Yeah, I'm already familiar with this interpretation, and I don't necessarily disagree that this could be part of the "role" that the women play in the story. But this doesn't contradict the mystery cult context and Mark wanting to tell an empty tomb/missing body story. If you were familiar with mystery cults, you would know that women always play an important role in the story and that mystery cults (especially the cult of Dionysus) were popular with women. So Christianity, being something like a Jewish version of a mystery cult, is popular with women and has women playing an important role in its story.Kunigunde Kreuzerin wrote: ↑Wed Nov 15, 2023 11:02 pm Oh men! I should criticize you harshly for squeezing this story into schemes that have little to do with it and thereby overlooking the essential point.
Until this moment, GMark was a story in which the characters following Jesus were men. The role of the unnamed women was limited to the home and a passive role (mother-in-law of Peter). Women sought help from Jesus but were not active disciples. This was particularly noticeable at the feeding of the 5.000 in GMark 6:44, where only men are said to have been present.
Now the male hero of the story is dead. His male companions have all denied him and have all fled. The movement is dead. Everything is over.
But in a dramatic and truly surprising twist of the story, we as readers learn that there are a large number of female followers. From a flashback we learn that these women followed Jesus in Galilee and went with him to Jerusalem. These women were present at his deeds and heard his teachings. These women know something.
Mark, the master of dispense, plays his final card as the author of this story. With the appearance of these women within the story, new hope arises: OK, the men have completely failed, but perhaps these women can bring the story to some sort of conciliatory end. Our entire hope as readers that this story could have a happy end now rests on these women.
So it doesn't just have to be one or the other.
Dionysos (Routledge, 2006), Richard Seaford:
Reading Dionysus: Euripides' Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians (Mohr Siebeck, 2015) Courtney Friesen:In roughly the same period as Bacchae there is evidence for Athenian hostility to, and sometimes persecution of, certain cults that were of foreign origin or at least imagined to be in some way foreign. These cults tended to be ecstatic and initiatory, and the hostility to them seems to have been based on the same kind of moral objection – for instance to drunkenness and sexual licence – as was advanced against the new foreign ecstatic initiatory cult by Pentheus in Bacchae. But we may suspect that in most such cases the basic motivation is the need felt by the centre for social cohesion, for control.
Of these supposedly foreign cults, those of Cybele and of Sabazios were closely associated with Dionysos, and the cults of Adonis, Cybele, and Sabazios were entirely or largely confined to women. The courtesan Phryne was prosecuted for forming thiasoi of men and women and introducing a new god called Isodaites, a name which means something like ‘Equal divider in the feast’ and reappears much later as a title of Dionysos (Plutarch Moralia 389a5; compare Bacchae 421–3). The appeal of foreign spirits to marginal groups, and especially to women, has been anthropologically documented. But that Dionysos appealed to women because of his imagined Asian provenance was less likely than the reverse. The imagined foreign provenance of Dionysos and of his cult, as expressed notably in Bacchae, may derive from the alienation of women from the deities of the male dominated polis, as well as from the consequent male hostility to the cult, from the adoption of foreign elements such as Phrygian music, and from the aetiological myth of the annual entry of Dionysos into the city (Chapter 4)...
The epiphany of a deity may emerge entirely from the framed expectant enthusiasm of ritual. In Greek vase-painting of the classical period Dionysos frequently appears in the company of frenzied women (maenads). And in the first century BC Diodorus (4.3.3) records the practice, ‘in many Greek cities’, of cult for Dionysos that includes married women in groups ‘generally hymning the presence (parousia) of Dionysos, imitating the maenads who were the companions of the god’. The thiasos is a band of mortals, but also the immortal company of the god
The Formal Education of the Author of Luke-Acts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), Steve Reece:Like Judaism, Christianity was at times variously conflated with the religion of Dionysus. Indeed, the numerous similarities between Christianity and Dionysiac myth and ritual make thematic comparison particularly fitting: both Jesus and Dionysus are the offspring of a divine father and human mother (which was subsequently suspected as a cover-up for illegitimacy); both are from the east and transfer their cult into Greece as part of its universal expansion; both bestow wine to their devotees and have wine as a sacred element in their ritual observances; both had private cults; both were known for close association with women devotees; and both were subjected to violent deaths and subsequently came back to life... While the earliest explicit comments on Dionysus by Christians are found in the mid-second century, interaction with the god is evident as early as Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians (ca. 53 CE). The Christian community founded by Paul in Corinth was comprised largely of converts from polytheism (1 Cor 12:2) in a city that was home to many types of Greco-Roman religion. At Isthmia, an important Corinthian cult site, there was a temple of Dionysus in the Sacred Glen. Perhaps most important for the development of Christianity in Corinth are mystery cults. Not only does Paul employ language that reflects mystery cults in several places, his Christian community resembles them in various ways, They met in secret or exclusive groups, employed esoteric symbols, and practiced initiations, which involved identification with the god’s suffering and rebirth. Particularly Dionysiac is the ritualized consumption of wine in private gatherings (1 Cor 11:17-34)
Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition (A&C Black, 2007), John Taylor:By the early Christians, the cult of Dionysus would likely have been regarded with some fascination, as the figures of Jesus and Dionysus and the cults that they spawned shared many similarities.3 Both gods were believed to have been born of a divine father and a human mother, with suspicion expressed by those who opposed the cults, especially in their own homelands, that this story was somehow a cover-up for the child’s illegitimacy. They were both “dying gods”: they succumbed to a violent death but were then resurrected, having suffered a katabasis into Hades, managing to overcome Hades’ grasp, and then enjoying an anabasis back to earth. Both gods seemed to enjoy practicing divine epiphanies, appearing to and disappearing from their human adherents. The worship of both gods began as private cults with close-knit followers, sometimes meeting in secret or at night, and practicing exclusive initiations (devotees were a mixture of age, gender, and social class—in particular there were many women devotees). Both cults offered salvation to their adherents, including hope for a blessed afterlife, and warned of punishment to those who refused to convert. Wine was a sacred element in religious observances, especially in adherents’ symbolic identification in their gods’ suffering, death, and rebirth; devotees symbolically ate the body and drank the blood of their gods; and they experienced a ritual madness or ecstasy that caused witnesses to think that they were drunk... Could Euripides’ Bacchae have been known in one or more of these forms to the author of Luke-Acts? The answer, surely, is a resounding “yes”.
Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford University Press, 2015), Teresa Morgan:Alongside this is the separate phenomenon of thematic similarity, extending beyond the broad equivalence of story pattern noted already. Bacchae shares with the Bible a basic religious grammar. Wine is central to Dionysiac as it is to Christian ritual. The discussion in Bacchae of Dionysus in relation to Demeter emphasises the elements of bread and wine, the staples for which those deities respectively stand. The paradox that Dionysus is himself poured out as wine in worship (Ba. 284) has something in common with the words of Jesus at the Last Supper (‘This is my blood of the new covenant’: Mark 14:24). The importance of the vine in Dionysiac cult and iconography foreshadows its role in the imagery of John’s gospel (‘I am the true vine’: John 15:1). The herdsman describes how the worshippers strike rock or earth to receive streams of water or wine, with milk and honey also miraculously produced (Ba. 704-11): we may think of Moses in the wilderness, and of the attributes of the land towards which he is travelling (Exod. 17:6 and 13:5), as well as the miracle at Cana (John 2:1-11). The idea of incorporation into Dionysus by his worshippers (for example Ba. 75) is similar to Paul’s language about being ‘in Christ’ (Rom. 6:1-10 and 8:1-11). The recurrent contrast in Bacchae (for example 395) of true and false forms of wisdom is paralleled by Paul’s description of God making the wisdom of the world look foolish, and of the foolishness of God which is wiser than men (1 Cor. 1:20 and 25).
The worship of the gods, for Greeks, Romans, and Jews alike, is so deeply implicated with social and political structures and practices that new cults which arise, or arrive, in a region without political connections or protection are often treated with suspicion, if not outright hostility. They can even be characterized as polities in themselves, and as such as a threat to the region’s existing polities. Livy provides a famous example in his account of the rise and suppression of the Bacchanalia in Italy in the early second century BCE. In his narrative, a cult which, to modern eyes, seems to have little or nothing to do with politics is vilified and attacked in political terms as, by its very existence, a threat to the state of Rome.
In 186 BCE, according to Livy, the Roman consuls were instructed by the Senate to investigate an ‘internal conspiracy’ which had arrived from the Greek East (39.8). This ‘conspiracy’ allegedly involved the worship of Bacchus, ‘secret nocturnal rituals’, drinking and feasting, promiscuity, and (the element on which Livy dwells at greatest length) sexual corruption of both men and women (39.8, 10). So far there is, to a modern reader, nothing obviously political about the cult. The Romans, however, think otherwise. They claim that adherents subvert the law by doing violence and murder (39.8, 9, 13) and committing perjury, false testimony, fraud, forgery, and other, nameless crimes (39.8, 16, 18). They create their own communistic economy by pooling their resources (39.18). They assemble, not, like Romans, for legitimate political or military purposes, but to plot immorality and crime (39.14, 15). They destroy the virtue and reputation of those who take part in it (39.10). All in all, the consuls claim, the new cult constitutes a conspiracy (39.13, 17) whose ultimate aim is to destroy not only the cults of the gods which sustain Rome but ultimately Rome itself (39.16)... Forms of the worship of Dionysus or Bacchus which involve nocturnal rituals, drinking, excursions beyond city walls, and undomestic behaviour by women have a long history of being treated with suspicion in the Graeco-Roman world, if not with persecution on this scale. But the most remarkable aspect of Livy’s account is how the cult, as a cult, is treated as a sociopolitical entity, with social, political, legal, economic, and ethical as well as (what we might think of as) religious aspects: an entity which, because it has no existing relationship with Rome, must be assumed to be in competition with it...
The Bacchanals’ behaviour is more than subversive of Roman social order: it constitutes an alternative social order based on alternative moral principles. In this, Livy offers an unexpected parallel with the texts of the New Testament. Here, as there, ethical ideas and practices do more than colour or validate a divine–human community structured by other things. They constitute a structure in their own right, through which the nature and working of the divine–human community can be understood, as well as through their priestly offices, habits of assembly, or distribution of property.
Are Christians and Bacchanals abnormal in structuring their communities, or polities, in part by ethical qualities? I shall argue that the prominence these groups give to such qualities is unusual but not unparalleled, and that the parallels shed further light on why pistis, agapē, dikaiosynē, and other qualities play such a large role in New Testament writings. First, though, it is worth making a more general point: that although they are not equally prominent in all contemporary discourses about Greek or Roman societies (or other societies), moral qualities and practices always have a claim to be treated as a social structure in their own right.