Chapter 3 THE CHRIST CULTS

Chapter 3

THE CHRIST CULTS

y choosing the terminology "Christ cults," Burton Mack means to differentiate those early movements that revered Jesus as the Christ from those that did not. For the Synagogue Reformers, the Q people, and the Community of Israel, Jesus need not have been the Messiah in any Jewish sense at all. If the Pillars and Heirs communities saw Jesus as the Messiah or the Messiah-elect, they saw the role in strictly nationalistic Jewish terms. But starting with his sixth category, Mack considers the communities for whom Jesus as a teacher (and even as a miracle worker) was of no importance at all, and who may not even have been aware of such a Jesus tradition. For them his role as a savior of one kind or another was pivotal. And the title "Christ" came to denote this. Outside of Palestine, this Greek equivalent of "messiah," i.e., Anointed One, rapidly became the proper name of a divine savior. After all, outside the Holy Land, and among Gentiles, traditional Judaism counted for little or was eclipsed by other religious traditions.

Mack is perhaps not quite clear about what would constitute a Christ cult. Or at least he seems to me to obscure some important distinctions between what would appear to be significantly different subtypes of Christ movements. I will subdivide his Christ cult category to pick up some of these differences.

THE JESUS MARTYR CULT

One might with equal justice call this group the "Other Sheepfold" (cf. John 10:16) or the "Son of God fearers." Here Mack tries to provide an environmental niche for Sam K. Williams's brilliant reconstruction of probably the earliest version of the atonement doctrine.' How did the death of Jesus ever come to be considered the remedy for the sins of the human race, especially in view of the terrific logical and moral difficulties attending the doctrine? There have been some dozen major attempts to explain how the cross saves, and why it is necessary at all. Why cannot God just forgive sinners and leave it at that?

Sam Williams, whose argument Mack capably summarizes, reasons that the earliest Jewish Jesus people had no thought of Jesus' crucifixion availing for anybody's sins. They were Jews; Judaism had always had perfectly adequate ways of dealing with sins, both moral and ceremonial. The idea of Jesus' death as a sacrifice must have first arisen when Jesus Jews, probably Hellenistic ones, were faced with the conundrum of Gentiles, pagans, wanting to be baptized into the Jesus movement. Forgiving their moral lapses was no problem: God had always been perfectly willing to bless righteous Gentiles so long as they kept to the basic short list of Noahic commandments (Genesis 9:4-6). He never expected them to trouble themselves to keep the special customs and rituals of Judaism, so he didn't hold it against them that they didn't. But there was a barrier. Gentiles could not enter into the worshipping community of Israel because they dared not draw near the Divine Presence reeking of ritual impurity. Ham sandwiches were nothing to condemn Gentiles to Hell over, but they did bar them from entering his courts with praise.

This is the same problem that kept great numbers of Gentiles on the margins of the Jewish synagogues all over the Mediterranean world. There was great interest in Judaism and its noble ethical monotheism. Many pagans liked that. But to become a member in good standing, there was the little matter of circumcision to be dealt with, that and some 612 other commandments. For Jews, none of this was a problem; they had been born into the culture that these commandments defined. The implicit cultural rules of any people are equally complex-and equally invisible to any member of that culture. But the thought of having to try to adopt the mores of a different culture is quite daunting. So few of these Gentiles actually took the step of full conversion. Most remained on the periphery, where they were welcome to attend synagogue and hear the scriptures read and preached. They were called the God-fearers, i.e., the pious Gentiles, the noble pagans. It was not biblical morality they quailed at; no, that is what attracted them. It was the ritual boundary that loomed above them like the Berlin Wall.

It was among such people that missionary Christianity made such terrific headway in the early decades. The not-quite Jewish God-fearers greeted Pauline preaching with great joy. Such a Torah-free gospel seemed ideally suited for them (and that's just what critics said it was: a watered-down, more marketable version that made conversion too cheap and only a halfway measure-the same way Hindu gurus look askance at Transcendental Meditation in the West, a McDonald's trivialization of the genuine article). Here was a way to embrace what they liked about Judaism, to consider themselves truly a part of Abraham's children, and yet without all those nuisance regulations! Jesus was important to them not so much as a teacher, but as their ticket into the House of Israel. Here's how it worked.

Hellenistic Jesus Jews thought back to their community's proud tradition of martyrdom, how old Eleazer (2 Macc. 6:18-3 1; 4 Macc. 5 and 6) and the seven brothers and their mother (2 Macc. 7; Heb. 11:35) had all yielded up their lives rather than renege on the Laws of God when pagan tyrants had tried to force them to do so. These saints had died not as a punishment for sin-God forbid!-but as witnesses to righteousness. But they knew that the sinner's death can mitigate his guilt before God, and they prayed to God with their last breaths that he might consider their righteous deaths an atonement, an expiation counted toward the sins of fellow Jews whose backsliding had invited these terrible persecutions (2 Macc. 7:37-38; 4 Macc. 6:27-29). It was the old "righteous remnant" ideology with which the sixth-century B.C.E. priestly aristocrats explained why it was they who had been deported and not the idolatrous populace whose sins had called forth the Babylonian conquerors in the first place (Isa. 53).

Well, come to think of it, Jesus had died for no sins of his own, perish the thought. So is it possible God was willing to accept his martyr death as an expiation for the accumulated ritual impurities and abominations of the unwashed, shrimp-eating pagans? Sure, that had to be it! "Otherwise Christ died to no purpose" (Gal. 2:21). So the difference Jesus made to the Godfearers was to let them into at least one form of Judaism, Hellenized Jesus Judaism, as full-fledged members.

(The Epistle to the Galatians seems to have been written to address such a group whose members later began to feel conscience pangs, to suspect that something so easily won could not be worth much. It was like wondering if you really deserved the job, or whether you got it because of racial preference quotas, especially if your colleagues assume the latter and don't bother hiding their contempt. You'd feel the need to prove yourself. That's one reason a number of Nation of Islam members abandon Farrakhan's faith once they learn about historic Islam: They want the real thing. And so the Galatians had after all decided to make it official and at least get circumcised.)

