Other important texts are the Greco-Roman novels such as "The Metamorphoses of Apuleius: The Golden Ass" and "Chaereas and Callirhoe", and Greco-Roman plays such as "The Bacchae" and "Frogs". All of these stories contain themes of suffering, the pharmakos/scape-goat ritual, initiation/mystery cults, underworld journeys, arriving into town as a stranger in disguise or the taking on of a lower status, imprisonment, mockery, torture, resurrection/rebirth, sea storms and shipwrecks, etc. all of which are found in the texts of the NT. The Greco-Roman novels were influenced by stories that came before them like the Homeric epics, The Bacchae, the Hymn to Demeter, Frogs, etc. In the Hymn to Demeter, Persephone is taken down into the underworld, Demeter mourns her daughter taking on the form of an old women, arrives into town as a stranger in disguise, and becomes a nurse-maid for the royal Eleusinian family. Persephone eventually ascends out of the underworld. In The Bacchae, Dionysus is a preexistent god who is born to a human woman; arrives into his home town as a stranger in disguise; he's rejected and mocked by his own people for being strange and effeminate; he and his followers are imprisoned and then miraculously released; the experiences and killing of Pentheus have themes of the pharmakos ritual and initiation, etc. Both Dionysus and Demeter are benefactors who bring with them gifts and eternal life for humanity. All of these themes are also found in the texts of the NT.
As already mentioned, initiation and mystery cult rituals are also important. A lot of the Greco-Roman novels and plays are influenced by mystery cults and initiation rituals. The characters in these stories often go through something like an initiation into a new life or state of being. Initiation rituals often involved some kind of suffering or traumatic experience or an underworld journey. Heroes such as Heracles and Asclepius were initiated into the mysteries. There's some evidence that initiates experienced ritual mockery and flagellation. Initiates may have been associated with a sacrificial animal during initiation and performed a symbolic death and rebirth/resurrection. The initiation ritual was closely related to the stories about the deities at the center of the cult. The mystery cult deities often experienced something like the human condition such as suffering, mourning or the loss of a loved one, and death which would lead to resurrection/rebirth. Metaphors that were often used for initiation were: going from darkness to light (initiation would sometimes take place in a dark place); from being blind to being able to see (initiates were often blindfolded); from being bound/imprisoned to being freed; from a storm at sea to a calm and safe harbor; from death to life, etc. All of this is also found in the NT texts. The Egyptian mortuary cult which revolved around the deaths and resurrections of Osiris and the sun god was referred to as an "initiation into the mysteries of the netherworld" and may have been the first form of mystery rituals. Osiris goes through suffering, is killed, and then is resurrected. The sun god would descend to the underworld every night, calm the storms of the netherworld which was filled with the primordial waters, enter the primordial waters, die, be reborn/resurrected at midnight, and ascend to the sky in the morning. The sun god in the underworld was described as being "in fetters" i.e. bound. The Egyptian mummy wrappings were also considered to be the "bonds of death/Seth". At the resurrection, the deceased person would be told to throw off their mummy wrappings. Egyptians were resurrected in emulation of Osiris and the sun god because they were the two deities that experienced and conquered death. The stories of Osiris and the sun god's journey through the sky and underworld were stories that Egyptians identified with because they provided a model on how a human can also conquer death just as they had. Notice the Egyptian mortuary cult contains a lot of the same themes later found in the mystery cults and Christianity. Paul describes baptism as a death and rebirth initiation ritual where Christians share in the death and resurrection of Jesus in baptism. Initiation also involves a cultic meal. In the Gospels Jesus is mocked, whipped, suffers, dies, and then is resurrected/reborn. Scholars have pointed out themes of the Greek pharmakos ritual and the Jewish scapegoat ritual in Jesus's death. Characters in the NT texts are physically blind but also spiritually blind. In Acts Christians are imprisoned and then miraculously released when light comes in the darkness of midnight like in The Bacchae. The "midnight sun" or light in darkness is an important concept in initiation/mystery cults. The disciples experience a sea storm that is calmed by Jesus. Calming sea storms seems to be a common "power" that deities associated with mystery cults have.
