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Please be seated. Our Thomas White Curry lecturer is Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson, the R.W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Candler School of Theology, Emory University.

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He earned a B.A. degree from Notre Dame and the M.A. from Indiana University. the M.Div.

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from the St. Meinrod School of Theology, and the Ph.D. from Yale University. He has had a distinguished career as teacher, having received numerous awards at Indiana, Yale, and Emory for his expertise.

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Known widely for his engaging communication skills as speaker and author, Dr. Johnson is a distinguished member of and active participant in numerous fora for the professional discussion of the Bible and its historical and theological contexts. As friends are wont to do, I did look on Google just to see what was there on colleague Johnson and found that there were over 2 million entries.

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Hard to believe, but it's true. Those personally acquainted with his prolific literary production of more than 20 books and several hundred articles and reviews marvel at his tenacity in rethinking and restating previous work on topics resembling, in fact, a person beholding shafts of light refracted in a prism while entertaining new possibilities and lines of questioning with his probing, restless spirit. Among his wide-read monographs are his studies on Luke-Acts, his 2004 publication of collected essays on the letter of James, entitled Brother of Jesus, Friend of God, this publication being prompted in part

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by the recent discovery of the so-called James Ossuary. A popular textbook on the writings of the New Testament is also one to his credit, and a volume on the historical Jesus, a book on the importance of creeds, a study on Paul and Romans, a book on religious experience, another on teaching religion to undergraduates, and one on decision-making in the church, another on new Gnosticism, and on and on, his probing spirit works. Professor Johnson is a keen observer of life, not content to remain within the confines of the New Testament Guild.

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His conversation partners are many and diverse. He is, moreover, a man of the Church, raised a Roman Catholic with five older siblings, He entered seminary at age 13, became a Benedictine monk for nine years, and was an ordained priest for three years. Now a married layman, who together with his wife Judy, shares all the challenges of parenting children and grandchildren.

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He continues to engage ecclesiastical matters critical for Roman Catholics and Protestants alike. Among them, the relevance of pistis formulae or creeds for contemporary Christians, issues and problems connected with the questions of the church's prophetic role in the debates about human sexuality, and relatedly, the needful yet troubling quest for the recovery of a genuinely Christian spirituality, and then also the important dialogue between Jews and Christians on matters of faith and identity. Since the days of his doctoral dissertation at Yale in the 70s, a study on the literary function of possessions in Luke-Acts, Professor Johnson has exhibited keen interest in history of tradition analysis and the milieu of primitive Christianity.

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This study laid the groundwork for an ongoing cultivation of the historical origins of the faith and Dr. Johnson's place of prominence in the long-standing quest to find adequate conceptual categories and modes of discourse with which to think and talk about God's relationship to history. From the programmatic beginnings of the likes of Lessing and Reimarus, and the dramatic portrayal thereafter in Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus, to the history of religion, school of multiple reincarnations, and subsequent new quests of the present,

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the debate goes on. The literary foci for the development of this interest in history and theology are his many books, commentaries, and articles on the synopsis. tradition, especially Luke-Acts, the pastoral epistles, and his studies in James. For us, however, the focus of the hour is the author in person, as he speaks to us in his first lecture on the topic, Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity: An Old Conversation Rejoined.

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Thank you, Professor Johnson, and welcome to Austin Seminary. Thank you, John, for those generous remarks of introduction. Thanks to Austin for having me as the Curry lecturer. I'm very honored.

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And for giving me such wonderful hospitality as I've visited Austin for the first time and like it very much. These lectures develop an argument that are sort of slow developing and the punchline comes in the third lecture. I hate to tell you that, but you're going to have to just, and I'm going to appeal to your well-cultivated Presbyterian sense of delayed gratification. So the topic is paganism and Christianity, Greco-Roman religion and Christianity.

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And let me give you just two reasons from this top, though, so that you have some motivation for hanging around about why this subject is of particular importance to us today. And the first reason is that Gentile religions are not of the past, they are of the present. That this is a world which is deeply pluralistic, and pluralism comes to roost in our neighborhoods and in our children's schools. And so we need to know how to converse with and about.

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not only other monotheistic traditions like Judaism and Islam, but even non-theistic religions. And so the question of Christianity's relationship to Gentile religion is not simply a matter of the past, but of the present. The second reason is that by studying others, we often come to understand ourselves better. And by understanding what I'm going to call the ways of being religious among Gentiles,

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We are going to see also ways of being religious in early Christianity that I am going to suggest apply also to us. The project, then, is 1 not entirely dissimilar to the one Cynthia, I think, is going to be developing, and that is a broader and more ecumenical vision of Christianity. Now the question of how Greco-Roman religion is related to Christianity is not a new one. It was debated already by Christianity's first critics and first Christian apologists.

