More on the novels containing some of the same themes as the texts of the NT. Journeys of suffering and the loss of status (becoming a slave or a lower form of being like a donkey in the case of Lucius) that lead to rebirth/resurrection and salvation, themes of "descent" and "ascent", Platonic and Stoic philosophical concepts, etc. are also found in the NT texts. The Novels reused themes from earlier myths and literature to create a new story. Same goes for the authors of NT texts.
Ideal Themes in the Greek and Roman Novel (Routledge, 2021), Jean Alvares:
Greco-Roman philosophy was both a series of doctrines and sometimes a countercultural lifestyle, one opposed to the pursuit of wealth, power, fame, as Longinus stresses (Subl. 7.1; Connor 4). D & C, Aithiopika, L & K and even the Metamorphoses are informed with philosophical elements that offer impressions of deeper issues being addressed while reflecting cultural realities, often in ironized form... Particularly popular were various forms of Platonism, especially the Phaedrus and the Symposium. Such philosophical idealism posits an ideal realm (e.g., the Beautiful and Good) that can be communed with, as love (Platonic and otherwise) and increasingly rarifed desire propel humans toward their original perfection, a philosophical justification for the emergence of the ideal. A philosophic debate over love’s nature was a standard topic of progymnasmata. Longus’ frame narrator promises to teach love’s nature, and his subsequent novel contains various theosophic elements concerning love. The center of Longus’ Plato-inspired Eros-philosophy is a saving vision of the beautiful, recalling the Symposium and Agathon’s praise of Eros (Repath, “Platonic Love”; Morgan, Daphnis 179 ff.)...
Platonically infected Stoicism is another influence. Thus, Xenophon of Ephesus stresses Stoic notions of the soul’s freedom to overcome temptations and tortures, especially regarding Habrocomes. Iambulus’ account of the Islands of the Sun refelcted Stoic theories on living the simple, ordered life according to nature (Möllendorff) and, with its description of ideal climate and worship of the Sun and Moon, also influenced Heliodorus’ conception of Meroe (Futre Pinheiro, “Utopia”). Neopythagorean, Platonic and Stoic-Cynic views of the ideal King as embodying a ruling, universal logos likewise earlier influenced Chariton (Ruiz Montero, “Caritón” 139–41). I show later how a greater valuation of women and erotic relationships was offered by Stoic and later Platonic philosophers, such as Musonius Rufus and particularly Plutarch in his Eroticus, Advice to the Bride and Groom and Consolation to His Wife...
Greco-Roman myths were always capable of literary revision. “Homer’s” epics altered older traditions, and tragedians (Euripides) and philosophers (Plato) fashioned variants on old myths or created new ones. Attic potters created a series of labors for Theseus to match those of Heracles. Such revisions proliferated in the Hellenistic and Roman eras, a process prompted by contacts with new cultures and, perhaps, a greater openness to forms of literary innovation (Bowersock, “Fiction” 1–28)... Especially important here is Vergil’s Aeneid, which revises the myths of Homer and the matter of Troy, Jason and Medea and even Plato’s Republic to create a grandly positive (although tragedy marred) history of Aeneas and the Roman state.
Our novels revise customary themes and narratives of Greco-Roman myth and literature to give happier and sometimes more world-significant outcomes to the protagonists’ erotic adventures. This extends the contrast between the darkly tragic Iliad and the Odyssey and its folktale-derived Odysseus, whose career suggests that for the resourceful and lucky, happy endings are possible. Heliodorus’ Charikleia and Theagenes replay the foundational Ethiopian myth of Andromeda and Perseus. The career of Theagenes adds a positive conclusion to tragic histories of his doomed ancestors, Achilles and Neoptolemus. The couple’s god-directed travels revise the wandering myths of Odysseus, Jason and Medea, and Aeneas and the Trojans...
To the extent our ideal novels can be imaginatively experienced as history, they offer a space for an idealized history that might have been and might yet be. Clearly, there was a spectrum of approaches to historiography, from a nearly modern respect for hard facts and reasoning from those facts to history as another form of (melo)dramatic entertainment. Further, note that Jacoby, when outlining the theoretical framework for his collection of historiographical fragments, argued that the collection should include “virtually all forms of nonfction prose writing, not just what we should narrowly call history, but also mythography, ethnography, chronography, biography, literary history and geography” (“Über” 80–123). For Veyne, much of Greek history-writing is not about recovering precise facts, but about creating a plausible story, and our erotic novels often have enough verisimilitude to achieve this task. Long ago Schwartz posited that the Greek novel arose from Hellenistic dramatic history (Fünf Vorträge). Consider how much solid historical information was known about Alexander the Great, yet within a few centuries Alexander’s mythos would gain adventures that surpass those of most Greek mythological figures. Consider, too, the Cyropaedia of Xenophon of Athens, which radically rewrites Cyrus’ life and career to provide an example of ideal government. As the Greek novelists rewrote mythic narratives to give happier outcomes to erotic love affairs, some novelists (e.g., Chariton, Heliodorus and the authors of the Metiochus or Ninus romances) created a type of alternative historical narrative which not only depicted a moment of ideal amatory achievement, but sometimes a moment of political and social superiority. I will show that Chariton’s Callirhoe is set in a known historical period with some historically real (or realistic) characters and situations, although major errors occur; such detail and Chariton’s occasional historiographical pose make Callirhoe the most fitting candidate as a positive alternate history illustrating potentials in the Greek past that could be activated in Chariton’s present. In contrast, the more comic and sardonic novels of Apuleius (whose Lucius idealizes Roman power) and Achilles Tatius seem set in the present or near past, and function not to give examples of utopian potential, but more to mock the insufficiencies of the current era...
Plato suggested that increasingly rarified forms of desire raise the lover upward to the ultimate Idea of Beauty, the telos of love. Plato, in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, makes Eros a particularly human entity, one who leads to the vision of the Idea of the Good. In the Phaedrus, desire for the vision of the beautiful helps the soul regain its lost wings, a moment when the lover looks upon the deepest truths and thus feels godlike; our amatory novels are filled with allusions to such mystic revelations...
I will first offer three consecutive chapters on the more ideal novels, Callirhoe, Daphnis and Chloe (D & C) and the Aithiopika, and then two chapters on the less ideal ironic-sardonic Leukippe and Kleitophon (L & K) and Metamorphoses. I frame my consideration of these ideal novels dialectically. Callirhoe is the most grounded in historiography, and its plot concerns major world-historical events centered on the marvelous child and near-avatar of the divine Callirhoe, while lacking explicit divine interventions...
Chariton’s Callirhoe is probably the earliest of the extant Greco-Roman novels, although by then the genre seems to have reached a certain maturity. Callirhoe resembles a historical novel, whose historical dimensions have been detailed. Chariton, as did later writers of the Second Sophistic, utilizes a wide expanse of Greek (perhaps even Latin) literary traditions, but with considerable freedom, artistry and even playfulness. Callirhoe’s reader may be uncertain about which interpretive paradigm to employ, as the novel alternates between the poles of hard history and mythical epic. Chaereas becomes a paradigmatic Greek literary protagonist by embodying a wide range of characters from Greek literature and myth, evoking the comic Chaereas as well as Alexander the Great, Nireus, Hippolytus, Hector, Odysseus, Protesilaus, Agamemnon, Theseus, Diomedes, Xenophon of Athens, Alcibiades, Achilles and other characters...
Callirhoe, as it narrates the protagonists’ comings of age, presents Frye’s elements of the descent into a lower world, the protagonists’ adventures there and the ascent from that world. The descent/underworld journey begins with Callirhoe’s false death and capture by pirates, while Chaereas’ begins with his leap into the sea while attempting suicide (3.5). Chaereas learns of Callirhoe’s abduction and goes off to recover her (his quest objective); symbolically, Callirhoe has been taken to deadlands, and Chaereas travels there, too, a motif reinforced by his false death, funeral and cenotaph. Both Chaereas and Callirhoe cross waters to enter a vast land, a virtual underworld, where their innocence, identity and life are challenged. Their loss of identity occurs in their changes of status, first into slaves... Symbolically, the protagonists’ travels to Babylon represent a journey into the lower depths of this underworld to confront its very lord, from whom Chaereas must rescue Callirhoe... During the funeral, the supposedly dead Callirhoe looks like sleeping Ariadne (1.6.2); later, Chaereas, discovering Callirhoe’s empty tomb, thought that a god had taken her, as Zeus took Semele or Dionysos took Ariadne (3.3.4–5); the similarity of “Dionysius” to “Dionysos” is uncanny (Scourfeld, “Chaereas” 301)...
As noted, Callirhoe appears as an apotheosis of a goddess, especially of Aphrodite, corresponding to the pattern of a “god among mortals.” Indeed, Callirhoe is more often compared to a goddess than heroines in the other ideal novels, while Chaereas lacks such comparisons (Temmerman 47). When Callirhoe frst appears in public, she is compared to a vision of Artemis that manifests itself to hunters in the wild, and many present immediately perform proskynēsis (1.1.16). Dionysius, when he frst encounters Callirhoe at Aphrodite’s shrine, assumes she is that goddess (2.3.6–7)... Accordingly, the announcement of Callirhoe’s death (1.5.1) is likened to the fall of a city, and she, like a notable political fgure, is given a state funeral attended by all segments of the population (1.6.3–4). When it is discovered that she is alive, all Syracuse joins the search for her, and upon her recovery, the city now restored, rejoices. As discussed earlier, elements of Burkert’s “Withdrawal-Devastation-Return of a God” and Sowa’s “Rape of the Goddess” patterns also appear, with many details similar to elements of the myths of Demeter and Kore and their mysteries, providing idealizing undertones of a profound myth about the conquest of baleful powers and the creation of a new form of life with substantial benefits to humanity... The protagonists’ sufferings and travels also connect to the “wanderings caused by angry god” pattern. Callirhoe sees herself as being persecuted by Aphrodite—the common mythic fate of mortals who receive (however unwillingly) honors normally received by gods... The quest archetype connects to patterns of initiation ritual, and Callirhoe delineates Chaereas’ transition from ephebe to full adulthood...
As noted, Hellenistic historians had played loose with historical facts and added material, such as scenes evoking dramas or elaborate ekphrases, aimed at entertainment—items which Chariton employs less than some Hellenistic writers... For Veyne, much of Greek history-writing is not about recovering precise facts, but creating a plausible story, and Chariton’s text has enough verisimilitude to achieve this task...
The central archetypes are the protagonist’s coming of age/quest/initiation, his descent, Ascent and Assumption and his becoming consort of the goddess. Lucius’ quest is a search for true knowledge, a home in the world and a type of rebirth and transition with many missteps, as Jason and Aeneas make (Harrison, “From” 55). Note that he is reborn in Isis at Corinth, his birthplace, but soon leaves for Rome. As a result of his incorrect valuation of magic, his inability to heed strong warnings its dangers, and his affair with the possibly duplicitous Fotis, Lucius suffers that loss of self-common to underworld journeys. This quest/journey pattern is deeply informed by the complex of myths (including Euripides’ play) concerning Hippolytus... Lucius is on a parodic search for wisdom. Greek literature and philosophy offered two models for wisdom—Odysseus and Socrates—whose evocations Apuleius’ narrative combines in connection with Vergil’s Aeneas and stories of Jason which Homer and Vergil drew upon. There are additional evocations of the legends of Theseus and Hippolytus. Odysseus represents experience and cunning, whereas Socrates denotes wisdom gained through hard, nontraditional thinking. The wandering, suffering Odysseus is a common model for the ideal novel’s traveling protagonists...
Lucius’ transformation into an ass (that animal hated by Isis [11.6]) recalls that profound loss of self-characteristic of underworld travels. He becomes the ultimate slave to whom anything can be done, with literally no ability to talk back. Odysseus’ disguise as a beggar made him the ideal spy to learn (often through dangerous direct experience) the decency of others. Lucius’ ass disguise will enable this and more. Odysseus’ time in the Deadlands allowed him to better grasp his old life by seeing his connection with fgures of his past as a prelude to the successful restoration of his identity and home. As noted, Lucius, having disappeared, is presumed dead. The question is, what will Lucius learn in this virtual Deadland as a prelude to the restoration of his human form and status?...
The Cupid and Psyche fable is a virtual figure for the whole novel, and Psyche’s adventures furnish a commentary on Lucius’ own career... The underworld descent is a hero’s capstone experience, often a prelude to divinization; our originally simple Psyche will become a god, as Hercules did and as Aeneas will (Aen. 6.129–31)... Psyche suffers in a virtual Hades, and likewise Lucius’ whole ass-life is a kind of false death. Psyche is saved by the intercession of a Cupid she can fnally see, and then is assumed into an Olympian heaven after a wedding with eschatological overtones. Lucius is saved by Isis encountered during an epiphany, then is assumed into the worldly heaven of Rome...
After this ceremony, Lucius, resting at the feet of goddess’ image, unable to leave, reveals his desperate brokenness (11.18). His time at the compound recalls those episodes in modern cults where a potential convert is surrounded and provided a new, positive community that reinforces his beliefs. His virtual underworld journey is not quite over yet; Psyche made a near fatal mistake while exiting the underworld, as did Orpheus. Lucius’ proper exit can only be accomplished by leaving this hell-world to enter the servitium of Isis... Finally, Isis indicates that Lucius is ready for initiation, a profoundly symbolic ritual of death and rebirth, the salvation story capstone where Lucius worships the gods face to face. Lucius undergoes another metamorphoses, with a new elaborate, upright stance as opposed to that of the prone quadruped (O’Sullivan 196–216). This ceremony replaces the marriage which often occurs at the end of the hero’s journey (Lateiner, “Marriage” 326). And, in his elaborate costume, called significantly the Olympic stole, Lucius appears an incarnation of Sol-Apollo, which recalls Psyche’s translation to Olympus itself.
"The Worship of Jesus and the Imperial Cult", Adela Yarbro Collins in The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism (Brill, 1999):
Hurtado refers to "Christ hymns" and cites as the major examples John 1:1-18, Colossians 1:15-20, and Philippians 2:6-11... The earliest of these three compositions is likely to be Philippians 2:6-11... This composition is certainly dependent upon Jewish tradition. But features of Greek, Hellenistic and Roman religion are also crucial for its interpretation... Thus we, as historical critics, should take seriously the likelihood that non-Jewish Hellenistic and Roman traditions, as well as Jewish traditions, shaped the religious experiences, ideas and writings of especially the Greek-speaking Jewish followers in the period immediately following his death. It is plausible to me that such groups adapted non-Jewish religious traditions deliberately and consciously as a way of formulating a culturally meaningful system of belief and life. Some may find it more likely that such people did not borrow ideas and forms consciously, but simply made use unreflectively of the ways of thinking and speaking that were widespread in the cultural situation at the time.
The plot or Gestalt of the hymn (or poem) in Philippians 2, taken as a whole, on the one hand, expresses a strikingly novel perspective in the context of the history of religions. On the other hand, certain features of both Jewish and non-Jewish tradition illuminate the meaning of this innovative composition in its cultural context. Scholars have debated whether it involves a "three-stage" or a "two-stage Christology". The plot and logic of the text clearly imply three stages of being. At first he is "in the form of God", then he "emptied himself, taking the form of a slave", and finally "God highly exalted him". Being "in the form of God" implies existence as a heavenly being who shares in the divine glory. The precise mode of existence or activity is left unspecified. In the cultural context of the first century C.E., this gap could be filled by imagining a principal angel; a hypostasis of God, such as the Logos or Wisdom; or, less likely, the noetic Adam, still possessing the glory of God as the image of God. The second stage, emptying himself and taking the form of a slave, implies the voluntary giving up of the divine glory, a change in being as well as in status. A heavenly being becomes human, a "Lord" becomes a "slave". This phase involves humbling himself and obedience unto death. The high exaltation of the third and final stage means a restoration of the mode of existence as a heavenly being. It is now explicit that this mode of being involves also the status of "Lord" over all creation (verses 9 and 10) as the chief agent of God...
The transition from the first to the second mode of being implies that a heavenly being is transformed into a human being. It is not a matter of the partial manifestation of a heavenly entity in a human being. The latter idea occurs in the Wisdom of Solomon in the statement that "in every generation [Wisdom] passes into holy souls and makes them friends of God and prophets". Enoch may be identified with the heavenly Son of Man in 1 Enoch 71, but the idea that the heavenly Son of Man became human as Enoch and then returned to heaven is not expressed. On the other hand, the motif according to which a god takes on human form is common in Greek literature. After Odysseus has returned to Ithaca disguised as a beggar, and when he is mistreated by Antinoos, one of the suitors of Penelope, another suitor rebukes his competitor saying:
"A poor show, that - hitting this famished tramp - bad business, if he happened to be a god. You know they go in foreign guise, the gods do, looking like strangers, turning up in towns and settlements to keep an eye on manners, good and bad."
This passage reflects the common belief that gods walked the earth in human form. More strikingly and concretely, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells how Demeter, because of her grief and anger over the abduction of her daughter, "went to the towns and rich fields of men, disfiguring herself for a long while". The queen among goddesses disguised herself as an old woman, a stranger, ex-changing her divine name, Demeter, for a human one, Dosos. When she reveals her identity to her human employer, she is once again transformed to the divine state of being... Apollodorus preserves a tradition that Zeus, wishing to test the behavior of the sons of Lycaon, came to them in the likeness of a poor man. These and related Greek traditions constitute an important precedent to the idea expressed in the first part of the hymn in Philippians 2, that a heavenly being is transformed into a human being and that this change involves the laying aside of glory and the taking on of a humble appearance and status. These traditions are closer to the passage in Philippians than the Jewish traditions in the ways that I have stated...