Greek philosophers would often use similar metaphors as the mystery cults to describe the experiences of the soul in the body and the release of the soul after death. Being imprisoned or bound in chains was often a metaphor used to describe the soul in the human body. Philosophers would use initiation/mystery cult language to describe being initiated into philosophy. The person who is calm during a sea storm was used as a metaphor for the Stoic philosopher.
One of the most important themes of these stories is that the main characters experience the human condition by going through suffering, traumatic experiences, transformation/metamorphosis, and mourning the loss of loved ones. A lot of these characters or deities (especially the heroes and mystery cult saviors) become something like models for ordinary people. Because these deities experienced and conquered death, humans hoped that they would also be able to conquer death and live a happy afterlife. The "noble death" of Socrates became a model for philosophers and influenced other stories that contain a "noble death" theme. This same theme is also important in Christianity. So by the time we get to the NT texts and the Greco-Roman novels in the first and second centuries CE, these themes were already very common. The authors of the NT and the novels were using all kinds of well-known tropes: underworld journeys, resurrection/rebirth, initiation rituals, divine births, shipwrecks and sea storms, miraculous healings, hero's journeys, Greek philosophical concepts, missing bodies, etc. These themes even show up in Greco-Roman bios and histories. There wasn't a clear dividing line between these different types of literature.
In the following quotes, I will bold parts that describe themes that I've mentioned. I'm likely going to be continuously adding sources to this thread. Other people can too if interested.
The Origins of Early Christian Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Robyn Faith Walsh:
Classics and the Bible: Hospitality and Recognition (A&C Black, 2007), John Taylor:Through comparison with a range of ancient bioi (lives), histories, and novels, this study demonstrates that the gospels are creative literature produced by educated elites interested in Judean teachings, practices, and paradoxographical subjects in the aftermath of the Jewish War. It provides a more concrete account of the processes by which the gospels likely were written and establishes that they are in dialogue with writings and writers of their age rather than assuming that they were produced by or for “Christian communities.”...
Likewise, the rhetorical claims, themes, and narrative structure of the Synoptic gospels are artifacts of certain traditions of imperial-age literature, and not evidence of their reliability and “incomparable uniqueness” as religious texts. It may no longer be novel to say that the gospels were not sui generis literature in the first and second centuries, but this has not stopped the field from largely treating them – and their authors – as if they are exceptional. To illustrate this point, apropos of Jefferson, we know that the gospel writers are heavily influenced by the Middle Platonists, Stoics, and other popular philosophies of the period; yet philosophical terminology and allusion (e.g., eidos, pneuma, logos, pistis) are still often translated with Western Protestant Christian theological vocabulary (e.g., “spirit”). We know that attributing authorship to divine forces or authorial anonymity are common rhetorical habits in this period, but when this occurs within the gospels, the tactic is associated with the adaptation of an oral tradition, memory, or “collective authorship.” We know Greek and Roman authors routinely offer fanciful paradoxographical or topographical descriptions of their subjects in order to indicate (most often falsely) firsthand knowledge; for the gospels, these references are often taken as literal in some measure (e.g., contact with “eyewitnesses” in Luke’s preface). Scholars have long noted parallels between the canonical gospels and works like the Greek novel or the Satyrica, including the shared topoi of ritual anointing, crucifixion, a disappearance off the cross, a cannibalistic fellowship meal, (implied) resurrection, and the motif of the empty tomb; yet comparisons between these ancient corpora are few and far between...