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And when Origen responded to Celsus, he noted that the apparent resemblance between Christian miracles and pagan wonders was deceptive because it was God at work in one and it was demons at work in the other. It's A delicate distinction. for it backhandedly acknowledges that something was at work in those pagan shrines that Christianity found necessary to deny or to explain. Christian apologists, like Tatian, regularly distanced themselves from pagan idolatry, even as they laid claim to the Greek philosophical tradition, especially in the form of Platonism.

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But the apologists, with their casual demonization, of Gentile religion. And that demonization continued within the Christian tradition up to our own day in a great deal of literature, and generated, of course, a great deal of missionary endeavor on the premise that those who were engaged in polytheistic religions were captive to demons. That continued.

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And the apologists were heirs to the New Testament, and the New Testament was heir to Jewish polemic against Gentiles. So already in Psalm 95, the Septuagint translates the Hebrew verse, the gods of the nations are idols to the gods of the nations are demons. And so what we find then is that Christianity aligns itself with Judaism over against paganism.

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And the polemic of Jesus' followers against their pagan neighbors was far more inflammatory than that directed against their fellow Jews. In Matthew's Gospel, Jesus derides the generosity of the Gentiles as self-serving, their concerns as materialistic, and their prayer as babbling. In Romans 1.18-32, Paul calls Gentile worship of the gods a perversion caused by the willful refusal to acknowledge the claim of the true God and the cause of a darkening of the mind that leads to every sort of moral depravity.

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In Galatians, Paul says that Gentiles are enslaved to the elemental powers of the universe and that they did not know God, but are slaves of beings that are not gods. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that sharing meals at the shrines of Gentile deities is sharing table with, yes, demons. Peter's language is equally vigorous. He dismisses the Gentile past.

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of his readers as the passions of ignorance, and tells them, let the time that has passed suffice for doing what the Gentiles like to do, living in licentiousness, passions, drunkenness, revels, carousing, lawless idolatry, wild profligacy. Now, given such a radical and emphatic repudiation of paganism within Christianity's normative texts, and the continuation of that repudiation with Christianity's apologetic tradition, God on one side, demons on the other, it is not surprising that the efforts of Enlightenment scholars, whose knowledge of the classical world was considerably more developed than his knowledge of Judaism, was to inquire once more into the possible antecedents of or influences on Christianity. And the debate became fractious, especially when the question was consistently pressed

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in terms of causality. What Greco-Roman practices or ideas anticipated or even created Christianity? Is Christianity derived from or at least explicable on the basis of Gentile mystery religions? For those who, like the deists, disliked Christianity's pretenses to absolute uniqueness, it was a pleasure to reduce everything possible to a pre-existent pattern.

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The death and resurrection of Jesus was surely just another version of the myths concerning Attis or Osiris. The myth of God becoming man made more sense within the framework of Ovid's metamorphosis than it did within the world of Torah. The cosmic battle between light and darkness certainly resembled Persian gnosis more than it did Pharisaic piety. In response, those who considered the truth of Christianity dependent upon its absolute uniqueness sought to construct a cordon sanitaire between Christianity and the culture within which it originated.

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Such defenders of Christianity's uniqueness sought a pure gospel in the teachings of Jesus or in the theology of the authentic Paul. that enabled them to claim a divine revelation that could be contrasted, and here's the tricky part, both to Judaism and Hellenism. The isolation of such a pure essence was all the more important, I am embarrassed to report, for Protestant apologists. since it enabled them to identify the development of Christianity in the direction of law and institution as a recrudescence of Judaism, on one side, and the appearance of sacrament and mystery as the infiltration of paganism, on the other side.

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See Alexander Hislop and all his successors. so that the development of Christianity into Catholicism could legitimately be termed a corruption or a decline. Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago has brilliantly identified the strain of what he terms pagano-papism in Protestant studies of Christian origins.

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So where you see the pope, you see a pagan, just to put the equation as simply as possible. In such a contentious atmosphere, when claims of uniqueness are the basis of the claims to truth, dispassionate judgments are rarely to be expected. Debate was like that of lawyers arguing over fingerprint or DNA identification.

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These 3 points of similarity prove identity, says one side. Oh no, says the other. These 3 points of dissimilarity cancel the significance of any resemblance at all. But theological tendentiousness was only one of the factors affecting earlier conversations concerning Greco-Roman religion and Christianity.

