The Unseen Realm is a scholarly book about the concept of the divine council in Ancient Near Eastern cosmology, especially in Ugarit, which was a near neighbor of Israel both geographically, culturally, and linguistically. Heiser finds this concept of the divine council assumed in the Hebrew Scriptures, similar to how the heliocentric model of the solar system is assumed in anything you see written since Copernicus. That is, it’s never stated or described directly, but it is referenced in many stories, phrases, and figures of speech, and is openly the setting for certain passages, such as Psalm 82.
The idea behind “the divine council” is that there is a Most High God (the Creator) who rules the earth with the help of a sort of committee of divine beings (elohim). This committee is traditionally conceived of as meeting on a high mountain, in a garden setting, often a place that is the source of rivers. Or as Ps. 82 calls it, “the great assembly.”
Heiser spends most of his book establishing that this view is present in Scripture.
After reading Heiser, I heard a podcast interview with Joel Muddamalle. Muddamalle is the academic protege of Heiser (who has now gone to his reward). He is carrying on with researching this idea of the elohim as an active presence in redemption history, and also with popularizing it in the Christian world. And I heard that he had written a book, The Unseen Battle, which might be viewed as a sequel to Heiser’s book. So naturally, I had to get it.
I expected TUB to be all the same material as TUR, just with Muddamalle’s own personal style. It was not. The first few chapters do recap Heiser’s cosmology, but they don’t spend a lot of time establishing it, as Heiser did. Muddamalle then moves on to the nature of the battle, which Heiser touched on but did not major on.
The nature of the battle is that God wants to get the nations back from the gods.
The way this is done, in the church age, is through evangelism, missions, and building healthy churches and families. In short, obedience. It’s not primarily through a lot of fancy, spooky ghost-hunting or exorcism stuff.
This exegesis, naturally, warmed my little Reformed heart.
Now, it does mean that, if you are attempting to be faithful to your spouse and/or raise your kids; work hard and honestly at a lawful calling; worship the Lord on Sunday and support His people; or do any other forms of healthy, faithful culture-building, you have stepped into the battle. The dethroned powers do not like this sort of behavior. This may, perhaps, explain why just trying to mind your own business and live a quiet, peaceable life can occasion so much resistance: everything from health problems, to Murphy’s Law and attacks of depression and discouragement; to actual hate and legal resistance from human beings who do not like what you are doing. (Per Muddamalle, Scripture makes it clear that the “hosts” on both sides of this battle are mixed, consisting of human beings and of spiritual beings.)
Particularly if you are contributing in any way (including by prayer) to the disciplining of not-yet-Christianized nations, you present a threat to the old gods, who do not want to be cast out as they have been cast out of so many other nations in the last 2000 years. This is why foreign missionaries and native pastors in unreached or partially unreached countries undergo so many hardships: poverty, evil bureaucracy, and all kinds of health and mental problems.
The church itself, existing as an entity comprised of people from many nations, is a rebuke to the powers.
The multiethnic and diverse nature of the family of God, the church, can be seen through Paul’s use of polupoikilos. This term is a combination of two adjectives meaning “much” (polus) and “various kinds, diversified, manifold” (poikilos). The word polupoikilos can also mean “of many colors” or “polychrome.” Classical Greek writers used this word to reference cloth or flowers to convey a sense of intricate beauty. The word poikilos is used in the Septuagint to refer to Joseph’s coat of many colors (Gen. 17:3, 23). As Timothy Gombis observes, “The powers have ordered the present evil age in such a way as to exacerbate the divisions within humanity. God confounds them by creating in Christ one unified, multiracial body consisting of formerly divided groups of people.”
ibid, pp. 169 – 170
How about that. The Rainbow of Diversity, which we have been taught to hate, is actually God’s goal as well. The reason that we have been taught to hate it, is because of the way they have pursued it … trying to force it down by means of human power and moralism, by defining righteous and unrighteous groups and viciously suppressing those deemed to be foes of the rainbow. They have made “inclusion” mean “we exclude you.” This is what happens any time people try to make the world look like the restored heavens and earth, without Christ. They end up bringing about the opposite. True harmony among the ethnic groups is not an easy thing. It can only be obtained by means of the New Birth.
Though this is a scholarly-for-the-layperson work, Muddamalle’s lighter personality shines in it. He has many call-out boxes sprinkled throughout the book, devoting a page or two to questions such as, “Are There Aliens in This World?” and “What About Demonic Exorcisms?”.