In a similar vein, certain rhetorical approaches deployed in the gospels contribute to the notion that they are somehow exceptional. These writers tell us that Jesus is divinely authorized through his birthright, teachings, and wonder-working as a son of God – a powerful figure, even if a social underdog. He is portrayed in turns as a riddler and purveyor of esoteric knowledge or an ethical teacher and miracle-worker. And, unlike the notable statesmen, poets, and philosophers who populated civic biographies, Jesus’ extraordinary wit and otherworldly superpowers reveal his authority and status. In combination, these features communicate that Jesus is an unparalleled figure and suggest that the gospel genre is an innovative departure from previous literary forms. Yet when compared with other first-century literature, the Jesus of the gospels can be fruitfully compared with the Cynics, Aesop, the pastoral heroes of the Greek novel, or witty underdogs in the biographical tradition, the subject of Chapter 5. Moreover, many of the topoi used by the gospel writers convey Jesus’ special standing, but they do so through familiar literary allusions – the empty tomb, for instance, is found throughout Greek and Roman literature and material culture (e.g., the novel and numerous paradoxographical fragments) to indicate supernatural status...
To this end, I situate these writings within the biographical tradition of Greco-Roman literature, which commonly features a marginal or subversive figure forced to succeed through the use of their wits or wonder-working skills. By bringing so-called early Christian texts into closer conversation with the larger canon of ancient Mediterranean literature and literary practices, my project traverses an artificial divide that has persisted for generations between academic disciplines that study ancient texts. When compared side by side, the bioi (lives) written by the gospel authors are no more remarkable than writings like Lucian’s Demonax, the Satyrica, other Greek and Roman novels, or later works like Apuleius’ Metamorphoses (a.k.a. The Golden Ass), among others...
I am by no means the first scholar to acknowledge parallels between the gospels and works like the Greek and Roman novel, philosophical treatises, ancient historiographers, biographers, and so forth. Indeed, in the following chapter, I build on these previous studies in order to suggest that the gospels should be classified as a form of ancient biography. Traditional approaches to the gospels, however, tend to attribute common literary topoi or rhetorical strategies like anonymous writing, divine genealogies, healings, teachings, fellowship meals, and empty tombs to received – that is, “communal” – oral tradition. Such idiosyncratic readings fail to recognize the gospels and their subject matter as the rational choices of educated Greco-Roman writers working within a circumscribed field of literary production. Literary borrowing is recognized without hesitation when it comes to the gospels citing one another or in their use of the Hebrew Bible – the same should be true for adaptations from broader Greek and Roman book culture...
The role of the rooster in prognostication, divination, and supplication is multivalent – including Socrates’ last wishes on his death bed (Phd. 118a 7–8). Possible associations between Jesus and Socrates as condemned teachers have long been acknowledged, including multiple similarities in the circumstances and manner of their trials and executions. Connections between Socrates’ death and that of Philoxenus are also reported in Athenaeus (8.341b). At a minimum, there are precedents in literature and in popular perception for each of these references to philosophers/teachers, anointing, funerary meals, and so on that extend well into the second century. The gospels are well situated in the center of this established literary conversation...
Throughout Mediterranean literature (and material culture), more often than not, these missing dead were understood to have experienced some form of apotheosis, resurrection/rebirth, or transition into a supernatural state. This is also how the gospel writers understand the phenomenon... Others have critiqued the tendency among scholars to limit comparanda for this passage [Mark 16:1–8] Others have critiqued the tendency among scholars to limit comparanda for this passage to the Hebrew Bible or Judean figures without due consideration of the empty tomb motif elsewhere in imperial biography, the novel, and paradoxography. Richard Miller attributes this tendency to “a fundamental misapprehension of the processes and principles governing Hellenistic literary production” in antiquity. Specifically, he cites a resistance among biblical scholars to recognize the literary habit of “creatively and consciously applying a variegated pastiche of Hellenic conventions and cultural codes, often drawn from the Greek classical canon” among writers through the Second Sophistic and beyond. By this measure, the empty tomb implied by the Widow of Ephesus is yet one more element with cultural currency among imperial writers and with which the gospels and the Sat. freely engage.
