In winter vegetable life was dead while Demeter, the giver of life, grieved for the loss of her daughter. by Bart D. Ehrman. This makes it sound as if they were unified, sharing common beliefs that . The Eleusinian myth told of these fundamental human experiences as well as of the life of nature., 29. Mithraism, a sect of Zoroastrianism characterized by the worship of Mithra as the defender of the truth, was a monotheistic mystery religion prevalent in the Roman empire before the acceptance of Christianity in the fourth century. Perhaps the most notable difference between Christianity and the mystery religions is Christianity's attitude towards proselytism. March 24th was the Day of Blood, whereon the High Priest, who himself impersonated Attis, drew blood from his arm and offered it up in place of the blood of a human sacrifice, thus, as it were, sacrificing himself, a fact which recalls to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: Christ being come an High Priest neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood obtained eternal redemption for us. That night the priests went to the tomb and found it illuminated from within, and it was then discovered to be empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicings, a sacramental meal of some kind being taken, and initiates being baptised with blood, whereby their sins were washed away and they were said to be born again., 14. At the same time, the . These are stated with sufficient elaboration in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, According to the story, Persephone, was stolen by Pluto and carried off to the underworld to be his bride. The mother, frenzied with grief, rushed about the earth for nine days., 26. Willoughby quoted from Apollonius Argonautica 1.1098 ff. The Mystery-Religions and Christianity. Now when Christianity triumphed we find that these same paintings and figures became those of the Madonna and child with little or no difference.\[Footnote:] Ibid, p. 123\ In fact archaeologists are often left in confusion in attempting to distinguish the one from the other.22, It is also interesting to note that in the second century a story began to spread stating that Mary had been miraculously carried to Heaven by Jesus and His angels.\[Footnote:] The spreading of this story has been attributed to Melito, Bishop of Sardis.\ In the sixth century a festival came to be celebrated around this event known as the festival of Assumption, and it is now one of the greatest feasts of Roman Catholicism. 1. Regardless, one consequence of interpreting Christianity as an embellished mystery religion is the conclusion that Christian faith per se is the invention of men, not a revelation from God. But although baptism did not originate with the Christians, still it was not copied from the pagans. Beliefs of the religion which are public knowledge but cannot be easily explained by normal rational or scientific means. The doctrine of the soul taught in Gnostic communities was almost identical to that taught in the mysteries: the soul emanated from the Father, fell into the body, and had to return to its former home. 115116: Now one of the earliest seats of Christianity was Antioch; but in that city there was celebrated each year the death and resurrection of the god Tammuz or Adonis, This faith had always exerted its influence on Jewish thought, and, indeed, the prophet Ezekiel had found it necessary to scold the women of Jerusalem for weeping for the dead Tammuz at the very gate of the Temple; while, in the end, the place at Bethlehem selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus (for want to [sic] any knowledge as to where the event had really occurred) was none other than an early shrine of this pagan god, as St. Jerome was horrified to discovera fact which shows that Tammuz or Adonis ultimately became confused in mens minds with Jesus Christ., 16. In this myth, Persephone is depicted playing in the meadows of Mysia in Asia with the daughters of Oceanus and Tithys. The words of St. Paul, They drank of that spiritual rock and that rock was Christ also seem to be {a} direct borrow from the Mithraic scriptures.35, The Hebrew Sabbath having been abolished by Christians, the Church made a sacred day of Sunday, partly because it was the day of resurrection. That is, with this study you have made, we see the philosophy both of Religion and History. cit., p. 125.\23, The Influence Of The Greater Mysteries At Eleusis. 39. Grant Showerman, introduction to Franz Cumont, Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism (Chicago: Open House Publishing Company, 1911), pp. In theology the differences between early Christians, Gnostics (membersoften Christianof dualistic sects of the 2nd century ad), and pagan Hermetists were slight. It is this fact that immediately brings to mind the words in the Epistle to the Hebrews: But Christ being come an High Priest neither by the blood of goats and calves, but by his own blood obtained eternal redemption for us.