Jesus' martyr death had become a red carpet for Gentile God-fearers to take their place among the clans of Judah. "Once you were no people, but now you are God's people" (1 Pet. 2:1 Oa). Burton Mack calls this form of faith in Jesus a Christ cult. But I beg to differ. There is nothing about the theory of Jesus' death rehabilitating the unclean heathen that depends on or follows from his being a messiah or a Christ. Nobody made Eleazer or the seven brothers Christs. Both the Jewish category of religious martyrs and the Greek category of the noble death of a hero on behalf of his homeland were good enough on their own. Calling such a martyr-hero the Messiah would only have confused the issue.

Thus I would place Sam Williams's reconstruction of the early atonement theology among Hellenistic mission-congregations who organized themselves into their own synagogues parallel to the Jewish synagogues they had previously attended. They could not have continued in the same synagogues unless they were run by Hellenistic Jesus Jews, which is always a possibility. But if we are to reckon with anything like the picture Acts gives of Jesus missions in the Hellenistic synagogues, cases, in other words, where the Jesus Jews were propagandists from outside, then we will have to envision schismatic rival Jesus synagogues forming alongside the parent bodies. And this is not because the traditional Jews had a crazed antipathy to Jesus as Acts depicts, but rather simply because unless the synagogue leaders themselves accepted the Jesus-atonement doctrine, they could not in good conscience allow the God-fearers more access than they had already given them. The God-fearers' own new belief did not make it so. In this case, in order to enjoy the new advantage Jesus' death had provided ("Through him we have gained access to this grace in which we stand...." Rom. 5:2), the God-fearers would have to set up their own parallel synagogues, which we may imagine having a good deal of resemblance, not to today's Protestant fundamentalist "Jews for Jesus" organization, but rather to present-day Reform Judaism.

Such a community could very well have generated the Epistle of James, written in the name of a great Jewish-Christian authority, and full of mixed Jewish and popular Stoic maxims, and with but an obligatory tip of the hat to Jesus, who would really have made little substantive difference for such a group. We might wonder if it is also such a group that comes in for criticism in the Book of Revelation as "those who say they are Jews and are not, but are a synagogue of Satan" (2:9). They are imagined still to partake of their old heathen ways, eating meat sacrificed to idols and patronizing temple prostitutes ("priestitutes," we might call them), all on the assumption that once Jewish purity regulations go, the whole thing's gone. (The logic is familiar enough: If Jesus eats with sinners, then he must have become one of them!Mark 2:15-17; Matt. 11:19.)

If this group of "Son of God fearers" does not really fit the "Christ cult" rubric, is it even to be classed as a separate Jesus movement? Possibly, but then again, it would be no surprise to find them sharing worship with Mack's Synagogue Reform movement, if we imagine the debates being conducted between the two types of synagogues rather than within a single congregation. The God-fearers would certainly have had the Greek education to create the pronouncement stories or chreias. They could have been the later Q communities, too, since even the earliest layer of Q as Mack divides it up (following Kloppenborg) already contains the saying "Not even in Israel have I found such faith!" (Matt. 8:10/Luke 7:9). The Roman centurion to whom Jesus refers is a model portrait of a Gentile God-fearer. And remember that the second-century satirist Lucian of Samosata called Jesus "the crucified sophist," implying Jesus was recalled as no less a philosopher for having also been revered as a martyr. A Q community with Gentile God-fearers as members would certainly have viewed it that way.

Nor is it difficult to imagine this Jesus martyr cult as one with, or overlapping, the Community of Israel, once we recall how both Samaritans and Galileans traditionally bore the stigma of being only marginally Jewish (like Herod the Great, a professing Jew, but really a no-good Idumean/Edomite). If they had internalized this southern Jewish scorn, they would have felt much like the "halfway covenant" God-fearers on Greek soil. They would have welcomed the new understanding of the death of Jesus, as Sam Williams describes it. They would have seen Jesus as "the Prophet like Moses," and Moses had once offered to have his own name erased from God's book if only it could save his semipaganized people (Exod. 32:32). They might have been able to accept the Jewish estimate of themselves if in the same moment they were provided with a way of removing that taint.

In fact, to view the Community of Israel as including a significant percentage of God-fearers from "Galilee of the Gentiles" (Matt. 4:9) would make it much easier to accept Mack's characterization of that group as rejoicing over a new or renewed sense of Israelite identity. We would have the missing piece of this particular puzzle. Mack had a good idea of what it would look like (the self-esteem business) but hadn't yet found it. Here it is.

If the Jesus martyr cult does not qualify as a Christ cult, what does? First we have to try to supply a couple more transitional forms in the fossil record of early Christian evolution. One of these, the Gnostic Christ cult of the Syrian apostles, will somewhat overlap the Q community and some of its later developments. The other, the Kyrios Christos cult, is barely mentioned by Mack, and he never really distinguishes it from what I am calling the martyr cult of Jesus. And yet it is one of the most important of all.

THE GNOSTIC CHRIST CULT

Walter Schmithalsz noticed various puzzling inconsistencies in the several New Testament uses of the term "apostle," as well as certain patterns to those inconsistencies. In short, he began to suspect that either traditional New Testament scholars had confused various names and ideas that were originally distinct, or the ancient writers and editors of individual New Testament writings had. In short, he wound up totally dismantling and rebuilding the concept and history of the term "apostle." Schmithals systematically examined all the hitherto suggested possible origins of the Christian idea of the apostles and finally traced it down to Syrian Gnosticism.

