I say, “O.K., we’re going to put in a load of laundry, then we’re going to water the garden, write blog post, start supper.” The purpose of this should be obvious. It helps me organize the twenty things I want to do, triage them, and make the winners my official Next Activity. This is hard to do without saying stuff out loud (at least, for me). My thoughts don’t do well when they are left inside my head unsupervised.
Notice that I call myself “we” for purposes of decision making. This may be a side effect of having raised three children.
But I also talk to other entities that are not visible to the naked eye. I talk to God, of course. “I’m sorry, Lord, I was trying to promote myself just now instead of Your glory.” “I’m scared, God.” “Help!” I talk to people I haven’t seen in years, apologizing out loud for that one thing I did back in university. I tell my potted plants, “You guys sit tight there. I’ll be right back.” I’ll never forget the first time I accidentally said “I love you” to the chickens.
I won’t put down what I say to web sites that make it difficult to do things.
I know it’s not just me. You are busted, Reader! I’ll bet you, too, talk to … I don’t know, spoons. Trees. Whatever. It turns out, people need something to talk to. Evidence:
“Elves always wanted to talk to things,” says Treebeard, when speaking of the Elves first “waking up the trees.”
The Tom Hanks character, in Castaway, famously saves his sanity by talking constantly to a volleyball named “Wilson.” When Wilson is washed away, near the end of the movie, he really grieves him. And it turns out that, by getting into daily “conflicts” with the volleyball, he has become better at relating to actual people when he is near them again. This points up how humans are able to anthropomorphize anything. Robots, for example, or rocks.
I have not done this myself, but I’ve heard that many people talk to their dead loved ones… either at their grave, or just throughout the day.
In C.S. Lewis’s novel Perelandra, philologist Ransom finds himself alone on Mars after he had been kidnapped by fellow academics. (In the story, Mars has air and water that are consumable by humans.) Ransom is very alone, very scared, in a very strange situation. As he wanders through the Martian forests, he begins to talk to himself. Not just in the sense of speaking out loud. He actually feels as though “Ransom” is a second person beside him, whom he must comfort, reassure, and consult with. “Don’t worry, Ransom,” he says. “We’ll make it.” It’s actually a creepy scene as we realize how on the edge he is, and even feel our stability slipping with his.
This might be Lewis’s interpretation of the intriguing and spooky Third Man Phenomenon. This is an experience that some people have in survival situations, such as mountain climbing, where they sense another person with them in the situation. It can happen to people who are alone in the wilderness, or in a group. This sense of another person with them is persistent, and so vivid that they may hear a voice. Psychologists, of course, tend to explain this as a hallucination brought on by things like sleep and oxygen deprivation, and/or a coping mechanism comparable to Stockholm Syndrome. (The sleep deprivation theory does raise the question, Why doesn’t this happen to new mothers? At least, not that I know of.) I don’t know what to make of the Third Man, but I will say that he does make me think of the fourth man in the furnace with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
Lewis has another instance of the Third Man phenomenon in his book Pilgrim’s Regress. The narrator, who has been traveling all over the world to find the place he considers paradise, ends up on a perilous cliff, at night, and debates going back to the last house he stopped at, which is definitely not the place he has spent his whole life looking for, but at least it’s safe. At this point a mysterious man appears, prevents him from going back the way he came, and forces him to go on until he is “cliffed out,” at which point the stranger leads him over the perilous part.
“Men go crazy in congregations, but they only come back one by one,” sings Sting. While I like Sting, and while I recognize that cults do exist, as a generalization this line from his song is the inverse of the truth. People really, really need something or someone to talk to. We always want to talk to things.
So, if you’re comfortable sharing, what do you talk to?
In my recent big post about sacrifice (willing and otherwise), I pointed out some similarities between the different sacrificial deaths in Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, and the death of Christ.
Some of these similarities are deep. Theseus, as future king of Athens, has an honorary title the Shepherd of the People. He is the king’s son, and he feels “the god” (Poseidon) calling him “to the bulls,” that is, to go and be a human sacrifice in Crete. Before he departs, he reassures the parents of the other future bull-dancers, “I will go with your children, and take them into my hand. They shall be my people.”
Two thousand years after Christ, we are so saturated in the power of His story and of the things He said that it is hard to read these ancient customs as anything but Christological types. And, since The King Must Die was published in 1958, it’s pretty clear the author also was aware of Christ and was intentionally pulling phrases from Him. More about that in a moment.
Other similarities are superficial, but nonetheless striking. Near the end of TKMD, a sixteen-year-old “king” who is about to be torn to pieces by wild women in a Dionysian rite, goes to his death riding in a cart, crowned with ivy, brandishing a wine cup and scattering wheat seed on his people. Now, this rite is almost nothing like the death of Christ. It’s pagan. It does not happen on Passover, the date of the annual sacrifice of a lamb, but rather it is part of an annual ritual of human sacrifice mixed with orgy. The “king,” along with everyone else, is reeling drunk. He has just spent a year as the consort of the priestess/queen, and he has no choice in what is about to happen to him. It’s hard to imagine a death more different from Christ’s.
And yet, these very superficial similarities do not strike us as coincidences. Instead, they seem significant. On this side of Christ, we can’t help but notice when a man who is about to go up a hill and die shares out bread and cup to his followers.
This sort of horrifying, yet somehow moving, ritual is not something Renault just made up. It’s well-attested in myths, legends, and histories. In this essay, I will argue that Christ did not share out bread and wine because it had been done before. Rather, the pagan one-year king shared out bread and wine because Christ did so one thousand years later. Future events cast backwards shadows.
What was Renault trying to do?
To be clear, that is my thesis, not Renault’s. She was a lesbian who published a number of contemporary gay romance novels before discovering her personal obsession with ancient Greece. Writing about Socrates and Alexander the Great allowed her to write sympathetic historical novels about gay characters who lived in a context where this sort of behavior was considered completely normal. The King Must Die certainly includes all kinds of sexual activity; for example, in the Bull Court, the female bull-leapers cannot be allowed to get pregnant, so they are sequestered from the boys, and turn to relationships with each other. Many of the male bull-leapers become the paramours of upper-class Cretan men. Theseus himself is straight, but as an ancient prince, let’s just say he’s not exactly chaste. (I may have lucked into picking up Renault’s least gay book about ancient Greece.)
All this to say, I don’t think Renault was trying to say that any ancient customs were foreshadowings of Christ. If she was “trying to say” anything at all about Christ, it’s probably that He’s not so unique, and anybody familiar with ancient Hellenistic ideas would understand that. But her novels (at least TKMD) are not really “message” novels. She immersed herself in that world, wrote characters and customs that grew organically out of it, and this is what came out.
So no, I don’t think Renault is projecting Christ back into the ancient Mediterranean customs intentionally, except in the sense that she would have been familiar with biblical phrases as a woman raised in 1900s England. I think she was primarily writing from her research and imagination.
Is Christianity a ripoff from Greek mystery religions?
Still, when I first read TKMD, the tone was familiar to me and I immediately picked up the implications. Not that many years before reading it, I had been through a year of thorough education in Greek mythology by a high-school teacher who could safely be described as feminist. My best friend at the time was a neo-pagan. Between the two of them, this teacher and friend were quick to point out any parallels between Greek paganism and Christian practice, and to accuse Christians of “stealing” it. Looking back, there was a certain defensiveness there, which I did not realize at the time. But my teacher and friend were only two voices in a large crowd of scholars.
During a period of time running roughly from about 1890 to 1940, scholars often alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism, Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic world. Largely as a result of a series of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal … Today, most Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue. [But] even though specialists in biblical and classical studies know how weak the old case for Christian dependence was, these old arguments continue to circulate in the publications of scholars in such other fields as history and philosophy.
–Christianity and the Hellenistic World (1984), p. 10
As an aside, notice that the peak of this theory were the years during which Mary Renault was growing up and going to school.
