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Thomas White Curry Lecture of 2006. Let us pray. God of grace, of righteousness, God of mercy and peace, God of all times, all places, all people, we celebrate this afternoon the wonders of creation and the beauty of life. We celebrate blue sky and friendship, friends old and new.

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We ask your blessings on this broken planet, on every creature, on every horizon, even on human history and its violence. May your kingdom come, may your will be done, this day, in this place. In the name of Jesus, in whom all your promises are fulfilled, in whom your kingdom comes, we give you thanks and praise.

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Amen. My name is Louie Donaldson, and I teach New Testament at Austin Seminary, and it is my pleasure to introduce this afternoon Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson, who is the R.W.

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Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University. It was my intent to highlight for you this afternoon the rather astonishing range of scholarship of Professor Johnson's career. But the problem with that introduction is that his topic is too good. this question of Christianity in the Roman world, of how we understand the history of Christianity in the incredibly diverse religious world of the ancient Mediterranean.

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As a discipline, we are struggling with any conclusions. Let me give you one example. This will take about 20 minutes, again. Sardis.

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Sardis is famous not only for its well-preserved synagogue, but for one of the largest temples in the ancient world. In the 4th century BC, a huge temple dedicated to Artemis was begun. Like many temples, it was imagined too big to ever finish. But it was set on the site of an ancient Anatolian altar

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dedicated to a female deity, probably Kybelli, but who knows? In any case, this huge temple to Artemis emerges. In the 2nd century AD, Romans divide the Sela in two and dedicate half of it to the Empress Faustina. That in itself is interesting, but here comes the tricky bit.

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In the middle of the 4th century AD, some Christians, Some unknown Christians attach a chapel to the side of the temple. There it is. It's still there.

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You can go see it. What I want to know is, what were those Christians doing? What were they thinking? There's no plaque, no inscription, no guide.

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Just a little chapel attached to this ancient sacred goddess site. And when I take students to Turkey to see it, I always hide, because I'm afraid they will ask me, why is that chapel there? And I have no idea. I don't have a single sentence, not one.

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So, I'm hoping Professor Johnson will give me... A sentence, just one sentence. As a scholar, I can talk for days with one sentence if it's a good one. And the truth is, this is not unfair.

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Luke Timothy Johnson provides these kinds of sentences. He is so good at explaining to scholarship what is going on. As you noticed this morning, not only is he a scholar of astonishing range and competence, he is a teacher. Your teacher.

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My teacher. I give you our teacher, Dr. Luke Timothy Johnson. You have to come to a Presbyterian school to learn graciousness like that.

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Thank you, Lewis. Good afternoon. I hope everybody had a good break. This is the biorhythmically challenged time of the day,

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But we'll do what we can. I suggested this morning that new ways of looking at religion and the vast new amounts of information about antiquity that we've gotten from literary and archaeological sources have enabled us to reopen that old, old question about the relationship between Christianity and paganism. And in this presentation, I want to suggest a better way to frame the question. in terms of thinking about the multiple ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman world, and to use that in the next lecture as a way of entering into conversation with what I hope I will show, are the multiple ways of being Christian.

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Let me begin with some remarks about some dimensions of Greco-Roman religion. And this will seem to you like a kind of a topsy-turvy-dom survey of all kinds of stuff, but that's part of the point. So just buckle your seatbelts.

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It'll sort itself out as we go along. I won't answer that question, I guarantee you. But I'll try to provide some clarity. But first, I just want to give you some impressionistic things.

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Perhaps the most important realization about Greco-Roman religion, gained by these new methods and this new knowledge, is that it does not yield easily to generalization. One fairly safe affirmation is that threskeia, the term that is probably the most all-encompassing for religious activities and convictions, was public, pervasive, and pluriform. It penetrated to every aspect of life in a multitude of ways that even the most pious of contemporary American Christians would find astonishing, unless they are Roman Catholics of a certain age.

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Gestures of respect and gratitude to tutulary deities and short prayers such as, if God wills it, a prayer, by the way, found in Judaism only in places influenced by Hellenistic piety, accompanied every daily activity from planting and harvesting to lighting the hearth fire, preparing the meal, embarking on a journey, entering a house, or going into battle. Religion for Greeks and Romans was not something done with part of one's time, space, and attention. It demanded attention in every time and space, for the simple reason that every time and space was potentially an opening to a divine presence and power. Nor was it something only personal and private.