That’s it. Just I promised: a short review.
Oh! What are the “three rebellions”?
Adam and Eve’s rebellion at the Tree
The rebellion of the “sons of God,” when they chose to come down and take human wives (Genesis 6)
Humankind’s post-Flood rebellion at Babel (Genesis 11). It was at this point that God divided up humankind among the elohim, giving each people group extant at the time its patron god.
Anyway … back to the battle! God be w ye this weekend!
Manson suggests we do two things: first, assume that whatever else may be the case, the New Testament at the very least gives us evidence about what the early church believed and did; second, read the New Testament “with ordinary common sense” and not through the spectacles of naturalistic unbelief or fanciful speculation.
–Ronald H. Nash, Christianity & the Hellenistic World, p. 269
Of course, there are many people whose definition of common sense includes a strict naturalism, or rather anti-supernaturalism. However, Nash and Manson are both talking to Bible scholars, who we would not expect to hold this view.
Like anybody who has ever encountered it, I have “issues” with the story of Jason and Medea.
In case you missed it, he sails off on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece. She is a witch, daughter of the king of Colchis, descendent of Helios, the sun god. Struck by Eros with an inordinate crush on Jason, she helps him accomplish all the tasks necessary to get the fleece and escape alive. He takes her with him on the Argo, and they crash around Greece, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Eventually, he throws her over for a younger model, a native Greek gal who is daughter of the king of Corinth. Medea takes a bloody and spectacular revenge, which I won’t spoil (look it up).
I first heard all this from my ninth-grade Lit teacher. She presented it in a very feminist way, but to be fair, this particular story sort of begs for that. I remember, in university, arguing rather incoherently with a male classmate about who was the real villain in this story. Later, when I was home schooling and read a simplified version of the legend to my kids, we decided we didn’t like the story, and we didn’t like Jason or Medea either, and they were both horrible people and they deserved each other.
So, hopefully, this book will be the nadir of my year of reading Greco-fiction: facing the story of Jason and Medea square on, by reading an entire novel about them.
The reason I liked the title of this novel is that it sounded like a phrase taken directly from the Greek — and so it was. The author, Natalie Haynes, has really done her homework.
Euripides’ Medea was the first Greek tragedy I saw performed, and it was the first or second play I read in Greek. … I wrote my dissertation on the heroics of infanticide in Euripides (I don’t have children, before you think about composing your sternly worded letter). … I’ve been reading and thinking about this play for the best part of thirty years, and I have probably seen it performed twenty-five times … I decided that the thing I needed to do [before writing the novel] was translate the Euripides, longhand. This is–in case you are wondering–weapons-grade procrastination. It took me a few weeks …
Haynes, in the Afterword, pp. 359 – 360
Haynes’ treatment of this story has been called feminist. And O.K. … sort of? But it’s not “feminist” in the sense of someone who understands the literature poorly who then reacts against the ancient heroic-age value system and sets out to undermine it. It is, rather, the work of someone who has marinated themselves in the ancient heroic-age mileu, which inherently presented a very broken relationship between men and women (especially husbands and wives). This story, and also the story of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, bring a lot of tension with them and almost demand that you take what might be called a “feminist” perspective, at least in part, unless you want to take a very simplified view of the whole thing and not really analyze it much at all.
It’s not just me saying this. Apparently, everyone has been arguing about Medea for … well, ever since she came to their attention.
Diodorious Siculus says that the reason we have so many contradictory versions of her story is because tragic poets are drawn to talking about marvels. It’s also worth mentioning that any character who prompts different versions of their story is one who was popular in antiquity. If you want to read more about Medea, I spent many happy hours with “Medea,” a collection of essays edited by James J. Clauss …
ibid, pp. 365 – 366
Apparently, my and my children’s feeling that the whole story is regrettable is echoed by the Nurse of Jason and Medea’s two sons. Here is her opening monologue to the play (translated by Haynes):
If only the Argos had sunk to the bottom of the sea rather than winging its way towards the land of Colchis … For then my mistress Medea would not have sailed to the towers of Iolcus, stricken with love for Jason … and she wouldn’t live here, in Corinth, with her husband and children, pleasing the citizens to whose land she came in flight, helping Jason in everything. That is the greatest help: whenever a wife doesn’t disagree with her husband. But now, everything is hostile .. For Jason–betraying his own children and my mistress–is sharing his bed with royalty … Medea is wretched, dishonored like this. She cries out about the oaths he swore to her .. I’m afraid she is planning something. She’s a strange woman. No one starts a fight with her and takes an easy victory.
ibid, pp. 272 – 273
Successive phrases from this speech are used as chapter headings for the first 3/4 of the book.