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Severely limited theoretical positions and even more severely limited knowledge also made dispassionate analysis difficult. The way to reopening that old conversation, indeed, results from a combination of new knowledge and new categories or perceptions that enable a more fruitful way of posing the conversation. We can best appreciate the present possibility of a new conversation by reminding ourselves of the limitations under which earlier scholars labored.

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We must remember, first, that all those earlier interested in the subject, whether as critics or as apologists, were themselves deeply shaped by Christianity. even if they identified themselves as classicists or as philologists rather than as theologians. And therefore they tended to read the ancient evidence in terms of their own ideal vision of Christianity. So Christianity supplied the categories of analysis, and nobody was aware

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of this. And for Enlightenment era Protestants in particular, what was important about religion was its ideas, especially as stated in theological propositions, or its feelings, especially as experienced by sensitive individuals. Comparisons with paganism therefore would involve mainly doctrines and myths as located in literature. Because they did not appreciate the role of ritual within their own Christianity,

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Neither did they have much interest in ancient ritual. The history of religions school, which struggled mightily against just such presuppositions, was only partially successful in its efforts. The classic works by Reitzenstein and Busset are devoted much more to the religious significance of religious words than to any understanding of religious practices, because people simply didn't think in terms of practices.

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They thought in terms of words and of propositions. From both sides, then, the earlier conversations were constrained theoretically. Ancient religion was seen through the lens of Christianity, and Christianity itself was defined in terms of ideas rather than practices. Straightforward academic biases also limited the range of the earlier conversation.

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Historians of antiquity were mainly concerned with, until very recently, with what was considered historically significant, namely great men involved in politics and war. Religion was generally either the cause or the casualty of real history, being the realm of the stable, the domestic, and often of the female. and therefore escaped the scan of serious historians of the Greco-Roman world. Similarly, classicists were concerned with, well, the classics of Greek and Latin literature, above all the epics and tragedies that elevated the human spirit through their grand diction and exalted vision, rather than the low comedies that degraded human ideals through their common speech and naturalistic nonsense.

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Most of the religious literature was not regarded as worth reading as literature, in direct proportion that it was religious. Jews wrote in Hebrew, for God's sakes, which has no place in a British public school curriculum. And the Greek of the New Testament, it must be said, was an unfortunate expression of that vulgar diction quite properly designated as koine or common. As for Latin, after Cicero or Seneca, perhaps, why bother?

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Philosophers, meanwhile, remain fixated on the great theories fashioned in classical Athens by Plato and Aristotle and Zeno and Epicurus. They were persuaded by the first historian of philosophy, Diogenes Laertius, that philosophy was, in fact, a matter of ideas on logic, cosmology, and ethics handed down in influential schools. The so-called popular philosophers of the early empire, those who were contemporaneous with the New Testament, seemed to them to be either only mildly interesting or perhaps even faintly embarrassing for their lack of original ideas and their intense moralism.

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They represented little more than a boring interval before the resumption of the great Platonic symphony in Plotinus. The combination, then, of theological bias and academic bias meant that the conversation concerning Greco-Roman religion and Christianity would move along the same old grooves it had always followed, for no new data could find its way into the conversation. The understanding of what religion meant and the presuppositions about what was important for the study of antiquity unconsciously colluded in keeping the focus of the subject too narrow.

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for any profitable re-examination. So how can we prepare for a new conversation, or how are we prepared for a new conversation? The news is going to get steadily better from this point on. A new conversation concerning Greco-Roman religion and early Christianity has been made possible by the development of new perspectives in the study of religion,

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and by the acquisition of unprecedented new knowledge concerning the Mediterranean world for the 200 years before and after the birth of Christianity. Each affects the other. Changed theoretical perspectives enable new things to be seen, and the discovery of new things, in turn, changes perspectives. As a result,

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A typical college sophomore majoring in religion at the beginning of the 21st century has at his or her fingertips, quite literally in terms of internet access, more data concerning antiquity than even the greatest of historians, say an Adolph Harnack, had at the beginning of the 20th century. A college sophomore has more real knowledge available at the beginning of the 21st century than even the greatest of scholars had at the beginning of the 20th century. The new perspectives on the study of religion have resulted from the happy convergence of three factors.

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The first is that other than Christian voices have joined the conversation about the nature and function of religion, eliminating the assumption that Christianity and authentic religion are synonymous. The second is that comparison to other religious traditions has enabled Christianity for the first time to be seen by itself and by others as one religious system among others. The inevitable result of comparison is that Christianity is seen more cleanly and clearly. than when viewed solely in terms of attack and defense by competing rivals within the tradition.

