Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

The quotation from Adela Yarbro Collins argues that the pouring of aromatic oil on Jesus, and the women going to the tomb on the Sunday to anoint the body are not historical. What is interesting is that either could be historical but it is unlikely both can be, not that I am arguing that either is ...

Anybody who's familiar with the mystery cult context of Christianity can see that the "mourning women" who anoint him throughout the Gospels and witness his death, burial, and resurrection are in the role of the mourning women/goddesses of the mystery cult stories and rituals. It's always ...

You quoted from Nicola Denzey Lewis quoting Ulansey The theme of the ‘setting right’ of the cosmos through the power of a celestial Redeemer has parallels in other religious movements of the second century ce, and thus appears to have been a more-or-less standard way of conceptualizing divine power...

There is nothing explicit to indicate that Lucius has died and been raised in emulation of Osiris. One could argue that the explicit solar imagery, (Lucius clearly is in some sense identified with the sun), implies that Lucius is identified with Osiris, but I am not convinced. Right, the text doesn...

The problem with this is that it ought IMO to be a comparison between Pauline baptism and what we solidly know about the Late Hellenistic mysteries of Isis Dionysus etc. However it seems to cover a lot of material some of which (e.g. Ulansey on Mithras) is extremely speculative and some of which (e...

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...