I’m reading The HarperCollins Study Bible, Introduction, pages liii-lv, titled The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament written by David E Aune. I find myself drawn to a rabbit hole here and am going to dive in and try to learn a little. I learned a bunch from responses to my last post and thought I’d try to crowd source a jump start to my research. I don’t know what I don’t know.The thought above (the title) occurred to me and made me want to go down this rabbit hole:
Aune tells us:
Throughout the first century CE, Greek religion and culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean… Three main types of voluntary Greek private associations existed, each of which had a greater or lesser cultic component: professional corporations or guilds…, funerary societies…, and religious or cult societies, centering on the worship of a deity. This last category includes “mystery religions,” a general term for a variety of ancient private cults that shared several features.
I know ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t believe in a blissful afterlife but it wasn’t until I read that that I realized the idea of salvation and heaven as the carrot, and hell as the stick evolved over time. A little more because I am having a hard time finding this text to link:
The term “mystery” is related to a Greek term meaning “initiate” and “mystery” itself means “ritual of initiation,” referring to the secret initiation rites at the center of such cults. …the period of greatest popularity appears to have been the first through the third centuries CE. …Initiates who experienced the central mystery ritual became convinced that they would enjoy soteria (“Salvation”), health and prosperity in this life as well as a blissful afterlife.
So this is all happening with great popularity in the same place and time of Jesus and later that century, Paul. These cults are popular as Christianity is formed into a religion. Little is known about details on the cults, because, well, they were secret. Seems like early Christianity may have united these cults by adopting some of their fundamentals? I’ve found this so far but I’m just diving in and it occurred to me that one of you might light a path for me. Anybody been down this road already?
You might want to check out Bart Ehrman’s YouTube channel. He’s a New Testament scholar who speaks very understandably and convincingly.
Totally agree. I appreciate Ehrman, both from a personal level and for his contributions. He’s been really helpful to me in my late deconstruction and has been an inspiration for me to dig deeper and learn more.
I’m reading deeper into that link I posted.
The followers of Dionysos derived many of their eschatological beliefs and ritual prescriptions from Orphic literature, a corpus of theogonic poems and hymns. The mythical Thracian poet Orpheus, the archetypical musician, theologian, and mystagogue, was credited with the introduction of the mysteries into the Greek world. According to myth, Orpheus’ reclusion that followed his unsuccessful attempt to bring back his wife Eurydice from the Underworld or, alternatively, his invention of homosexuality brought about the tragic, violent death he suffered at the hands of Thracian women.
It’s getting juicy. (I know I’m a nerd).
Bacchic-Orphic beliefs and practices: itinerant religion specialists and purveyors of secret knowledge, called orpheotelestai, performed the teletai, private rites for the remission of sins. For the Orphics, Dionysos was a savior god with redeeming qualities.
Sounding familiar.
From the Titans’ ashes the human race was born, burdened by the horrific inheritance of an “original sin.”
Then from the Kybele, cult:
Known among the Greeks as Kybele, or Great Mother of the Gods…Ritual purity was a prerequisite of initiation into the ecstatic cult of the Mother. Her priests, the Korybantes, and followers worshipped her with wild, loud music produced by cymbals (13.225.5a,b) and frenzied dancing, which, like the revels in honor of Dionysos, carried the participants despite and beyond themselves.
I recognize dogma and ritual I grew up with mixed in here.
Little known fact - by Jesus’s day Atrapanus of Alexandria had claimed in his ~2nd century BCE book Concerning the Jews that it was actually Moses who taught Orpheus the mysteries.
Manetho, the Egyptian historian, claimed that Moses had been a priest of Osiris (the equivalent of Dionysus).
There’s a few other fun oddities too.
For example, the Eleusinian Mysteries were credited to Eumolpus (“good singer”) a fellow from North Africa who was put into the water as a baby and raised by a different family until leaving later on to Thrace where he became king and then conquering Athens.
You have the story of Zalmoxis, an ex-slave who learned the gift of prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt before coming to Thrace where he became advisor to the king and told people of the promise of an afterlife by way of a meal.
And some of the apocryphal stories of Moses have him too coming to a foreign city where he becomes advisor to the king before eventually becoming king himself, such as in Josephus or medieval Book of Jashar.
(There’s quite a bit more to this, particularly in light of recent discoveries in the archeology of the early Iron Age Levant. Too long for a comment though.)