Sometimes books come to you, serendipitously, just when you are ready for them. As I was thinking about this question of the similarities between fictional (but history-based) sacrificial victims in Renault, and my own Dying God, I imagined how I would build a case that He was clearly not copying them. Although He did grow up in a thoroughly Hellenized environment, He was a Jew. He was extremely faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and was so familiar with the Law and the Prophets that He could quote them off the cuff. His veins seemed to flow with the Hebrew Scriptures. In short, He showed no signs of wanting to throw over the religion of His ancestors for that of the Greeks. Furthermore, many of the elements of how His last days went down came about as a result of the particular historical conditions in which He found Himself. He went up the hill to die because Jerusalem is built on a height. He shared out bread and wine because they were having the Passover, and this ceremony had been established 1400 years before in the desert of Sinai, not 1000 years before in the Ionian islands. He called Himself a king because that was what the Jewish Messiah was supposed to be, and He was of the house and lineage of David … not because He had been selected by matriarchal priestess to live as a king for one year and then die. He called Himself the Good Shepherd because of the Israelite pastoral tradition, not because of the Athenian one. The Roman soldiers put a crown of thorns on His head because they were professionals at humiliating and torturing people. It’s hard to imagine how He could have orchestrated all these historical factors intentionally in order to copy a pagan custom that was practiced far away, and centuries before He was born.
I can assert all this stuff, but there is always some scholar out there who could be quoted to argue with me. I needed a book. And the book came to me. As I was turning all these things over in my mind, I had to venture out to a Christian bookstore that was closing. (“Come get your novels,” they said.) Of course, many of their books were on clearance, and there before me was Nash’s Christianity and the Hellenistic World for the low low price of one dollar, its asking price all out of proportion to its value to me at that moment. Nash can prove what I can only assert.
Nash systematically addresses claims that early Christian writers, particularly Paul, got many of their key concepts from Platonism, Stoicism, the mystery religions, and Gnosticism.
Among the many claims published in this century are the following:
Early Christianity was just another Hellenistic mystery religion.
Important Christian beliefs and practices were either borrowed from, or were heavily dependent on, similar beliefs and practices in the mysteries.
Both baptism the Lord’s Supper evidence the influence of similar rituals in the mystery cults.
Among the many Christian beliefs drawn from the mysteries is the Pauline doctrine of salvation, which parallels the essential themes of the mysteries: a savior-god dies violently for those he will eventually deliver, after which the god is restored to life.
A major movement in the development and promotion of such theories was the History of Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule).
-ibid, pp. 116 – 177
Nash addresses problems with these claims such as the following: in the mysteries, the dying god does not really rise. Osiris lives on in the underworld; the dead god’s body becomes the wheat, etc. As far as we can tell, ritual washings in the mysteries were just purification rituals, and they had to be repeated. They do not seem to have been a one-time entry into a new life like the Christian baptism. For many of these mystery religions, we don’t actually know much about the content of the rituals, because they were intentionally kept secret. For many mystery-religion practices that are well-attested, such as the taurobolium where the initiate stood beneath a grate while a bull was slaughtered, these practices seem to have developed after Christ rose and Paul wrote his letters. In the case of the mystery religions of the first, second, and third centuries, some of them were actually influenced by Christianity, not the other way round.
But I’ll let German scholar Adolf von Harnack, quoted by Nash, have the last word:
We must reject the comparative mythology which finds a causal connection between everything and everything else, which tears down solid barriers, bridges chasms as though it were child’s play, and spins combinations from superficial similarities … By such methods one can turn Christ into a sun god in the twinkling of an eye, or one can bring up legends attending the birth of every conceivable god, or one can catch all sorts of mythological doves to keep company with the baptismal dove; and find any number of celebrated asses to follow the ass on which Jesus rode into Jerusalem; and thus, with the magic wand of “comparative religion,” triumphantly eliminate every spontaneous trait in any religion.
–ibid, pp. 118 – 119
Too many keys to mythology
In short, the problem is not that there are some key symbolic parallels between Christ and ancient pagan symbolism. The problem is that there are too many parallels, or similarities, right down to the animals involved. Part of this is simply the limitations of living in this world. Jesus had to eat something, He had to ride on something, He had to use some kind of words when He spoke, and there were a finite number of foods, mounts, and terms in the ancient world, just as there are everywhere. I have pointed out before, when addressing the problem of whether Christians “stole” pagan practices like hot cross buns and wedding customs, that there are a limited number of ways to do every human activity. If you eat something, wear something, or go through a life passage, and you are a human being, I guarantee that in the past four thousand years there has been someone who did it that way before you. And that someone was probably pagan.
As G.K. Chesterton said about finding mystical and symbolic connections:
The true origin of all the myths has been discovered much too often. There are too many keys to mythology, as there are too many cryptograms in Shakespeare. Everything is phallic; everything is totemistic; everything is seed-time and harvest; everything is ghosts and grave-offerings; everything is the golden bough of sacrifice; everything is the sun and moon; everything is everything.
–The Everlasting Man, p. 103
These are the givens of the universe that all humans encounter; and, unless we are sorely impoverished, we all have some way of dealing with them. But just because they are ubiquitous does not mean they are unimportant. These things are shadows of what was to come. The reality, however, is found in Christ.
Symbolism in Reality
Last point: Jesus was the fulfillment of all these confused hints in every culture. But the vibe of the New Testament historical records is much less gorgeous, mythical, and poetic than the ancient pagan stories. As C.S. Lewis put it:
When I first, after childhood, read the Gospels, I was full of that stuff about the dying God, The Golden Bough, and so on. It was to me then a very poetic, and mysterious, and quickening idea; and when I turned to the Gospels never will I forget my disappointment and repulsion at finding hardly anything about it at all. The metaphor of the seed dropping into the ground in this connexion occurs (I think) twice in the New Testament, and for the rest hardly any notice is taken; it seemed to me extradordinary. You had a dying God, Who is always representative of the corn; you see Him holding the corn, that is, bread, in His hand, and saying, ‘This is My Body,’ and from my point of view, as I then was, He did not seem to realize what He was saying. Surely there, if anywhere, this connexion between the Christian story and the corn must have come out; the whole context is crying out for it. But everything goes on as if the principal actor, and still more, those close to Him, were totally ignorant of what they were doing. It is as if you got very good evidence concerning the sea-serpent, but the men who brought this good evidence seemed never to have heard of sea-serpents. Or to put it another way, why was it that the only case of the ‘dying God’ which might conceivably have been historical occurred among a people (and the only people in the whole Mediterranean world) who had not got any trace of this nature religion, and indeed seemed to know nothing about it?
–C.S. Lewis, “The Grand Miracle,” in God in the Dock, p. 83
Well, when you put it that way, it’s pretty funny, isn’t it? Jesus’s death reads as disappointingly prosaic compared to the myths only because it actually happened. This is very humble of God. He has quite the sense of humor. As John puts it after his account of the Triumphal Entry, “At first His disciples did not understand all this. Only after Jesus was glorified did they realize that these things had been written about Him and that they had done these things to Him.” John 12:16
Sources
Chesteron, G.K. The Everlasting Man. Ignatius Press: 2008, originally published in 1925.
Lewis, C.S., ed. Walter Hooper, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics. Eerdmans: 1970, 1978.
Nash, Ronald H. Christianity and the Hellenistic World. Zondervan: 1984.
Renault, Mary. The King Must Die. Alfred A. Knopf, Everyman’s Library edition pub. 2022, originally published by Pantheon Books in 1958.
This is my final post about The King Must Die. It will have spoilers. They will be the sort of spoilers that make you want to read the book.
Like any good literary book with a strong theme, this one announces the theme in its title. The King Must Die. Why? Why must the king die? The entire story is an effort to provide the answer.
A Rude Awakening: the Death of the King Horse
The first major incident in the book involves the slaughter of a sacred horse. Theseus, who is about seven at the time, loves this horse. It is the “king horse,” the stallion of the sacred herd. Theseus, who has been told that the god Poseidon is his father, thinks of this horse as his literal brother. He is taken to the sacred island to attend a special ceremony. He has no idea that this ceremony is going to culminate in the slaughter of the horse he adores.
It was a good clean killing. I myself, with all Athens watching, am content to do no worse. Yet, even now, I still remember. How he reared up like a tower, feeling his death, dragging the men like children; the scarlet cleft in the white throat, the rank hot smell; the ruin of beauty, the fall of strength, the ebb of valor; and the grief, the burning pity as he sank upon his knees and laid his bright head in the dust. That blood seemed to tear the soul out of my breast, as if my own heart had shed it.