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The third factor is that additional voices and additional religious traditions have gathered in the context of the university religious studies department. enabling an even richer set of conversations across disciplinary lines, including anthropology, sociology, psychology, and literature. Religion is no longer the sole property of classics, philosophy, and theology. And that's good news for the understanding of religion.

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The study of religion from comparative anthropological and phenomenological perspectives provides a fresh view of ancient materials. Scholars, for example, now understand religion as a constructive human activity in which experiences and convictions concerning ultimate power both depend on and reshape people's social structures and symbolic worlds, enabling a way of life based on and seeking to mediate such experiences and convictions. Now, it may be helpful, just for the sake of swallowing that, to break down that lengthy statement into a couple of bite-sized chunks. First, religions involve experiences and convictions concerning ultimate power.

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I am fond of Joachim Vock's fine definition or description of religious experience. It is, he says, a response to what is perceived as ultimate, involving the whole person, characterized by a peculiar intensity, and issuing inappropriate action. I'm going to break down each of those phrases, too. For those of you taking notes, each phrase in that careful definition requires further, though necessarily brief, parsing.

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Religious experience seems to the one experiencing not to be self-generated, not to be self-manipulated, but to be a response to power, not of an ordinary kind, but of an extraordinary kind. And a response that takes place not just in the mind, it's not just the question of ideas, not just in the will, as in Kant, so it's a matter of decision, or a feeling, it was Schleiermacher, or being strangely warmed, as we tend to do at Candor School of Theology. In fact, since the thermostat went out, we've all been strangely warmed, it seems to me.

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But this response involves the entire self, including the body, individual and communal. The phrase peculiar intensity points to the sense of urgency and realness associated with such an experience. It may not be loud or externally manifested, may in fact be internal and silent, may be that still small voice, but it has the quality of being the real thing compared to which other experiences are to be measured.

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The most significant elements in Vach's Description, however, may be the terms perceived to be ultimate and issues an appropriate action. The first phrase, perceived to be ultimate, points us to the inevitable hermeneutical dimension of all religious response. It is deeply subjective, or perhaps better, inter-subjective.

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And it always requires interpretation. Interpretation by no means simply follows experience, The experiencing itself involves interpretation. Perception itself depends upon the social construction of reality, which is a cognitive enterprise.

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I can see the power of the Holy Spirit at work in a certain situation because my symbolic world is one which enables Holy Spirit to be seen. Religious Experiences not only confirm symbolic worlds, to be sure, prophecy is real, incarnation is real, new things happen, crucifixion and... resurrection is real, and religious experiences happen with sufficient force to shatter and then demand a complete reconstruction of a fractured symbolic world.

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But nevertheless, always experience involves hermeneutics. But it's the final phrase, issues an appropriate action that is most significant for the actual study of religion. For religious experience, the experience of power tends to organize life around itself. And the experience of absolute power tends to organize life around itself absolutely.

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Seeking forms of mediation, the separation of what is sacred and profane in terms of time and place, the expression in cult and ritual and doctrine, forms of mediation through which safe access to power might be continued. To be religious in any culture, therefore, is not simply to think certain things, but above all to act in certain ways. So that, notice, from the way in which space and time are configured among any group of people, we can make some kinds of deductions about the central power, or the power that they consider to be central.

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Behavior, in other words, need not call itself religious in order to demonstrate religious patterns, the NCAA basketball tournament comes to mind. Since religion is not simply a matter of reciting stories or creeds, but also a matter of enacting rituals and fostering morals, furthermore, it is legitimate to pursue the religious implications of any structured form of social behavior. Spring Break and March Madness come to mind.

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Finally, recent studies have at least recognized the importance of the religious life of the non-elite. It is no longer assumed that real or authentic religion can be found only among those with fine theologies and delicate sensibilities. Religion can and often is just as powerful and real in the messily demotic confusion of what used to be dismissed as popular religion. which translated means religion not worth investigation precisely because it's popular.

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Not surprisingly, such popular religion often included the actual religious aspirations and affections and practices of half of humanity at any given moment. Women come to mind. Indeed, scholars of religion have become acutely aware of the ways in which the social construction of the academic study of religion itself base, after all, in the study of literature in dead languages, has served to construct the meaning of real religion, which translated is stuff that we can control for the purposes of analysis.

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One reason why anthropology, and especially ethnography, have helped reshape religious studies is that they offer, through oral transmission and participant observation, the chance to deal with real, living religious phenomena. and not only the literary residue of religion in texts. An example of the difference this can make is the study of glossolalia. Contemporary analysis of tongue speaking in its linguistic, anthropological, psychological, and sociological manifestations is not only valuable in its own right, it helps those of us who continue to study ancient texts to understand precisely what was at issue.