On the one hand, Schmithals showed how, once you bracket a couple of mistranslations (Mark 6:30 refers back to 6:7 and should be translated "the ones sent out returned to Jesus," not "the apostles returned to Jesus") and textual corruptions (someone has added "whom he also named apostles" to Mark 3:14: "he appointed twelve"), Matthew, Mark, and John never refer to "the apostles," but only to "the Twelve," or, at most, "the twelve disciples." Even the Twelve, Schmithals argues, are a group of authorities originating in the early church that was subsequently read back into the time of Jesus in order to give them greater clout. But the idea of the apostolate was not even in view here. The picture of an official and exclusive college of twelve apostles emerges only in early catholic writings from about 125 C.E. onward, and this includes the two-part work Luke-Acts. Schmithals agrees with John Knox3 that Luke-Acts in its present, canonical form, is a response to Marcion in the mid-second century. Marcion, like the evangelist Mark, had written off the Twelve as dunces who grossly misunderstood Jesus. He accepted Paul as the only genuine apostle: Why had Jesus appeared to him after the resurrection except to find someone who could succeed where the Twelve had failed, in grasping the truth of his gospel? Marcion compiled the Apostolicon, a canon consisting of a single gospel (probably an earlier, shorter version of our Luke) along with the ten epistles ascribed to Paul at the time (lacking 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, the so-called Pastoral Epistles, which were no doubt subsequently written against Marcion, attempting to create an orthodox "counter-Paul"). The success of this theological Sputnik, a distinctively Christian Testament, spurred the emerging Catholic Church to reply with its own New Testament canon, which included an expanded, "catholicized" Luke followed up by an Acts which co-opted Paul by pairing him with Peter and subordinating him to "the Twelve Apostles." The Twelve Apostles, then, are a later churchly construct, just like the notion of the apostolic succession of bishops. But at first the office of an apostle had entered Christian circles from a very different source. Both "apostle" and "Christ" had meant something quite different.

Schmithals went on to sketch the origin of the apostle idea in the circles of early, pre-Christian Gnosticism. Gnosticism was later assimilated with Christianity, giving us both Gnosticized Christianity (including the idea of Jesus as an incarnation of a heavenly Christ-being) and Christian Gnosticism (like that represented in many of the Nag Hammadi texts, where Jesus is portrayed as a Gnostic teacher on the model of Valentinus, Markos, or Simon Magus). But in Gnosticism, before it began to crossbreed with Christianity, the Christ was not identified with any particular historical figure, at least with none from the recent past. The Revealer/Redeemer was identified instead with some ancient figure (Seth, Adam, Enosh, Melchizedek, and so on), or with some personified abstraction (e.g., Dame Wisdom in Proverbs, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach; Manda d'Haye, "Knowledge of the Life," in Mandaean scripture), who in turn was supposed to be symbolic of the Primordial Human, the aVipomOS. Like Gayomard, the first human in Zoroastrian myth, or the androgynous Adam of rabbinical speculation, the Primordial Human contained the souls of all future men and women in itself.

The aV*p(OTCOS was a being of pure spirit and light. But somewhere along the line it had plunged into the shadow-world of loathsome matter and has been held prisoner ever since, long ago having forgotten its true identity. It exists now only in the form of a myriad of divine sparks scattered throughout the material world. It can become self-aware again only insofar as individual human beings who happen to possess the spark can be awakened to that fact. The Gnostic Revealer is the Gnosis (divine self-knowledge) awakened within the Gnostic himself or herself. Thus the savior and the saved are one and the same, and we can speak of a "Redeemed Redeemer." For Gnostics, the Christ, the Son of Man, is the spiritual nature of the elect, the Gnostic elite. Think of the connection made in 1 John 2:27 between revealed knowledge and anointing: "The anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true...." There is nothing about nationalistic Jewish messianism here; we are in a different world altogether, one in which Gnosticism's Christ existed as a Transcendental Aion or Spiritual Power. This Christ was buried in the material world and would rise as more and more of his sundered shards awakened and, in so doing, reassembled the severed Body of the Christ, the Primal Man.

If it seems to be strained special pleading to suggest that the term "Christ" could have meant something unconnected with Jewish messianism, one only need remind oneself that already in the Pauline Epistles, "Christ" is nothing but the surname of Jesus (or sometimes the pronomen). As Werner Kramer shows, there is not one single instance in the Pauline Epistles where "Christ" seems to or needs to be a reference to the Jewish messiah.' This is the basis for Lloyd Gaston's bold statement, "For Paul, Jesus is neither a new Moses nor the Messiah."' I am not suggesting Paul was implying anything particularly Gnostic in his usage of "Christ." All I mean is that he could use it without any hint of Jewish messianism, and so could others, who might have filled the term with a different significance altogether.

In the understanding of the Gnostic Christ cult, who would qualify as an apostle? An apostle would be anyone who awakened to his or her true Christidentity and experienced the urgency to spread this word of salvation to the rest of the lost sheep. The Gnostic mystagogues like Simon Magus, Valentinus, and Markos apparently considered themselves the visible "incarnations" of the Christ. But their point was hardly that they were Christ and you were not. Just the opposite. "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice" (John 18: 37). It was much the same later with the Sufi mystic al-Hallaj, tortured and killed for the blasphemy of hullul, claiming to be God incarnate. He went about proclaiming "I am the Truth!" "I am God!" all the while meaning that God was all there was, and that al-Hallaj had renounced the brazen illusion that he had any separate existence alongside God.6 No, his whole point was not that he was God in some sense in which others were not, but that he was God simply because everyone is. He had just awakened to the truth and was telling others. His knowledge made him a Christ and an apostle of God, for the two, in Gnostic terms, are synonymous.

We need not go outside the parameters of Gnosticism to show that such a Christ concept is no mere construct of Schmithals. But it may be worth noting that, as at so many points, this Gnostic idea finds a striking parallel in Mahayana Buddhist thought. Just as each Gnostic mystagogue was himself the Christ, the only "incarnation" of Christ that made any difference, the Bodhisattvas were all believed to follow the same path as Prince Siddhartha once had, through countless reincarnations through the Ten Bhumis (stages) on the way to full Buddhahood. But they viewed Siddhartha Gotama not as Western scholars do, as the single historical Buddha and the founder of Buddhism, but rather as merely one of at least twenty-six past and future Buddhas, all of whom are the subjects of fabulous legend. It was not that the other Buddhas and Bodhisattvas were following in his footsteps; rather, Siddhartha Gotama had simply trodden the same path all Bodhisattvas tread. And each alike was a manifestation of the eternal Buddha-Nature.' Once one awakens to the fact of one's own Buddha-Nature, one becomes both redeemer and redeemed. Just as in Gnosticism.