I give this book 3 out of 4 stars. (Or 4 out of 5, take your pick.) The research, storytelling and psychology are spectacular. It gets tenser and more tragic towards the end. It is, of course, very hard to read, because this is a tragedy. The hardest parts to read, for me, were the parts where the Nurse speaks to the children. Even though it’s set in the ancient world, this is fundamentally a story about a home that gets broken when the children are very small. That’s hard to bear.
The one missing star? I needed more description.
This book consists almost entirely in monologues by the different characters (except for Jason), punctuated occasionally by dialogue. I guess that makes sense for a novel that is a re-telling of a play. But if I’m going to read a book set in the ancient Mediterranean, which includes a tour of the cities of Iolcus, Colchis, Aeaea (Circe’s island), and Corinth, not to mention the Aegean, Adriatic, and Black Seas, I want more than little hints and scraps about what these places look, sound, and smell like. I want to see the terrain, the buildings, and the clothes people wear. Haynes gives us almost none of that. We only get a little bit of description when it is directly relevant to a plot point, like the Symplegades (giant clashing rocks), or the golden dress that Medea gifts to Glauke. This is where Haynes falls short of Renault, who describes buildings, clothing, and artifacts in detail.
Also, there is almost zero description of how the people look. That’s important to me.
As for Jason, we are only told that he is “good-looking” until he meets Medea, when we find out that he has dark, curly hair and golden skin. This means that we have to go through the Argo’s entire outbound journey making up our own mental image of Jason, and then modify it when we find out what is canon in the novel. In the case of Jason, that may be intentional. Part of his characterization is that he is a chameleon, able to be the figure that people want in order to get what he wants; or, as Haynes puts it, “a blank space where a man ought to be.”
But there are plenty of other characters that Haynes could describe when we first meet them, and she doesn’t. What do the Colchians look like? They are “not Greek.” Do they look Asian? Or is Medea made of gold, like the children of Helios in the novel Circe? What do the different Argonauts look like? The Tutor? The Nurse? Haynes does a better job describing the various goddesses, women, nymphs, and the golden ram whose lives are also busted up by this story … but still, I could use more.
Gentle reader, you have survived the harrowing journey of the Argo with me. What horrible ancient Greek story should we read about next?
Christianity & the Hellenistic World, by Ronald H. Nash, pub. 1984 by Zondervan and Probe Ministries International. This review was published on GoodReads on May 8, 2026.
C&THW is a capable review of the scholarship around the question: Did Christianity actually arise from Platonism/Stoicism, Gnosticism, or the Hellenistic mystery religions?
The view that it did, became popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s, especially in a German school of thought called Comparative Religions, or the “History of Religions School” (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule — one of the many great ideas that German philosophers have given us). (p. 117) These claims were fairly quickly debunked by theologians and early-church historians, and they stopped being taken seriously in theological circles.
However, as often happens, the bad idea had escaped the barn and was wandering freely throughout the neighborhood. The idea that Christianity’s inception lay in Hellenistic thought-systems and not in the Jewish Law & the Prophets followed by the events of 30 A.D. was still being taught as fact by various philosophers and historians years later. (p. 11)
Nash’s book was written to survey the Comparative Religionists’ claims and present the debunking evidence for the lay person. It’s what I would call a popular-level scholarly book. The topic is scholarly and there are a ton of references, but it never gets too far into the weeds on any one topic. For example, I would have liked a lot more detail about the mystery religions, but that is not this book’s purpose, and you don’t need to know a lot about the mystery religions before you see that they are nothing like the Christian communion ceremony, for example.
The writing itself is matter-of-fact, capable, and not flashy. Probably many people would find this book boring. I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up ordinarily. But my interest in this topic had been piqued because I recently read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a lot of which is about ancient Greek “solar kings.” I was struck by how they parallel Jesus, and yet are very different from Him at the same time. I wondered whether anyone has tried to claim that Christianity was just the solar king myth repackaged for the Jews. Turns out, they have. So this book came to me at just the right moment to be pretty interesting. It’s going in my home library for sure.