But it wouldn’t have been that strange for someone familiar with the respected scholarship of the 1st century CE in seeking a better understanding of Judaism to look to Orphism or the mysteries. Especially given Hecataeus of Adbera’s claim that the records of the Jews had recently been altered under the Persian and Macedonian conquests.
This might not have gone over well with more orthodox crowds at the time, but hybrid thinking of Judaism considering Greek concepts was pretty popular already. And vice versa - Enochian literature of Enoch’s tour of the heavens likely informed Virgil.
All that said, there’s a ton of misinformation about the mystery cults and I’d recommend being wary of most discussions of what they were or weren’t. The truth is we really don’t know and most sources are later Christian authors who tended to see Christian archetypes in everything else whether they had actually existed there or not.
If you want a good resource on the mystery cults, I recommend Jan Bremmer’s Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World, which is free to read on Kindle.
Edit: Also, regarding the Kybele cult practices, an astute eye will notice cymbals and dancing associated with Miriam in the Bible.
Thank you. Good information and I grabbed that book and will read it. I had a feeling kromem@lemmy.world would show up holding the lantern 😊
If Moses was a priest of Osiris, then was the concept of salvation baked into Judaism of the time? I’m specifically interested in the concept of “being saved” through initiation and how it evolved into the rituals of modern Christianity.
That’s a great question, but it kind of needs to be set against the context of “when did Moses show up in Judaism.” Because he may have been a very late addition.
There’s a major religious reform described in the Bible under Josiah, where he literally kills and performed human sacrifice of the old priests, hides away all the artifacts of the Moses time like the Ark and anointing oil, gets rid of Yahweh’s wife, destroys the golden calves in Bethel and Dan which Jeroboam set up, discovered a new book of laws, and institutes the Passover story.
You might notice that there’s a parallelism between Josiah’s reform in getting rid of old laws and bringing new laws while destroying golden calves and Moses breaking the old commandments and going to get new ones in response to the people worshipping a golden calf.
So we can reasonably regard at least some of the Moses stuff in the Bible as post dating Josiah given that it effectively mythologized his alleged reforms.
But the problem is, Josiah’s reforms appear to at least be in part anachronistic.
In letters over a century after Josiah, the Jewish community in Elephantine in Egypt are writing back and forth to Jerusalem discussing the upcoming Passover period, and there’s zero mention of any Moses or Passover story. There isn’t even any evidence in the letters that the two separate festivals of the earlier Canaanite festival of unleavened bread and the Pesach lamb sacrifice have combined at this point.
The version of the Old Testament we have today is actually from quite late, maybe more like the 3rd century BCE. And as mentioned, there was a contemporary claim around that the tests had recently been altered.
And between the Greek test from around then and the surviving Hebrew text from later on, we can see that things like a duplicated story about Jeroboam going to Egypt and marrying the sister-in-law of the Pharoh, mirroring the event two chapters before where the king of Edom did the same, disappears by the time of the latter. So something funky is certainly going on.
But outside of being able to say that parts of the Moses narrative are actively being changed much later on then one might think, it’s almost impossible to say how early on Moses is an integral part of Yahweh worship, Judah or the Israelites, etc.
We’re effectively stuck with layers and layers of propaganda written by the victors, and while there may be hints of what lay earlier on underneath the layers, exactly when and who and what those layers represented is broadly a mystery.
All that said, I’m personally of the opinion that a historical Exodus as described by Greek and Egyptian sources with a multitude of different peoples occurred at the end of the 19th dynasty with the Anatolian/Aegean sea peoples and Libya, that a Mose/Mopsus was a central figure to those events, and that sometime following the forced relocation of those peoples into the Southern Levant by Ramses III that there was syncretism with the Israelites/Judah with several rounds of reworking until the version we are left with today. But that effectively the Biblical narrative is a distant echo of the underlying story.
The populist features in the events of the sea peoples retaking their countries of origin and the descriptions of changes during the foreign conquest of Egypt at the end of the 19th dynasty would very loosely suggest that a paradigm change of salvation from being extremely classist in Egypt (you needed to spend massive resources on your tomb to try to impress your way into the afterlife) to something like the universalism Zalmoxis was bringing to a Thrace (“everyone sitting here at dinner won’t actually die”) might be plausible. But the most primary evidence of that time reflects a rejection of religious structures, with the conquers allegedly “making the gods like men” in keeping with the alleged Phonecian creation story of that period where the pantheon was actually described as just humans who had invented stuff culturally deified after death. So the salvation stuff could have simply been a later return to theology after a period of what was effectively atheism?
