Jesus and Dionysus
In what has been called “one of the most haunting passages in Western literature,” the Greek historian Plutarch tells the story of how passengers on a Greek merchant ship, sometime during the reign of Tiberius (14â37 BCE), heard a loud cry coming from the island of Paxos. The voice instructed the ship's pilot to call out, when he sailed past Palodes, “The Great God Pan is dead.” As soon as he did so, the passengers heard, floating back to them from across the water, “a great cry of lamentation, not of one person, but of many.”
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It's a strange story: one disembodied voice after another issuing from over the water. Early Christian writers seemed only to hear the first voice, which signaled to them the collapse of paganism in the face of a nascent Christianity. Pan, the horned god who overlapped Dionysus as a deity of dance and ecstatic states, had to die to make room for the stately and sober Jesus. Only centuries later did Plutarch's readers fully attend to the answering voices of lamentation and begin to grasp what was lost with the rise of monotheism. In a world without Dionysus/Pan/Bacchus/Sabazios, nature would be dead, joy would be postponed to an afterlife, and the forests would no longer ring with the sound of pipes and flutes.
The absolute incompatibility of Jesus and Dionysusâor, more generally, Christianity and the old ecstatic religionsâwas a tenet of later Christian theology, if not of “Western” thought more generally. But to a Roman living in the first or second century, when Christianity emerged, the new religion would not have seemed so hostile to Dionysus or his half-animal version, Pan. From a Roman perspective, Christianity was at first just another “oriental” religion coming out of the east, and, like others of similar provenance, attractive to women and the poor. It offered direct communion with the deity, with the promise of eternal life, but so did many of the other imported religions that so vexed the Roman authorities. In fact, there is reason to think that early Christianity was itself an ecstatic religion, overlapping the cult of Dionysus.
To begin with the deities themselves: The general parallels between Jesus and various pagan gods were laid out long ago by James Frazer in
The Golden Bough.
Like the Egyptian god Osiris and Attis, who derived from Asia Minor, Jesus was a “dying god,” or victim god, whose death redounded to the benefit of humankind. Dionysus, too, had endured a kind of martyrdom. His divine persecutor was Hera, the matronly consort of Zeus, whose anger stemmed from the fact that it was Zeus who fathered Dionysus with a mortal woman, Semele. Hera ordered the baby Dionysus torn to shreds, but he was reassembled by his grandmother. Later Hera tracked down the grown Dionysus and afflicted him with the divine madness that caused him to roam the world, spreading viniculture and revelry. In this story, we can discern a theme found in the mythologies of many apparently unrelated cultures: that of the primordial god whose suffering, and often dismemberment, comprise, or are necessary elements of, his gifts to humankind.
The obvious parallel between the Christ story and that of pagan victim gods was a source of great chagrin to second-century Church fathers. Surely their own precious savior god could not have been copied, or plagiarized, from disreputable pagan cults. So they ingeniously explained the parallel as a result of “diabolical
mimicry”: Anticipating the arrival of Jesus Christ many centuries later, the pagans had cleverly designed their gods to resemble him.
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Never mind that this explanation attributed supernatural, almost godlike powers of prophecy to the pagan inventors of Osiris, Attis, and Dionysus.
Leaving aside Christ as the generic pagan victim god, we find far more intriguing parallels between Jesus the historical figure and the
specific
pagan god Dionysus. Both were wandering charismatics who attracted devoted followings, or cults; both had a special appeal to women and the poor. Strikingly, both are associated with wine: Dionysus first brought it to humankind; Jesus could make it out of water. Each was purported to be the son of a great father-god-Zeus or the Hebrew god Yahwehâand a mortal mother. Neither was an asceticâJesus loved his wine and meatâbut both were apparently asexual or at least lacking a regular female consort. Both were healersâJesus directly, Dionysus through participation in his ritesâand both were miracle workers, and possibly, in Jesus' case, a magician.
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Each faced persecution by secular authorities, represented by Pentheus, among others, in the case of Dionysus, and Pontius Pilate in the case of Jesus. For what it's worth, they even had similar symbolic creatures: the fish for Jesus, the dolphin for Dionysus.