\[Footnote:] Heb. Christianity emerged and grew at a time when mystery religions were popular throughout the Roman Empire. it has been suggested that Christianity had its origin in a mystery of initiates. The three actors of the Eleusinian tragedy, enacted the mystery of human life and death. During the centuries leading up to the birth of Christianity, the Pagan Mystery religion, often known simply as the 'Mysteries', had spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean.Many of the greatest figures of the Pagan world were initiated into these Mysteries, and regarded them as the very source of civilisation. It is not so much that Christianity was influenced by the Mystery Cults, or borrowed from them, but that in the long process of history this religion developed. Hardcover, 335 pages. I do not deny that there are some similarities. It should also be noted that early Christianity was an exclusivistic religion while the mystery cults were not. The divine personage in whom this cult centered was the Magna Mater Deum who was conceived as the source of all life as well as the personification of all the powers of nature.\[Footnote:] Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114.\7 She was the Great Mother not only of all the gods, but of all men as well.8 The winds, the sea, the earth, and the snowy seat of Olympus are hers, and when from her mountains she ascends into the great heavens, the son of Cronus himself gives way before her, and in like manner do also the other immortal blest honor the dread goddess.\[Footnote:] Quoted in Willoughbys, Pagan Regeneration, p. 115.9\. The pagan cults and rites, for example, those of Eleusis, Attis, Osiris, Cybele, and Mithra (see mystery religions, greco-oriental). In the Christian congregations of the first two centuries, the variety of rites and creeds was almost as great as in the mystery communities; few of the early Christian congregations could have been called orthodox according to later standards. 213214 in this volume. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 116: This god was believed to have suffered a cruel death, to have descended into Hell or Hades, to have risen again, and to have ascended into Heaven; and at his festival, as held in various lands, his death was bewailed, an effigy of his dead body was prepared for burial by being washed with water and anointed, and, on the next day, his resurrection was commemorated with great rejoicing, the very words The Lord is risen probably being used. Les myst res pa ens et le myst re chr tiens. Many views, while passing out of paganism into Christianity were given a more profound and spiritual meaning by Christians, yet we must be indebted to the source. The central theme of the myth was the triumph of Attis over death, and the participant in the rites of the cult undoubtedly believed that his attachment to the victorious deity would insure a similar triumph in his life. Mystery religions, as a rule, can be traced back to tribal origins, Christianity to a historical person. The earlier Greek mystery religions were state religions in the sense that they attained the status of a public or civil cult and served a national or public function. : Putnam, 1928), p. 121: Attis was the Good Shepherd, the son of Cybele, the Great Mother, or, alternatively, of the Virgin Nana, who conceived him without union with mortal man, as in the story of the Virgin Mary., 12. While Herodotus fails to give a date for this festival, Plutarch says that it lasted four days, giving the date as the seventeenth day of the Egyptian month Hathor, which, according to the Alexandrian claendar used by him, corresponded to November 13th.\[Footnote:] Frazer, op. In fact the idea did not appear in the church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. During her short stay at the temple of Eleusis, the whole earth grew barren. The present study represents an attempt to provide a survey of the influence of the mystery religions on Christianity. Various writers gave different Versions of the Cybele-Attis myth. It is well-nigh impossible to grasp Christianity through and through without knowledge of these cults.5 It must be remembered, as implied above, that Christianity was not a sudden and miraculous transformation, springing, forth full grown as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus, but it is a composite of slow and laborious growth. We can understand the Christianity of the fifth century with its greatness and weaknesses, its spiritual exaltation and its puerile superstitions, if we know the moral antecedents of the world in which it developed.. Mystery religions were seen as more vibrant than the more stale state religions. These scholars made two errors here. Please contact Intellectual Properties Management (IPM), the exclusive licensor of the Estate of Martin Luther King, Jr., Inc. atlicensing@i-p-m.comor 404 526-8968. (4) The rebirth of converts was a fundamental idea in the two cults. Greek life was characterized by such things as democratic institutions, seafaring, gymnasium and athletic games, theatre, and philosophy. In the former capacity she was identified with the great mother-goddess, Demeter, whose mourning for Persephone was the main feature in the Eleusinian mysteries. This triumph may be attributed in part to the fact that Christianity took from its opponents their own weapons, and used them: the better elements of the mystery religions were transferred to the new religion. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, p. 137: Mithra was born from a rock, as shown in Mithraic sculptures, being sometimes termed the god out of the rock, and his worship was always conducted in a cave; and the general belief in the early Church that Jesus was born in a cave is a direct instance of the taking over of Mithraic ideas. After telling a fictitious tale of her escape from pirates, she won the sympathy of the girls who took her home and at her own request was given a job to nurse their infant brother, Demophon. Christianity triumphed over these mystery religions after long conflict. The hypothesis of a mutual dependence has been proposed by scholarsespecially a dependence of Christianity upon the mysteriesbut such theories have been discarded. There are also great differences between Christianity and the mysteries. It is an interpretation of human history that breeds Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable.6. The mystery religions and Christianity had many similar featurese.g., a time of preparation before initiation and periods of fasting; baptism and banquets; vigils and early-morning ceremonies; pilgrimages and new names for the initiates. One must avoid any suggestion that there was one common mystery religion. Osiris and Isis, so the legend runs, were at one and the same time, brother and sister, husband and wife; but Osiris was murdered, his coffined body being thrown into the Nile, and shortly afterwards the widowed and exiled Isis gave birth to a son, Horus. Still others felt that, after the death of Jesus, the disciples saw in their common meal an opportunity to hold a kind of memorial service for him. the hellenistic mystery religion decisively in Alexandria and contributed to its development. This universal law is expecially true of religion. 223224 in this volume. They maintained that it was the work of the devil who helped to confuse men by creating a pagan imitation of the true religion.38, There can hardly be any gainsaying of the fact that Christianity was greatly influenced by the Mystery religions, both from a ritual and a doctrinal angle. Jesus was the divine Lord. Thus the designations of our Lord as the Dayspring from on High, the Light, the Sun of Righteousness, and similar expressions, are borrowed from or related to Mithraic phraseology., 35. When we come to Christian thought the influence seems even greater, for even the place at Bethleham selected by the early Christians as the scene of the birth of Jesus was none other than an early shrine of this pagan goda fact that led many to confuse Adonis with Jesus Christ.\[Footnote:] Weigall, op. Selected Answer : True Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 114: She was the Great Mother not only of all the gods, but of all men as well.. The more crusading a religion is, the more it absorbs. Certainly Christianity has been a crusading religion from the beginning. The first Christian communities resembled the mystery communities in big cities and seaports by providing social security and the feeling of brotherhood. The Institute cannot give permission to use or reproduce any of the writings, statements, or images of Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a nature myth, a vivid depiction of the action of life in the vegetable world with the changing of the seasons. These fundamental human experiences and the life of nature are the main substances of the Eleusinian Mysteries.28 To the searchers of salvation, the Eleusinian cult offered not only the promise of a happy future, but also a definite assurance of it.\[Footnote:] Nilsson, Greek Popular Religion, p. 54.\, Now when we observe the modern Greek Easter festival it seems certain that it preserves the spirit if not the form of the old Eleusinian worship. Church leaders talked about "initiations, passwords, and mysteries" using exactly the same . Every year nature passes through a cycle of apparent death and resurrection. There are no parallels in Christianity to the sexual rites in the Dionysiac and Isiac religion, with the exception of a few aberrant Gnostic communities. These two great Egyptian deities, whose worship passed into Europe, were revered not only in Rome but in many other centers where Christian communities were growing up. That night the priests went back to the tomb and found it empty, the god having risen on the third day from the dead; and on the 25th the resurrection was celebrated with great rejoicing. Weigall, Paganism in Our Christianity, pp. The inner spiritual, continues ever.. The existence of this atmosphere was vitally important in the development and eventual triumph of Christianity. As for my characterization of Mormonism, it depends on the definition. Freedom's Ring: King's "I Have a Dream" Speech, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Volume I: Called to Serve, January 1929-June 1951. In the end, virtually all the unique teachings of New Testament theology, including the distinctive doctrines on Jesus Christ, God, man, sin, salvation, and so on, are . On the contrary many of its forms and some of its old content has been perpetuated in Christianity.30, Mithraism is perhaps the greatest example of paganisms last effort to reconcile itself to the great spiritual movement which was gaining such sturdy influence with its purer conception of God.