To make Jesus a Gnostic Redeemer in some exclusive sense was a hard adjustment for Christian Gnostics to make, and many of them did not quite make it. Some made Jesus just one of the previous temporary manifestations of the Christ, and for some, Jesus had himself been more recently superseded by Simon Magus or Mani. (Again, this was the way Mahayana Buddhism incorporated Siddhartha Gotama into a larger framework, pointedly denying his uniqueness.) Some Gnostics allowed a certain priority to Jesus as the historically revealed Christ, but they were tempted toward Docetism, denying that in this case the Revealer had really touched down in human history. (Again, Mahayana Buddhists had done precisely the same thing, making the earthly appearances of all the Buddhas mere apparitions of the Nirmankya, the "Transformation Body," without physical substance.) But when Jesus was given some measure of centrality, it meant that he himself would be considered the Apostle, the one sent from the heavenly realm of light to enlighten poor mortals. His earthly lieutenants, commissioned to relay that message, were not considered "apostles." But where there was no attempt to focus the role of Christ and OCV$p(LYitoS exclusively in the individual person of Jesus, the several previous and subsequent preachers of the gnosis (yvo atS) all alike qualified as "apostles," sent ones. In this sense Mani and Muhammad could both call themselves "apostles."

Schmithals concludes that the Gnostic idea of the Christ-Apostle had been adopted by Paul along with various items of Gnostic theology and terminology, only he had tried to use such conceptuality to express a faith centered upon Jesus Christ. Many who knew the Gnostic gospel in something like its pristine form took exception to Paul's syncretism. In Corinth Paul ran afoul of "superapostles" (2 Cor. 11:5) who could, without any hint of inconsistency, say both "I am of Christ" (i.e., part of the Heavenly Adam-Christ) and "Jesus be damned!" (Compare 1 Cor. 1:12 with 1 Cor. 12:3.) To curse Jesus was to deny Paul's claim that Jesus was uniquely and exclusively the Christ. (Beside the Corinthian curse of Jesus we may place the Zen saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him"-because the only real Buddha is the Buddha-Nature, the gnosis, inside you.) To these Corinthian Gnostics, the Jesus Paul offered them must have seemed a veritable antichrist, a usurper of the saving Christ-identity that all Gnostics had as their inalienable birthright and the key to their salvation.

And yet Paul still considers himself an apostle. He is still using the original Gnostic term, even though he has had to squeeze Jesus into the system. But whether Paul embraced the Syrian Gnosticism or not, Schmithals's researches would in any case delineate for us the basis of a pre Jesus cult of the Christ, one in which the Christ had nothing in particular to do with Jesus the Nazorean. And eventually it could be found alongside some form of Hellenized Jesus movement, I would guess the Jesus martyr cult, in Corinth.

Earlier I mentioned Gerd Theissen's identification of the Corinthian superapostles as some of the itinerant Q preachers, Jesus-Cynics. Would Schmithals's identification of the superapostles contradict Theissen's? Not at all. If we look at Theissen's earlier discussion of the "itinerant charismatics" we see that Theissen perceives how the references these people made to the Son of Man, either as a personified threat of revenge, or as the heavenly authorizer of their preaching, seemed to function less as an appeal to a famous historical predecessor, Jesus the Nazorean, than as the invocation of an ideal counterpart to themselves.' The Son of Man was something like many scholars take John's "Beloved Disciple" to be: an idealization of the faithful disciple. I submit that here we are contemplating something very close to Schmithals's picture of a multitude of wandering "apostles" (both Theissen and Schmithals make their itinerants the same as the apostles of the Didache) who themselves embodied their Christ/Primal Man/Son of Man. Neither group's ministry presupposes a previous historical founder, a historical Jesus Christ. Both groups, then, were probably the same group.

And, further, I submit that only on this understanding of the Corinthian superapostles do we have any hope of doing justice to the striking fact that some of the factions viewed Cephas, Paul, and Apollos as on the same footing with Christ himself, much as the Empress Julia Domna is said to have kept a chapel adorned with statues of Jesus, Abraham, Orpheus, and Apollonius of Tyana, a veritable pantheon of "Ascended Masters."

How does the Theissen-Schmithals conception of wandering Gnostic apostles fit with that of the Q tradition stemming from the itinerants? Rather well, as a matter of fact. Helmut Koester had already tagged the sayings collection pregospel type as the seed for Gnosticism. The Q-like Gospel of Thomas was certainly a favorite of Valentinian Gnostics and Manicheans, because they believed they had attained the gnosis required to "find the meaning" of these "secret sayings" and thus escape death.

How would there ever have been enough continuity, or even similarity, between a Gnostic Christ cult and any type of Jesus movement for the two of them to wind up cheek by jowl in the same meetings, as in Corinth? Or, to ask a related question, how would the sayings of the Divine Wisdom/Heavenly Christ have attracted the name "Jesus" for a character in pronouncement stories? The major consideration here is that sometimes the primordial Revealer figure in pre-Christian Gnosticism, as Schmithals shows, was an abstract personification like "Wisdom" or "Knowledge of the Life" or "The Anointing/Anointed." Might "Jesus," which means "salvation," have been originally such a personification?

The Gospel of Matthew, though in its present form it obviously assumes a historical Jesus, draws attention to the theological character, implicitly the titular character, of the name "Jesus." "You shall call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins" (1:21). Only two verses later, Matthew grafts into his narrative a text from Isaiah, "and his name shall be called Emmanuel." If we did not take for granted that the baby will be named Jesus, we would be surprised to discover the holy child is not henceforth called "Emmanuel Christ," or some such. But the parallel between the two divine namings, one mandated by an angel, the other by a prophecy, further underlines the symbolic theological significance of the name Jesus. That "Jesus" might once have been a title of a god, only later concretized into the personal name of a historical founder of Christianity, was sometimes argued by Arthur Drews9 and other advocates of the Christ-Myth theory. But the argument was little heeded since it seemed to have little going for it but the bare possibility. However, I would suggest that Schmithals's parallels with Gnostic personifications of the principle or knowledge of salvation give the theory real credibility. I am not trying to say that there was a single origin of the Christian savior Jesus Christ, and that origin is pure myth; rather, I am saying that there may indeed have been such a myth, and that if so, it eventually flowed together with other Jesus images, some one of which may actually have been based on a historical Jesus the Nazorean. The old Christ-Myth theorists took for granted a single-root origin theory, just as orthodoxy did; it just chose a different candidate for the root.