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Such understandings of religion are thoroughly Western and thoroughly recent. Indeed, they are thoroughly Protestant. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Religion for Greeks and Romans was woven into every aspect of social life.

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The temples and shrines that dominated public spaces served many functions. They were sanctuaries for the pursued and the persecuted. They were places of judgment as well as of healing. They served as banks.

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The gold of Athens was placed at Athena's feet in the Parthenon. The shrine of Apollo at Delphi financed the wars against the Persians. They were places of sacrifice and therefore served as well as meat markets for the more prosperous. Holidays and athletic contests were celebrations of and with the gods.

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Patron gods were invoked not only at meals of explicit religious associations, theasoi, explicitly devoted to their cults, but were greeted just as enthusiastically at the meals of collegia and trade guilds and funerary societies and philosophical schools, whose drinking parties, the symposia, under the sponsorship of the god Dionysus, the god of wine and fine excess, inspired that table talk, both solemn and silly, across the more than 300 years between Socrates and Plutarch. The talk that was, after all, the real point of the gathering and the drinking in Vino Veritas. It was in the name of the gods that such groups collected funds and kept them in common for the support and mutual benefit of members, above all, offering them a decent burial.

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The distinction, then, between personal private versus public official is, in the ancient Mediterranean world, only a formal distinction and should never be made into a separation. Now this public and pervasive aspect of ancient Greco-Roman religion is in some ways least accessible to us today, even as it was probably most important to its participants, precisely because it fell into the category of the accustomed, or what goes without saying, what we do every day, and only incidentally entered into the written record. Here is a case where we would know very little the religious life of associations, or indeed, of the vigorous life of associations at all, were it not for the inscriptions uncovered by archaeology.

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Now, regarding this public dimension of religion, we contemporary observers must avoid an anachronism shaped by a Christian bias. We should not think that offering a handful of incense to the image of an emperor was any less personal or meaningful than our voting in an election which our candidate cannot win. Plutarch's most serious charge against the Epicureans is that their denial of the gods was accompanied by a withdrawal from active civic and political life, which Plutarch saw as a threat to the civilized order.

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That same charge of atheism, you will recall, was made against Christians, who appeared equally subversive for much the same reasons. Now, the pervasiveness of religion does not, to be sure, mean that everyone was equally convinced. or committed to a religious outlook or a life of piety. Just the opposite.

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The Mediterranean world had a range of attitudes toward the numinous at least as wide as that found among us and our contemporaries. At one extreme were those people whose devotion to the gods was so all-encompassing and so credulous that they were considered by the more sophisticated to be simply superstitious. The very term desidemonia, in fact, can mean either intensely religious, a good thing, or superstitious, a bad thing, depending on what context it was used in, which makes it very difficult to interpret by the way Acts 17, when Paul tells the Athenians that he sees that they're very desidemonia.

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they're either really, really superstitious or they're really, really religious. The superstitious person, in fact, was sufficiently obvious and well-known in behavior to be included in Theophrastus' character types, where he is described in a thumbnail sketch as what we would call an obsessive-compulsive personality, somebody who needed to be purified every day, needed to have continual initiations into various cults. The superstitious person was also an obvious and easy target for Lucian of Samosata's lampoons.

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Credulity for credulity's sake was not much valued among the thoughtful. Plutarch, in fact, declares that superstition is worse than atheism. To deny the existence of the gods is bad, he agrees. But it's worse, Plutarch says, to think about the gods wrongly.

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Superstition is worse than atheism. I like it. At the other Furthermost extreme were the cynical manipulators of popular faith.

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I've never heard manipulator pronounced that way before. Manipulators. The cynical manipulators of popular faith and superstition. These are the people who preyed upon the superstitious for their own fame or fortune.