Empty tombs and the resurrected dead were particularly popular conventions of paradoxography, a genre that experienced a resurgence in the first and second centuries ce. These “marvels” or “wonders” were themselves a pastiche – a thematic compilation of fantastic tales and facts presented with little or no clarification and with only a loose narrative structure. In many respects they resemble the gospels and the Sat. in their episodic descriptions of remarkable events (e.g., miracles) that seemingly defy the natural order. Comparatively few collections survive – the admiranda of Kallimachos of Cyrene, Cicero, and Varro, for instance, have been lost. Those that remain are largely derivative in the sense that they reference many of the same wonders chronicled by earlier authors of the ethnographies, histories, and travelogues that became increasingly popular from the fifth century bce forward...
The “empty tomb” or supernaturally missing corpse, for instance, is quite intelligible as a “convention in Hellenistic and Roman narrative” acknowledged by ancient writers and critics. Plutarch discusses the motif at length, citing the missing Alcmene, Aristeas of Proconnesus, Cleomedes the Astypalaean, and Romulus, calling it an established mythic tale among writers and one that “all the Greeks tell (Ἑλλήνων περί ... μυθολογουμένοις)” (Vit. Rom. 28.4). Indeed, Plutarch’s subsequent analysis of Romulus’ missing corpse, and its associated motif, elicits numerous points of contact with literary and popular imagination, including the gospels. From cataclysms and darkness to an ascension and/or deification, recognition of divine status as a “son of god,” brilliant or shining manifestations, awe and fear over the events, a commission to report what transpired, and eyewitnesses, the formulaic elements of these stories were well established.
To Plutarch’s exhaustive list of missing mortals, Miller compiles no fewer than twenty-nine additional examples throughout Hellenistic and Roman literature of figures who have “disappeared and were worshipped as a ... god,” many of which have more than one known literary reference.68 Of this list he does not cite examples from the novels, which include embellishments and details also echoed in the gospel accounts, such as the displaced stone at the grave’s entrance...
The remarkable ubiquity of this motif and, evidently, the frequency with which it was recognized in popular imagination demonstrates that, while the bodily ascension of Moses or Elijah may have been one point of reference for Jesus’ empty tomb, the topos was also well established elsewhere in Greek and Roman literature. Later church fathers like Justin Martyr, Origen, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Arnobius, and competitors like Celsus all acknowledged that “the early Christians patterned Jesus’ resurrection tale after the Roman imperial and Greek heroic, mythographic tradition.” The empty tomb trope in particular was a compelling and dramatic touchstone for communicating the “translation fable” of the mortal who becomes a hero-sage or god. Notable “missing” figures like Romulus, Alexander the Great, Castor and Pollux, Herakles, or Asclepius helped to make the empty tomb palatable for readers of the gospels – a clear illustration of Jesus’ new supernatural status. In his work on Paul and myth-making, Stowers notes that myths like that of Herakles, his missing body, and conquering of death would have helped contextualize Paul’s message about the new, pneumatic body of Christ. For creative writers, this kind of association also generated an opportunity for novel approaches to an established topos. The rolled-away stone from the tomb in the gospels and Chariton’s novel heighten mystery and expectation. The missing body illustrates that the absent corpse is now a god or godlike with or without explicit explanation.
That Mark is employing a certain, well-worn illustration of the supernatural status of his subject encapsulates the degree to which he is a writer bound by the standards of imperial writing practices. Literary allusions to other supernatural leaders, gods, heroes, and so forth helped to create a symbolic universe for the Jesus of the gospels that indicated his status and importance through established conventions of Roman book culture. Again, this is an approach to writings like the gospels that does not mystify their origins as manifestations of oral speech or special knowledge. Each of the topoi just discussed and the subject matter it evoked was quite intelligible within the literary field of the imperial period.
In reading and teaching Greek and Latin literature I am constantly struck by biblical parallels. These have received surprisingly little attention in recent times, though a glance at the history of art (or at Milton) shows that acknowledgement of affinity was once usual. Classical literature and the Bible are nowadays conventionally studied in separate compartments, but this is a curious and constricting orthodoxy. The time span of the two sets of texts is roughly the same, beginning in perhaps the eighth century BC (though incorporating earlier material) and extending for about a thousand years. Both are products of a Mediterranean world influenced by older cultures of the Near East...