In at least one significant respect, Jesus far more resembles Dionysus than Attis. Attis was a fertility god who died and was reborn again each year along with the earth's vegetation, while Jesus, like Dionysus, was markedly indifferent to the entire business of reproduction. For example, we know that Jewish women in the Old Testament were devastated by infertility. But although Jesus could cure just about anything, to the point of reviving the dead, he is never said to have “cured” a childless womanâa surprising omission if he were somehow derived from a pagan god of fertility.
Furthermore, to the extent to which Dionysus can be said to have a philosophy or ethical stance, it bears a certain resemblance to that of Jesus. Dionysus was a lover of peace, as we have seen; and, like Jesus, he upheld the poor and rejected the prevailing social
hierarchy. According to Euripides, who was certainly not an unambivalent admirer of the wine god, the Dionysian man is:
Watchful to keep aloof both mind and heart
From men whose pride claims more than mortals may.
The life that wins the poor man's common voice,
His creed, his practiceâthis shall be my choice.
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Rounding out their shared bohemian perspective, both were scornful of the toil and striving that take up so much human energy. Dionysus was always pulling women away from their housework to join his manic rites. Jesus advised his followers to quit worrying about where their next meal would come from and emulate the lilies of the field and the fowls of the air: “for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns.” Both, in fancier words, upheld what has been called a
hedonic
vision of community, based on egalitarianism and the joyous immediacy of human experienceâas against the
agonic
reality of the cruelly unequal and warlike societies they briefly favored with their presence.
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There is one more parallel between Jesus and Dionysus. Long before Jesus' arrival, Dionysus had himself become a god of personal salvation, holding out the promise of life beyond the grave. The official patriarchal godsâZeus (Jupiter to the Romans) and Yahwehâhad little to offer by way of an afterlife, but the various ecstatic cults available in the Greco-Roman worldâthose centered on Demeter, Isis, Cybele, and Mithra, for exampleâall held out their mysteries as portals to eternal life. According to Burkert, “The same is true for the Dionysiac mysteries from at least the fifth century B.C. onward [although] scholars have been reluctant to acknowledge this dimension of Dionysiac worship.”
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The widespread use of Dionysian imagery on gravestones testifies, most likely, to the wine god's promise of salvation.
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This was not simply a verbal promise, as it was for Christians; pagans could apprehend their immortality directly, through participation in the god's ecstatic rites. To
“lose oneself” in ecstasyâto let go of one's physical and temporal boundariesâis to glimpse, however briefly, the prospect of eternity.
How to explain the resemblance between the son of Zeus and the son of Yahweh? It could be argued that each is a manifestation of some underlying archetype, existing within the human imagination, of a divine or semidivine rebel and savior figure. But there is another possibility: that the historical figure of Jesus was subtly altered and shaped by his early followers and chroniclers
in order
to make him more closely resemble Dionysus. As hellenized Jews, who spoke and wrote in Greek, these early chroniclers were familiar with Dionysus and the entire extended family of pagan deities. In fact, more so than other Jews, the early Christians were intellectually engaged with the ideas and philosophies of classical pagan culture.
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But why should they want to style their own god-man after a pagan deity, and an apparently disreputable one at that?
The answer must be connected to the strange fact that, in apparent defiance of the First Commandment, the Jews of Roman Israel were
already
worshipping Dionysus at the time of Jesus and identifying him with their “one” god Yahweh. The historian Morton Smith pointed out that the god Dionysus was worshipped throughout the Hebrew world in Roman times: “Accordingly, it is not surprising that Yahweh was often identified by gentiles with Dionysus ⦠The surprising fact is that this identification first appears among the Jews themselves.” On a Hebrew coin, for example, Yahweh is portrayed (and the mere fact of his portrayal is a startling break from Jewish tradition) with Dionysian attributesâwearing a satyr's mask and driving the chariot of Triptolemus, which Dionysus had used for his travels around the world.
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In addition, there are reports of Jewish worship of Dionysus in Rome, while in Jerusalem the Jews may have been ecumenical enough to worship Yahweh in the form of both Zeus and Dionysus.