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in Corinth, when Paul both wanted to validate glossolalia and yet was deeply concerned about it. And if I can add my own participant-observer experience, I could never take with quite the same seriousness proposals concerning Gnostic movements after my own experience as a Benedictine monk with a colleague in a cell down the hall, who after the Divine Office, Matins, at night, would contentedly read the Urantia papers. Does anybody in here know what the Urantia Papers are? It's a contemporary Gnostic composition.

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And he read it as spiritual uplift after a day devoted to the thoroughly exoteric life of a Benedictine monk. It has always made sense to me that the Nag Hammadi compositions were similarly the recreational reading of the Pecomian monks who buried them. Real religion constantly breaks the boundaries. of ideology.

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These changing theoretical perspectives on religion have encouraged and been profited by a flood of new knowledge about the ancient Mediterranean world that research over the past century, indeed the past two centuries, has made available. We're all familiar with the dramatic discoveries at Wadi Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and at Nag Hammadi, and how they have reshaped our understanding of the diversity of Judaism in the 1st century and the diversity of Christianity in its early centuries. Easily as significant as these archaeological discoveries, however, though less publicized, notice because they don't touch as it is thought, as directly on early Christianity, are the astonishing accomplishments of archaeological research over the last centuries over the entire range of the ancient Mediterranean world.

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From the border city of Dura-Europos in present-day Iraq, all the way to the seaside city of Bath in present-day England, an impressive number of sites have been excavated and studied. They include cities of such obvious interest to Christian origins as Sepphoris in Galilee, a Hellenistic center within a few miles of Jesus' boycott Rome in Nazareth. Maritime Caesarea, Sardis, Ephesus, and Corinth, as well as such amazingly well-preserved centers of Roman everyday life as Herculaneum and Pompeii. Out of such digs

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have come cultural artifacts and thousands of inscriptions that fundamentally shape our sense of everyday life and social realities in the Roman Empire, giving specific and often vivid detail to our impressions of how actual people ate and drank and, yes, bathed together in public. Archaeology had also, even before the discoveries at Qumran and Nagamati, discovered thousands of papyri at sites such as that at Ochorhynchus in Egypt, scraps of writing that sometimes contained religious texts, including variant versions of the sayings of Jesus, but also testify to everyday domestic and commercial and academic and political affairs in the imperial province of Egypt. Let me briefly mention 4 examples of the impact of such studies and discoveries. First, the excavations at Dura Europos, carried out by Yale archaeologists in the 1930s, showed the striking architectural and artistic features of three religious buildings that were virtually side by side on Wall Street, facing the east in this Roman

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colony or defense city that was destroyed by the Parthians in 250 of the Common Era. A Christian house church, a Jewish synagogue, and a Mithraeum, the cult of Mithras, side by side, cheek by jawel. The discovery gives a specific sense of the social setting of a Christian community with a synagogue down the street and a Mithraeum next door. What's even more striking is that the internal architecture of these houses is remarkably alike.

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And specifically, the resemblances between the synagogue and the house church are most impressive, revealing a rich tradition of Jewish iconography in which Moses appears as a mystagogue of a mystery religion. Second, The discovery of Jewish inscriptions at Sardis, where the gorgeous and impressive synagogue at Sardis was excavated, and elsewhere throughout the diaspora, shows that women played a more active role in synagogue leadership than had previously been thought, when the only source was that famously misogynist literature written by the rabbis. When wealthy Jewish women could function as heads of synagogue, as the inscriptions say, their place was roughly equivalent to what similarly placed Gentile women occupied who served as priestesses in the imperial cults throughout Asia Minor.

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The popular opinion that Christianity would automatically have appealed to Jewish women because of its egalitarian ideals needs to be reexamined in the light of such evidence. Third, speaking of the imperial cult, inscriptions from many sites in Asia Minor indicate that the religious honor paid to the emperor and to the imperial family was not a cult imposed oppressively by Roman megalomaniacs on unwilling provinces, but rather it was a popular expression of civic boosterism. with cities of the region competing with each other for the privilege of housing the imperial cultures. Ephesus took great pride in being called twice Neochoros, the keeper of the temple of the great goddess Artemis and the keeper of the cult of the emperor.