'Life is warfare, and a visit in a strange land’ wrote the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius about AD 170 (Meditations 2.17.1), referring implicitly to the two Homeric epics. The Iliad and the Odyssey embody our most basic spiritual metaphors: life as a battle, and life as a journey. The hero of each is in some sense a representative man... The returned and disguised Odysseus is ill-treated as an unwelcome guest though he is the true host... Polyphemus at the end of the episode experiences a moment of recognition: like the Phaeacians, he links the man in front of him to someone he has heard about, in an old prophecy that Odysseus would one day come and rob him of his sight (9.507-12). Similarly in the next book the enchantress Circe immediately realises it is Odysseus she is entertaining when, forearmed with an antidote from Hermes, he proves impervious to her potion (10.330-2). The Sirens too know at once who Odysseus is (12.184). Enemies and unexpected people quickly recognise the hero whilst his benign Phaeacian hosts do not. This theme has a parallel in Mark’s gospel, a text similarly concerned with the themes of disguise and revelation. Demons and evil spirits habitually recognise Jesus while his own companions remain unaware of his true identity. The possessed man in the synagogue at Capernaum cries out ‘I know who you are, the Holy One of God’ (Mark 1:24). When Jesus carries out healings he ‘would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him’ (1:34). The man called Legion (because of the multitude of spirits tormenting him) asks ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?’ (5:7). Mark’s distinctive idea of the ‘Messianic secret’ (expressing the real but deliberately hidden nature of Jesus) uses dramatic irony about the identity of the central character in a way which is curiously reminiscent of the Odyssey... We have seen that recognition or revelation of the hero is in the Odyssey repeatedly reminiscent of a theoxeny or epiphany. This association of ideas becomes more explicit when Odysseus reveals himself to his son in Book 16...
All through Mark’s narrative the shadow of approaching death is cast forward... Like the Iliad, the gospel story moves towards a death which lesser ones foreshadow: in John’s version this is particularly true of the death of Lazarus (John 11:1-27). Like the Iliad, the gospel story tells of a young man on a lonely course to a death which he foresees and accepts... The so-called Homeric Hymns (of unknown authorship and various dates) appear to have originated as overtures to bardic performances, but the longer ones in the collection have outgrown this role and are important poems in their own right. Several of them involve stories of disguised gods engaging with mortals...
These encounters, and in particular the characteristic moment of epiphany, perhaps reflect (at a later date, but in more original form) the traditional narrative pattern which lies behind the human recognitions and self-revelations in the Odyssey. Richest of all these texts is the Hymn to Demeter, written probably in the sixth century. It has received particular attention in recent years, for a variety of reasons. It explains how an aspect of the world came to be as it is, and how the deities involved acquired their familiar powers: in this respect it is akin to the Theogony. In particular it has important links to the Eleusinian Mysteries, the secret religious cult for which it provides an aetiological charter. Demeter (like Dionysus) had only a peripheral role in grand epic; here she is central, and the hymn is unusual in Greek literature for its sustained focus on female experience. With its extended and attractive narrative element, it is an episodic but self-contained short epic. We shall see in Chapter 3 that Hellenistic and Roman poets were importantly influenced by features both of the Hymn to Demeter and of the Hesiodic poems.
Persephone, daughter of the goddess of corn and agriculture, is carried off by Hades, god of the Underworld (and her uncle). Demeter in mourning travels through the cities of men, disguised as an old woman. At Eleusis near Athens she is met at a well (that significant place of encounter in so many classical and biblical stories) by the daughters of the local ruler Celeus and his wife Metanira. Though the emphasis is not here explicitly on the testing of those who receive the goddess, she is welcomed hospitably into their house and entrusted with the care of their infant son Demophon: it is psychologically realistic that she finds thereby some comfort for her own loss. But she is caught by Metanira holding the boy in the fire to make him immortal: the mother’s alarmed interference angers the goddess and denies him eternal life (Hymn to Demeter 91-291). Human dullness has failed to recognise Demeter, and human folly forfeits the intended reward. This may seem therefore a failed theoxeny. But from a longer perspective an offer of immortality is made nonetheless, in a different sense and on a larger scale. For it is because of this visit that the Eleusinians build a temple to Demeter, whose cult will hold out to initiates the promise of blessedness after death. The story and the subsequent rite here stand in unusually close relation to each other, and the events described in the hymn were some of the most significant ever to take place on Attic soil. Persephone is released to spend part of each year with her mother, this narrative of absence and return providing additionally an allegorical explanation for the origin of the seasons.
