Biblical Criticism & History Forum - earlywritings.com

mlinssen wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 1:40 am The earliest Pliny document dates from the 15th CE

For many persons of every age, every rank, and also of both sexes are and will be endangered. For the contagion of this superstition has spread not only to the cities but also to the villages and farms.

The tragedy [Bacchae] presents a religious vision in which Dionysus appeals to, and indeed requires, the allegiance of all humanity, both Greeks and barbarians. As E.R. Dodds observes, "Euripides represents the Dionysiac cult as a sort of 'world religion', carried by missionaries (as no native Greek cult ever was) from one land to another."... Acts similarly represents Christianity as a religion with universal claims, one that must reach "to the end of the earth" (1:8).

Early observers of Christianity also noted its resemblances with Dionysiac religion. Pliny the Younger, for example, the earliest extant writer on Christianity, in his famous letter to Emperor Trajan in 112 CE (Ep. 10.96), describes Christian activities in Bithynia and requests the emperor’s advice on how to proceed. Robert Grant has argued that Pliny’s account is significantly shaped by the description of the Bacchanalia affair written by Livy, whom Pliny was known to have read and admired. As in Livy, the Christians meet at night, they sing hymns and take oaths, and they share a common meal (Ep. 10.96.7; Livy 39.8, 18). Moreover, contrary to accepted social and religious practice, as in Livy, participants include a mixture of class, gender, and age, and come from both the city and the country (Ep. 10.96.9; Livy 39.8-9). Jean-Marie Pailler builds on these observations, arguing that in addition to the verbal parallels adduced by Grant, there are wider similarities in the manner in which Pliny conducted his investigation. His request for direction in policy from the emperor is analogous to that of the consul’s relationship with the Senate in Livy; his question as to whether Christians should be punished because of the name itself or only for offences committed follows the distinction made by Livy in the prosecution of the Bacchanalia affair between those who were merely initiated and those who committed actual crimes (39.18.3-4). In addition, Pailler argues that Pliny’s description of the Christians’ folly appears “bien ‘bachique’”: “Others were of the same madness” (10.96.4). If the thesis of Grant and Pailler is correct, then Pliny’s Epistles 10.96 indicates that at least one early observer of Christians—the earliest extant example—interpreted their religious behaviors in close connection to Dionysiac mystery cults. In the following chapter, we will see that this perception continues with Celsus who, writing about six decades later, similarly compares Christianity with Dionysiac mystery cults and contrasts Jesus with Dionysus...

In both texts, the Senate outlawed new organizations of mysteries; those that continued to exist would require special permission and have limitations on the number of participants and on the mixing of genders... If Livy's report of the events surrounding the Bacchanalia affair is historically problematic, it nevertheless reveals much about the official attitudes toward Dionysiac religion in the Augustan period. First, Livy represents it as a foreign threat to Roman stability. Although it is clear that the rites of Bacchus were already well known in Rome prior to 186 BCE, Livy depicts them as having been introduced for the first time by a Greek of low status (39.8.3)." Dionysiac religion was, thus, fundamentally un-Roman; yet, it had attracted a multitude so large that "it now was nearly another nation" (39.13.14). Consequently, the cult was put down by the Senate as a political conspiracy (39.8.1-2), and resulted in the trials and executions of seven thousand (39.17-18). Indeed, the well-structured organization of the Bacchic cult that transgressed conventional boundaries of gender and class is precisely the aspect targeted in the senatus consultum. Second, from Livy's perspective, Bacchic religion is morally suspicious. Not only did it involve mixings of genders, classes, and ages, it consisted of nocturnal rites and of all kinds of debauchery, drunkenness, and even murder, thus threatening "to extinguish every distinction of modesty” (39.8.6). Livy's concern with the debauchery of Bacchic religion as symptomatic of the decline of Rome's morality reflects popular stereotypes. In reality, however, the Senate's actions did not arise from moral concerns but rather, as John North demonstrates, were aimed at the consolidation of its political power because the egalitarian structure of Bacchic groups "evades the normal basis of State control and supervision of religion at all levels."

Thus, in both Alexandria and Rome, legislation was enacted in order to exercise authority over the practice of Dionysiac religion. Underlying both decrees, so it would seem, is the anxiety that it was an inherently foreign and destabilizing threat. Its implicit promise of freedom in every aspect of human experience potentially conflicts with political authority and social hierarchy, a tension that will be evident at several places throughout this study.