Alien Intrusion: UFOs and the Evolution Connection by Gary Bates, A Book Review
I’ve found myself recommending this book to multiple people in multiple comments sections in recent days, so perhaps it’s time to re-post a shortened version of my review of it from 2024. This is a great resource if you’re wondering about UFOs and the beings that are presumably inside them.
Alien Intrusion is 400+ pages, with endnotes to each chapter, appendices, and an index, yet it is accessibly written. It is a capable survey of the whole phenomenon, starting with the social history of UFO sightings and how aliens are portrayed in fiction; moving on to the science of whether light-speed travel is really possible (it’s not); whether indications of physical life beyond Earth look promising (they don’t); the theory of Directed Panspermia and how it was supposed to save evolution; sightings of lights in the sky and cover-ups associated with them; conspiracy theorists, true believers, and hucksters who have capitalized on the UFO craze; and finally, testimonies of people who have had abduction experiences.
“Abducted — Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind” is a really interesting chapter. Bates has just spent more than half the book showing that the extraterrestrial hypothesis, at least as it is usually understood, cannot be true for multiple reasons. But now, he turns his attention to the many people who have had alien abduction experiences. And instead of dismissing them as hoaxers (dealt with in the last chapter) or gaslighting them, he believes them. And he has a great deal of compassion for them. This is why I think so highly of Bates.
A “Typical” Alien Abduction Story
According to Bates, drawing on the work of other researchers, here are the elements of “Classic Abduction Syndrome [CAS]”: the abductee is captured, often at night, and often while being seemingly paralyzed. Once on the ship, they are typically undressed and subjected to some kind of invasive and humiliating “medical” examination. Often, this escalates to sexual abuse of various kinds. Then, the aliens “teach” the abductee. This involves being told that they have been chosen for a special mission. Predictions are made about the future of earth or of humanity. The aliens are trying, and they want the abductee’s help, to raise humanity’s consciousness or to save humanity. Often, they say they are engaged in a breeding program, creating human/alien hybrids. Sometimes this is explained as a way for humanity to survive when the earth is destroyed. Abductees may be given a tour of the ship or of other locations, and they may meet a divine being or an entity claiming to be Jesus, the pope (!), or a dead relative. After the abductee is returned to his or her surroundings, they often don’t immediately remember their abduction experience. They may experience “lost time,” and recall the experience only later (sometimes under hypnosis, which raises other issues).
Abductees experience lasting physical and mental aftereffects of their experience, whatever its nature may have been. They have PTSD-like symptoms. They have may bruises, scars, or puncture marks on their body, though these are never of an obvious enough nature to prove their story. They may experience new chronic health problems, commonly with their reproductive system, even including uterine or breast cancer.
On the spiritual side, many abductees come out of the experience with a new openness to the occult and to New Age beliefs. Others, though they initially feel understandable anger and fear towards the aliens, after multiple abductions come to a passive state of appearing to love and be fascinated with their tormentors, almost like Stokholm Syndrome.
Assuming that all these people are not just making up these bizarre and traumatic experiences, it is clear that they have come into contact with entities that do not wish them well.
On their own testimony, the “aliens” can be shown to be unreliable. For example, they tell abductee they are torturing them “for your own good.” They say they are wise and want to help human beings evolve to the next level, yet they subject their human subjects to frightening and degrading sexual practices. Either these beings don’t understand humans very well, or they are traumatizing them on purpose to “break” them.
The aliens also seem eager to explain exactly where they are from. In past decades, they would claim to be from Mars or Venus. Now that we know more about those planets, they tend to name a star or star system that is outside of our galaxy. Aliens tend to appear to humans in whatever form is culturally expected at the time.
Over the decades, we have allegedly been visited by long-haired Space Brothers, stacked Space-Babes, black-eyed and large-headed dwarfs, bipedal reptiles, praying mantis-type creatures, and … well … the list goes on and on. But, they all seem perfectly comfortable with Earth’s gravity, temperature, oxygen levels, etc. Doesn’t that strike you as a bit odd?
Nick Redfern, UFO researcher, quoted in ibid, p. 321
So, we have powerful, apparently deceptive entities, which kidnap and traumatize people, and then unfailingly give them a New Age message to take back to earth, often going out of their way to say that the Bible has “gotten it wrong.”