Much here resonates with texts we have considered already and with others we shall look at in later chapters. This theoxeny story is highly Odyssean in character. The goddess disguised as a helpless old woman resembles Odysseus masquerading as a beggar. The welcome by the girls echoes the scene where Odysseus meets Nausicaa and her attendants (Odyssey 6.135-210). The old woman tells them a false story of being brought against her will from Crete (Hymn to Demeter 123-34), prompting the reader to recall the several Cretan stories told by the disguised Odysseus (for example Od. 13.256-86). The experience of Demeter resembles that of the divine visitors Jupiter and Mercury in Ovid’s account of Baucis and Philemon, who likewise find only one house to receive them: that story too ends with the aetiological account of a shrine. The language and iconography of the Eleusinian cult prominently involved the corn of which Demeter was patron goddess. The details of the mysteries remain obscure, for their secret was well kept, and it is a matter of controversy how far this and similar cults had any direct influence on Christianity. But the underlying idea, the claim of analogy rather than contrast between the cycle of nature and the doom of humankind, echoes in the words of St Paul: ‘that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die’ (1 Cor. 15:36)...
Individual characters and themes in tragedy have compelling biblical analogues: in addition to those considered in this chapter, we could cite Prometheus in the play traditionally attributed to Aeschylus (bound and suffering for his love of humanity), Alcestis in Euripides (offering herself as a voluntary and vicarious sacrifice), Heracles both in the same play (motivated by compassion to fight and conquer death) and in the later one named after him (posing the problem of undeserved suffering), or Philoctetes in Sophocles (a pariah saviour)...
Like Demodocus in the Odyssey, Teiresias is physically blind but has compensatory spiritual insight. It is when Oedipus attains similar inward vision that he makes himself physically blind. The powerful contrast between outward and inner forms of sight and blindness is variously used by later writers: in John 9 the man born blind recognises who Jesus is whilst both the disciples and the Pharisees are spiritually blind... Throughout the early scenes Oedipus is seen by the Theban people as the deliverer who came once to decisive effect and who can surely save them again. In time that saviour leaves the city, despised and rejected. The scapegoat in Leviticus (16:15-28), driven out into the wilderness to bear the sins of the community, has a parallel in Greek religion in the notion of a pharmakos, the human scapegoat who in the festival of the Thargelia in Athens and other Ionian cities was ritually expelled to cleanse the city. This idea has many echoes in tragedy: Pentheus will likewise be cast as a victim on behalf of Thebes (Bacchae 963). The pharmakos was a marginal person, typically a criminal, but pampered and privileged in the period before the rite. In earlier times he had perhaps actually been a human sacrifice... Jean-Pierre Vernant points out that Oedipus is simultaneously pharmakos and king...
Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex (claiming that the hero enacts the feelings of every male towards his parents) may be discredited, but he was right to give Oedipus a universal significance. In the Odyssey the idea of the hero as Everyman is only implicit. In this play the chorus twice draw general conclusions from the plight of Oedipus, an extraordinary man who is yet a figure for the ordinary... Again at the end of the play he is explicitly a model for the understanding of man...