As the newborn babe, who has been rocked day and night in his soft cave knowing no other, is thrust forth where the harsh air pierces him and fierce light stabs his eyes, so it was with me.
p. 13
This is the first king to die in the story. And for Theseus, it is also a kind of death, and a kind of birth. He is the grandson of a king, and this is his birth into the world where the king must die.
Then Theseus is “dedicated.” This involves smearing the horse’s blood on his forehead. But when his older cousin tells him “Come, you must be dedicated,” he thinks that he is about to be sacrificed like the King Horse. So the little boy steps forward in his first act of courage, ready to give his life. And for the first time, he senses the presence of the god Poseidon with him.
Theseus’s grandfather, the king, notices that his grandson is struggling with what just happened. Later, in grandfather’s upper room, the two of them have a talk.
The Lord Poseidon, who rules everything that stretches under the sky, the land and the sea. He told the King Horse, and the King Horse led [our ancestors to new grazing grounds].”
I sat up; this I could understand.
“When they needed new pastures, they let him loose; and he, taking care of his people as the god advised him, would smell the air seeking food and water. Here in Troizen, when he goes out for the god, they guide him round the fields and over the ford. We do that in memory. But in those days he ran free. The barons followed him, to give battle if his passage was disputed; but only the god told him where to go.
And so, before he was loosed, he was always dedicated. The god only inspires his own. Can you understand this, Theseus?
The King Horse showed the way; the barons cleared it; and the King led the people. When the work of the King Horse was done, he was given to the god, as you saw yesterday. And in those days, said my great-grandfather, as with the King Horse, so with the King.”
I looked up in wonder; and yet, not in astonishment. Something within me did not find it strange.
“Horses go blindly to the sacrifice; but the gods give knowledge to men. When the King was dedicated, he knew his moira [=destiny]. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whenever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or else he was no king, and power would not fall on him to lead the people. And the custom changes, Theseus, but this token never.
“Later the custom altered. Perhaps they had a King they could not spare, when war or plague thinned the Kindred. Or perhaps Apollo showed them a hidden thing. But they ceased to offer the King at a set time. They kept him for the extreme sacrifice, to appease the gods in their greatest angers … And it was no one’s place to say to him, ‘It is time to make the offering.’ He was the nearest to the god, because he consented to his moira; and he himself received the god’s commandment.”
He paused; and I said, “How?”
“In different ways. And so it is still, Theseus. We know our time. Listen, and do not forget, and I will show you a mystery. It is not the sacrifice, whether it comes in youth or age, or the god remits it; it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all. It washes heart and mind from things of no account, and leaves them open to the god. But one washing does not last a lifetime; we must renew it, or the dust returns to cover us.”
pp. 16 – 19
Thus the king of Troizen lays out the entire rationale for Hellene royal sacrifice. Perhaps you have already noticed a few Bible Easter eggs. “Behold, I tell you a mystery” and Jesus saying, “The Father loves me because I lay down my life. No one takes it from me; I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down and authority to take it up again. This command I received from my Father.” (John 10:17 – 18) Those few lines map exactly onto what Theseus’s grandfather has just told us, albeit with perfect clarity instead of wrapped in mysterious ancient customs.
Was all this really present in the culture of the ancient Greeks and their Indo-European forebears? Or is Renault reading it back into that culture from the Bible? Or, did Jesus borrow all this from the ancients? I’m looking into it.
You might think that Theseus’s grandfather’s speech is too heavy-handed; showing instead of telling. But Renault knows what she is doing. This is not the whole secret of the book laid bare within the first twenty pages. It is only the beginning. This instruction from his grandfather sets Theseus’s attitude towards the god, himself, and his duty. It will guide how he responds to things throughout the rest of the book.
All the Kings that Die
Spoiler time. Here is a quick list of all the kings whose death Theseus causes or witnesses in this book:
Kerkyon, the “king” of Eleusis. This young man is a “solar king,” that is, he lives in a matriarchal society where the king reigns for only one year and then is killed by his successor. Thesus gets chosen as the next solar king and kills Kerkyon in hand to hand combat. Then he becomes the next Kerkyon.
Minos. Minos is dying and has no legitimate heir. He eventually becomes aware of Theseus and asks him to kill him using the sacred double-headed axe that has been used by kings in Crete from ancient times.
Astarion, the “Minotaur.” In this version of the story, Astarion is Pasiphae’s illegitimate son by an Assyrian bull-dancer. He is angling for the throne of Crete, and after Minos dies he has himself crowned king. A priest anoints him with oil and puts on him the sacred gold bull-mask. Theseus interrupts the ceremony and fights Astarion, who is still wearing the sacred mask. Though he gained the throne by illegitimate means and held it for only a few minutes, technically Astarion is another king whom Theseus kills.
The solar king on the island of Dia. Theseus, Ariadne, and the fleeing bull-dancers make a stop on this island on the way home to Athens. It happens to be on the day of the year that the Dionysian rite will take place, where the past year’s king is torn to pieces by the Maenads.
Theseus’s father Aigeus. Aigeus kills himself by leaping from the cliff of Athens when he sees that the returning ship is bearing a dark blue Cretan sail instead of a white one. Leaping from the cliff is the traditional way that kings of Athens have been known to “make the sacrifice” when the god calls them.
All of these tragic events might seem like an unrelated potpourri of senseless suffering. But actually, they are all closely bound up with each other, and we can see it if we look at the Hellene, Minyan, and Cretan attitudes towards sacrifice.
Other Sacrifices
Sacrifice is everywhere in this ancient world. Every year, the people of Troizen kill a “scapegoat,” a non-royal person that they have decided is causing their troubles. There are animal sacrifices, there are libations of wine poured out, and so forth. The priestess, when she goes to do divination, offers the “house snake” a dish of milk. In Crete, when a man is going to become king, he throws a ring into the sea to “marry the sea lady.” I want to here mention two notable sacrifices that royal characters make.
Early in the book, we learn that during a time of drought and plague, Theseus’s mother sacrifices her virginity. Typical of ancient pagan thinking, when none of the gods of the Hellenes claimed responsibility for the plague, the king, with increasing desperation, finally figured out that the god who was angry was “the Mother.” He offers a “holocaust” (a burnt offering) of pigs all around the large mossy rock in the Mother’s shrine, but apparently this is not sufficient. The old priestess, who is unattractive and dislikes pretty girls, tells the king that his fifteen-year-old daughter must “hang up her girdle for the Mother.” This means she must go to the “myrtle house” (a shrine on the sacred island) and give herself to the first man who shows up, as an offering to the Mother. Then the drought will stop.
It’s an incredibly poignant scene as the king, now a grandfather, describes to Theseus how he felt he could not get out of this. He goes to his daughter about it, and she says of course she is willing to make this sacrifice to save the life of the people.
As it happens, the king of Athens is visiting Troizen, and he agrees to go and visit the young princess on the island so that at least her experience will be with a man who is kind, and whom she has met before. But the king of Troizen cannot tell his daughter that this is going to happen, because as a member of the royal family, she has to go to the sacrifice consenting. “The readiness is all.” So the king of Athens swims over to the sacred island and becomes Theseus’s father. As he jumps into the water, a thunderstorm is already coming to end the drought.
Later, Theseus sacrifices himself for his people when he volunteers to go to Crete as part of the tribute of seven youths and seven maidens. He feels the god Poseidon calling him to do this, “sending him to the bulls.” (The bull-dance of Crete is actually a sacrificial rite in honor of Poseidon.) At first, Theseus resists. He tries to offer the god his horses instead, but he can feel the presence of the god withdrawing from him in response to this. So, in a moment of anguish, he makes the decision to give up his life in Athens, with his father and eventually the throne. Going to Crete does not mean instant death, though it’s understood that bull-dancers last a maximum of six months in the ring. But it is a death to all of Theseus’s hopes and dreams.