Furthermore, apart from claiming to be from space, these “alien” abduction experiences have a lot in common with abduction stories from past ages where the perpetrators were fairies, demons, or other paranormal entities. It is starting to look as if we are hearing the same song, but a different verse. And in fact, Bates suggests that these “aliens” are probably demonic, or fallen angelic, entities. They are, in short, the “elohim” described by Heiserand identified as “the gods” by Cahn.
Jesus Really Is the Answer
Two UFO researchers, Joe Jordan and Wes Clark, noticed that out of all the abduction cases they had heard of, very few were Christians. They put out a call for anyone who was a Christian and had an abduction experience to contact them. Confusingly, they were contacted by people who said things like “I’m a Christian and I was abducted and saw Jesus on the spaceship.” With further research, they found that people who identified as Christian but did not “walk the walk,” as the researchers put it, were just as likely to experience abduction and subsequent New Age brainwashing by the “aliens.” However, “walk the walk” Christians had a different experience:
Clark said that many of the respondents claimed to be Christians who told of their own abduction experiences. He felt that they were happy to have someone to talk to; they usually felt uncomfortable talking about their experiences because most UFO investigators had New Age inclinations and ideas that opposed their own beliefs. In addition, the Christian church is not equipped to deal with such reports because the UFO phenomenon has been largely misunderstood and dismissed by organized religions. Clark comments:
“As the number of cases mounted, the data showed that in every instance where the victim knew to invoke the name of Jesus Christ, the event stopped. Period. The evidence was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.”
ibid, p. 267
So, My Prediction
Therefore, here’s what I expect from the government files about UFOs which are being released a chunk at a time.
These files cover years of reports, so they will comprise a bunch of different types of experiences. “Aliens” seem to adjust their approach based not only on the cultural expectations of the time, but regionally as well, and perhaps tailored to the individual. So this will be a very heterogenous mass of stuff.
Most of it will not be conclusive. There will be grainy videos and plenty of eyewitness testimonies. Some of the testimony is going to come from people considered sane and reliable (like Air Force pilots), but most people simply can’t bring themselves to accept testimony of something they believe is impossible, no matter how upstanding the witness. As we have seen with abduction experiences, “aliens” might leave some kind of physical evidence (small puzzling scars), but they tend not to leave anything conclusive. Observe that they have been dropping strange hints, and lots of them, for more than a century, but they have never made an open appearance that would settle all questions.
If there really are, say, powerful and ethically challenged interdimensional beings who wish to sell humankind a narrative by appearing as aliens, why have they not settled on a unified approach and made a big, dramatic appearance with an internally consistent story to back it up? I can think of three reasons.
The first reason is that they want control of the narrative, which means they only want to present themselves openly to people they can successfully brainwash. Presumably, they can’t give Stockholm Syndrome to 300 million people at the same time, so they save the extreme treatment for individuals. For people they can’t directly access for whatever reason, they give ambiguous physical phenomena, such as lights that move as nothing should be able to.
Second reason: They aren’t unified, and/or they don’t have really great self-control. There is no reason to think that fallen angelic beings would all work together. Perhaps they are all going rogue. Clearly, they can’t resist torturing their victims, even when that would seem to work against their goal of presenting as wise and gaining humankind’s trust.
Third reason: They are limited by a greater power. You cannot come into a strong man’s house and take his possessions unless you can first tie up the strong man. Say you want to manifest yourself as a god or with a big obvious spaceship in a randomly chosen country. If that country was, at one time, loyal to the Creator of the Universe, and large sections of it still are, He quite likely will not put up with this.
So, from these government files I expect a bunch of different stuff, maybe even an alien “corpse,” which will be weird and ambiguous and perhaps look like it was made for a movie (because, in a sense, it was) … but nothing that would be seen as conclusive by a skeptic.
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.
Under the tab Impression Elements are photojournalistic articles documenting the process that the author and others went through to re-create the armor and accoutrements of Archaic to Classical period Greek warriors.
I read the Archaic Bell Cuirass page, and can I say, I was impressed. This man is Hephaistos. We are talking months of work to get the cuirass (“breastplate” to an amateur like me, though I’m sure there is a difference) into the right shape. Then, he wore it and discovered how it works on the battlefield, which in turn yields some theories about how battle was carried out in the era when this style of cuirass was popular.