In Herodotus 2.47-48 you can actually see a bit of similarity between festivals of Osiris/Isis and the later Passover festival. He described a sacrifice of a pig near the entryway of the home on a full moon. Replace the pig with a lamb and you have something remarkably similar to the Passover story’s sacrifice for the 10th plague.
Did Judaism have any earlier influence from Osiris mythology? Maybe? But there’s speculation that Osiris came to Egypt from Libyan beliefs, and Libya is very much involved in the events at the end of the 19th dynasty, so it could instead be that Manetho saw the Greek claims of Orphic mythos as having been pulling from Osiris rather than as syncretism of a shared source between both Egypt and the later Thracian beliefs. Or something else entirely.
And part of the problem is that whatever early Judaism was, at least half the equation has been torn out with the reforms removing the goddess worship. Yahweh is a minor local god that’s consort to major goddesses. Early parts of the Bible have a ton of indicators of empowered women with authority. But that’s all stripped out. And the mystery traditions are all very goddess focused. So it’s entirely possible there was greater similarity in the parts that were removed.
For example, Herodotus credited a women only multi-day festival that was celebrated all over the Mediterranean as originating with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt. In Judges 11, you can see the mention at the end of a multi-day women only festival in Judaism, explained with what’s effectively the same story as Idomenus’s return home to Crete from the Trojan War sacrificing his kid based on sacrificing the first thing he sees. But this festival disappears from practice and history other than this mention in Judges.
Much like how Judges 18 preserves a tradition of Moses’s descendent as priest of Dan, contrary to the claims elsewhere the priest should be from Aaron’s line. Which again disappears from anything in Judaism, but is extremely curious if Yigael Yadin’s theory the Denyen sea people in Adana were the lost tribe of Dan given that there’s two separate bilingual inscriptions by the Denyen in the 8th century BCE claiming their rulers belong to a “House of Mopsus.”
It’s a bit like reconstructing what a shredded document soaked in water until it’s a giant ball of mush might have once said.
TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s a bit like reconstructing what a shredded document soaked in water until it’s a giant ball of mush might have once said.
I’m starting to really understand that the more I read. Between secrecy of practice, what’s been destroyed or hidden or removed on purpose, and the purposeful purging of information by the victors, there isn’t much left to show. Hopefully archaeology will continue to give us new pieces to the puzzle.
For the scope of this community, I find that knowledge on this and other Biblical topics help me see Christianity for what it is; just another belief of people, created solely by people. I was heavily indoctrinated as a child and my deconstruction contained many struggles and moments of weakness when I questioned my questioning relentlessly. All of the indoctrinated guilt is built on a foundation of Biblical justification. Scholarly knowledge of the Bible, the time period in which it was written, and the people that wrote it has been the only effective medicine for me, long term, to loosen the hold those childhood lessons held over me.
Specifically to the topic of this post; If the concept of salvation predates Jesus by centuries and the Biblical “path to salvation” is just a new iteration of the soteria from Greek initiation rituals, how can any of it (Christianity or the Bible) be true? There’s no more weight to salvation and by extension, no heaven or hell. Nothing worth fearing. Nothing worth believing.
Archeology does offer some very promising new pieces. Though part of the problem is that those pieces tend not to fit very well into what the majority of people studying the field professionally want to see, so there’s undue focus on things they think they can tie into the narrative as it stands and far less on the things that offer a quite different narrative entirely. But given enough time, I think it will sort itself out.
As for the concept of salvation predating Jesus, arguably the even more interesting question is just what picture of salvation Jesus was actually pitching. There’s a common assumption that Jesus as depicted by the canonical texts is a faithful approximation of the historical figure’s theology, but while this is often taken for granted, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the surviving tradition passing the filter of Jewish persecution and then later Roman acceptance is the unadulterated representation of the guy who allegedly upset both factions enough he was killed for it.
So most consideration of Christian concepts has this inherent anchoring bias around all the details of modern Christianity that are inescapable in the western world.
But we’re dealing with a tradition where literally the earliest texts are letters from a guy who is known to have been persecuting followers of Jesus writing to communities outside the areas he would have had authority to persecute, swearing he’s not lying about having joined the movement while simultaneously telling people not to pay attention to any other versions of Jesus or gospels than the one he offers them and to give him money.