Two Attitudes to Sacrifice
As I’ve hinted in this and in previous posts, the customs of the earth-mother-worshipping Minyans differ quite a bit from those of the sky-god-worshipping Hellenes when it comes to sacrifice. In contrast to the Hellene approach laid out in the first section of this post by Theseus’s grandfather, the Minyan solar “kings” are not really kings at all, but more like sacrificial animals. The “king” serves as the consort of the priestess/queen for one year. During this time, he is pampered in every way, sort of like fattening an animal for slaughter, but he has no real power. The queen, together with the other matriarchs, is one who conducts the business of the land. In Eleusis, the war chief is not the queen’s husband but her brother. In these “earthling” societies, the important thing is not how the king dies but simply that he die.
Just inshore, the road sloped upwards to a flat open place at the foot of a rocky bluff. Stairs led up to the terrace where the Palace stood: red columns with black bases, and yellow walls. The cliff below it was undercut; the hollow looked dark and gloomy, and had a deep cleft in its floor that plunged into the earth. The breeze bore from it a faint stench of rotten flesh.
She pointed to the level place before it, and said, “There is the wrestling ground.”
I looked at the cleft and said, “What happens to the loser?”
She said, “He goes to the Mother. At the autumn sowing his flesh is brought forth and plowed into the fields, and turns to corn.”
ibid, p. 68
It is not the king’s life, his attitude, his self-sacrifice, or his leadership that the goddess-worshippers need, but only his rotting body, his symbolic and literal death.
This system produces a fatalism in Minyan “kings” that is very different from the warrior spirit of the Hellenes.
As we met each other’s eyes, I thought, “He has stood where I stand now, and the man he fought with is bones under the rock.” And then I thought, “He has not consented to his death.”
I drank of the mixed drink, and the priestess gave it to the King. He drank deep. The people gazed at him; but no one cheered. Yet he stripped well, and bore himself bravely; and for a year he had been their king. I remembered what I had heard of the old religion. “They care nothing for him,” I thought, “though he is going to die for them, or so they hope, and put his life into the corn. He is the scapegoat. Looking at him, they see only the year’s troubles, the crop that failed, the barren cows, the sickness. They want to kill their troubles with him, and start again.”
I was angry to see his death not in his own hand … But I saw from his face that none of this came strange to him; he was bitter at it, but did not question it, being Earthling as they were.
“He too,” I thought, “would think me mad if he knew my mind.”
ibid, pp. 69, 71
Theseus encounters this same unbridgeable disconnect again near the end of the book, when on the island of Dia he meets their sixteen-year-old “king.”
There was something about him I could put no name to, a daimon in his eyes; not that they wandered, like men’s eyes whose wits are troubled; rather they were too still. Whatever he fixed his gaze on, it was as if he would drain it dry.
Something oppressed me in his silence, and I said only to break it, “You have a god’s feast here tomorrow.”
“Yes.” That was all; but something woke in my mind, and of a sudden I saw everything. I remembered Pylas saying to me in the mountains above Eleusis, “I know how a man looks who foreknows his end.”
He read it in my face. For a moment our eyes met, seeking to speak together. It was in my mind to say, “Be on my ship before cocklight, and with the dawn we will be away. I too have stood where you stand now; and look, I am free. There is more in a man than the meat and corn and wine that feeds him. How it is called I do not know; but there is some god that knows its name.”
But when I looked into his eyes, there was nothing in them that I could say it to. He was an Earthling, and the ancient snake was dancing already in his soul.
ibid, pp. 319 – 320
The Minyans kill their king, and “do not share the sacrifice, offer nothing of their own.” This attitude is even more pronounced in Crete, as Theseus finds when he goes there.
Theseus takes his call to go “to the bulls” very seriously, as a form of sacrifice. Indeed, the bull-dancing developed from an original simple human sacrifice where a single victim was thrown into a pit to be gored by a bull, representing the god. But in the aeons since then, it has developed into entertainment. Originally, it was the youths of the noble families of Crete who would dance with the bulls until the day they were killed. Even then, they were celebrities. But now, the people of Crete do not enter the bull-ring themselves. Instead, the bull-dancers are slaves taken as tribute, captured, or bought from all corners of the world: not only the Greek islands but Libya, Phoenicia, Assyria, Scythia, even Israel. The Cretan upper classes adore these teenaged bull-dancers. They bet on them, send them gifts, have affairs with them, invite them to parties. They cry over their deaths. But ultimately, what is life and death to the bull-leapers is, to the Cretans, a diversion.
Avoiding the Sacrifice
Theseus does not resent being the one to put his life on the line in the bull-ring, because the sport itself is intoxicating, perfect for a teenaged adrenaline junkie. But he observes more than once, “These people only play at their sacrifices.” For example, the Cretan upper classes have dolls made of themselves which they hang on the trees every year in their place, at the time of year when, in ancient times, a royal person would be sacrificed.
“But that is a …” She checked herself and said, “only a mainland custom. Here in Crete no king has been sacrificed for two hundred years. We hang our dolls on the trees instead, and the Mother has not been angry.”
I made over her the sign against evil.
p. 253
As a result of this unwillingness to do the actual sacrifice, even the family of Minos no longer have the presence of the god. Theseus is appalled when Ariadne tells him how she plans to fake a fit of prophecy in her capacity as priestess. And he is stunned to find that Minos does not hear the voice of the god.
“Come,” he said, “tell me of this. The god spoke to you, you say. You have heard the voice that calls the king. How does it speak? In words? In a sound of music, or the wind? How does it call?”
I stared at him. Amazement rooted my tongue. I thought I must have heard wrong, yet knew not how to ask. We were silent, looking at each other.
He was the first to speak. He leaned his head on his hand, and said in his sad muffled voice, “Boy, how old are you?”
I said, “If I live to spring, my lord, I shall be nineteen.”
“And after dark, when the bats fly over, you hear their cry?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “Often the night is full of it.”
“They cry to the young. And when the old man passes, they are not silent; it is his ear that has hardened. So also with kings’ houses; and it is time then to think of our going. When the god calls you, Theseus, what is in your heart?”
Finding what words I could, I opened my heart in this small closed room to Star-Born Minos, Lord of the Isles.
When I had said my say … he raised his crystal eyes again, and slowly nodded. “So,” he said, “you made the offering. And yet, it is your father who is King.”
His words went sounding through me, deeper even than my grandfather’s long ago; deeper than my own thought could follow. “No matter,” I said. “A good Shepherd will give his life for the sheep.”
pp. 265 – 266
So Minos has lost, but he knows what he has lost. There is an even deeper depth of cynicism displayed in his stepson, Astarion, Pasiphae’s illegitimate child by a bull-leaper. When Theseus finds out that Astarion is planning to become king by a political coup, he can barely comprehend it:
“But,” I said, “then Crete is being ruled by a man who does not belong to any god; who was never dedicated. He has all power; yet he has not consented to make the sacrifice. Has he consented?”
There was a shadow on her cheek, as if she would smile; but her face grew grave, and she shook her head.
“Then,” I said, “the god will never speak to him. How can he lead the people? Who will see their danger coming? What will happen, if the god is angry, and there is no one to offer himself? He takes service, tribute, honor; and he gives nothing! Nothing! He will be death to your people if they let him live.”
p. 256
Theseus understands what many Cretans, and many in our godforsaken time, do not: that being a king is about more than just power.
Eventually, Astarion commits what reads to Theseus as the ultimate sacrilege. Astarion has sponsored Theseus’s team of bull-leapers for almost a year. Hard up for money, and with no access as yet to the royal treasury, Astarion seeks to make some money off his team. He places bets that they will die in the next dance, and then secretly has their bull drugged to madden it. Though Theseus is gored, the team manages to survive for a few minutes, and then the stratagem backfires when the bull dies of the drugs. The team, when they realize what he has done, are furious: “How this man has despised us!”
But Astarion has not only despised his team. He has despised the bull, the ritual, and hence, the god. Within twenty-four hours, Theseus is feeling the warning in his body and spirit that always comes over him right before Poseidon sends an earthquake. But this time, it is stronger than ever before.