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Fourth, inscriptions and papyri dealing with relations between sovereigns and provinces have provided a form of a letter, sometimes called the mandata principis letter, the commandments of the prince letter, that provide the closest analogy to the odd literary form that we find in Paul's letters to his delegates, Timothy and Titus. These letters support the mission of the prince's delegate by publishing the prescriptions that the sovereign wants enacted, and at the same time, They provide the populace with the standard of character and behavior in the delegate that they have a right to expect. Because of this literary form, it is no longer necessary to think of the so-called pastoral letters as an inner Christian invention due to development in early Christianity and a step toward church orders.

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Paul could have been writing to his delegates in the manner that kings have been writing to their representatives for several centuries. In short, I hope, in short, archaeology, is there sentient life out here? Is this okay?

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Archaeology, in short, has provided a set of facts on the ground that both enables and requires a fresh reading of ancient literary evidence. Now let's turn to that. Because when the Dead Sea Scrolls were uncovered, you'll recall, we had to reread all of Jewish literature with new eyes. And when Nag Hammadi was discovered, we had to read all of the early Christian literature with new eyes.

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The same thing has happened with regard to these excavations with regard to Greco-Roman religion. We've gained a deeper appreciation of the variety and complexity of Greco-Roman religion. Scholars have begun to read Greek and Roman novels, for example, for a new appreciation for what they can tell us about religious attitudes and practices. Apuleius' golden ass, or the Metamorphoses, has long been appreciated as our most important source for the experience of initiation into a mystery cult, as well as for its portrayal of magic and of wandering prophets.

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Those eunuchs who whirled and dance and slashed themselves and spoke in strange tongues, glossolalia, in honor of the mother goddess Kybele. But now other novels are being read, not for their plot and characterization, which is pretty thin, but for their reflection of social realities and religious instincts. H.J. Cadbury once remarked,

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that Caritan of Aphrodisias's romantic novel, Carias and Calliroe, probably had more parallels to the Acts of the Apostles than any other ancient text. And Heliodorus's novel, The Ethiopians, opens with a powerful scene of necromancy, black magic. sort of black magic based upon the power of somebody violently killed and therefore whose spirit is still powerfully available to be manipulated. An understanding that would, to some Gentile, eyes have appeared as strangely reminiscent of what Christians were claiming about the crucified Jesus.

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Other literature is now read in light of archaeology and found to yield new knowledge. Herodotus' history, of course, was always a great source of gossip and information about exotic religions, but also the natural history of Pliny the Elder and Strabo's geography and Pausanias' travels in Greece are suddenly and perhaps surprisingly important sources for local religious practice. A significant example for the way in which you've had to reevaluate things is Aelius Aristides' sacred texts, sacred tales, excuse me. They were once deemed as insignificant compared to the public declamations of one of the great rhetoricians of the empire.

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Everybody read his speeches. Nobody wanted to read his sacred tales. But now, His sacred tales offer poignant testimony to the passionate devotion of a sickly man to the healing powers of the god Asclepius that were revealed in the sacred precincts of Pergamum.

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Most of all, attention has been drawn in recent years to the moral philosophers of the ancient, of the early empire. Remember those philosophers that the philosophers have scorned? especially because of the way that their therapy of desire, as Martha Nussbaum calls it, fits within a framework that in many respects is distinctly religious. The religious character of Hellenistic philosophy is actually the starting point of my analysis of the variety of ways of being religious in early Christianity.

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So this point, in contrast to everything else previous to this, actually might have some significance. The religious significance of Hellenistic philosophy is most obvious in the traditions associated with Pythagoras and Epicurus. In each case, the founder of the school was revered by followers as divine. The lives of Pythagoras, written by Porphyry and Iamblikus, trace his origins to the gods.

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Epicurus was worshipped even during his lifetime by his follower Collotes. The sayings of each teacher were memorized by followers as prophylactics against fear and pollution. Their adherents committed themselves to forms of friendship so intense that it demanded a life together, in the case of the Pythagoreans demanding even a common table and common possessions, and included a period of probation for assessing candidates. The life of Apollonius and Tiana and the letters of the Cynic philosopher Heraclitus both witnessed to the conviction that a philosopher could share in and reveal to humans something of the divine.

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Philosophers in the Stoic tradition were more circumspect in their language and more individualistic in their outlook. book, but in Dio Chrysostom, Seneca, Marcus Aradius, and above all, in that grand old man, the exiled slave Epictetus, we find the sense of philosophy as far more than a set of ideas. They considered philosophy to be a way of life, indeed a vocation, to live a life worthy of God in service to other humans. Does that language sound familiar?

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To live a life worthy of God in service to other humans. The commitment to the philosophical life demanded more than the wearing of a beard and long cloak and the carrying of a staff. It required a real conversion of life, a rejection of vice, and an embrace of virtue. Even the satirist Lucian of Samosata, whose favorite target was philosophers who failed to live up to these ideals.