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Lucian, again, describes the philosophical charlatan, Proteus Peregrinus, who used his public virtue as camouflage for private vice, and who is willing to do anything, even associate with Christians, even commit self-immulation, in order to gain notoriety. Lucian also depicts Alexander of Abunotychus, a flim-flammer, who created a mystery cult. He found an egg in the mud, he rigged a fake snake out of a stock, and he took advantage of poor lighting in a dark room in order to gull the local populace of its money in exchange for phony oracles.

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So we have these extremes of superstitious and cynical manipulation at the two ends. And in between these extremes lay a variety of attitudes toward religion. The characters in Petronius's novel, Satyricon, for example, are totally secular in their outlook. Their picaresque adventures are motivated by nothing more than the desire for pleasure.

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In contrast, I mentioned this morning the deep and personal dedication of the rhetorician Aelius Aristhides toward the healing god Asclepius, a faith that never flagged despite a life of chronic illness and frequently failed therapies at the god's shrine. Nor should we omit from this catalog those sober-minded moralists like Cornutus and Heraclitus and Plutarch who strove to save both the ancient traditions of the Greeks, their sacred texts as found in the epics and tragedies, and a morally responsible piety by rendering the sometimes scandalous stories of the Olympian gods as allegories that contained deep moral and spiritual truths.

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The use of allegorical interpretation enabled young people to read the classic texts that shaped their world, their paideia, while understanding that what they were reading about was not really lust and adultery and rage among the gods, but about the desire for wisdom and virtue. Both Jews and Christians would profit from these hermeneutical precedents and turn the same interpretive techniques to their own deeply problematic and often immoral scriptures. Diversity also marked views concerning the relationship of the divine to the natural and human realms.

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The official system, you remember, is polytheistic, as it was for all ancients except for the Jews. In polytheism, the divine dynimus, I'll use this term over and over again, dynimus looks in Greek like dynamic does in English, it means power. The divine dynimus was perceived as personal but also as diffused through an elaborate extended family of gods, whose influence was exerted over various domains of natural and human life.

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Much in the way that Mediterranean society ran on an elaborate system of patronage and honor that enabled intercourse between higher and lower levels of society, so did the gods give benefits and benefactions to those who honored them. So the religious system and the societal system matched almost perfectly. The membrane separating the divine and the human, furthermore, was permeable, with traffic moving both ways.

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Nowhere is this more consistently or impressively displayed than in Ovid's Metamorphoses. in which gods and humans are constantly changing and exchanging shapes. The gods can easily make themselves immediately present in human form, says Ovid, as when the aged Phrygian couple, Bausis and Philemon, were visited by Zeus and Hermes and offered them hospitality unknowingly. But humans can also enter into the extended divine family by means of extraordinary wisdom or valor or virtue, transformed as Heracles was through ascension or apotheosis into an adopted son of God.

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In this sense, polytheism is a generous and capacious religious system. there's always room for another member of the divine family. The proclamation of Jesus as a son of God in power through his resurrection from the dead would have not have sounded nearly so strange to Gentile ears as it did to Jewish. Although interestingly, for these Gentiles, such a designation would not either have carried with it any claim to uniqueness.

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And they certainly would have, and in fact they did, questioned whether a man who had died the way Jesus did, abandoned by followers, filled with terror, would be worthy of a place among the immortals. These are points that are actually made by the philosopher Celsus. Polytheism as a system specializes in minimizing, excuse me, I've got to reverse this, specializes in maximizing the divine presence and diffusing the burden of theodicy throughout the entire system.

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Here's what I mean. One god or goddess may bear a grudge against you, but there's always another god to whom one can appeal. One god may fail, but the system doesn't fail. There's always another god to whom one can turn for help.

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Of course, subtler minds back then tended to view the Olympians, much as the British do, an equally fractious and embarrassing royal family. necessary for the glue of society, but not of much use for actual governance. In different ways, a sense of a stronger, more unitary, and directing power superior to that of the various gods was imagined and factored into the religious outlook. If the temperament

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and circumstance of the writer were positive, this overarching force behind the Olympic odds might be construed benignly and personally as pronoia, providence. Some writers, like Plutarch, were confident that such providence worked for the reward of the good and the punishment of the wicked, giving polytheism A moral valence that its classical expression sometimes lacked. The language used in such discussions of providence, associated more and more with a single name, Zeus or Dios, comes remarkably close to a functional and, in some cases, even a reflective monotheism.

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Defenders of providence then, of course, in turn, were faced with the same challenges as defenders of God's justice within monotheistic systems, namely, the evidence to the contrary, suggesting that the evil go unpunished and the good do not prosper. Now, if one's outlook or temperament were more grim or circumstances more dire, The limits imposed on gods and humans alike might be designated as moira, limit, or hamarmene, fate, an inexorable and relentless boundary against which there could be no appeal. And if circumstances seem particularly capricious, this divine force could also be called tike, chance,

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or fortune. The assumption that divine power was accessible to humans for their benefit was operative then, not only in all the round of domestic and civic observance, but also in manifestations of piety that sometimes demanded great effort and the dislocation of ordinary life. I want to give you 3 examples. of particular pertinence to Christian origins, namely, prophecy, healing, and initiation into the mysteries.

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First, prophecy. It is sometimes thought that prophecy is restricted to biblical religion. But in fact, it is one of the most conspicuous aspects of Greco-Roman religion. And in fact, it took several forms.

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The first was the kind of official prophecy carried out by priests through the study of the entrails of birds and animals. It was called technical prophecy, or the testing of the auspices, or divination. But more highly esteemed from the time of Plato were the forms of prophecy called mantic, from the word mania, ecstasy. In these cases, the divine spirit, the divine pneuma, took hold of a human and put the human in a state of what was called enthusiasmos, and enabled the person to speak beyond that person's normal capacity.

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The human became a speaking tube for the god. Such mantic prophecy manifested itself in the orgiastic ravings of Kybele's eunuch priests, But it was also routinized in the oracles delivered by the god Apollo at Delphi and Dodona, where a woman sitting on a tripod above a declivity in the earth delivered strange messages that required decipherment by the shrine's propheti, or prophets. Finally, there were also the written prophecies, such as those derived from the Sibyl,

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that were called the Sibylline Oracles, a collection of texts that enjoyed enormous authority and were, in fact, interpolated and expanded by Jewish writers. In his work on the obsolescence of oracles, Plutarch reports a conversation with friends, in which deep puzzlement and dismay is expressed, over the fact that Delphi no longer seems to provide oracles. And his friends discuss a number of scientific and theological reasons why such prophecy has ceased.

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The dismay, however, at such cessation of oracles testifies to the premise that Plutarch shared with the less sophisticated that in one way or another, the divine pneuma could seize hold of humans, could use them to communicate truths otherwise unavailable to them. Indeed, Greece's early history could be told, and was told by Herodotus, at least partly in terms of the seriousness with which the Delphic oracles were taken, in matters both private and public. What is most significant here is the way in which attention to such revelations organized life around what was perceived to be transcendent power, breaking into the world.

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People traveled to the prophetic shrine, heard the divine message, and then lived their lives in response, sometimes even going to war in obedience to what they thought the god was telling them. This is a serious revelatory religion. The divine dunamis could also break through in acts of healing.

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The occasional stories of curative or exorcistic powers worked by an emperor like Vespasian or a philosopher like Apollonius of Tyana are impressive as demonstrations of divine power operative in Theoi Andres, divine men. But they are not religiously nearly so significant as the elaborate rituals of revelation and healing offered by the god Asclepius at shrines like Epidaurus and Pergamum. Think Lourdes. If you think Lourdes, you've got the whole picture.

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Therapies that we would consider natural or medical were offered at these shrines or hospitals. as well as spiritual counseling. But the special feature of these spas was the nocturnal visitation of the god to those sleeping within the temple precincts. The extant inscriptions from Epidaurus dating from 300 years before Jesus.

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bear eloquent testimony to the religious sensibility that regarded the entire process of medical and divine therapy as the work of the god in response to the faith of those who came with broken limbs and lives and returned to their homes healed, leaving behind casts of the limbs and organs healed, as well as vivid vignettes recounting the wonders worked by the god. In the case of Aelius Eristhides, as I've mentioned several times, we have the rare chance to see firsthand, in the words of his sacred tales, the genuineness and the depth of devotion to this God, and the way in which such devotion organized completely the rhetorician's life. Finally, the mysteries, which so dominated the earlier conversation concerning paganism and Christianity. Mysteries have been part of Greek religious life from deep antiquity.