The noise tormented me; the warning surged and roared and crashed through my head, or withdrew leaving a dreadful hollow hush filled with the tread of the approaching god. The awe and terror which it is man’s nature to feel before the Immortals goaded and spurred me to fly for my life. And when I held my ground, the madness burned me up, and the warning would not be contained within me. I shook Amyntor off and leaped on the table among broken winecups, and shouted it aloud.
“Poseidon is coming! Poseidon is coming! I Theseus tell you so, I his son. The sacred bull was killed and the Earth Bull has wakened! The House of the Ax will fall! The House will fall!”
p. 294
After the massive earthquake, when Theseus defeats Astarion,
Now I saw his face, grimacing with bared teeth. I stepped up to him, to hear what he would say to me. But he only stared at me as at some shape of chaos, seen in a dream when nothing makes sense. He who had thought to rule without the sacrifice, who had never felt the god’s breath that lifts a man beyond himself, had nothing to take him kinglike to the dark house of Hades.
p. 312
By denying the gods and expecting others to sacrifice for him, Astarion has destroyed his own mind and ushered himself into hell. This is the darkest place. It is darker even than the Minyan solar kings. Though they are about 90% scapegoat and only about 10% king, yet even they, because the Minyans still take their sacrifices seriously, provide some faint foreshadowing of Christ. When the young king of Dia rides off in a cart to go up the mountain and be torn to pieces, he goes crowned with ivy, raising a wine cup in his hand, and scattering wheat (bread) onto his people. Apparently, this is part of the deep structure of a properly done sacrifice: sharing out the bread and the cup before one’s death. Going up the hill. A vegetable crown.
And Today?
What did I mean, “And Now”? I can barely remember why I put that in the title.
Obviously, we no longer live in a world where human sacrifice is necessary to keep ourselves alive. Arguably, it never was, but I think this novel makes a pretty good case that there was something deep going on there. Human sacrifice bad, yes, but we cannot by the same token say paganism worthless, with no glimpses of the truth and with nothing to teach us.
Regarding the question of where these resemblances came from, I do not have time to go into whether Christianity “copied” from ancient Greek mystery religions, was not even aware of them, or was aware of them and did some riffing on them. But in the providence of God, I recently ran across a book that looks into exactly that. I’ll be back when I’ve read it, with a more robust case that these types and shadows found in paganism had their source in God.
The book of Hebrews–and in fact the entire New Testament–makes a strong case that, when our King laid down His life, that was the last, sufficient sacrifice, making it no longer necessary even to sacrifice animals. The only reason Theseus comes out looking so heroic is because of his resemblance to the King of Kings. And a Happy Easter to you. He is risen indeed!
But there is a miniature version of “the king must die” that applies in the daily life of every Christian, indeed of every adult. Being a king is about much more than just power, and this goes for every kind of leader. In order to be a good parent, you should be sacrificing yourself for your children much more often than you expect them to sacrifice for you, although of course this doesn’t mean that you let them be in charge. Most of a parent’s sacrifice is invisible to the children. And in fact, the one who sacrifices the most is the one who has the most authority. Otherwise, how will the unction of the god fall upon you to lead your people? Who will see danger coming?
Similarly, a good boss or manager works harder than any of his employees. A major principle of leadership and love is “my life for yours.” As Jesus said, “Whoever wants to come after me must deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow me.” “Pick up their cross” corresponds to getting in the cart, the one that takes you up the hill. So, you, know, in a small way, we should all strive to be Theseus and not Astarion.
demə- … “to force,” especially in the sense of “to tame horses.”
Derivatives: daunt, indomitable, tame
kwel– … “to revolve, move around; herd stock.”
Derivatives: Latin colere, to till, cultivate, inhabit; colonus, farmer. Hence, cult, cultivate, culture, colony, colonize.
Greek telos (from the suffixed form kwel–es), completion of a cycle, consummation, end result. Hence, talisman, teleology, leutospore.
kw(e)-kwl-o (suffixed reduplicated form of kwel) … “wheel, circle.”
Derivatives: Old English hwēol, hweogol. Hence, wheel.
Greek kuklos “wheel” and Latin circulus, “circle.” Hence, circle, cycle, cyclone, etc.
Sanskrit chakram, “circle or wheel.” Hence, chakra.
wegh- … “to go or transport in a vehicle” Derivative: wagon
“Chariot racing for sport and ritual purposes was prominent in the culture of many early Indo-European peoples, such as the Indo-Iranians, Greeks, and Irish.”
source: The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. & ed. by Calvert Watkins, pp. xxviii – xxix and 46
Yes indeed, the Indo-Europeans loved their horses.
But they are not the only ones.
The Mongolians love their horses too. And let’s not forget the American Plains Indians. As soon as horses became available to them, some of them (notably the Lakota) re-structured their entire society around them, and began doing amazing things that the Europeans had never dreamt of (at least, not for many generations), such as hanging by their legs off the side of the horse to shoot a moving target with a bow.
Basically, horses are cool and beautiful, and also extremely demanding and high-maintenance. People tend to like them, but bear in mind that you do have to make them the focus of your entire life if you are going to do anything at all with them.
The “Parthian shot.” The Parthians were a people related to the Scythians and other horse-riding groups of Central Asia. That conical hat, too, is found among the Scythians, a people who live in what is presumed to be the Indo-European homeland.
As part of my ongoing, yearlong foray into fiction set in the ancient Mediterranean, I am now re-reading Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. There is so much history and speculation packed into this book, that I make free to do a series of posts on different topics from it, en route to the final book review. So, buckle up! I hope you like ancient historical fiction! (And, since you are visiting Out of Babel Books, I assume you at least don’t hate it!) Today’s topic is Renault’s theme of the two conflicting cultures of Hellenes vs. what they call the “Shore People.”
On the timing of the Theseus story
I have always had the impression that the story of Theseus was one of the older historical myths. It happens when Knossos, on Crete, is still a thriving city. So, in my mind, I put it a few generations before the Iliad. Madeline Miller, author of Circe, seems to agree. In her book, Circe hears of Theseus having killed the Minotaur well before Odysseus comes to land on her island.
If you do the math, Theseus living before the Odyssey would also put him living before Agamemnon returns from the war at Troy and is slaughtered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra. In the play Agamemnon (written, of course, much later), Clytemnestra kills her husband in revenge for his having sacrificed their thirteen-year-old daughter before he sailed for Troy, in addition to a couple of other grudges. Like most women, I find it hard not to think Clytemnestra has a case.
Renault, however, takes a different tack. She has a teenaged Theseus hear the following story from a bard:
The song he gave us was the Lay of Mycenae: how Agamemnon the first High King took the land from the Shore Folk, and married their Queen. But while he was at war she brought back the old religion, and chose another king; and when her lord came home she sacrificed him, though he had not consented. Their son, who had been hidden by the Hellenes, came back when he was a man, to restore the Sky Gods’ worship and avenge the dead. But in his blood was the old religion, to which nothing is holier than a mother. So, when he had done justice, horror sent him mad, and the Night’s Daughters chased him half over the world.
ibid, p. 40 in my copy
So here we have Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, their son Orestes, and the Furies. At the same time, this passage raises some questions.
The Shore People and Their Appearance
The Shore People make their appearance on the very first page of The King Must Die.
Our house is Hellene, sprung from the seed of Ever-Living Zeus. We worship the Sky Gods before Mother Dia and the gods of the earth. And we have never mixed our blood with the blood of the Shore People, who had the land before us.
-ibid, p. 1
As the story progresses, it rapidly becomes obvious that the Hellenes have, in fact, mixed their blood with the blood of the Shore People. There is the story of Agamemnon, above; Theseus is said to be “blonde and blue-eyed like the Hellenes, but small and wiry like the Shore People,” and Theseus, who is very promiscuous, even has a child who “came out small and dark, but so was [his mother’s] brother.”
So we have two populations, one that is native to the Greek coastlands (or at least has been there a long time), and one that came there from the steppes. Theseus’s grandfather explains to him their ethnic history, which he got from his own grandfather:
“Long ago, he said, our people lived in the northland, beyond Olympos. He said, and he was angry when I doubted it, that they never saw the sea. Instead of water they had a sea of grass, which stretched as far as the swallow flies, from the rising to the setting sun. They lived by the increase of their herds, and built no cities; when the grass was eaten, they moved where there was more. … When they journeyed, the barons in their chariots rode round about, guarding the flocks and the women … [Lord Poseidon] told the King Horse, and the King Horse led them. When they needed new pastures, they let him loose; and he, taking care of the people as the god advised him, would smell the air seeking food and water. The barons followed him, to give battle if his passage was disputed; but only the god told him where to go.”
ibid, pp. 16 – 17
This is a description of the Indo-European lifestyle and homeland. The Indo-Europeans took their reverence for the horse, and their wheeled carts and chariots, with them wherever they went, including to Scandinavia. So the Hellenes are Indo-European, and the Shore People, presumably, Hamitic or Semitic.
The mask at the top of this post is Mycenaean. Mycenae is located in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, which is also the location of Troizen, Theseus’s home. The ancient Mycenaean culture, older than classical Greece, took its cues from the Cretan urban culture of the time. In later Greece, you get men wearing himations and women wearing finely woven chitons. This is usually how Helen of Troy, for example, is illustrated. However, she probably looked more like the Mycenaean and Cretan women. Here is someone’s attempt to reconstruct the probable hairstyle and costume of the most beautiful woman in the world:
Notice the Egyptian-style, kohl-lined eyes, and the red suns for makeup. Helen might have been blonde, being a Hellene, but her clothing was perhaps more like this.
Here is someone else, reconstructing a traditional Mycenean costume and pose:
I’m guessing these fashion choices came from the Shore People.
Theseus’s mother is described as wearing this ancient Mycenaean style. She wears a tiered, flounced skirt hung with charms, exposed breasts (what was going on, Crete and Mycenae?) and hair that is curled by the use of “crimping braids” (probably to attain a very curly look for those who do not, like the Shore People, have it naturally). Though a blonde Hellene, she is a priestess of the mother goddess, and so she takes some of her cues from the Shore People, and here is where we find the tension.
The Shore People and Their Religion
Both the Hellenes and the Shore People practice the sacrifice of their kings. However, there is a difference. For the Hellenes, it does not come on a regular schedule. Theseus’s grandfather explains:
“When the work of the King Horse was done, he was given to the god … And in those days, said my great-grandfather, as with the King Horse, so with the King. When the king was dedicated, he knew his moira [i.e. doom]. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whenever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or else he was no king, and no power would fall on him to lead the people. And the custom changes, Theseus, but the token never. … Later the custom altered. They ceased to offer the King at a set time. They kept him for the extreme sacrifice … And it was no one’s place to say to him, ‘It is time to make the offering.’ He was the nearest to the god, because he had consented to his moira; and he himself received the god’s commandment. And so it is still, Theseus. We know our time. … It is not the sacrifice … it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.”
ibid. pp. 18 – 19
This might explain why so many kurgan burials are of high-born individuals who seem not to have died of old age.
It also, of course, explains the title of the book.
Meanwhile, it has been established that the Shore People do things a different way: “old laments have come down from the Shore People, of young heroes who love a goddess for a year, and foreknow their deaths” (p. 37). In other words, the Shore People treat their king primarily as the goddess or priestess’s consort, and kill him after just a year.
Marija Gimbutas has tried to make the case that the Shore People practiced a gentle, feminine, goddess-worshipping religion, and that they were cruelly exterminated by the warlike, sky-god worshipping evil Indo-Europeans. Renault is not going to paint with such a broad brush. Realistically, she shows both groups living next to one another and influencing each other. Also, throughout the course of the story, she is going to show by increasingly vivid illustrations that these two cultural systems are absolutely incompatible with each other. And that the mother-worship, in the end, is at least as bloody as the worship of Zeus.
Renault’s take on the story of Agamemnon is a great illustration of this. She interprets the story as a conflict between Clytemnestra’s mother-goddess culture and Agamemnon’s sky-father culture. When Clytemnestra brings back the “old religion,” it means that Agamemnon must die–not in battle, not some day, but now, and actually, yesterday. It means that Orestes is doubly cursed. He has loyalty to both religions, with their incompatible demands, and he is put at the mercy of the furies, the representatives of the goddess-religion. They chase him because he killed his mother, but if we string out the implications, even if he had not, they would probably be chasing him anyway. After all, he is a male heir to the throne, so his days are definitely numbered. Behold, the kindness of the religion of the goddess.
Obviously, there are some universal truths and some redemptive metaphors here, hidden under a thick layer of occultism, war between the sexes, and general pain and suffering for everyone. It is going to take a much greater King than Theseus to cut this difficult knot.
Seasonal Postscript
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! Such a romantic post, I realize.
You can read the incident that this is a reference to, in I Samuel chapters 4 – 6.
The Philistines were a culturally Aegean/Mycenaean people who had settled along the coast of Canaan. Though culturally Greek, they spoke a Semitic language. Their god, Dagon, was a man/fish god who had antecedents going all the way back to Sumeria.
The genre of these particular chapters of Scripture might be described as dark comedy. It’s a unique story, because it presents the reaction of an Aegean people when confronted with the God of Israel. The story is told in a Hebrew historical record, but the amount of detail means that the Hebrew chronicler must have had spies or eyewitness accounts.
The Philistines, though, or perhaps because, they are pagans, are pretty canny. They start out thinking they have won a victory over the Israelites by capturing their god, but it doesn’t take them too long to figure out that this God is trouble, and to ascertain, by process of elimination, what He wants.
Or you could say that God is very adept at communicating with the Philistines.
Sometimes, you get into a discussion in a comments section that clearly is beyond the scope of the comments section, both because a) it requires really long comments, b) with footnotes, and c) your interlocutor is not actually going to be convinced. In other words, this discussion ought to be a persuasive essay instead.
When you have a theology blog, this is nothing but good news.
I recently got into such a discussion.
The context: Doug Wilson’s interview with Ross Douthat. Douthat asks Wilson whether, in his ideal Christian Republic 500 years from now, every sin would be against the law. Wilson makes the helpful distinction between sins and crimes. Not every sin should be against the law, he says. Failure to understand this concept got the Puritans into trouble, but we have learned a lot since then. Wilson then goes on to mention the well-known classification of “three types of law” found in the Old Testament: the moral law (universal, binding on all individuals before God), the civil law (what was legal and illegal in the kingdom of Israel, and with what civil penalties), and the ceremonial law (regulations having to do with the Temple, the sacrificial system, and various purity laws such as food laws). If you have been around Christian circles, particularly Reformed circles, you will have heard this distinction. (Edit: I’m now not sure whether Wilson brought up the three categories of law in the video, or whether it came up in the comments as we discussed the distinction he was making between sin and crime.)
Now we come to the commenter who kindly gave me a prompt for this essay. I don’t even know whether this person is man or a woman, but I’m going to call him Rufus.
Rufus says,
The problem is that the distinction [between sin and crime] is always arbitrary, and tends to align with the cultural norms of a particular period of time (e.g. USA in the 1950s).
The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)
What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument. The fact you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice is why the Hebrew Roots movement exists. Their position is wrong, but it’s totally reasonable given the premises they’re starting with.
Thanks for the prompt, Rufus. This will give us a lot to chew on.
The trickiness of not knowing who you’re talking to
First, let me clear up just a few simple misunderstandings that Rufus can hardly be blamed for.
Rufus mentions, or implies, that Wilson is just taking a sentimental look back at 1950s America and assuming that, if he can get his Christian republic to look like that, he will have applied the law of God in a culturally appropriate way. Now, it happens that Wilson, in this interview and elsewhere, does mention 50s & 60s America as a place he remembers fondly. He usually brings it up in order to make the point that sodomy was banned back then, and yet America did not resemble the Handmaid’s Tale, which must mean laws against sodomy don’t necessarily produce that kind of society.
However, if Rufus knew Wilson a little better, he would know that Wilson does not look back at the 1950s with a sentimental and uncritical eye. In fact, Wilson has compared the position of the U.S. in the 1950s to that of someone who has just fallen out of an airplane, but is still only a yard below it. Now, we are approaching the ground, but going back to one yard below the plane, if we could do such a thing, would not help in the long run.
