hellenistic Mysteries. Later, other Mystery elements from the broader world of Hellenistic Mysteries attracted themselves to that dying/rising nugget as time went on, like iron filings.

I think there can be no doubt that Christianity is initially a Jewish vision, a vision of cultured, Hellenized Jews, with a clever "time inversion" of the Messiah from the future to the past, mixed with the idea of a dying/rising saviour. It's a really simple basic idea, and at that stage as mythical as the Jewish Messiah itself.

But on the one hand the Messiah-in-the-past element invites people (everyone from good storytellers to people with axes to grind) to "fill in" the mythico-historical gap (with a "hard" historicisation being one logical possibility, inevitably filled); and on the other hand, the dying/rising element sympathetically attracts more Mystery elements than were initially present.

Clivedurdle

Why is somewhere critiqued but somewhen accepted?

Are they not both outside the earth and therefore supernatural? Are they not both the other?

Minimalist

The crux of the argument. Much like the Flood myth, which has hundreds of variants across the globe and many incorporate the idea of some divine "warning." Why focus on the differences when the similarities are more compelling and fascinating?

andrewcriddle

To say that the Osiris myth (the killing of Osiris by Seth and the recovery of his body by Isis etc) happened before normal historical time but took place in various specific places in Egypt and in specific places outside Egypt like Byblos, seems very different to me from saying it occurred somewhere other than our earth.

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

I'm not sure how far 'Mystery religions' is a true family group.
It certainly is a very very diverse family.

Membership seems based partly on content (the worship of Adonis in the Meditteranean is usually included among the mystery religions although it seems unlikely that there were Adonis mysteries in the strict sense. )

Membership is also based partly on practice. Mithraism is certaibly a mystery religions in the sense that all Mithras worship takes the form of mysteries. However its religious ideas seem very different from the other mystery religions.

If it were not for the interest of scholars in comparing and contrasting Pagan religion with Christianity I wonder if the category 'Mystery religions' would exist in its present form.

Andrew Criddle

Clivedurdle

I assume we are agreed someone made all this Osiris stuff up - therefore why are you saying one fictional element - place - is more real than another - time? Do not Egypt and the past both exist. Are we not also able to imagine fictional times and places? What evidence have you that this Egypt is more real than the past? You discount the past, why not also assume this Egypt may be a fictional construct?

The Egypt in the past you describe is identically fictional to placing it below the moon or as in Star Trek in a warp in the spacetime continuum.

I have noted this elsewhere - there does seem to be a real problem in distinguishing what is real sometimes!

Roger Pearse

I'm not sure that we know how the myth that we find in the historical record arose? If so, it would be deeply unsafe to say "someone made it up" since we would then reasonably ask "who", "when" and "for what purpose".

The feeling in antiquity, certainly in Eusebius, was that these deities were originally kings. In a society that had no system for controlled dissemination of knowledge, hearsay was king (rather like a society in which there are no scholars, no universities, no books, and only online fora to seek out information). Over time these figures gathered myth around them. Storytellers -- who needed to earn a living -- embellished the stories, perhaps.

It's an interesting idea. What it would mean, of course, is that there is liable to be a core of fact, and a lot of incidental information along the way as well as a great many pretty stories which are useless as history but illuminating for evidence about the kind of society that they reflect.

I hope that this doesn't sound evasive; it isn't meant to be. Instead I don't want us to disappear down a path of doubtful accuracy and hasty generalisation.

This query seems to be a natural consequence of the mis-formulation of the original statement (which is why I think we need to stick to what we know).

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Clivedurdle

It might be based on a king a thousand years before but there is no way of knowing anything about that king because so many stories have been told. And the place that alleged king lived is equally fictional as the time.

Once upon a time there lived a famous king in a huge old castle next to a dark lake.

This is the stuff of story telling.

Once upon a time there lived a Christ in the heavens who died for our sins.

I cannot tell the difference - how do you?

I assume you accept there are stories about crossing the Styx? What is the problem then with stories set in the sub lunar realm?

Clivedurdle

A wonderful example of cause and effect in this! (The sea done it!)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml