Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

Classifying the Duat: Tracing the Conceptualization of the Afterlife between Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts (De Gruyter, 2018), Silvia Zago: The goddess Nut, personifying the celestial vault as early as the Pyramid Texts (Allen 1989: 16), was believed to conceive the sun each night and to give birth...

The Isis-Book (Metamorphoses, Book XI) (Brill, 1975), J. Gwyn Griffiths: While the palm crown is here solar in form, it probably derives from the Osirian ‘crown of justification or victory' ... Drexler, (‘Isis’, 464), cites gems on which the Osiris mummy bears a radiate crown... There are clearly si...

The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries (Routledge, 1990), Manfred Claus: The killing of the bull has nothing to do with mere slaughter or destruction, rather with transfiguration and transformation . The transformation is often depicted, namely in the cases in which cornears or a clust...

Reading Dionysus: Euripides' Bacchae and the Cultural Contestations of Greeks, Jews, Romans, and Christians (Mohr Siebeck, 2015), Courtney Friesen: A central concern in the Dionysiac mysteries was one's condition in the afterlife, secured through a ritualized death in initiation. This view of the my...

Continuing: Becoming Divine: An Introduction to Deification in Western Culture (Wipf and Stock Publishers,2013), M. David Litwa: In the ancient world, typically only kings and pharaohs claimed the divine prerogatives of immortality and ruling power. Yet in the mysteries of Dionysus - the topic of ch...

This is a book by Donghyun Jeong that came out recently on initiation rituals in Paul and the mystery cults. It's pretty good overall but there are a few things I disagree with and want to comment on. The following is taken from the conclusion at the end of the book. I have bolded the parts I will b...

"Death and Initiation in the Funerary Religion of Ancient Egypt", Jan Assmann in Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt (Yale Egyptological Studies 3, 1989): The idea of interpreting the ritual and conceptual structure of the funerary religion of Ancient Egypt in the light of the anthrop...

In initiation rituals and "mystery stories" (mystery cult myths) you find themes of darkness to light and being blind or not being able to see clearly, to being able to see the light. This obviously has a spiritual meaning to it. This metaphor is used a lot in the Gospel of John. The Gospe...

The idea that both Hermeticism and Christianity "contain actual Egyptian concepts" and therefore "are coming out of similar contexts" doesn't say much, actually. Or rather, it requires your own elaboration, not reams of excerpts inchoate to your point. The issue I've raised is p...

It's "childish" and borderline delusional to think that Christianity wasn't influenced by its surroundings. That's not how things work in the real world. You may as well try to convince me the earth is flat. Who is arguing that Xianity wasn't "influenced by its surroundings"? Th...