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?
That's a great question, but it kind of needs to be set against the context of "when did Moses show up in Judaism." Because he may have been a very late addition.
There's a major religious reform described in the Bible under Josiah, where he literally kills and performed human sacrifice of the old priests, hides away all the artifacts of the Moses time like the Ark and anointing oil, gets rid of Yahweh's wife, destroys the golden calves in Bethel and Dan which Jeroboam set up, discovered a new book of laws, and institutes the Passover story.
You might notice that there's a parallelism between Josiah's reform in getting rid of old laws and bringing new laws while destroying golden calves and Moses breaking the old commandments and going to get new ones in response to the people worshipping a golden calf.
So we can reasonably regard at least some of the Moses stuff in the Bible as post dating Josiah given that it effectively mythologized his alleged reforms.
But the problem is, Josiah's reforms appear to at least be in part anachronistic.
In letters over a century after Josiah, the Jewish community in Elephantine in Egypt are writing back and forth to Jerusalem discussing the upcoming Passover period, and there's zero mention of any Moses or Passover story. There isn't even any evidence in the letters that the two separate festivals of the earlier Canaanite festival of unleavened bread and the Pesach lamb sacrifice have combined at this point.
The version of the Old Testament we have today is actually from quite late, maybe more like the 3rd century BCE. And as mentioned, there was a contemporary claim around that the tests had recently been altered.
And between the Greek test from around then and the surviving Hebrew text from later on, we can see that things like a duplicated story about Jeroboam going to Egypt and marrying the sister-in-law of the Pharoh, mirroring the event two chapters before where the king of Edom did the same, disappears by the time of the latter. So something funky is certainly going on.
But outside of being able to say that parts of the Moses narrative are actively being changed much later on then one might think, it's almost impossible to say how early on Moses is an integral part of Yahweh worship, Judah or the Israelites, etc.
We're effectively stuck with layers and layers of propaganda written by the victors, and while there may be hints of what lay earlier on underneath the layers, exactly when and who and what those layers represented is broadly a mystery.
All that said, I'm personally of the opinion that a historical Exodus as described by Greek and Egyptian sources with a multitude of different peoples occurred at the end of the 19th dynasty with the Anatolian/Aegean sea peoples and Libya, that a Mose/Mopsus was a central figure to those events, and that sometime following the forced relocation of those peoples into the Southern Levant by Ramses III that there was syncretism with the Israelites/Judah with several rounds of reworking until the version we are left with today. But that effectively the Biblical narrative is a distant echo of the underlying story.
The populist features in the events of the sea peoples retaking their countries of origin and the descriptions of changes during the foreign conquest of Egypt at the end of the 19th dynasty would very loosely suggest that a paradigm change of salvation from being extremely classist in Egypt (you needed to spend massive resources on your tomb to try to impress your way into the afterlife) to something like the universalism Zalmoxis was bringing to a Thrace ("everyone sitting here at dinner won't actually die") might be plausible. But the most primary evidence of that time reflects a rejection of religious structures, with the conquers allegedly "making the gods like men" in keeping with the alleged Phonecian creation story of that period where the pantheon was actually described as just humans who had invented stuff culturally deified after death. So the salvation stuff could have simply been a later return to theology after a period of what was effectively atheism?
In Herodotus 2.47-48 you can actually see a bit of similarity between festivals of Osiris/Isis and the later Passover festival. He described a sacrifice of a pig near the entryway of the home on a full moon. Replace the pig with a lamb and you have something remarkably similar to the Passover story's sacrifice for the 10th plague.
Did Judaism have any earlier influence from Osiris mythology? Maybe? But there's speculation that Osiris came to Egypt from Libyan beliefs, and Libya is very much involved in the events at the end of the 19th dynasty, so it could instead be that Manetho saw the Greek claims of Orphic mythos as having been pulling from Osiris rather than as syncretism of a shared source between both Egypt and the later Thracian beliefs. Or something else entirely.
And part of the problem is that whatever early Judaism was, at least half the equation has been torn out with the reforms removing the goddess worship. Yahweh is a minor local god that's consort to major goddesses. Early parts of the Bible have a ton of indicators of empowered women with authority. But that's all stripped out. And the mystery traditions are all very goddess focused. So it's entirely possible there was greater similarity in the parts that were removed.
For example, Herodotus credited a women only multi-day festival that was celebrated all over the Mediterranean as originating with the daughters of Danaus fleeing Egypt. In Judges 11, you can see the mention at the end of a multi-day women only festival in Judaism, explained with what's effectively the same story as Idomenus's return home to Crete from the Trojan War sacrificing his kid based on sacrificing the first thing he sees. But this festival disappears from practice and history other than this mention in Judges.
Much like how Judges 18 preserves a tradition of Moses's descendent as priest of Dan, contrary to the claims elsewhere the priest should be from Aaron's line. Which again disappears from anything in Judaism, but is extremely curious if Yigael Yadin's theory the Denyen sea people in Adana were the lost tribe of Dan given that there's two separate bilingual inscriptions by the Denyen in the 8th century BCE claiming their rulers belong to a "House of Mopsus."
It's a bit like reconstructing what a shredded document soaked in water until it's a giant ball of mush might have once said.
TL;DR: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm starting to really understand that the more I read. Between secrecy of practice, what's been destroyed or hidden or removed on purpose, and the purposeful purging of information by the victors, there isn't much left to show. Hopefully archaeology will continue to give us new pieces to the puzzle.
For the scope of this community, I find that knowledge on this and other Biblical topics help me see Christianity for what it is; just another belief of people, created solely by people. I was heavily indoctrinated as a child and my deconstruction contained many struggles and moments of weakness when I questioned my questioning relentlessly. All of the indoctrinated guilt is built on a foundation of Biblical justification. Scholarly knowledge of the Bible, the time period in which it was written, and the people that wrote it has been the only effective medicine for me, long term, to loosen the hold those childhood lessons held over me.
