I’m reading The HarperCollins Study Bible, Introduction, pages liii-lv, titled The Greco-Roman Context of the New Testament written by David E Aune. I find myself drawn to a rabbit hole here and am going to dive in and try to learn a little. I learned a bunch from responses to my last post and thought I’d try to crowd source a jump start to my research. I don’t know what I don’t know.The thought above (the title) occurred to me and made me want to go down this rabbit hole:
Aune tells us:
Throughout the first century CE, Greek religion and culture dominated the eastern Mediterranean… Three main types of voluntary Greek private associations existed, each of which had a greater or lesser cultic component: professional corporations or guilds…, funerary societies…, and religious or cult societies, centering on the worship of a deity. This last category includes “mystery religions,” a general term for a variety of ancient private cults that shared several features.
I know ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t believe in a blissful afterlife but it wasn’t until I read that that I realized the idea of salvation and heaven as the carrot, and hell as the stick evolved over time. A little more because I am having a hard time finding this text to link:
The term “mystery” is related to a Greek term meaning “initiate” and “mystery” itself means “ritual of initiation,” referring to the secret initiation rites at the center of such cults. …the period of greatest popularity appears to have been the first through the third centuries CE. …Initiates who experienced the central mystery ritual became convinced that they would enjoy soteria (“Salvation”), health and prosperity in this life as well as a blissful afterlife.
So this is all happening with great popularity in the same place and time of Jesus and later that century, Paul. These cults are popular as Christianity is formed into a religion. Little is known about details on the cults, because, well, they were secret. Seems like early Christianity may have united these cults by adopting some of their fundamentals? I’ve found this so far but I’m just diving in and it occurred to me that one of you might light a path for me. Anybody been down this road already?
Moses is believed by historians (including biblical scholars) to have never existed. There was no Moses. There was no Abraham. Most of those characters were fictional, and those that were not were fictionalized. There was no great nation of Israel. There were some small nations that occasionally were united under someone and then fell apart after he died, and they were conquered and occupied several times. They were polytheistic and then henotheistic, with Ashera worship occurring into 2CE as I recall.
I’m sorry - I just have a pet peeve against people who espouse that a character of legend actually existed because his legends (and it’s usually a he) sound a bit like the legends around another legendary character.
The “scholarly position” on Moses exclusively engages with the Biblical account and does not engage with the Greek and Egyptian accounts, which depict multiple groups of people including pre-Greek ancestors as having been involved.
So the rejection of the narrative is the rejection of the claim that the Israelites came out of Egypt, for which I agree there’s no evidence and in fact counter-evidence. But they aren’t engaged with the consideration that the narrative was one absorbed into Israelite mythological history from elsewhere.
The tide is starting to shift though. For example, Yigael Yadin’s theory Dan were the Denyen sea peoples was a fringe theory, but in just the past few years we now have the lead scholar excavating Tel Dan, David Ilan, talking about the strange find of Aegean style pottery made with local clay in the site in the early Iron Age, and how he feels the evidence lends itself to strengthening Yadin’s theory.
DNA confirming imported bees to Tel Rehov, the only evidence of actual bee honey in the theoretical “land of milk and honey” is less than a decade old. That apiary also has one of the earliest if not the earliest “four horned shrine” in the region, a feature which later finds itself into Israelite shrines and directions on making shrines that way into the Bible. But it’s on a shrine to an unknown bee goddess where they were burning honey (something later explicitly prohibited in Leviticus). That apiary is burnt down right around the time period matching when Asa was reported to have deposed his grandmother the Queen Mother.
Not only were they worshipping Asherah who was considered Yahweh’s wife during some of that time, but you also have the record of a combined Yahweh/Anat worship in Elephantine. And yes, they were polytheistic for quite a while, with about 30% of Israelite theomorphic names being based on Baal for centuries before the monotheistic reforms.
Which is part of why it’s so strange that scholarship pretty much exclusively debates the Exodus narrative as recorded in the Bible. For which I agree there’s no evidence for the majority of it. But the scholars in antiquity were nearly unanimous about a very different version of it, with the earliest attestation also claiming that the Biblical record had been altered - for which there’s certainly evidence of alterations or composition post-golden calf reform given the parallel “get rid of old laws and golden calf and bring new laws” in the Moses story to Josiah’s alleged reforms (themselves anachronistic given the letters between Elephantine and Jerusalem over a century later).
Don’t mistake what I’m saying.
I’m not saying Israel was involved in any of this. But there’s evidence that Israelites and sea peoples were cohabitating in the early Iron Age, and the same Babylonians that conquered Judea conquered the Que/Denyen of Adana, who in multiple Luwian/Phonecian bilinguals attributed their rulers to a House of Mopsus.
I’m saying sometime in between the early cohabitation and the return from the Babylonian captivity that the Israelites appropriated a narrative pertaining to a different peoples and reworked it into the version we have in the Bible today, with the additions of Aaron and the priestly line, the ethnocentrism in contrast to other accounts, the “god of my father” as opposed to the maternal line of prophetic inheritance attributed to Mopsus, etc.
I actually suspect that this was a cultural history inherited along maternal lines imported by way of one of the various foreign marriages of Israel to a gebirah (“great lady”), likely Jeroboam given the story of him marrying the sister in law of the first Lybian Pharoh present in the LXX which is removed from the Bible by the time of the Masoretic text and the alleged reforms of Josiah primarily targeting Jeroboam’s legacy. Given those reforms allegedly involved hiding away the relics of the Mosaic period while also introducing the Passover narrative, that’s a pretty good candidate for when an Exodus tale was being reworked into the form we have today.
Biblical scholarship is much less encouraging than you might think it you haven’t really dug into it, and one can’t make an effective case against something one hasn’t even considered.
Feel free to look at the thread starting here in Reddit’s /r/AcademicBiblical if you want more of the finer details.