Considering the “popularity of the cult of Dionysus in Palestine” as well as the material evidence from coins, funerary objects, and building ornaments showing that Yahweh and Dionysus were often elided or confused, Smith concluded that “these factors taken together make it incredible that these symbols were meaningless to the Jews who used them. The history of their use shows a persistent association with Yahweh of attributes of the wine god.”
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As the theologist Robert M. Price writes:
There surely was such a thing as Jews taking attractive features of Gentile faiths and mixing them with their own ⦠Maccabees 6:7 tells us that Antiochus converted large numbers of Jews to the worship of Dionysus. One suspects it was no arduous task, given that some Greek writers already considered Jehovah simply another local variant of Dionysus anyway. The Sabazius religion of Phrygia is plainly an example of worshipping Jehovah as Dionysus.
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Thus Jesus was born into a Jewish culture that had embraced, to a certain extent, the pagan gods, especially Zeus and Dionysus. According to the classicist Carl Kerényi, Jesus' early followers, and probably Jesus himself, were aware of “the existence of a massive non-Greek religion of Dionysus between the lake of Genesareth and the Phoenician coast.” Jesus traveled in this region and took many of his metaphors from viniculture. In particular his odd insistence that he is “the true vine” makes little sense unless there is also a false vine, and has been interpreted as a direct challenge to Dionysus.
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As for Jesus' Dionysus-like trick of turning water into wine, this was, Smith argues, derived from “a myth about Dionysus told in a Dionysiac festival celebrated at Sidon.” A first- or second-century CE report of the festival “shows striking similarities, even in wording, to the gospel material.”
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There are several features of Dionysus that would have made him an attractive prototype for the deified Jesus. First, of course, were the ecstatic elements of Dionysian worship; the Maccabees
had introduced elements of Dionysian ritual into Jewish festivities two centuries before Jesus' birth, and Smith says these were very popular. In a broader sense, the early Jewish followers of Jesus may have been impressed, as were the Greeks and Romans before them, by the wine god's accessibility to the individual worshipper. Yahwehâat least before his own apparent merger with Dionysusâhad been a stern and impersonal deity, while Dionysus always held out the possibility of a direct and personal relationship through participation in his rites. Furthermore, unlike so many deities, Yahweh included, Dionysus was not a local or parochial god; his cult was universal and potentially open to anyone, anywhere.
When the historical Jesus was executed by the Roman authorities, his followers coped with this tragedy by turning him into a godâbut not just any god. They seem to have chosen as their model a particular god who was already at large in their community, a god who held out the promise of immortal life and divine communion, and who welcomed even the lowliest of individuals. I am not suggesting that this was a conscious choice, made by certain followers of Jesus who secretly fancied the god Dionysus. But Dionysiac themes were ever present in the pagan/Jewish culture in which Jesus' followers sought to interpret their leader's brief life and tortured death. There were forty years between Jesus' death and the first written account of his lifeâtime enough for his followers to assemble a myth of his divine lineage and mission out of the cultural bricolage available to them, which already included the notion of a wine-bringing, life-giving, populist, victim god. Christ crucified was, perhaps in a more than merely symbolic way, Dionysus risen.
Could there have been any actual overlap between the cults of Jesus and Dionysus, or fraternal mixing of the two? In support of that possibility, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, in their somewhat sensationalist book
The Jesus Mysteries
, offer a number of cases, from the second and third centuries, in which Dionysusâwho is identified by nameâis depicted hanging from a cross.
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Then there is what the
archaeologist Franz Cumont called “a strange fact for which no satisfactory explanation has as yet been furnished”: the burial of a priest of Sabazios, along with another follower of this god, who was a variant of Dionysus common to Asia Minor, in the Christian catacomb in Rome.
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Accompanying the burial site are frescoes depicting “how Vibia [the follower of Sabazios] was carried away by Death, as Kore had been carried away by Hades, how she was judged and acquitted, and how she was introduced by a âgood angel' to the sacred meal of the blessed.”
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The presence of Dionysus/Sabazios in a Christian burial site decorated with a very Christian story of death and the afterlife would seem to suggest that the deified Jesus and the old wine god were, however briefly, once on excellent terms with each other.