In Bacchae the god of the theatre appears as a character in a play performed there. Dionysus has come to Thebes disguised as a priest of his own cult. He brings a new form of worship from the east, but his origins lie in Thebes. He is the son of Zeus and the Theban princess Semele, though his divinity has been denied even by her sister Agave, mother of the young king Pentheus. He has made the women of Thebes mad and sent them to celebrate his ecstatic rites on Mount Cithaeron. Cadmus, the aged and abdicated founding king, father of Agave and Semele, accepts the new religion, as does the seer Teiresias. But Pentheus is violently hostile: he has the disguised Dionysus imprisoned, though the miracle-working god shows this to be futile... The play ostensibly dramatises an historical event, the coming of a new cult to a Greek city. The arrival of Dionysus was re-enacted each year in Athens at the start of the festival, his cult statue brought in procession from the border at Eleutherae as if being introduced for the first time...
The play is strongly intertextual with the Odyssey and with earlier tragedy. Like Agamemnon it is the story of the killing of a king, but it stands in an especially close relationship to Oedipus Tyrannus (written perhaps twenty years earlier, though set two or three generations later). Dionysus like Oedipus originates from Thebes and comes back there as a stranger: another boomerang journey, another story of a visitor coming in disguise to his own place. Bacchae is a narrative of host and guest with ambiguities. This is the account of an arriver: will he be received or rejected, bring havoc or blessing? It is a grim and failed theoxeny, but as in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter the gloom is mitigated by reflecting on what followed. Like many theoxeny stories, it provides an explanation of later ritual...
Reading the play from within the Christian tradition is like seeing the tesserae of a familiar mosaic rearranged in a strange new pattern. Mark Stibbe in John as Storyteller demonstrates the especially close parallels between Bacchae and the fourth gospel. Dionysus comes as a god in human form (and not just for a fleeting appearance as the Olympians in Homer typically do). He comes in disguise to his own domain. Unrecognised, he is rejected specifically by members of his own family (‘his own received him not’). He faces hostility and unbelief from the ruling powers of the city, but is welcomed by the meek and lowly. He works miracles. Dionysus as a prisoner answers the questions of Pentheus in a studiedly enigmatic way, so that we sense it is the interrogator who is really on trial.
This seems remarkably similar to Jesus before Pilate, again particularly in John’s version which gives us two notable dialogues not in the synoptic gospels (John 18:33-8 and 19:8-11). These exchanges are full of dramatic irony: they attest John’s stature as a creative writer, but they may suggest also the direct influence of Euripides. Jesus like Dionysus uses language in a less literal way than his questioner (‘my kingdom is not of this world’): he answers questions with questions, or with statements of a profundity and irony which Pilate is incapable of comprehending. Pilate’s own ‘What is truth?’ might indeed seem to a modern reader also potentially profound, but in its context it simply signals loss of integrity and control. The interruption of the interrogation when Jesus is taken outside, flogged and mocked is not historically realistic: it is perhaps indebted to the punctuation provided in Bacchae by the imprisonment of Dionysus between his first and second encounters with Pentheus. Jesus when threatened with crucifixion calmly replies that the worldly power of Pilate is derivative from God: this echoes the claim of Dionysus that imprisonment and violence are useless, as the god will set him free whenever he wishes (Ba. 498 and 504). In each text the interview ends with the superior power of the prisoner clearly shown...
Bacchae was a popular play in antiquity, often alluded to by later authors: indeed it acquired something approaching the status of a sacred text. For several passages in Acts a convincing case can be made for direct influence. The escape of Dionysus from prison in a miraculous earthquake (Ba. 580-603) is very similar to the experience of Paul and Silas at Philippi (Acts 16:25-30). Richard Seaford shows that this scene in Bacchae also resembles a more famous episode in Acts: the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3-9). The two biblical stories and the Euripides passage allow a fascinating triangulation of themes, again with shifting typology. Saul is initially (like Pentheus) the persecutor, the opponent of the new cult, but it is an indication of how dramatically the story has developed that within a few pages Paul has become the incarcerated victim like Dionysus. Both on the Damascus road and at Philippi the suddenness of the divine manifestation is explicitly stressed (Acts 9:3 and 16:26), as it also is in Bacchae (576). An invisible voice and lightning are common to Bacchae and the scene on the Damascus road; the jailer at Philippi rushes in with drawn sword and collapses, as Pentheus also does. The followers of Dionysus like Paul and Silas are singing a hymn to their god when the epiphany occurs. Dionysus once freed reassures Pentheus he will not run away, and Paul similarly confirms to the jailer that the prisoners have not fled. Saul and later the jailer accept and are converted by the successive epiphanies, and the followers of Dionysus are turned from desolation to joy by the miraculous appearance of their god.