By far the strongest piece of evidence for an early use of "Jesus" for a mythic figure is the so-called Kenosis hymn quoted in Phil. 2:6-11. M. Couchoud`° long ago pointed out a startling detail never even mentioned in the great number of exegetical studies of the passage. What he was alone in noticing was the fact that the hymn has the exalted Christ being rewarded for his humiliation by the bestowal of the name of "Jesus." "Therefore he was highly exalted and given the name that is above every name, that at the name Jesus every knee should bow and every tongue confess thatJesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father." Exegetes universally take for granted that the "name that is above every name" is the title Kyrios, "Lord." But Kyrios is not a name. "Jesus," on the other hand, is.

The sense of the passage is also evident from the appositive parallelism between the two members, "at the name Jesus every knee should bow" and "every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord." Specifically, bowing the knee at the name of Jesus on the one hand, and swearing fealty to him, on the other, are equivalent. Neither reading fits conventional orthodoxy very well; for a man already named Jesus to receive the title Kyrios would suggest Adoptionism, but for the heavenly Christ subsequently to receive the name Jesus implies something even stranger, namely that the form of the salvation myth presupposed in the Philippians hymn fragment did not feature an earthy figure named Jesus. Rather, this name was a subsequent honor. Here is a fossil of an early belief according to which a heavenly entity (perhaps already called Christ, like the Valentinian Christ-Aion) subsequently received the cult name Jesus. In all this there is no historical Jesus the Nazorean. Nor, as Couchoud pointed out, could there be, since all the gospel tales of the wandering Jesus are at once revealed as later fabrications, taking for granted the naming of the savior as Jesus and reading it back anachronistically into his period of earthly servitude. (Is it possible, we might speculate, that the savior's name originally had been Emmanuel, attested in the christological fossil Matt. 1:21?)

And eventually, Jesus, the martyred sophist whose death gave Gentiles access to the true Judaism, might have been identified with Jesus Christ the exalted Aion.

THE KYRIOS CHRISTOS CULT

The ancient Mediterranean world was hip-deep in religions centering on the death and resurrection of a savior god. Usually these religions and their rites measured the yearly renewal of nature. The imagery of death and resurrection might symbolize the withering of vegetation in autumn and winter and its restoration in spring and summer. Or it might stand for the waning of daylight till the Winter Solstice and its gradual waxing thereafter. Or perhaps the planting (death and burial) of the seed and its sprouting (resurrection). All were variations on the one theme. But the myths of each such god supplied the motivation for the fate and triumph of the savior, one that made sense in the native context.

One of the oldest we know of, the myth of Aleyan Baal, had the warrior god venture battle with the death monster Mot, who devoured him. His consort Anath bewailed his death and determined to enter the netherworld to bring her lover forth again. She did. And, thus raised from the dead, he took the divine throne beside his father El as Lord ("Baal") of gods and mortals. Dumuzi, or Tammuz, was his Babylonian counterpart. He, too, died and went to the netherworld, from whence his lover Ishtar rescued him, dying and rising herself in the process! Both these divine pairs were notoriously worshipped in Israel, much to the distress of certain prophets like Zechariah (12:11) and Ezekiel (8:14). The Song of Songs is most naturally interpreted as the liturgies of Ishtar and Tammuz."

Osiris of Egypt, an ancient divine king who taught agriculture to the Egyptians, was betrayed and murdered by his brother Set (the desert god). Isis his queen bewailed the death and went forth, accompanied by her attendant maidens, to weep and to search for the body. Once she found it, she managed to revive Osiris in a kind of double resurrection. Osiris himself entered into the netherworld as its supreme judge and ruler, but not until he had fathered upon Isis a son, Horus/Harpocrates, his own earthly reincarnation, who grew up to take revenge on the wicked Set.12

Attis was a Phrygian godling, either the son or the lover (or both) of the cave goddess Cybele. One day he betrayed her, marrying a mortal princess. Cybele appeared at the event like the witch at Sleeping Beauty's birthday party and scattered the guests. Attis fled and, in remorse, castrated himself and bled to death. Cybele wept and contrived to raise him from the dead. Adonis betrayed Aphrodite, who sent a vicious boar to gore him to death, but she thought better of it and revived him. On Crete, Dionysus suffered the same fate and lived again.

In the Orphic myth, Dionysus, in his avatar as Zagreus the Hunter, had been dismembered and eaten by the Titans. Zeus wiped them out and consumed the heart of baby Zagreus, giving rebirth to him as the more familiar Dionysus of Thebes. Mithras died on the shortest day of each year but was reborn on the next day.

Originally all these myths were rehearsed yearly in rites intended either simply to commemorate the change of seasons, or actually to facilitate the change.13 At this stage of the game, either the king/chief himself was put to death and "raised" in the form of his replacement, a new consort for the queen, or else some hapless surrogate died as "king for a day," whereupon the real king returned to the throne. Eventually a new inner significance to the myth was "discovered" by those elite few for whom the external ceremonies of an agricultural faith were spiritually unsatisfying. These people were familiar with the ritual passage from childhood to adulthood, at which time they had been educated about the rituals of their people and declared qualified to participate in them.14 Was it possible, they wondered, to undergo yet a further stage of initiation to a still greater maturity? Was it possible for them to participate in the god's death and resurrection in some way, and so gain an immortality like his? Sure it was. And the Mystery Religions were born. The Mystery cult would be the esoteric core of a traditional religion whose exoteric concern was the renewal of the fields in the spring. But with the great social dislocations of the Hellenistic age, great numbers of people found themselves trying desperately to maintain an ethnic/cultural identity in a radically pluralistic society. Like the Jews, who created the synagogue as a magnet for maintaining their heritage, other groups transplanted their religions, too. Only since they did not share a social religion with their new neighbors, the old exoteric dimension fell away, leaving only the esoteric Mystery rituals. These were still kept secret from outsiders, but anyone could become an insider, seeking redemption and finding it in their sanctuaries. And anyone could be a member of more than one such religion at the same time, probably suspecting that the various deities, all so similar to one another, were different names for the same savior.

The rituals which allowed the initiate to share the saving trial and triumph of the savior varied greatly from cult to cult, but most had this element in one form or another. For instance, whereas Mithras had wrestled a great bull to the death (originally symbolizing the supplanting of Taurus by Perseus in the precession of the equinox"), the Mithraist undertook a ritual shower in the blood of a disemboweled bull (or, if he couldn't afford it, a lamb). Brother, have you been washed in the blood?