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They remain fascinating, not least because of how remarkably little we know about them. The Disciplina Arcana, maintaining secrecy about what is revealed in initiation, was sufficiently impressive in practice as to become proverbial for keeping silence. We catch at best glimpses. Our best information comes

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from the ancient rituals at Eleusis, devoted to the goddess Demeter, which celebrated the pattern of death and renewal of the earth. It is the one mystery that remained resolutely and exclusively local in character. So great was its prestige that kings and even emperors sought to be included among its initiates. What we know about the cults that proliferated in the time of the empire

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associated with Isis and Osiris, Attis and Kimbelli, Serapis and Mithras, is largely fragmentary. Our most direct source is Apuleius's novel Metamorphoses of the Golden Ass. It tells how a young man's dabbling in fortune caused Tike, the goddess Fortune or Chance, to change him into an ass. And in the form of that animal, he passed from one stage of alienation and degradation to another, ending up in Corinth in a sexual sideshow.

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But one night on the beach at Kenkre, a suburb of Corinth, the goddess Isis revealed herself to him as the queen of the gods. He was initiated into her mysteries, and found in them not only a participation in divine power and the restoration of his humanity and the hope of immortality, but also remarkable success in his career as a lawyer. And there's a clue there that the mysteries were not simply about that other stuff, it was also about networking, which is what all ancient associations were about.

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The novel also shows how entry into the mysteries often involved multiple initiations. For after a period of time, Lucius was initiated as well into the cult of Osiris, the consort of Isis. So these modes of divine accessibility, I want to emphasize, are not mutually exclusive. Devotion to Asclepius or the Oracle of Apollo was by no means incompatible with initiation into the mystery of Isis and Osiris.

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Indeed, we find evidence not only for multiple initiations within individual cults, but truly devout people who sought initiation into a number of different cults. The point was not correct doctrine and certainly not exclusive devotion. The point was experiencing power. And in that respect,

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Polytheism is a generous, cooperative, and non-competitive religious system. The most important thing for us to note is the way in which initiation into a mystery, travel in search of oracles, and pilgrimages to healing shrines, all organized lives of certain pagans around places where transcendent power was perceived to be experienced for the benefit of life, now and in the future. All right, that's my impressionistic tour.

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I know you want me to stop now, but I actually want to do a little sorting out here, okay? So there's a little bit more to go. Well, there's quite a bit more to go. You started that business with your 20 minutes on Sardis, right?

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That little chapel at the synagogue in Sardis. The wee chapel in the glen. Now this catalog of religious phenomena could be extended indefinitely, which raises the question, is there any useful way to organize the religious sensibilities of the Greco-Roman world? That's my question now.

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Clearly, imposing categories drawn from Christianity and Judaism is inappropriate. We find here no clash of theologies, no demand for exclusive loyalty, no competition for status as a uniquely true or uniquely effective manifestation of the divine. Analyzing the phenomena according to time periods is equally unhelpful.

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You know, we often find studies which, you know, Gilbert Murray's famous five stages of Greek religion, you know, sort of an evolutionary or developmental model of humankind moving toward enlightenment. I don't think we can do that with this material, at least in the present state of knowledge. The mix of perceptions and practices appears so complex that it's impossible to mark clearly defined epochs determined by social or political influences, still less trace a clean line of development. So in the remainder of this presentation, and in the book that I'm going to write on the basis of these presentations, I will attempt a third way of giving some shape

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to the constant metamorphoses that make up Greco-Roman religion. I propose a typology of ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman world, and we'll sketch four such types of religious sensibility. I am as aware as you are of the dangers of typology. They tend to oversimplify.

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They tend to distort evidence in order to make it fit predetermined size. They tend to create the illusion of watertight compartments where actually there's water slopping all over the place. I'm aware of these things. And such dangers are perhaps particularly real in the case of ancient Mediterranean religion.