Bacchae may also colour other accounts of miraculous escapes from prison in Acts: the apostles when imprisoned by the priestly party in Jerusalem (Acts 5:19) and Peter after his arrest by Herod Antipas (12:7-10) are released by angels. The description in the second messenger speech of how the voice of Dionysus was heard from above and ‘a light of holy fire towered from heaven and earth’ (Ba. 1078-83) is a further possible model for the scene in Acts 9. The question to Saul ‘Why are you persecuting me?’ (Acts 9:4) shares with the plan of Pentheus to attack the women (Ba. 781-5) the assumption that the god is persecuted if his followers are. When later Paul recounts that incident before Agrippa, he says of the divine voice ‘it is hard to kick against the goads’ (Acts 26:14): this expression, unique in the New Testament, echoes Dionysus urging Pentheus not to ‘kick against the goads’ (Ba. 795). Convention or coincidence might explain individual parallels, but these examples seem cumulatively persuasive evidence of direct debt.
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)...
Like the perception of biblical parallels in Bacchae, the comparison between Socrates and Jesus goes back a long way. Theirs are the two most famous and influential trials in history... We do not have the speeches of his accusers, but the Apology itself is an implicit accusation of the authorities who put Socrates to death. Charged with disruptive religious innovation, Socrates on trial is reminiscent of Dionysus before Pentheus, and like him seems to foreshadow Jesus before Pilate. The Apology challenges us to pass judgement on Socrates as the gospels challenge us to form a verdict on Jesus. Like the Iliad, like many tragedies, and like the gospels, the story of Socrates funnels inexorably towards the death of its hero... The accounts of the last days of Jesus and Socrates are remarkably alike. The Passion took place at the season of Passover, commemorating the Exodus, and the New Testament presents the Resurrection as a new Exodus, from the shackles of sinful mortality. Jesus is thus cast as a new Moses. The death of Socrates also took place at the time of an important religious event...
Alexander himself after a formative visit to the Egyptian desert shrine of Ammon, where he was addressed as son of this god (equated to Zeus), seems to have formed a romantic but genuine conviction of his own divine nature, and at least some cities responded to his desire to receive worship. This is the background to the cult of Hellenistic kings, and of the Roman emperor. It was always more at home in the eastern Mediterranean: Augustus and those later emperors whom the sources regard as virtuous trod carefully in Rome, only the wicked and insane insisting on being saluted as gods in their lifetime. Ruler cult is seen by modern historians as a response to power. Ancient polytheism was capacious, and any patron or benefactor in the Hellenistic world could be praised in quasi-divine terms. Several kings took the title Epiphanês, a god made manifest and here present (the Latin praesens deus), in implicit contrast to the greater but remote gods visible only as inanimate representations. The title is closely linked to the concept of ‘euergetism’ or benefaction, the immediate and tangible blessings brought by such a god: this nexus of ideas is centrally important in Virgil. Modern scholars have rightly shown that questions about belief and sincerity framed with Christian assumptions do not provide appropriate categories for understanding ruler cult, but equally have insisted that it is a religious phenomenon rather than merely a political one. We can speak of a religious as well as linguistic Koinê: Adolf Deissmann in his classic Light from the Ancient East (1923) showed by a host of examples from papyri and inscriptions both that the language of the New Testament was the everyday Greek of its period (rather than a special variety used by Jews of the Near East, or by the Holy Ghost), and in particular that the titles and categories applied by the early Christians to Jesus are closed paralleled in the imperial cult: the words for god, lord, son of god, saviour, gospel, advent, and epiphany are all used in the eulogy of earthly rulers. The Hellenistic world created a melting-pot of religions, and the idea of a theios anêr (‘divine man’) is found in many forms.
