Jesus Christ copy cat savior ? Dionysian Mysteries

Dionysian Mysteries

1) Dionysus was not born of a virgin.

The Greek god Dionysus is said to be the god of wine, actually he began as a fertility god in Phrygia and in Macedonia, Thrace, and other outlying regions. The origin of the cult is probably in Asia. (Charles Seltman, The Twelve Olympians, New York: Thomas Y. Corwell Company, 1960.)

"In the myths about Dionysus the most important is the tale of his birth. His mother was Semele...in fact she was an earth goddess...the usual form of the story is that Zeus loved Semele and consorted with her...." (Ibid, 171). Hera, of course was jealous and tricked the girl into asking Zeus to show himself to her in his true from. She was fried by his thunderbolts which cannot help but constantly shoot from his true form, but Zeus was able to save the child that she carried. I can find no authority who says that Dionysus mother was a virgin. But this is one of the tricky ones, she may have known no mortal man, but she was not the product of virginal conception. She was also not mortal herself, so the idea of her having a Virginal conception is out of the question, because whatever she did would be supernatural anyway, and we don't' know what gods she dated before Zeus.

2) Dionysus not laid in a manger.

There is one very tiny aspect of a manger-like thing in the Dionysus myth, and it is not very central. A flower basket which could double as a crib was used as one of many fertility symbols. In fact there is no real manger connection at all. Near the end of the 5th century BC the Greek Euripides wrote a play, The Bacchae, one of the major sources of Dionysian mysteries. I've seen skeptics claim that he was laid in a manger at his birth. But he was not, he was laid in Zeus's thigh until he came to term and there is no manger scene at all (Stelman,171).

3) Title "Son of god" Other similarities.

Euripides does refer to Dionysus as "son of god." But that is just profanatory. In mythology gods were like people, they were born, they had parents, and they lived in families. Why? Probably because people do. The phrase "son of god" and the general concept may be "influenced" by paganism in a general sense (see above) but the specific notion of Jesus' incarnation is totally different. Jesus is the incarnation of the divine logos, the second person of the Trinity, God incarnate. He is the incarnation of the rational that created the universe; not a mythological demigod, the offspring of a god and mortal. Besides that, the term "Son of God" in Judaism of Jesus' day was understood as a Euphemism for the Messiah.

4) Dionysus Dying and Rising.

In some stories Dionysus is torn apart by the Titans. In other stories it is Hera's orders that he be torn apart. But he was torn apart, not crucified. Moreover, since he was not an historical figure he was not a flesh and blood man. He did not really die, and his resurrection is not really bodily. His dying and rising are an echo of the death of plant life and fertility in winter and his rising is the rising of the plants in the Spring. "He was the vine which is always pruned as nothing else which bears its fruit; every branch cut away, only the bare stock left, through the winter a dead thing to look at...he was always brought back to life..." (Edith Hamilton, Mythology, Mentor edition, original copywriter 1940, pp. 61-62). Hamilton says that his rising did offer hope of new life, the immortality of the soul. "He was the assurance that death does not end all."

But this is very different from the historical claims of Christ's resurrection. Dionysus did not have an historical existence, no empty tomb, no flesh and blood body seen and felt by witnesses afterward. He is merely the archetype suggested by seasons, the human wish for a rejuvenation and the circularity of nature.

"In Christianity everything is made to turn on a dated experience of a historical Person; it can be seen from I Cor. XV. 3 that the statement of the story early assumed the form of a statement in a Creed. There is nothing in the parallel cases which points to any attempt to give such a basis of historical evidence to belief" A. D. Nock (Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background", 1964, p. 107).

5) Not a savior

Moreover, the followers of Dionysus did not gain their sense of eternal life from Dionysus himself, nor form his death, but from their own drunken ecstasy in the "Béchamel." (Yamauchi, in "Easter: Myth, Hallucination or History," and c.f. M. Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries of the Hellenistic and Roman Age, 1957).

His death was not an atonement and his resurrection has not even the semblance of an historical, much less history making aspect. But perhaps it was a dress rehearsal.

6) Moreover, he was not crucified as Till claims but instead was torn apart by the Titans.