An analogy to the shift from the second to the third stage form of existence in the hymn may be found in Jewish tradition in Gen 5:24, which hints that Enoch was exalted from earth to heaven. This idea seems to be presupposed in the passage mentioned earlier, 1 Enoch 71, in which the patriarch is apparently identified with the heavenly Son of Man. Another analogy is the ascension of Elijah in a heavenly chariot by a whirlwind in 2 Kings 3:11. These traditions are similar to Philippians 2 in that a human being is exalted from the earth to heaven, but are different with respect to the fact that Enoch and Elijah did not die. According to Deuteronomy 34:5-6, Moses died and was buried in the valley in the land of Moab opposite Bethpeor, but no one knows the exact place of burial. According to Josephus, Moses did not actually die, but was taken up into heaven... Here also the motif of exaltation following upon death, the pattern expressed in Philippians 2, is lacking.
Such a motif is found, however, in Greek religion. Herakles was the best known of the Greek heroes, although he was not a typical hero at all. The popular tales about him were known everywhere, and thus his cult extended throughout the Greek world and beyond. He was the son of Zeus, but mortal. Suffering dreadful torment, he immolated himself on a pyre and then ascended through the flames to the gods. He was remembered as a benefactor of humanity and was frequently invoked as an omnipresent helper. He is also the prototype of the ruler who, by virtue of his divine legitimation acts for the benefit of humankind, is rewarded by being taken into the company of the gods after his death. He is also the model for the ordinary person who can hope for the life among the gods as a reward for an upright life of drudgery. The complex of traditions about Herakles thus provide a striking analogy to the second and third stages of the Philippian poem: a human being suffers for the good of humankind and is, therefore, given a divine nature and status...
Thus the motif of the worship of Christ in the poem of Philippians 2 has literary parallels in Jewish literature of the second Temple period, but there is very little evidence that there was actual, communal worship of a Son of Man figure based on Daniel 7 or the Similitudes of Enoch. The strongest parallels to the worship of an exalted human being after death are found once again in Greek and Roman religion.
"The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’s Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi", Michael Cover in Harvard Theological Review (2018):
Scholarship on Phil 2:6–11 has long wrestled with the question of “interpretive staging.” While acknowledging that Jewish sapiential and apocalyptic literature as well as Roman apotheosis narratives provide important matrices for the hymn, the following study pinpoints a third backdrop against which Paul’s dramatic christology would have been heard in Philippi: Euripidean tragedy. Echoes of Dionysus’s opening monologue from Euripides’s Bacchae in the carmen Christi suggest that Roman hearers of Paul’s letter likely understood Christ’s kenotic metamorphosis as a species of Dionysian revelation. This interpretive recognition accomplishes a new integration of the hymn’s Jewish and imperial-cultic transcripts. Jesus’s Bacchic portraiture supports a theology of Christ’s pre-existence, while simultaneously establishing him as a Dionysian antithesis to the imperial Apollonian kyrios Caesar... Dionysus's prologue in the beginning of Euripides's Bacchae serves as a critical intertext, which would have been heard by some of Philippians’ recipients:
"I have come to this Theban land, a child of Zeus, Dionysus, whom Cadmus's korē brought forth once, Semele, prodded by firebearing lightning. My form I've altered, from God to mortal, my parousia here by the streams of Dirce and Ismenus's waters."
Although gods often introduce Euripides's plays, Dionysus's direct address to the audience at the outset of the Bacchae is unique. As E. R. Dodds remarks, unlike Euripides's “other prologizing gods,” Dionysus “will not vanish... but will mingle unrecognized, in human form, with the actors in the human drama.” None of these other gods, moreover, explicitly takes on human form and risks suffering.
Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014), M. David Litwa:
In the Bacchae, Dionysus exercised his power from an initial chosen position of weakness and inferiority. He appeared as an effeminate Lydian teenager and allowed himself to be chained and mocked (Eur., Bacc. 434-518). Just so, Jesus allowed himself to be bound and ridiculed, while giving ample demonstration of his power (e.g., by the earthquake, eclipse, and the rending of the temple veil coincident with his death; Matt. 27:45-56, par.). By a simple self-identification, according to the Gospel of John, Jesus was able to knock down all those who came to arrest him (18:6)... Origen immediately turns to the beneficial aspect of Jesus’ death. By defeating the devil, Jesus’ demise proved “beneficial to all”(2.23). Jesus’ silent passivity during the trial, for Origen, does not disprove his deity. Rather, Jesus is an example of one who died “willingly for religion” and—like Dionysus in the Bacchae—showed how to “despise people” who laugh and mock at piety.