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His portrayals of daytime virtue and nighttime vice are classic and have a startlingly contemporary tone. testifies in his tribute to the noble philosophers, Daemonax and Negrinus, how much he actually shared in those high ideals. Reading Greco-Roman moralists in light of new categories for the study of religion, they didn't say they were religious, but we can see that they were religious, is a splendid example of how new evidence, changing theory, and the rereading of old evidence has opened up new vistas on Greco-Roman culture and on its ways of being religious.

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The old way of carrying out the conversation, where a certain stage in the development of Christianity, such as Paul, was linked to a certain phenomenon within Greco-Roman religion, such as the mystery cults, in order to argue for and against dependence, is clearly inadequate. It survived as long as it did because of a lack of good historical knowledge, and the persistence of certain categories. Let me give you just a final, an example that I think all of us are familiar with.

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A staple version of early Christian development over the past century, monumentalized in the classic works of Bucet and Bultmann, begins with the premise that Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, of course, and that the primitive church in Palestine was totally defined by Jewish categories, and therefore could not have regarded Jesus as Lord, Kyrios, since such a designation had to have arisen in the Diaspora under the influence of Greco-Roman mystery cults. Serapis was called Kyrios, Lord. It was when the Hellenists, described in Acts 6 and 7, came to Antioch

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that Hellenistic Christianity developed in the direction of a mystery cult of the crucified and raised Messiah who could now be hailed during worship as Kyrios, Lord. Paul, therefore, inherited this form of Hellenistic Christianity and made it the basis of his theology. So there are three stages in the development of Erdeus Christianity. Palestinian Christianity, stage one.

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Stage 2, Hellenistic Christianity. Stage 3, Pauline Christianity. The entire analysis, however, depends upon the watertight compartments between Jewish and Greek being maintained. And on these compartments, maintaining separation on the basis of geography.

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Palestine is apocalyptic and rabbinic. Diaspora is Hellenistic with Hellenistic Judaism. Now, there were a few problems with the theory from the start. The scholars who advanced it ignored the fact that the title Kyrios would have been available to Greek-speaking Christians from the Septuagint.

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Since Kyrios is the way the Septuagint translated the proper name of Israel's God, the Tetragrammaton, No mystery cult was required to derive from Psalm 110.1, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool for your feet. An understanding of Jesus' exalted Lord sharing in God's life and therefore worshiped as divine was totally available within the framework of Torah. Even more embarrassing,

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was the evidence that Jewish and Aramaic-speaking Christians in Palestine already called Jesus Lord in the prayer Maranatha, come Lord, which is quoted by Paul, remember, in Aramaic to Greek-speaking Christians in Corinth, in the full expectation that they would recognize a prayer in Aramaic as well as its implications. But of course, despite the problems in the theory, it remained attractive precisely because it worked and gave some control over the data. And after all, that's what we want, control over the data. Don't laugh too hard because I'm going to be seeking some control over the data also.

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But this explanation, which is, by the way, the one you learned in seminary if you read Bultmann, So I've just been reporting to you what you once passed an exam on. Such theories are now recognized as completely inadequate. in the light of the new knowledge that has been gained concerning the presence of Greco-Roman culture within Judaism.

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Because of the same archaeological discoveries and re-examination of literature that expanded our knowledge of Greco-Roman religion, we are today in a better position than any previous generation to understand the full complexity of Judaism within the Greco-Roman world. In this regard, the pioneering work of Henry Fischel, Saul Lieberman, and especially Edwin Goodenough, reveal that the old categories that separated Palestinian and diaspora Judaism could no longer be maintained. And after the magisterial work of Martin Hengel and others, those pioneering efforts have been advanced to the point of near-universal recognition among scholars.

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We now understand the extent to which Judaism, not only in the diaspora, but also in Palestine, was thoroughly Hellenized. and had been for over 200 years by the time of Jesus, a period roughly equivalent to the entire history of the United States. The Greek language, and with it Greek rhetorical, political, and cultural ideals, infiltrated Jewish life and literature to the extent that the Talmud is filled with Greek loan words. And such midrashic midot as kol v'chomer, the light and the heavy, actually represent Judahized versions of Greek rhetorical arguments.

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Palestine was the home not only of great rabbinic scholars, but also of Greek-speaking rhetoricians and philosophers. It was the home of stoicism. Jews, both within and outside Palestine, sought ways of relating Judaism to the dominant culture of the world. The most obvious example is the literature generated by the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, carried out some 250 years before the time of Jesus.