\[Footnote:] Dill, Roman Society From Nero to Marcus Aurelius, p. 585.\ Ernest Renan, the French philosopher and Orientalist, expressed the opinion that Mithraism would have been the religion of the modern world if anything had occured to halt or destroy the growth of Christianity in the early centuries of its existence. The preceding three paragraphs are similar to a passage in Kings earlier paper, A Study of Mithraism, p. 211 in this volume. Mystery religions were seen as more vibrant than the more . The Apostles Creed and Athanasian Creed say that between the Friday night and the Sunday morning Jesus was in Hell or Hades; It has no scriptural foundation except in the ambiguous words of the First Epistle of Peter; it did not appear in the Church as a tenet of Christianity until late in the Fourth Century., 19. The Mystery Religions were eventually wiped out by Christianity. This still stands as a festival in the ecclesiastical calendar; and thus Christians unconsciously perpetuate the worship of Osiris and the commemoration of all his subjects in the Kingdom of the Dead., 22. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, pp. In both cases, national religions of a ritualistic type were transformed, and the transformation followed similar lines: from national to ecumenical religion, from ritualistic ceremonies and taboos to spiritual doctrines set down in books, from the idea of inherited tradition to the idea of revelation. As the religious history of the empire is studied more closely, writes M. Cumont, the triumph of the church will, in our opinion, appear more and more as the culmination of a long evolution of beliefs. Meanwhile the coffin was washed up on the Syrian coast, and became miraculously lodged in the trunk of a tree. The date of Christmas was purposely fixed on December 25 to push into the background the great festival of the sun god, and Epiphany on January 6 to supplant an Egyptian festival of the same day. Interpretation in Platonic concepts was also the means by which the Judeo-Christian set of creeds was thoroughly assimilated to Greek ideas by the early Christian thinkers Clement of Alexandria and Origen. Willoughby, Pagan Regeneration, p. 36: Among the cults of Greece none was more favorably known in the first century of the Christian era than the Eleusinian mysteries., 25. Each following {year} there was a great festival in commemoration of his resurrection, and the very words, The Lord is risen, were probable used. He had left behind the secret whereby men could achieve the goal with him.\[Footnote:] Enslin, op. These many religions, known as Mystery-Religions, were not alike in every respect: to draw this conclusion would lead to a gratuitous and erroneous supposition. The Christian theologian Origen wrote in the 3rd century that it was part of the divine plan that Christ was born under the emperor Augustus: the whole Mediterranean world was united by the Romans, and the conditions for missionary work were more favourable than ever before. Joining a mystery religion was a personal decision and was not connected to what family or culture one belonged to. To discuss Christianity without mentioning other religions would be like discussing the greatness of the Atlantic Ocean without the slightest mention of the many tributaries that keep it flowing.40. Paris, 1930 . the calling of the Gentiles into the Christian Church, so designated ( Ephesians 1:9 Ephesians 1:10; 3:8-11; Colossians 1:25-27); a truth undiscoverable except by revelation, long hid, now made manifest.The resurrection of the dead ( 1 Corinthians 15:51), and other doctrines which need to be explained but which cannot be fully understood by finite intelligence ( Matthew 13:11; Romans . They covered an enormous range, and manifested a great diversity in character and outlook, from Orphism to Gnosticism, from the orgies of the Cabira to the fervours of the Hermetic contemplative.\[Footnote:] Angus, The Mystery Religions and Christianity, p. vii.\2 However it is to be noticed that these Mysteries possessed many fundamental likenesses; (1) All held that the initiate shared in symbolic (sacramental) fashion the experiences of the god. The other gods pleaded with her to relent but she refused to do so until Persephone was restored to her. (Interesting parallels between the mystery faiths and early Christianity are discussed, without either apology or venom, but with an avid interest.) This article discusses mystery religions and how they influenced the New Testament and early Christianity. The Greeks interpreted the national religions of the Greek Orient chiefly in terms of Platos philosophical and religious concepts. 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