He advocates a tradition based on the authority of Peter, the guy whose own tradition constantly has him missing the point of teachings or arguing with Jesus, and who is unanimously agreed in texts to have been denying Jesus 3 times concurrent to the ~3 different trials to condemn Jesus. In some Peter even goes back into the guarded area where one of the trials is taking place.
If this wasn’t a global active religious tradition, but instead a murder mystery, might we not want to be a bit skeptical of the guy seen fighting with him who was publicly denying him around the time of his trial and arrest or the guy persecuting his followers who suddenly joins them claiming he couldn’t see and then miraculously could after communicating directly with their dead leader? But no, it’s all fine because a rooster crowed.
When you look beyond cannon, there’s wildly different versions of a lot of the concepts in canonical Christianity.
For example - don’t you think it’s weird that an “only child” of God would constantly be referring to those around him as his brothers and sisters? That language seems inherently at odds with the canonical exclusivity of Jesus’s literal divine parentage, but seems much more in line with concepts like those found in the Gospel of Thomas, such as:
When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living Father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.
Or
Jesus said, "If they say to you, ‘Where have you come from?’ say to them, ‘We have come from the light, from the place where the light came into being by itself, established [itself], and appeared in their image.’
If they say to you, ‘Is it you?’ say, ‘We are its children, and we are the chosen of the living Father.’
This notion of recognition of one’s own divine parentage in that work then fits into its depiction of salvation as a birthright:
Jesus said, “The messengers and the prophets will come to you and give you what belongs to you. You, in turn, give them what you have, and say to yourselves, ‘When will they come and take what belongs to them?’”
Further played out in parable form:
Jesus said, “The kingdom is like a person who had a treasure hidden in his field but did not know it. And [when] he died he left it to his [son]. The son [did] not know about it either. He took over the field and sold it. The buyer went plowing, [discovered] the treasure, and began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.”
This picture of salvation as an inheritance for each individual effectively removed the priestly business of getting people to hand the authority over their salvation over to you in order to lend it back out to them at interest. A massive business at the time.
If you were Jewish and you committed sin, you were supposed to go to the temple, buy animals to sacrifice, and bring them to the priests to eat and burn. As well as regularly pay the temple to keep up these functions.
Canonically, Jesus kicked out the people selling these animals from the temple, but you might notice that it’s only in Mark that he tells people to stop carrying offerings through the temple when doing so. That part goes missing in the ones copying off it, I suspect because of the timeline issue of prohibition of sacrifice before he’s allegedly taken the symbolic place of sacrifices.
But the admonishments against any kind of sin sacrifice seem again more in line with extra-canonical Jesus’s stance on sin, such as:
His disciples asked him and said to him, “Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?” […]
Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.
The attitude therein, of “Don’t lie, and don’t do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before the truth” seems more akin to the attitudes in Corinth pre-Paul of “everything is permissible for me” even if Paul was correct that not everything is beneficial.
The canonical Jesus has an emphasis on the body such that there’s a Eucharist to become one with him by drinking his blood and eating his body. In Thomas there’s a radically different approach where it is by drinking in his words and ideas that one becomes like him and sees as he did.
But this version of Jesus didn’t magically find its way on top of the table at Nicaea, and instead ended up buried in a jar for centuries because simply possessing it was a death sentence, and the version of it that was preserved is distanced enough from a historical figure that it’s again like reconstructing wet shredding.
So while it’s likely that a historical Jesus existed, what he was actually pitching regarding salvation is largely a mystery. But the canonical depiction of it has serious issues when considered without anchoring bias, and there was a wide array of alternatives that differed quite significantly from the canonical claims.
All that said, I agree that diving into a secular analysis of the Bible is pretty effective at reducing the hold of indoctrination. Like people indoctrinated with absolute terror over the influence of Satan might be pretty surprised to find that the whole concept probably draws from fanfiction following a lazy adaptation of a polytheistic story in the opening of Job where a goddess’s name was replaced with the generic term ‘adversary’ (Satan) in petitioning the head god to kill the child of the protagonist (as the goddess Anat petitions El in the earlier Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat). The Israelites were polytheistic for centuries until later monotheistic reform, so a lazy adaptation of Job to monotheism may have left a supernatural ‘adversary,’ and suddenly people became obsessed with the idea to the point of eventually burning their neighbors alive trying to hunt it out.
Satan and Hell terrified me completely as a child. I was able to shake it but can still feel the scars. Too bad this is buried. I think further discussion on hell would be fun for me and beneficial for others here. Still willing to learn more about it all. I am pretty far past being afraid of the fictional version I was raised with but the concept of eternal torture hung me up for a long time during deconstruction (see my first post in this community for my overall view, boiled down).