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I am willing to make the attempt, however, because I'm being paid good money to do so. Now, I don't know where that particular line came from. The devil made me say that. Now, I want to try this because, as I said, the old conversation doesn't work.

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These alternative ways of organizing those. And I think that if we take these types as heuristic categories, that is, as ways of enabling us to see things that we might not otherwise see, We can make some meaningful distinctions in what otherwise appears to be a chaotic welter of facts. And I think it also enables a new way of thinking about connections with early Christianity.

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I present for your consideration then, for the remainder of this presentation, four ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman world. First, the way of participation in benefits. The way of participation in benefits. This type actually encompasses virtually everything I've said in the lecture up to this point.

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And so I don't have to spend a lot of time on this right now. This is what I would call religiousness type A. Its emphasis is on the negotiation of divine power in the present life, even if it has one eye on the future. The emphasis is clearly on the divine acting on humans

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in the empirical world, revealing through prophecy, healing through revelation, providing security and status through the mysteries, enabling and providing for the daily round of individuals, households, cities, and empire alike. In this way of being religious, attention to the moral agency of the devotee may get some small attention, but not much. In the extant sources, it does not hold a central place. If this type were asked what salvation meant, the instinctive response would be in terms of safety and success.

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The extreme version of this type is found in the practice of magic. Discussions of magic in the ancient as well as the contemporary world are complicated because of the social dynamics involved even in the conversation. The charge of magic often serves a majority tradition to marginalize and discredit a minority tradition that from viewed from within could be considered as authentically religious as the competitive version.

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Nevertheless, that being said, magic was practiced vigorously in the Greco-Roman world, in forms ranging from astrology to the casting of spells to the wearing of apotropaic amulets. There does remain some validity to the classic distinction between religion as magic, religion and magic, as the distinction between being acted upon by power and the effort to control power. Although as soon as we make the distinction, we recognize how hazy that boundary is. Magic's steady concentration on the negotiation of cosmic powers, however, must be seen as closely akin, if not identical, to the pattern of religious response I have termed the way of participation in benefits.

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Two, the way of moral transformation. Here's where I want to take advantage of the new theoretical methods for understanding religion and place the religious response I have described as Greco-Roman moral philosophy. I indicated in the previous presentation some of the reasons. for considering the pattern of life exhibited in philosophical schools as religious in the sort of obvious sense of that term.

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Among Pythagoreans and Epicureans, we have divine founders, community of possessions, grades of admission and probation, much as in the mysteries, the practice of mutual correction, expulsion. I've also pointed out that even philosophers in the Stoic and Cynic traditions considered philosophy as a way of life to be lived rather than a set of ideas to think about, had distinguishing physical characteristics, the long beard, the robe, the staff, the leather purse, the sandals, the itinerancy, even celibacy sometimes, and the social role, critic, gadfly, prophet, scout. It is within philosophy also that we find the phenomenon of conversion.

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in one of two senses. First, conversion from a life of vice to a life of virtue. And also, a conversion from one school to another. Therefore, it is also within philosophy that we find competition for adherence, and polemic against differing traditions.

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We have all kinds of attacks by Stoics against Epicureans. and so forth and so on, back and forth. If ancient philosophers agreed on the goal of living the virtuous life, they certainly disagreed on which school could best reach the goal. So it's precisely among such moral lists as where we find what many of us would consider real religion.

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It remains to ask, therefore, what about the distinctive emphasis distinguishing this religious response from type A? In moralists like Dio Chrysostom and Epictetus, we find no denial of the divine benefits available through various external religious observances or any attack on such observances. We do find an attack in Lucian's Daemonax. But Dio and Epictetus show no real interest in the power of the divine outside the human moral agent.

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just as what I described as Type A paid little attention to moral agency, although they probably weren't against it. Among these philosophers, the focus is on the mandate implicit in being called by God to live a life worthy of God. It's Epictetus's language. Their way is to imitate the divine agency in the world by the transformation of their life through moral effort, and through the extension of the divine agency and the divine blessings of moral instruction and transformation to others.

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For Epictetus, the true cynic is Zeus's scout. sent to other humans to call them to a life that is exemplified by the cynic himself. Epictetus calls out, do you want to see what a free man looks like? Do you want to see what it's like to live without fear and in boldness and in lack of dependency on external things?

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Look at me. Sounds like Paul, doesn't it? And it's exactly right. The divine power, in short, is present imminently through their...

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their own activity in the world. Even the Epicureans' desire for ataraxia, the quiet life, removed from political involvement is, in a real sense, the imitation of the blessedness of the immortals, and the extension of that blessedness to others through this demanding way of life practice within the Epicurean community of friends. So, in this way of being religious, salvation would not be understood in terms of a sharing in the benefits of security and success.

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Indeed, risk and adversity and even suffering is built into the philosopher's counter-cultural stance. It's not about success and safety. It's about danger and risk. Salvation, rather, is understood in terms of the triumph of the human spirit.

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In other terms, The triumph of the divine dunamis, or for the Stoics, the pneuma, the spirit, over ignorance and moral inertia. The patterning of life is just as real and often more concentrated than among those seeking prophecy and mystery and healing. The piety is just as real and perhaps among some even more intense.

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But the arena of divine activity is in moral transformation. Three, the way of transcending the world. The first two types are the clearest and the easiest to locate in the Greco-Roman world. Once we use the contemporary categories to see Greco-Roman moralists as driven by deeply religious impulses, even when they do not use explicitly religious language.

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The third type is clear conceptually, but by its very nature is more difficult to pin down. It is especially hard to detect as a precise type before the rise of Christianity because it came to full flowering only later. So we'll revisit it in the next lecture. Its roots within Hellenism, however, are ancient and deep.

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The type can be detected in the Orphic tradition. Orpheus is the ancient singer who gained access to the underworld and is closely associated with the myth of Dionysus, whose dismemberment and then regathering of the elements expresses A tragic view of the origin of existence and the perilousness of trying to get back. It finds permutations in the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophies and may be suspected as well in certain aspects of the mysteries.

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Perhaps can best be located by means of a contrast to the first mode, which is fundamentally optimistic in its appreciation of the divine presence and power in the world. And the second mode, which is basically positive and optimistic concerning the power to change human behavior in a manner worthy of the divine. In this third way of religion, being religious, the motto is, let's get out of here.

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The world and human existence are viewed more negatively in terms of illusion and entrapment. expressed by the cryptic slogan, Soma Sama, the body is a tomb. The path of salvation is to be found not in powers made available through the structures of society or the world, nor through moral endeavor, but by a process of purification from the body and its entanglements, leading to the eventual liberation of the soul. It is spirit alone that is worth saving.

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The process of saving the spirit involves a restriction of human appetites, usually dietary and sexual, which is made known by means of revelation from a higher realm to elect souls. The fullest, the earliest full expression of this way of being religious within the Greco-Roman world is probably the Hermetic literature, above all in the Poimandres, which includes all of the elements that I have described, and whose affinity to Middle Platonism has long been noted. For this type, salvation is not a matter of worldly success and security and not a matter of the moral transformation of the self and others. It is a matter of the souls being related through knowledge to a divine realm that transcends the world of deception and illusion and ultimately reaching union with that realm, the soul's true home.

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So salvation is somewhere else, not here. Fourth, the way of stabilizing the world. I've had a hard time deciding whether this truly represents a way of being religious or whether it merely represents the supply side of type 1.

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participation in the divine benefits. I think here of all the keepers of shrines and temples, all ministers and mystagogues of cults, all priests who sacrifice, all prophets who translate glossolalia and examine entrails and record sibylline utterances, all therapists in both sense of the word who enable the god Asclepius to do his work, as well as the vessel virgins whose presence and dedication assured the endurance of the city. From 1 perspective, all these are the official keepers of the flame. That enable the divine benefits to flow in religiousness.

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A. From another perspective, while some such roles are inherited, others are chosen and draw certain kinds of people to them. This is the side of the many-sided Plutarch that is less concerned with moral transformation than with the continued success of the cult of Apollo at Delphi, where he is a priest. The same side of Plutarch that attacked Epicureanism most vigorously because its atheism threatened the stability of the social order, which depended upon the recognition and service of the gods.