Attis converts would be swept up in the ecstatic dances of the devotees and would feel impelled to castrate themselves, pitching the severed testicles into the lap of a silver image of Cybele. General mourning, both for Attis and for their own manhood, would follow, culminating in the ritual interment of an effigy of Attis crucified to a pine trunk. On the third day he would be proclaimed gloriously risen from the dead: "Rejoice, you of the mystery! For your god is saved! And we, too, shall be saved! "(Firmicus Maternus, The Error of the Pagan Religions 22:1)16 Similarly, burial inscriptions for the believers in Osiris assure the mourner, "As Osiris died, so has N_ died; and, as Osiris rose, so shall N_ rise." His devotees would partake of a sacramental meal of bread and beer, symbolizing his body and blood. The (female) Maenads of Dionysus would recapitulate the death of their Lord by going into a frenzy and ripping live animals limb from limb.

Entering into these rituals initiated the process of an inner spiritual transformation into a divine and immortal being. Worship was often ecstatic, as the gathered congregation worshipped their Kyrios, their Lord, or their Kuria, e.g., the Lady Isis or the Magna Mater. We have copies of written invitations to sacramental banquets held in honor of the gods, e.g., "Pray come dine with me today at the table of the Kyrios Serapis." It is no doubt such social events which trouble Paul in I Cor. 8-11, where he admits that indeed "there are gods aplenty and Kyrioi aplenty" (1 Cor. 8:5), but seems to need to remind his Corinthian Christians that "for us there is but one God, the Father, who created all things, and one Kyrios, through whom all things were made" (1 Cor. 8:6).17

It is very hard not to see extensive and basic similarities between these religions and the Christian religion. But somehow Christian scholars have managed not to see it, and this, one must suspect, for dogmatic reasons. Those without such a Maginot Line mentality have less trouble. John Cuthbert Lawson18 recounted how, during a trip to rural Greece, he attended a Passion play. As the local man acting the role of Jesus was being brought into the tomb on Good Friday evening, Lawson was startled at the manifest anxiety of an old peasant woman beside him. On his asking the cause of her distress, she blurted out, "Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise to-morrow, we shall have no corn this year." One might venture to say that it was her very lack of scholarly sophistication that enabled her to recognize what was really going on.

Conservative scholars and Christian apologists have never been at ease even recognizing the existence of the dying-and-rising-god motif in nonChristian Mystery Religions, much less their relevance for Christian origins. As apologists are merely spin doctors for a theological party line, their aloofness to the dying-and-rising-god mytheme is scarcely surprising and one is hard-pressed to take their disdain seriously, any more than the ancient attempts of Justin Martyr and Firmicus Maternus to discount such parallels as Satanic counterfeits. But in recent days, the apologists' agenda has received significant support from an unexpected quarter. Jonathan Z. Smith, in his Encyclopedia of Religion article on "Dying and Rising Gods,"19 seeks to explode the whole notion, dismissing it as an artificial composite of elements taken out of context from the religions in question. Since Smith, an excellent scholar, is rightly taken quite seriously, I believe a slight digression is called for: In my view, Smith's criticisms are unjustified, and to ignore the importance of the dying-and-rising-god mytheme in Christian origins is to shortcircuit our understanding of that subject.

Smith's first error is his failure, as I see it, to grasp the point of an "ideal type," a basic textbook definition/description of some phenomenon under study. As Bryan Wilson has reminded us, an ideal type is not some box into which all the various instances of the phenomenon must fit snugly. If that were the nature of an ideal type, the scholar would find himself either trimming away the rough edges of particular phenomena (in this case redeemer myths) or building his box big enough and shapeless enough to fit everything in. And since this would serve no descriptive purpose, Smith, finding that there are significant differences between the so-called dying-and-rising-god myths, abandons any hope of a genuine dying-and-rising-god paradigm. For Smith, the various myths of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, and the others, do not all conform to type exactly; thus they are not sufficiently alike to fit into the same box-so let's throw out the box! Without everything in common, Smith sees nothing in common. But an ideal type, as Wilson points out, is rather a yardstick abstracted from the admittedly diverse phenomena; it represents a general family resemblance without demanding or implying any absolute or comprehensive conformity. Indeed the very lack of conformity to the type by a particular myth would serve as a promising point of departure for understanding its special uniqueness.

Smith's error is the same as that of Raymond Brown, who dismisses the truckload of comparative religion parallels to the miraculous birth of Jesus:` This one is not strictly speaking a virgin birth, since the god fathered the child on a married woman. That one involved physical intercourse with the deity, not overshadowing by the Holy Spirit, and so on. But, we have to ask, how close does a parallel have to be to count as a parallel? Does the divine mother have to be named Mary? Does the divine child have to be named Jesus? Here is the old "difference without a distinction" fallacy.

Smith tries to pry apart the dying-and-rising-god mytheme into disparate components: disappearing and reappearing deities on the one hand and dying (but not rising) gods on the other. Adonis, he says, is never said to have died, but only to have undertaken a bicoastal lifestyle, splitting the year cohabiting with two romantic rivals for his attention, Aphrodite and Persephone. To winter with the latter, he must head south to Hades. And then, with the flowers, he pops up again in the spring, headed for Aphrodite's place. This makes him not dead? But what does it mean to say someone has descended to the netherworld of the dead? Enkidu did not deem it quite so casual a commute "to Hell and back" as Smith apparently does: "He led me away to the palace of Irkalla, the Queen of Darkness, to the house from which none who enters ever returns, down the road from which there is no coming back." One goes there in the embrace of the Grim Reaper. Similarly, Pausa- nias: "About the death of Theseus there are many inconsistent legends, for example that he was tied up in the Netherworld until Herakles should bring him back to life" (Guide to Greece, I:17:4).21 Thus, to abide in the netherworld was to be dead, even if not for good.

Aleyan Baal's supposed death and resurrection does not pass muster for Smith because the saga's text has big holes in it "at the crucial points." Mischievous scholars may like to fill them in with the model of the resurrected god, but Smith calls it an argument from silence. Is it? Even on Smith's own reading, the text actually does say that "Baal is reported to have died" after descending to the netherworld. There he is indeed said to be "as dead." Anath recovers his corpse and buries it. Later El sees in a dream that Baal yet lives. After another gap Baal is depicted in battle. What is missing here? Smith seems to infer that in the missing lines it would have been discovered that Baal was the victim of a premature burial, that the report of his demise, like that of Mark Twain, was premature. But does Smith have any particular reason to be sure about this? And even if his guess were to prove correct, it seems evident that a premature burial and a rescue via disinterment is simply a variant version of the death and resurrection, not an alternative to it.