I’m reading Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient world, on your suggestion. This seems like solid gold to answering my questions I posted. I appreciate the direction. I see there is a bunch to cover but this is doing a great job of getting me started.
Moses is believed by historians (including biblical scholars) to have never existed. There was no Moses. There was no Abraham. Most of those characters were fictional, and those that were not were fictionalized. There was no great nation of Israel. There were some small nations that occasionally were united under someone and then fell apart after he died, and they were conquered and occupied several times. They were polytheistic and then henotheistic, with Ashera worship occurring into 2CE as I recall.
I’m sorry - I just have a pet peeve against people who espouse that a character of legend actually existed because his legends (and it’s usually a he) sound a bit like the legends around another legendary character.
The “scholarly position” on Moses exclusively engages with the Biblical account and does not engage with the Greek and Egyptian accounts, which depict multiple groups of people including pre-Greek ancestors as having been involved.
So the rejection of the narrative is the rejection of the claim that the Israelites came out of Egypt, for which I agree there’s no evidence and in fact counter-evidence. But they aren’t engaged with the consideration that the narrative was one absorbed into Israelite mythological history from elsewhere.
The tide is starting to shift though. For example, Yigael Yadin’s theory Dan were the Denyen sea peoples was a fringe theory, but in just the past few years we now have the lead scholar excavating Tel Dan, David Ilan, talking about the strange find of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the site in the early Iron Age, and how he feels the evidence lends itself to strengthening Yadin’s theory.
DNA confirming imported bees to Tel Rehov, the only evidence of actual bee honey in the theoretical “land of milk and honey” is less than a decade old. That apiary also has one of the earliest if not the earliest “four horned shrine” in the region, a feature which later finds itself into Israelite shrines and directions on making shrines that way into the Bible. But it’s on a shrine to an unknown bee goddess where they were burning honey (something later explicitly prohibited in Leviticus). That apiary is burnt down right around the time period matching when Asa was reported to have deposed his grandmother the Queen Mother.
Not only were they worshipping Asherah who was considered Yahweh’s wife during some of that time, but you also have the record of a combined Yahweh/Anat worship in Elephantine. And yes, they were polytheistic for quite a while, with about 30% of Israelite theomorphic names being based on Baal for centuries before the monotheistic reforms.
Which is part of why it’s so strange that scholarship pretty much exclusively debates the Exodus narrative as recorded in the Bible. For which I agree there’s no evidence for the majority of it. But the scholars in antiquity were nearly unanimous about a very different version of it, with the earliest attestation also claiming that the Biblical record had been altered - for which there’s certainly evidence of alterations or composition post-golden calf reform given the parallel “get rid of old laws and golden calf and bring new laws” in the Moses story to Josiah’s alleged reforms (themselves anachronistic given the letters between Elephantine and Jerusalem over a century later).
Don’t mistake what I’m saying.
I’m not saying Israel was involved in any of this. But there’s evidence that Israelites and sea peoples were cohabitating in the early Iron Age, and the same Babylonians that conquered Judea conquered the Que/Denyen of Adana, who in multiple Luwian/Phonecian bilinguals attributed their rulers to a House of Mopsus.
I’m saying sometime in between the early cohabitation and the return from the Babylonian captivity that the Israelites appropriated a narrative pertaining to a different peoples and reworked it into the version we have in the Bible today, with the additions of Aaron and the priestly line, the ethnocentrism in contrast to other accounts, the “god of my father” as opposed to the maternal line of prophetic inheritance attributed to Mopsus, etc.
I actually suspect that this was a cultural history inherited along maternal lines imported by way of one of the various foreign marriages of Israel to a gebirah (“great lady”), likely Jeroboam given the story of him marrying the sister in law of the first Lybian Pharoh present in the LXX which is removed from the Bible by the time of the Masoretic text and the alleged reforms of Josiah primarily targeting Jeroboam’s legacy. Given those reforms allegedly involved hiding away the relics of the Mosaic period while also introducing the Passover narrative, that’s a pretty good candidate for when an Exodus tale was being reworked into the form we have today.
Biblical scholarship is much less encouraging than you might think it you haven’t really dug into it, and one can’t make an effective case against something one hasn’t even considered.
Feel free to look at the thread starting here in Reddit’s /r/AcademicBiblical if you want more of the finer details.