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This form of religiosity is most thoroughly woven into the fabric of society with a capital S, and serves most to serve as the glue of the social political order. The imperial cult whether local or regional, is its perfect expression. If religion is about negotiating power, then where is power more visibly and palpably present than in the theoi phenomenoi, the gods who actually appear, who run the empire?

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If religion is about organizing time and space according to, on the basis of power, who does this more impressively than the emperor who conquers territories and organizes calendars? In the imperial cult, service to the state and religious service are blended, not in a manner inconsistent with polytheism, but as an utterly consistent expression of it. The very best people, the Onestliores, who are notable by birth and often also by wealth, serve as the priests and priestesses of the imperial cult. By their enthusiastic participation, they serve to stabilize the social and political order of Rome.

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The best people are serving in it, after all, and serve as well to assure their position within that order, for they would not have such privilege if they weren't among the very best people. My conclusion, page and a half. I always want to know these things when I'm listening to somebody. I really don't like not being told.

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I'm looking at my watch and I want to make sure my speaker's looking at his or her watch also. So, conclusion. That's so cheap, Bill. That's just so cheap.

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Couple of concluding remarks. I offer these four ways of being religious as an effort to make sense of Greco-Roman religion as something experienced by its participants in a manner true to the phenomena as reported by the evidence and not skewed by Christian categories. I offer them for their heuristic value, how they help us see things we might not otherwise see. I do not offer them as watertight compartments that prevent us from seeing the complexity, fluidity, and richness of Greco-Roman religion.

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Above all, I want to emphasize that I did not propose that any one of these ways of being religious is more true, more authentic, than others. And I'm going to return to that point next lecture. Any more than I think that any ancient religious person would regard them as being in competition with each other. In the final presentation tomorrow morning, I will use these same ways of being religious as heuristic categories for looking at early and subsequent Christianity.

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in a slightly different manner. It would be equally possible, I think, to examine first century Judaism this way. The way of participation and benefits is magnificently attested in all the popular religious life of Jews in Palestine in the diaspora, especially as centered in weekly Sabbath observance and in the pilgrimage festivals, not to mention all of the attention given to holy and charismatic men and messiahs and new revelations. The way of moral transformation is found above all in the Pharisees and the Essenes, whom Josephus rightly regarded as philosophers, for their approach was exactly the same of the religiosity of Greco-Roman philosophers.

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The way of transcending the world is found only faintly in modes of Jewish mysticism, especially that centered in the Merkava, the heavenly throne chariot, and apocalypticism. though neither truly embodies the spirit of dualism found in the Hermetica. And the way of stabilizing the world is well attested in Judaism by the machinery of the temple cult maintained by the priesthood and the aristocratic party called the Sadducees. The ability to apply the categories of Greco-Roman religion successfully to ancient Judaism

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raises the question whether I am proposing ways of being religious in the Greco-Roman world or whether I'm proposing ways of being religious that might be actually universal. Perhaps they will turn out to be so, but I am unprepared to make such a large claim. For the moment, my interest is in how these ways of being religious might or might not also be found in nascent Christianity and what that might tell us. That the same categories also work in the case of Judaism reminds us, at the very least, how pervasive and powerful Greco-Roman culture really was.

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the 1st century. And for all the New Testament's negative portrayal of the Gentiles and their religiosity, it was the case, after all, that it was the Gentiles, rather than the Jews, who found this particular version of Judaism attractive enough to embrace and make it their own. I've tried to suggest in this presentation some of the elements within Gentile religion that might account for this remarkable fact. At the end of Acts, having turned for a third and final time from his doubting Jewish interlocutors, Paul solemnly declares, this word of salvation has been sent to the Gentiles.

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They will listen. Perhaps at least in part, it is because they had heard a lot of it before. Thank you. We thank you, Professor Johnson, for that wonderfully inviting, challenging, helpful lecture, and I am ready for more.

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I have two brief announcements. A reminder that at 7 o'clock tonight, we have a service of word and sacrament with William Carl preaching again. And if you heard him last night, you will want to come back again tonight.

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And we also have, starting right now, in the Stotts Dining Hall, a panel discussion with the three speakers, to which everyone is invited to come and participate. Thank you very much.