If Rufus knew the neoReformed world from within Wilson is writing even better, he would know that, when we do romanticize historical eras, it ain’t the 1950s we usually choose. It’s more likely to be Jane Austen’s England, or Knox’s Scotland, or Jonathan Edwards’s Puritan New England. This shows that Rufus does not really know who he is talking to. He can hardly be blamed for this, on the Internet, but if he wants to attain a “touche” moment, he needs to find out the actual position of his interlocutor, not talk to somebody he has in his mind (maybe a Southern Baptist?).
Then Rufus says to me (or perhaps it’s a general “you”), “What you are doing is looking at the text vs. normative Christian practice and trying to figure out a system that explains why we follow some of the commandments and not others. Then once you have devised the system, you apply it to the text and say that’s why we follow these and not those. This is a circular argument.”
Why yes, it would be a circular argument, if that were something I was doing. And perhaps there are some people who do that, and these are the people Rufus had in mind as the intended audience for his comment. However, I am not those people. I am a person who lived overseas, trying to get a Bible translation movement started in jungle area that boasted a lot of paganism still, a strong Muslim presence as well, and heavy influence from Christian norms that were not American Christian norms. Both before and after living there, I took anthropology and missiology classes where almost all we did was discuss how the Bible can and should be applied in different cultural contexts. I’ve prayed with native people who use their language’s name for the Creator (Mohotara), and it was glorious. I’ve attended a traditional dance ceremony that had been adapted for Christian purposes to give thanks for something. I’ve listened to people discuss whether Christians can keep in their homes heirlooms that were once used for pagan purposes, and what happens when a Muslim man with multiple wives converts to Christianity.
So no, Rufus, if I was the intended audience for your comment, you have me wrong. I was not just taking a received American Christian practice and backfilling it to make it look biblical. But there is no way you could be expected to know this. After all, I don’t even know whether you are a man or a woman.
O.K., so my claim is that people who talk about the three categories of the Law are not just arguing in a circle, or justifying sentimentality or lazy thinking. What is our biblical argument, then? Let’s address Rufus’s exegetical objections.
Rufus is right … sort of
First, let me say that Rufus is technically right in his comments about Leviticus and Deuteronomy:
The inconvenient fact is that moral/civil/ceremonial law distinctions are not in the text, either explicitly or implicitly based on the arrangement (e.g. if you read straight through Leviticus and Deuteronomy, you will find yourself constantly flipping between categories, sometimes verse to verse, without any indication you should be doing so.)
Rufus 100% is correct that nowhere in the Law are there headings that say “Moral Law,” “Civil Law,” or “Ceremonial Law.” He is also correct that all these three types of commands tend to be mixed together, and sometimes it’s hard to tell which one a given commandment is. In this essay, I will argue that his correctness about the distinctions being “not in the text” only holds if you confine yourself to the texts of the actual commands, ignore the narrative parts, ignore the New Testament, and play dumb.
Mysterious Accounts and Emerging Distinctions
First, let’s acknowledge that the Books of the Law (Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) strike the modern person as disorganized. These books toggle back and forth between law and narrative. They give the Ten Commandments, and then a bunch of differing elaborations on them in different places, organized in different ways depending upon the book, the passage, and what is foregrounded after the narrative that just took place. Sometimes, Israel acts up, God says He’s going to reject them, Moses talks Him around, and then all the commands are repeated as they are reiterated. In Numbers, new applications and case law are given as new situations arise (for example, how inheritance should work if a man has only daughters). Some of the annual ceremonies (not to mention the daily ceremonies) work differently when the people of Israel were dwelling in tents with the Tabernacle right there, versus when they were living on their homesteads throughout the land, days, or weeks’ journey from the Tabernacle and later the Temple. So, no, the laws are not organized and laid out conveniently, the way modern people would like a code of laws to be. In some ways, they are more like a tribal history, which is how laws often worked back then.
In fact, I’ll do you one better. The narrative accounts from the times of the patriarchs and Exodus are also mysterious and confusing. All this was so long ago, and so little is known about the context, that it can be difficult to re-construct, for example, Israel’s exact route out of Egypt, despite the many, now obsolete, place-names given. So yes, this is an ancient, ancient document, not a simple user’s manual.
But the distinction between ceremonial, civil, and moral law is far from the only distinction that was not present in the ancient mind, and emerged over time with progressive revelation. Another great example of this would be the doctrine of the Trinity. In the Old Testament, we often see the LORD appearing as a man. Sometimes “the Angel of the LORD” does the same thing, and very occasionally, such as in Genesis 18, we see them together. (See Michael Heiser and his discussion of “two powers in heaven” in his book The Unseen Realm.) We also see “the spirit of the LORD” coming upon people in the Old Testament. The result was usually that they prophesied, or had a kind of battle madness come upon them. Thousands of years later, in the New Testament, we see Jesus say that He is God’s Son, and that “I and the Father are one.” We see the Spirit come down upon Jesus in the form of a dove. In John 15 and 16, Jesus talks openly about both the Father and the Spirit. Finally, in Matthew 28, we get “Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” You could not get trinitarian doctrine out of just Leviticus and Deuteronomy, but if you take the whole Bible as inspired, you can’t avoid it.
C.S. Lewis has said somewhere, I think in The Abolition of Man, that the ancient mind did not make a distinction between spiritual and physical. When ancient people saw a king’s throne, for example, they reacted to it as a totality. The physical throne and the concept of majesty and authority were one thing. As time has gone by, and humanity has made a sharper and sharper distinction between physical and spiritual, we can readily infer when the ancients were talking about one, the other, or both.
In the same way, once we have been given the “three categories of law” as a tool to help us in reading Leviticus, it’s usually pretty easy to tell which kind we are looking at. Civil laws usually come with some kind of civil penalty, anything from remuneration to death. Moral laws are usually just commands: “If you see the donkey of one who hates you falling down under its load, do not leave it there; be sure to help him with it.” (Ex. 23:5) Ceremonial laws are often prescriptions of how to handle ceremonial objects and what sacrifices to offer; the subclass of ceremonial laws called purity laws usually come with some kind of purification ritual if someone becomes “unclean.” All this may not be explicit, but neither is it arbitrary.
Now, we acknowledge that these categories are not completely watertight in the context of ancient Israel. Some offenses are both civil and ceremonial, and these often call for death. Examples would be a wide range of sexual offenses that not only wrong the victim, but also defile the nation and dishonor God. Some offenses are just ceremonial but not civil or moral: touching a dead body. Some are both moral and civil (false testimony in court), where others are just moral (envy, gossip). Having said all this, you can usually tell the category(-ies) of the offense by using common sense.
Also – ahem – the New Testament
Finally, I’d like to call Rufus’s attention to the fact that the New Testament exists. The question of the difference between a sin and a crime, and of what parts of the Old Testament Law were binding on non-Jewish believers, occupies large swathes of the New Testament. I mean large swathes. This is discussed at length.
The entire book of Hebrews establishes that the ceremonial law was a preparation for Christ, was fulfilled by Christ, and now is no longer necessary. Hebrews was written not too long before the destruction of the Temple in 70 A.D. It warns repeatedly that the whole sacrificial system is “passing away.” Galatians discusses at length whether circumcision, a purity ordinance designed to differentiate Israel from other peoples, is necessary for a Christian to practice (answer: No). Large chunks of Acts are devoted to early believers trying to figure out which parts of the Law are binding on Gentile converts to Christianity. God Himself reveals to Peter that the food laws no longer apply. This gives us a pretty good case that the ceremonial laws associated with temple system, and the purity laws associated with separateness, are their own category.
But there were some prohibitions that were moral, civil, and ceremonial offenses in old Israel, which now are just moral offenses. Fornication, adultery, and sex with temple prostitutes are prime examples. These things were legal in the Roman empire. They are not ceremonial offenses for Gentiles who are no longer under the ceremonial law. But Paul is at some pains to point out in his letters that they are still moral offenses against God. (“Then they should not be illegal in a Christian republic!” Whether they should be civil offenses, they were not in the Roman empire. This shows there is a distinction between moral law and a civil law.)
