The idea of salvation and living forever in bliss evolved over time.
I'm reading The HarperCollins Study Bible, Introduction, pages liii-lv, titled The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament written by David E Aune. I find myself drawn to a rabbit hole here and am going to dive in and try to learn a little. I learned a bunch from responses to my last post and thought I'd try to crowd source a jump start to my research. I don't know what I don't know.The thought above (the title) occurred to me and made me want to go down this rabbit hole:
Aune tells us:
Throughout the first century CE, Greek religion and culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean... Three main types of voluntary Greek private associations existed, each of which had a greater or lesser cultic component: professional corporations or guilds..., funerary societies..., and religious or cult societies, centering on the worship of a deity. This last category includes "mystery religions," a general term for a variety of ancient private cults that shared several features.
I know ancient Greeks and Romans didn't believe in a blissful afterlife but it wasn't until I read that that I realized the idea of salvation and heaven as the carrot, and hell as the stick evolved over time. A little more because I am having a hard time finding this text to link:
The term "mystery" is related to a Greek term meaning "initiate" and "mystery" itself means "ritual of initiation," referring to the secret initiation rites at the center of such cults.
...the period of greatest popularity appears to have been the first through the third centuries CE.
...Initiates who experienced the central mystery ritual became convinced that they would enjoy soteria ("Salvation"), health and prosperity in this life as well as a blissful afterlife.
So this is all happening with great popularity in the same place and time of Jesus and later that century, Paul. These cults are popular as Christianity is formed into a religion. Little is known about details on the cults, because, well, they were secret. Seems like early Christianity may have united these cults by adopting some of their fundamentals? I've found this so far but I'm just diving in and it occurred to me that one of you might light a path for me. Anybody been down this road already?
Totally agree. I appreciate Ehrman, both from a personal level and for his contributions. He's been really helpful to me in my late deconstruction and has been an inspiration for me to dig deeper and learn more.
The followers of Dionysos derived many of their eschatological beliefs and ritual prescriptions from Orphic literature, a corpus of theogonic poems and hymns. The mythical Thracian poet Orpheus, the archetypical musician, theologian, and mystagogue, was credited with the introduction of the mysteries into the Greek world. According to myth, Orpheus’ reclusion that followed his unsuccessful attempt to bring back his wife Eurydice from the Underworld or, alternatively, his invention of homosexuality brought about the tragic, violent death he suffered at the hands of Thracian women.
It's getting juicy. (I know I'm a nerd).
Bacchic-Orphic beliefs and practices: itinerant religion specialists and purveyors of secret knowledge, called orpheotelestai, performed the teletai, private rites for the remission of sins. For the Orphics, Dionysos was a savior god with redeeming qualities.
Sounding familiar.
From the Titans’ ashes the human race was born, burdened by the horrific inheritance of an “original sin.”
Then from the Kybele, cult:
Known among the Greeks as Kybele, or Great Mother of the Gods...Ritual purity was a prerequisite of initiation into the ecstatic cult of the Mother. Her priests, the Korybantes, and followers worshipped her with wild, loud music produced by cymbals (13.225.5a,b) and frenzied dancing, which, like the revels in honor of Dionysos, carried the participants despite and beyond themselves.
Isis was another Eastern goddess whose cult spread all over the Mediterranean.
I recognize dogma and ritual I grew up with mixed in here.
Little known fact - by Jesus's day Atrapanus of Alexandria had claimed in his ~2nd century BCE book Concerning the Jews that it was actually Moses who taught Orpheus the mysteries.
Manetho, the Egyptian historian, claimed that Moses had been a priest of Osiris (the equivalent of Dionysus).
There's a few other fun oddities too.
For example, the Eleusinian Mysteries were credited to Eumolpus ("good singer") a fellow from North Africa who was put into the water as a baby and raised by a different family until leaving later on to Thrace where he became king and then conquering Athens.
You have the story of Zalmoxis, an ex-slave who learned the gift of prophecy and predicting celestial events in Egypt before coming to Thrace where he became advisor to the king and told people of the promise of an afterlife by way of a meal.
And some of the apocryphal stories of Moses have him too coming to a foreign city where he becomes advisor to the king before eventually becoming king himself, such as in Josephus or medieval Book of Jashar.
(There's quite a bit more to this, particularly in light of recent discoveries in the archeology of the early Iron Age Levant. Too long for a comment though.)
But it wouldn't have been that strange for someone familiar with the respected scholarship of the 1st century CE in seeking a better understanding of Judaism to look to Orphism or the mysteries. Especially given Hecataeus of Adbera's claim that the records of the Jews had recently been altered under the Persian and Macedonian conquests.
This might not have gone over well with more orthodox crowds at the time, but hybrid thinking of Judaism considering Greek concepts was pretty popular already. And vice versa - Enochian literature of Enoch's tour of the heavens likely informed Virgil.
All that said, there's a ton of misinformation about the mystery cults and I'd recommend being wary of most discussions of what they were or weren't. The truth is we really don't know and most sources are later Christian authors who tended to see Christian archetypes in everything else whether they had actually existed there or not.
Thank you. Good information and I grabbed that book and will read it. I had a feeling kromem@lemmy.world would show up holding the lantern 😊
If Moses was a priest of Osiris, then was the concept of salvation baked into Judaism of the time? I'm specifically interested in the concept of "being saved" through initiation and how it evolved into the rituals of modern Christianity.
Moses is believed by historians (including biblical scholars) to have never existed. There was no Moses. There was no Abraham. Most of those characters were fictional, and those that were not were fictionalized. There was no great nation of Israel. There were some small nations that occasionally were united under someone and then fell apart after he died, and they were conquered and occupied several times. They were polytheistic and then henotheistic, with Ashera worship occurring into 2CE as I recall.
I’m sorry - I just have a pet peeve against people who espouse that a character of legend actually existed because his legends (and it’s usually a he) sound a bit like the legends around another legendary character.