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It's noteworthy that the legends recounting that miraculous translation by the 70 scholars also emphasize that they were scholars who had been brought from Israel to Egypt to do the job. These were Palestinian Jews, in other words, who knew their Greek as well as their Hebrew, otherwise they couldn't have translated. That such a translation was thought to be required is testimony enough of the thoroughly Hellenized condition of some 5 million Jews living mostly by choice and preference outside Palestine, compared to only some 2 million within, but also to the devotion that they had toward their ancestral scriptures.

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The Septuagint, in turn, became the basis of an extensive apologetic literature in which Jews sought to interpret themselves in terms of Greek culture, and by so explaining, became ever more Greek in the process. Authors like Philo Judaeus and the author of the wisdom of Solomon were intensely devoted to the one God of Israel, even as they were intensely loyal to their own people. Yet even in the compositions they wrote to defend their God and their customs against Gentile slanders, they reveal in every word their profoundly Hellenistic sensibilities. Jews like Ezekiel the tragedian

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and pseudo-phosalides even employed the distinctive literary forms of the Gentiles with such subtlety that the Jewish authorship of their work was not detected for centuries. Even the heroic tales of resistance to Greek culture and idolatry told in the books of the Maccabees were told in Greek. And the profoundly conservative wisdom of Ben Sira was quickly translated as Sirach, For the diaspora, Judaism hungry for Jewish wisdom from the homeland.

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The synagogue paintings at Dura Europos that I described earlier show that Philo was not the only Jew who thought of Israel's religion in terms of the Eleusinian mysteries of Greece, and saw Moses as both a philosopher and as a mystagogue who initiated adepts into God's mysteries in the law. Indeed, a pseudonymous Jewish work in praise of Abraham and Moses, perhaps ascribing to them something close to divine honor, was penned by a Jew under the name of Orpheus, the ancient mythological patron of the Greek mysteries. Isn't that interesting? Well, I mean, I thought it was, otherwise I wouldn't have told you, but I...

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We're coming to a quick... We'll be there soon. The most paradoxical example of Hellenization within Judaism is perhaps the Qumran community itself. It's paradoxical first because of its fierce devotion to the Hebrew text of scripture and the use of classical Hebrew in its Pesher interpretation.

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as well as its overt and bitter opposition, not only to the hated Gentiles, but also all Jews who associated with Gentiles. No group in Palestine could appear on the surface to be more straightforwardly anti-Hellenistic. Yet, in its organization of life, in its system of probation and excommunication, in its absolute community of possessions, we find much more ode to Greek utopian models Than any precedent found in Torah, so when Josephus describes Moses as a philosopher, and when he describes the Jewish.

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parties within Palestine in terms of Greek philosophical schools. And when in particular he describes, he compares the Essenes to the Pythagoreans, he was not doing violence to the reality. He was only testifying to the complex ways in which Jewish and Greek cultures interacted. Now I come to a two-paragraph conclusion.

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Hellenistic Judaism is important to the topic of the relationship of Greco-Roman religion and earlyist Christianity in two ways. First, it powerfully reminds us of how complex and subtle were the modes of religious cross-fertilization in antiquity. Even for Judaism, this most highly defined and resistant tradition, There was a variety of ways in which the dominant Greco-Roman culture was negotiated.

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So that for some Jews, totally loyal to their heritage, it was perfectly natural to think of their religion in terms of a philosophy and as the best of mysteries. Second, Hellenistic Judaism also serves as a middle term between paganism and early Christianity. It reminds us that an insistence on Christianity's deriving from Judaism as so many Christian apologists have done, does not yet by itself answer the question of how Greco-Roman religious sensibilities might have been among the elements of the symbolic world that Christianity recatalyzed.

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In this presentation, I have shown the way toward the rejoining of an old conversation concerning Greco-Roman religion and Christianity that has been prepared by the formulation of better categories for understanding religion as such, and by the recovery of new and re-evaluated knowledge about the Mediterranean world. The hard work of sorting and organizing this vast body of knowledge lies before us. In the next presentation, I will suggest a way of making sense of Greco-Roman religion as a way of making better sense of Christianity, not only at its start, but also through its history and still today.

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Thank you for your attention. Thank you, Dr. Johnson. We look forward to your next presentation and gaining control over the subject matter in the time ahead.

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We will take about a three-minute break so that some people can get seated if some need to leave, and then we'll have our next lecture coming up soon thereafter. Thank you very much. Thank you. Welcome to the initial lecture of the Westerfeld Lectures for 2006.