Specifically to the topic of this post; If the concept of salvation predates Jesus by centuries and the Biblical "path to salvation" is just a new iteration of the soteria from Greek initiation rituals, how can any of it (Christianity or the Bible) be true? There's no more weight to salvation and by extension, no heaven or hell. Nothing worth fearing. Nothing worth believing.
Archeology does offer some very promising new pieces. Though part of the problem is that those pieces tend not to fit very well into what the majority of people studying the field professionally want to see, so there's undue focus on things they think they can tie into the narrative as it stands and far less on the things that offer a quite different narrative entirely. But given enough time, I think it will sort itself out.
As for the concept of salvation predating Jesus, arguably the even more interesting question is just what picture of salvation Jesus was actually pitching. There's a common assumption that Jesus as depicted by the canonical texts is a faithful approximation of the historical figure's theology, but while this is often taken for granted, it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the surviving tradition passing the filter of Jewish persecution and then later Roman acceptance is the unadulterated representation of the guy who allegedly upset both factions enough he was killed for it.
So most consideration of Christian concepts has this inherent anchoring bias around all the details of modern Christianity that are inescapable in the western world.
But we're dealing with a tradition where literally the earliest texts are letters from a guy who is known to have been persecuting followers of Jesus writing to communities outside the areas he would have had authority to persecute, swearing he's not lying about having joined the movement while simultaneously telling people not to pay attention to any other versions of Jesus or gospels than the one he offers them and to give him money.
He advocates a tradition based on the authority of Peter, the guy whose own tradition constantly has him missing the point of teachings or arguing with Jesus, and who is unanimously agreed in texts to have been denying Jesus 3 times concurrent to the ~3 different trials to condemn Jesus. In some Peter even goes back into the guarded area where one of the trials is taking place.
If this wasn't a global active religious tradition, but instead a murder mystery, might we not want to be a bit skeptical of the guy seen fighting with him who was publicly denying him around the time of his trial and arrest or the guy persecuting his followers who suddenly joins them claiming he couldn't see and then miraculously could after communicating directly with their dead leader? But no, it's all fine because a rooster crowed.
When you look beyond cannon, there's wildly different versions of a lot of the concepts in canonical Christianity.
For example - don't you think it's weird that an "only child" of God would constantly be referring to those around him as his brothers and sisters? That language seems inherently at odds with the canonical exclusivity of Jesus's literal divine parentage, but seems much more in line with concepts like those found in the Gospel of Thomas, such as:
Or
This notion of recognition of one's own divine parentage in that work then fits into its depiction of salvation as a birthright:
Further played out in parable form:
This picture of salvation as an inheritance for each individual effectively removed the priestly business of getting people to hand the authority over their salvation over to you in order to lend it back out to them at interest. A massive business at the time.
If you were Jewish and you committed sin, you were supposed to go to the temple, buy animals to sacrifice, and bring them to the priests to eat and burn. As well as regularly pay the temple to keep up these functions.
Canonically, Jesus kicked out the people selling these animals from the temple, but you might notice that it's only in Mark that he tells people to stop carrying offerings through the temple when doing so. That part goes missing in the ones copying off it, I suspect because of the timeline issue of prohibition of sacrifice before he's allegedly taken the symbolic place of sacrifices.
But the admonishments against any kind of sin sacrifice seem again more in line with extra-canonical Jesus's stance on sin, such as:
The attitude therein, of "Don't lie, and don't do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before the truth" seems more akin to the attitudes in Corinth pre-Paul of "everything is permissible for me" even if Paul was correct that not everything is beneficial.
The canonical Jesus has an emphasis on the body such that there's a Eucharist to become one with him by drinking his blood and eating his body. In Thomas there's a radically different approach where it is by drinking in his words and ideas that one becomes like him and sees as he did.
But this version of Jesus didn't magically find its way on top of the table at Nicaea, and instead ended up buried in a jar for centuries because simply possessing it was a death sentence, and the version of it that was preserved is distanced enough from a historical figure that it's again like reconstructing wet shredding.
So while it's likely that a historical Jesus existed, what he was actually pitching regarding salvation is largely a mystery. But the canonical depiction of it has serious issues when considered without anchoring bias, and there was a wide array of alternatives that differed quite significantly from the canonical claims.
All that said, I agree that diving into a secular analysis of the Bible is pretty effective at reducing the hold of indoctrination. Like people indoctrinated with absolute terror over the influence of Satan might be pretty surprised to find that the whole concept probably draws from fanfiction following a lazy adaptation of a polytheistic story in the opening of Job where a goddess's name was replaced with the generic term 'adversary' (Satan) in petitioning the head god to kill the child of the protagonist (as the goddess Anat petitions El in the earlier Canaanite A Tale of Aqhat). The Israelites were polytheistic for centuries until later monotheistic reform, so a lazy adaptation of Job to monotheism may have left a supernatural 'adversary,' and suddenly people became obsessed with the idea to the point of eventually burning their neighbors alive trying to hunt it out.
Satan and Hell terrified me completely as a child. I was able to shake it but can still feel the scars. Too bad this is buried. I think further discussion on hell would be fun for me and beneficial for others here. Still willing to learn more about it all. I am pretty far past being afraid of the fictional version I was raised with but the concept of eternal torture hung me up for a long time during deconstruction (see my first post in this community for my overall view, boiled down).
I'm reading Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient world, on your suggestion. This seems like solid gold to answering my questions I posted. I appreciate the direction. I see there is a bunch to cover but this is doing a great job of getting me started.