There is also a fair amount of discussion in the New Testament as to what should be the Christian’s relationship to the civil magistrate — the legal system of the country they live in. In Luke 3:14, when Roman soldiers ask John what they should do to demonstrate repentance, he doesn’t tell them to quit working for Empire, but he tells them not to be corrupt and oppressive. Paul says that Christians should be known as law-abiding (Romans 13:4). He seems to feel that the civil magistrate has actual real authority to enforce civil laws, but that he should not get involved in disputes within the church (I Cor. 6). Similarly, Jesus tells us that paying taxes to pay for law enforcement and national defense should not burden our conscience (Matthew 22:15ff). If someone who has legal authority over others becomes a Christian, Paul (Philemon 1 – 25) and Jesus (Matt. 24:48) say that they should use their authority to do good. Jesus also says that we should use our wealth to do good (Luke 16:9). The general picture is of two different spheres of authority, which overlap in commonsense ways. A Christian may have to engage in civil disobedience if ordered to bow down to the golden statue, but he is not culpable merely by virtue of participating in the system in which he finds himself, and should be law-abiding except in extraordinary circumstances. A Christian who finds himself with some civil power should use that power like a Christian: don’t be corrupt (the prohibition on taking bribes goes all the way back to Exodus), and try to use your influence to do as much good as possible. Long-term, this was going to lead to things like the abolition of sex slavery, then polygamy and wife-beating, and then slavery in general. But the early church could not dream of such influence.
In sum, the New Testament has a lot to tell us about ceremonial, moral, and civil law, but it is not neatly organized. It is in the form of letters and narrative history.
Looking Matthew 5:17 – 22 in the face
So now we can address Rufus’s claim that “you can’t explain satisfactorily how Matthew 5:18 – 20 fits with normative Christian practice.”
I tell you the truth, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. Anyone who breaks one of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.
You are right, Rufus, but again, you are only right if we squint and play dumb. I can certainly explain it if you back up and include Matthew 5:17:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.
Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets. How does He do it? By being the last High Priest we’ll ever need (Hebrews 7), the last sacrificial lamb we’ll ever need (John 1:29), the true temple (John 2:19 – 22), the true Ark (I Peter 3:20 – 21), the one for whom the prophets searched intently (I Peter 1:10 – 12), the second Adam (Romans 5:12 – 21), and so on. When His ongoing work is done, then “everything will be accomplished.” At the moment, He has accomplished a lot of it, including making the ceremonial law obsolete. At the time He was speaking in Matthew 5, He had not yet accomplished a lot of this, so the ceremonial Law was still in full force. For a little while.
Jesus did take major issue with how the Law was being applied (all out of emphasis, and contrary to its own spirit). He had been so outspoken about this that some people got the impression He was throwing out the whole thing, and they didn’t know whether to be excited or terrified. In Matthew 5:17 – 22, Jesus hastens to clarify that He is still on the side of the Lawgiver. He wanted us to know that, although large parts of the Law were shortly going to be “accomplished,” they were never going to become wrong. That book is closed, you might say, but it is not burned. It will never be the case that God was wrong to give the Law He gave to the ancient Israelites. It will never be the case that that Law was not good. We cannot accuse God of giving an imperfect Law, which I think is the main point of this passage.
O.K., that’s it. Rufus, if you’re out there, you say that you have looked into these issues deeply, “for decades.” I don’t know what your experience has been. Clearly, it has differed from mine. I hope we can stop talking past each other.
Besides growing up around farms and reading a lot of literature set there, I’ve always kind of craved traditions, folk costumes, and folk practices. It’s not because I like being circumscribed in everything I do–I’m kind of a free spirit actually–but because I sensed these traditions and customs and bits of folk wisdom represented a thick culture, rooted in the distant past, that I as an American lacked. Traditional ways, whatever they were and wherever I read about them, seemed at the same time intriguingly exotic, and almost familiar.
In eastern Pennsylvania, where I spent my earliest years, many of the farmers were Pennsylvania Dutch–i.e., German immigrants. They had their own language, a dialect of German that my dad was able to pick up due to having majored in German. They had their own foods, like shoefly pie and scrapple. And they had a little, tiny bit of superstition: hex signs painted on barns. As a kid, I knew that these pretty little designs were called hex signs, but I had no idea of the connection between the word hex and spells or witches.
The Pennsylvania Dutch were nominally Christian, though I understand from my dad that they, like the Amish, often had a shallow and moralistic understanding of the Bible, and in fact sometimes didn’t have a Bible in a language they could read.
Despite their attractions, the Germans were to me among the least interesting of pagan farmers. I was more interested in British, Scots, and Irish folklore. It seemed warmer and more colorful somehow, and we had plenty of that around too, being in the Appalachians. It was also readily available in literature.
The connections between farming, weather-watching, astronomy, and European pagan religion are ancient and obvious. Here is Will Durant on Roman practices:
When [the Roman peasant] left the house he found himself again and everywhere in the presence of the gods. The earth itself was a deity: sometimes Tellus, or Terra Mater–Mother Earth; sometimes Mars as the very soil he trod, and its divine fertility; sometimes Bona Dea, the Good Goddess who gave rich wombs to women and fields. On the farm there was a helping god for every task or spot: Pomona for orchards, Faunus for cattle, Pales for pasturage, Sterculus for manure heaps, Saturn for sowing, Ceres for crops, Fornax for baking corn in the oven, Vulcan for making fire. Over the boundaries presided the great god Terminus, imaged and worshiped in the stones or trees that marked the limits of the farm. … Every December the Lares of the soil were worshiped in the joyful Feast of the Crossroads, or Compitalia; every January rich gifts sought the favor of Tellus for all planted things; every May the priests of the Arval (or Plowing) Brotherhood led a chanting procession along the boundaries of adjoining farms, garlanded the stones with flowers, sprinkled them with the blood of sacrificial victims, and prayed to Mars (the earth) to bear generous fruit.
Caesar and Christ, p. 59
Farming is so labor-intensive, so high-stakes, so heartbreaking, so subject to factors beyond human control, that it tends to produce nervous and conservative people. It would be impossible to engage in it for generations without coming to a profound humility before whatever entity you have been led to believe determines whether your whole year of work will be wiped out within a few days. For Christian farmers, that entity is the One who owns the cattle on a thousand hills. For post-Christian farmers, such as Wendell Berry, it’s the earth itself, I suppose, the environment. For pagans, it’s not hard to understand why they might be reluctant to let go of all the little rituals that stand between them and disaster.
Thus, paganism hangs on longer among country folk than in the city. If you want your eyeballs to be assaulted with an astonishing variety of pagan superstitions still proudly held by modern Americans, go get yourself a Farmer’s Almanac and look in the classifieds section.
“But modern Americans are returning to paganism!” you say. “It’s part of the New Age. It’s trendy, not traditional.”
Don’t I know it. I have met a few neopagans in my day. The one I knew best, was raised in a nominally Roman Catholic home. She was innovating with her paganism, part of the modern self-worshipping, I’ll-make-it-up-as-I-go ethos. The neopagans in the back pages of The Farmer’s Almanac don’t give me that vibe. I could be wrong, but it seems like they never left.
Where is the line between weather-watching, paying attention to the phases of the moon when you plant, following the zodiac along with the yearly calendar, hiring a water-witch, hanging a horseshoe over your door to protect your entryway with iron, and full-on pagan worship? How much of it is science, and how much is just doing things the way your mother did them? And how many “mindlessly followed” folk traditions turn out to have a sound scientific basis?
I’m guessing that Christian farmers in the modern age may have given up some valuable folk knowledge in an effort to avoid idolatry. Idolatry is a deadly poison, though, so no doubt, the sacrifice is worth it. If your eye cause you to sin, pluck it out. I hope that, as the generations roll by, we can build a culture that’s even richer than the pagan one we left behind.
Lena is rocked by the strength of her urge to give Trey [all the information] she has. For generations, this townland has been begging for someone to come along and defy it wholesale, blow all its endless, unbreakable, unspoken rules to smithereens and let everyone choke on the dust. If Trey has the spine and the will to do it, she deserves the chance. Lena only wishes she had got there herself, back when she was young enough and wild enough to throw everything else away.
Out of Babel Books 
