Mystery Cults as Background?
Mystery Cults as Background?
Some have offered parallels between dying-and-rising deities, especially in the mysteries, and the early Christian teaching of the resurrection. We must therefore address the alleged parallels first and then turn to what proves a far closer background for the early Christian teaching of the resurrection and its first articulations even in a Greco-Roman setting (see 1 Cor 15:4, 20-28, 35-49).
The Mysteries apparently influenced some Palestinian Jewish thought in late antiquity, though the exact date is unclear. Numismatic evidence indicates some presence of the mysteries in Palestine,40 though among Gentiles and especially in a later period.41 Limited mystery language may have infiltrated some forms of Judaism,42 but the use of such language is hardly evidence for widespread influence. 43 Pagan accusations that confused Judaism and the Mysteries44 do not constitute good evidence that Judaism as a whole made that confusion. For example, Reitzenstein’s early-twentieth-century claim that “Even in Trajan’s time the Roman Jewish community still . . . either altogether or in large part worshiped the Zeus Hupsistos Ouranios and the Phrygian Attis together with Yahweh”45 has turned out to be nonsense, refuted by subsequent research into Roman Judaism.46
The language of the mysteries clearly infiltrated Christian writers of the second century and later. For example, Tertullian claims that Christianity has the true mysteries, of which others are poorer and later copies.47 Such language becomes much more prevalent in the third and fourth centuries CE.48 Some of the “parallels” appear in Christian interpretations of the mysteries, not in the pagan sources (which naturally kept mysteries more secret). That the Fathers understood the Mysteries as “imitation démoniaque du Christianisme”49 may suggest that they, like many early modern students of these cults, read them through the grid of their own Christian background, and the ready-to-hand explanation of demonic imitation may have led them to heighten rather than play down the similarities between the two.
Yet it is in fact likely that by the patristic period some features of the mysteries were being borrowed from Christianity. As they began to lose devotees to Christians in a later period, the mysteries could have adopted some features of Christian practice; many of the “parallels” in the mysteries are known only from the period in which Christianity’s ideas had become widely known.50
Suggestions of mystery influence on first-century Christianity are overdrawn. Much of the most specifically mystery vocabulary is lacking in earliest Christianity: Metzger, following Nock, lists such terms as mustēs, mustikos, mustagōgos, katharmos, katharsia, katharsis, teletē, and so on.51 (We treated the Jewish use of the more general term “mystery” in ch. 13.) What is perhaps more significant is the different perspective on the events described by both kinds of religions. As Metzger points out,
. . . the Mysteries differ from Christianity’s interpretation of history. The speculative myths of the cults lack entirely that reference to the spiritual and moral meaning of history which is inextricably involved in the experiences and triumph of Jesus Christ.53
In the apostolic and subapostolic literature,
In all strata of Christian testimony concerning the resurrection of Jesus Christ, “everything is made to turn upon a dated experience with a historical Person [citing Nock],” whereas nothing in the Mysteries points to any attempt to undergird belief with historical evidence of the god’s resurrection.
To notice this difference is perhaps to notice the different cultural matrixes in which these cults took root. In contrast to mysteries, a cult rooted in Israelite biblical piety could not neglect concern for salvation-historical acts of God. God’s acts could be celebrated annually in cultic ritual (as with the Passover), but they were viewed as unique events secured by the testimony of witnesses, and grounded in corporate piety.55
Harvard classicist Arthur Darby Nock points out that, while many of Paul’s hearers may have understood him in terms of the mysteries, most of the early Jewish-Christian missionaries like Paul had probably had little firsthand exposure to the mysteries and reflected instead a broader milieu of which the mysteries were only a part.56 The mysteries played even less a role in the formation of the earliest Jesus movement in Galilee and Judea.