Comparisons between Dionysus and Jesus are already implicit within the New Testament itself. In the miracle at Cana in John 2:1–11, for example, Jesus transforms water into wine, a feat typically associated with Dionysus. Indeed, John’s Jesus—perhaps, over against Dionysus—emphatically declares himself to be the “true vine.” The Acts of the Apostles also shares several elements with Dionysiac mythology, such as miraculous prison breaks complete with earthquakes and doors that open spontaneously (Acts 12 and 16), the use of the term (fighting against god) to characterize human opposition to a divinely sanctioned cult (Acts 5:39), and the phrase “to kick against the goads”, which was attributed by Euripides to Dionysus (Bacch. 794–95) but in Acts is spoken by Christ (26:14). These examples suggest that it was Christian authors, not their critics, who first began to develop comparisons between Dionysus and Jesus.

Most strikingly Bacchae 576–641 projects the mystic transition, from despair and fear to joy, caused by the reappearance of the deity, who is identified with light. The chorus, despairing at Pentheus’ imprisonment of their ‘guardian’ (whom we know to be Dionysos), the missionary of the new cult, sing to their god Dionysos, who invokes earthquake, thunder, and lightning. Pentheus’ house falls to the ground, and the appearance of Dionysos from within brings joy to the chorus, who had fallen to the ground, each one in ‘isolated desolation’. The god then describes the strange behaviour of Pentheus failing to bind him within the house. Details of this behaviour, and of the experience of the chorus, reappear in accounts of mystic initiation, notably in a fragment of Plutarch (178) in which he compares the experience of dying with the experience of mystic initiation: in both passages there are exhausting runnings around, uncompleted journeys through darkness, fear, trembling, sweat, and then light in the darkness. And they also appear in the description, in the Acts of the Apostles (16.25–9), of the miraculous liberation from prison at Philippi: the missionaries of the new religion, Paul and Silas, are imprisoned, singing to their god in the darkness of midnight when there is a sudden earthquake, and (as at Bacchae 447–8) the doors open and the chains fall away from the prisoners. The gaoler seizes a sword, is reassured by Paul that the prisoners are still there, asks for light, rushes inside, falls trembling at the feet of Paul and Silas, and is converted to Christianity. So too Pentheus seizes a sword, rushes inside into the darkness, and finally collapses, while Dionysos remains calm throughout and reassures Pentheus that he will not escape. But Pentheus – in attacking with his sword the light made by the god in the darkness – expresses his obdurate resistance to being initiated/converted (antithetically to the chorus, and to the gaoler at Philippi).

The Bacchae passage is also similar in several respects to the various accounts in Acts of the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. Here the persecutor of the new religion is converted (like the gaoler at Philippi, and in contrast to Pentheus). Divine intervention is sudden (Bacchae 576, Acts 9.3, 16.26). The group hears the voice of the god but does not see him (Bacchae 576–95, Acts 9.7). To the lightning in Bacchae corresponds the description of the light appearing to Saul in terms of lightning (9.3, 22.6). The Dionysiac chorus falls to the ground and Pentheus collapses, and Saul falls to the ground (as does also, at 26.14, the group that accompanies him). The command to rise up, marking the transition, is given by Dionysos to the chorus and by the Lord to Saul. The chorus and Pentheus identify Dionysos with light; Saul saw the Lord, and it has been inferred that ‘Saul’s companions saw only a formless glare where he himself saw in it the figure of Jesus’ (Haenchen).

These similarities are too numerous to be coincidental. How are we to explain them? One possibility is that they derive from knowledge of Bacchae. Bacchae was indeed well known in this period: for instance, we hear of it being recited in Corinth in the first century AD (Lucian The Ignorant Book Collector 19), and the literary knowledge of the author of the Acts is exemplified by his including a verse of the Hellenistic poet Aratus in Paul’s sermon on the Areopagus (17.28). Moreover, in one version of the conversion of Saul the Lord says to him ‘It is hard for you to kick against the goads’ (26.14). This expression occurs nowhere else in the New Testament, but it does occur in early Greek literature, notably when Dionysos says to his persecutor Pentheus ‘Do not kick against the goads, a mortal against a god’ (Bacchae 796). Pentheus and Saul are advised not to resist by the god whose new cult they are vainly persecuting.

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:48 amI think that Pliny's letter is a forgery based on the false testimony of Tertullian.

Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 10:59 pm

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:48 amI think that Pliny's letter is a forgery based on the false testimony of Tertullian.

While I'd agree with that I'd take it a bridge further: Tertullian is also a forgery based on the false testimony of Eusebius and/or the Post Nicene "Fathers" and/or the church industry of the middle ages.

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 11:22 pm

Leucius Charinus wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 10:59 pm

Sinouhe wrote: ↑Tue Jan 17, 2023 7:48 amI think that Pliny's letter is a forgery based on the false testimony of Tertullian.

While I'd agree with that I'd take it a bridge further: Tertullian is also a forgery based on the false testimony of Eusebius and/or the Post Nicene "Fathers" and/or the church industry of the middle ages.

All the work of Tertullian or only the specific passage where he says to have read the letter of Pliny to Trajan?