Baal's variant self in Syria, Hadad, is even less prone to dying according to Smith, since Hadad is said merely to sink into a bog for seven years. He is only sick, but when he reemerges, languishing nature renews itself. Smith says, "There is no suggestion of death and resurrection." Nor any hint of ritual reenactment of the myth. What about Zech. 12:11, where we read of inconsolable ritual mourning for Hadad-Rimmon? What are they mourning? And even if one were to deny that seven years of submersion in a bog is as good as death, the difference would be, again, only a slight variation in a natural range for a widespread mytheme. We see the same variation among the Nag Hammadi and other Gnostic texts as to whether the Redeemer took on flesh. Some deny he did. Others say he did, but it was a condescension, and the savior stripped off the flesh shroud as soon as he got the chance. Some ascribe to Jesus a fleshly body but an apparent death. Others have a real death, but only of the human Jesus, once the Christ-Spirit has fled back to heaven. They are all equivalent versions, simply reflecting different choices from the menu of options. The differences are within a definite range along the paradigmatic axis, and the story is the same along the syntagmic axis.

Osiris, Smith admits, is said even in very ancient records to have been dismembered, reassembled by Isis, and rejuvenated (physically; he fathered Horus on Isis). But Smith seizes upon the fact that Osiris reigned henceforth in the realm of the dead. This is not a return to earthly life, hence no resurrection. But then we might as well deny that Jesus is depicted as dying and rising since he reigns henceforth at the right hand of God in Heaven as the judge of the dead, like Osiris. And the long constancy of the mytheme of Osiris' resurrection, from the ancient pyramid inscriptions to the Hellenistic period, ought to make us wary of Smith's constant suspicion that later, Christian-era mentions of the resurrections of Attis, Adonis, and the rest must be late innovations. In the case of Osiris, which we can trace, it is certainly no innovation. Why must Smith assume it was a late addition to the myth in the other cases? It is a fundamental methodological error to assume that a phenomenon must have arisen just shortly before its earliest attestation.

What about Tammuz, an ancient god so familiar to ancient Israelites that his name graces one month of the Jewish calendar to this day? Smith describes how scholars early speculated from the fragmentary Tammuz texts that he had been depicted as dying and rising, though the evidence was touch-and-go. Subsequently more textual evidence turned up, vindicating their theories. Shouldn't this tell Smith something? Namely that the dyingand-rising-god paradigm may not be a bad heuristic device to interpret fragmentary texts? But he quibbles even here. Though the new material makes unambiguously clear that Tammuz's lover Ishtar herself also dies and rises, Smith passes this by virtually without remark and picks the nit that Tammuz is "baaled out" of death for only half the year while someone else takes his place. Death, Smith remarks, is inexorable: The most Tammuz could get is a six-month furlough. The case is parallel to that of Adonis, but there Smith denied a half-year return from Hades meant a real death, whereas with Tammuz he says it means no real resurrection.

Why does Smith adopt the program of Christian apologists? I suspect it is part of his root-and-branch campaign to undo the theories of his great predecessor James Frazer. In any case, the viability of the dying-and-rising-god mytheme seems to me unimpeached. There was such a myth making the rounds. It is extant in several versions as we have seen. But did it exist before Jesus and Christianity? If not, may the borrowing have been in the opposite direction? Might the Hellenistic Mystery Religions have borrowed the resurrection doctrine from increasingly successful Christianity, as a top-rated sitcom swiftly garners imitations? Smith zeroes in on Attis, where the explicit mentions of his resurrection date from the Christian era (though they are not there mentioned as innovations). But as Vermaseren22 has shown, we do in fact possess a pre-Christian pottery depiction of Attis dancing, the traditional posture of his resurrection. But it seems to me that the definitive proof that the resurrection of the Mystery Religion saviors preceded Christianity is the fact that ancient Christian apologists did not deny it! Only so would they have reached into left field for the desperate argument that Satan foreknew the resurrection of Jesus and counterfeited it in advance, so as to prejudice pagans against Christianity as a mere imitative also-ran, which is just what they thought of it.

Richard Reitzenstein and Wilhelm Bousset were two scholars who did manage to grasp the relevance of these ancient faiths for the study of early Christianity. Their conclusion was a simple and seemingly inevitable one: Once it reached Hellenistic soil, the story of Jesus attracted to itself a number of mythic motifs that were common to the syncretic religious mood of the era. Indeed, as people familiar with the other Mystery Religions came to embrace the Christian savior, it would have been practically impossible for them not to have clothed him in all the accouterments of his fellow Kyrioi. If Jesus was a savior, then he was ipso facto to be considered a dying and rising god whose immortality one might share through participatory sacraments.

And we need not only think of the situation as Reitzenstein did, still picturing a process of individuals breaking with their old religion and accepting a new one instead. Since the Mystery Religions made no exclusive claim and begrudged no member his simultaneous membership in a parallel Mystery, we must assume that many early Christian "converts" had no thought of abandoning Mithras, Isis, Attis, or Dionysus. Why should they? Hippolytus, in his Refutation of All Heresies (V, 7:3-10:2), preserves the Naasene exegesis of a stillearlier Hymn to Attis, in which we hear that the Savior Jesus is the same as Adam or Attis or Adonis. (Adam and Eve had long been identified with Attis and Cybele, presupposing the ancient version of the Eden myth echoed in the Nag Hammadi texts, that Eve was a goddess and created Adam.)

What was the danger Paul perceived in the case that one "weaker in faith" should observe another Christian partaking in an idol's feast (1 Cor. chapter 8)? The "weaker brother," Paul implies, is "weak" precisely for not grasping that Christ is the only real Kyrios. He would take the example of a Christian eating from the communion table of Serapis as confirming his assumption that a Christian might be a Mithraist or anything else he had the fees to pay for. What Paul apparently faced in Corinth in these instances was the practice by Christians of what Max Muller called "kathenotheism," the worship of several gods, but one at a time. With the gates thus open, we would be amazed not to find a free flow of older "pagan" myths and rituals into Christianity. For instance, it is only under the influence of Dionysus (whether in Greece or even in Palestine) that Jesus bequeaths his devotees a sacrament of his body, the body of grain, and his blood, the blood of the grape (Mark 14:22-25). Only so is he the True Vine giving vitality to his branches (John 15:1-6), does he turn water into wine (John 2:1-10). As Jesus the Corn King, his winnowing fan is in his hand (Matt. 3:12), he is slain while the wood is still green (Luke 23:31), yields up his life like the planted seed (John 12:24), and is buried in a garden (John 19:41).

And we need not think that these Corinthians had fallen from some purer version of Christian orthodox truth. No, what we are seeing in the Pauline warnings against syncretic kathenotheism is the beginning of the process to exclude the other faiths as rivals and counterfeits of Christianity. But the barn door was, as usual, shut after the horse had got out (or rather, in!).

A Christ religion modeled after a Mystery cult is a Mystery cult, a Christ cult worthy of the name. This is what we expect Burton Mack to be talking about when he talks about Christ cults. As we have seen, he usually has in mind what I have called the Jesus martyr cult. But I do see a connection. We have to presuppose some sort of previous Jesus or Christ religion already in operation before elements of other religions could become mixed with it. And in Europe and Asia, the best candidate would probably be the Jesus martyr cult. It was already based on Jesus' suffering and death. There is, however, no reason to think the Jesus martyr cult involved any sort of belief in the resurrection of Jesus, except maybe in the future, at the general resurrection.

In fact, the resurrection idea does not seem to fit the martyrdom idea. What kind of a martyrdom is it when someone dies only for a couple of days? This is not exactly the supreme sacrifice. Thus the resurrection has its natural home in a different context, that of the myth of the dying and rising god who represents the temporary death of nature, soon to be revoked. Accordingly, in this context, the designation "Christ" probably denoted "the Risen One," reflecting Isis' anointing of the dead Osiris, which restored him to life. It is this anointing which we glimpse behind Mark 16:1 and 14:8.

The priority of the Jesus martyr cult to the Kyrios Christos cult means, in sociological terms, that the first Jesus adherents were the God-fearers on the margins of the synagogue, and that those attracted from the ranks of the Mysteries represented a second wave, as the Gentilized Jesus-Judaism became available to a broader section of the populace than would ever have given the time of day to synagogue Judaism. The Mystery cultists became God-fearers on the margin of the Jesus martyr cult, just as the Jesus martyr cultists had once been positioned at the border of Judaism. Then the Mystery cultists joined, reasoning that they weren't losing an old savior, they were only adding a new one. Jesus Adonis, Jesus Dionysus was the result.

What would the Gnostic Christ cult have made of the Kyrios Christos cult? The point of the two systems was not really the same, but the Gnostic Christ cult and the Kyrios Christos cult could no doubt coexist peacefully. Both envisioned "Christ" as a divine being appearing on earth for the salvation of mortals. Both understood salvation in terms of divinization. Both enjoyed secret rites. And both may easily have practiced baptism, the Gnostics seeing it as a spiritual resurrection in much the same terms as the Kyrios Christians.

NOTES

1. Sam K. Williams, Jesus' Death as Saving Event: The Background and Origin of a Concept. Harvard Dissertations in Religion 2 (Missoula: Scholars Press, 1975).

2. Walter Schmithals, The Office of Apostle in the Early Church, trans. John E. Steely (New York: Abingdon Press, 1969).

3. John Knox, Marcion and the New Testament: An Essay in the Early History of the Canon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942).

4. Werner Kramer, Christ, Lord, Son of God, trans. Brian Hardy. Studies in Biblical Theology no. 50 (Naperville: Alec R. Allenson, 1966), pp. 212-13.

5. Lloyd Gaston, Paul and the Torah (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987), p. 33.

6. Louis Massignon, Hallaj: Mystic and Martyr, trans. Herbert Mason. Mythos series. Bollingen Series 48. Abridged ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); for a shorter account of Al-Hallaj and his martyrdom, see Robert Payne, The Holy Sword: The Story of Islam from Muhammad to the Present (New York: Collier Books, 1962), pp. 199-221.

7. Har Dayal, The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1978); Leslie S. Kawamura, ed., The Bodhisattva Doctrine in Buddhism. Papers presented at the Calgary Buddhism Conference, September 18-21, 1978 (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1981).

8. Theissen, Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity, pp. 27-29.

9. Arthur Drews, The Christ Myth, trans. C. Delisle Burns. 3rd ed. Westminster College-Oxford: Classics in the Study of Religion (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1998), pp. 51-63.

10. M. Couchoud, "The Historicity of Jesus: A Reply to Alfred Loisy," The Hibbert Journal 37, no. 2 (1938): 193-214.

11. Marvin H. Pope, Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible. 7C (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), pp. 145-51.

12. Roland Guy Bonnel and Vincent Arieh Tobin, "Christ and Osiris: A Comparative Study," in Pharaonic Egypt: The Bible and Christianity, ed. Sarah Israelis-Groll (Jerusalem: Avigness Press, 1985), pp. 1-29.

13. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), pp. 68-115.

14. Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans. Monika B. Vizedom and Gabrielle L. Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

15. David Ulansey, The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries: Cosmology and Salvation in the Ancient World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

16. Firmicus Maternus, The Error of the Pagan Religions, trans. Clarence A. Forbes. Ancient Christian Writers no. 37 (New York: Paulist Press, 1970), p. 93.

17. Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos: A History of the Belief in Christ from the Beginnings of Christianity to Irenaeus, trans. John E. Steely (New York: Abingdon Press, 1970), pp. 119-52.

18. John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion: A Study in Survivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), p. 573.

19. Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods," in The Encyclopedia of Religion., vol. 4, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company: 1987) pp. 521-27.

20. Raymond E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah: A Commentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke (Garden City: Doubleday, 1977), p. 523.

21. Pausarias, Guide to Greece, trans. Peter Levi (Baltimore: Penguin Classics, 1971), p. 48.

22. Maarten J. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult, trans. A. M. H. Lemmers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), pp. 119-24.

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