As so often happens, the Bell Cuirass (Archaic) only looks simpler than the Muscle Cuirass (Classical). Turns out, it is much harder to make. Its fastenings, too, are simple and elegant in design, harder to make than the fastenings for the Muscle Cuirass, but easier to use. So we have the older artifact being more what we would call “advanced,” and requiring more skill to fashion. Score another point for ancient people.
One last observation: My first glimpse of the Bell Cuirass gave me strong Spanish Conquistador vibes. Apparently, the flared collar and cinched, flared waist in men’s armor has been in fashion more than once throughout history.
Anyway, I highly recommend this web page. Up to now, my perusal of re-created ancient clothing perhaps leaned too much towards female clothing.
The Senate of the Republic [508 – 49 B.C.] often abused its authority, defended corrupt officials, waged war ruthlessly, exploited conquered provinces greedily, and suppressed the aspirations of the people for a larger share in the prosperity of Rome. But never elsewhere … have so much energy, wisdom, and skill been applied to statesmanship; and never elsewhere has the idea of service to the state so dominated a government or a people. These senators were not supermen; they made serious mistakes … But most of them had been magistrates, administrators, and commanders; some of them, as proconsuls, had ruled provinces as large as kingdoms … it was impossible that a body made up of such men should escape some measure of excellence. The Senate was at its worst in victory, at its best in defeat. It could carry forward policies that spanned generations and centuries; it could begin a war in 264 and end it in 146 B.C.
I am sorry. I am sorry that I left your book, Pompeii, moldering on my bedside bookshelf for … I don’t know … several years after I got it … I don’t know … from my husband’s trucker friend, from the library sale shelf, somewhere like that. I should have picked it up and read it immediately. I thought it was going to be demanding and … you know … educational. I didn’t know it was going to be educational. Or gripping. Or The Perfect Historical Novel.
Spoiler: Vesuvius Blows
I don’t know, reader, whether you would pick up a novel about Pompeii. Perhaps you would worry that the tension would be somewhat lacking, given how everyone knows that the mountain explodes and buries the town. It would be, you might think, sort of like reading a novel called John Dies at the End.
Harris, of course, uses the volcanic eruption’s very fame to his advantage. The people in Pompeii, and Herculaneum, and in the other towns around the bay of Neapolis, don’t know what is about to happen to them. This gives the opportunity for an infinite number of ironic quotes and thematic moments, such as the line, “I ought to die and come back to life more often,” when a narrow escape from death causes a character to be met with newfound respect. You spend much of the book wondering which, if any, of these people are going to survive.
The Historical Background
No, I am not going to sketch all the historical background here. I’ll just tell you that an awful lot is known about Roman society of this period, both general things about the culture, diet, and technology, and specific things about individuals like Pliny the Elder. (And Nero. Nero had a favorite moray eel, did you know that?) Harris makes excellent use of all this research to build a story that grows organically out of the who the characters are and what they value.
At the beginning of the book is a nice clear map of the Bay of Neapolis and surrounding regions, which is critical to visualizing the action of the book. Special attention is given to the Aqua Agusta, an aqueduct which runs from the Apenine Mountains, past all the towns in the region, with spurs providing water to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and so on, until it terminates at the naval base of Misenum, in a reservoir called the Piscina Mirabilis, “Miracle Pool.” When you see how close the Aqua Agusta runs to Vesuvius, you can see that an imminent eruption might well cause problems for the region’s water system.
The Hero
Marcus Attilius, the “aquarius,” comes from a family of men who build and maintain the empire’s aqueducts (which, by the way, like the Aqua Agusta, are often not elevated but rather are underground pipes). He was sent from Rome to Misenum two weeks ago after his predecessor, Exomnius, mysteriously disappeared. When the water running into Misenum first turns sulfurous and then starts to lose pressure, everyone is ready to blame Attilius for not having foreseen or prevented this.
Attilius, realizing the gravity of the situation, orders the city’s water supply to be shut off. There is enough in the Piscina Mirabilis to last Misenum two days with rationing. Attilius, based on which towns have lost water and which haven’t, thinks he knows approximately where the break in the aqueduct is. By pressing very hard, he hopes in two days to sail to Pompeii, send a team inland to find the exact source of the leak, send another team to re-direct the water farther upstream, buy supplies, and work through the night with a team of slaves to fix the blockage. In this way, he hopes to prevent riots and death in the towns without water. The reader knows that Attilius is also racing against time to find the reason the aqueduct broke.
We learn a lot about the Romans’ amazing aqueduct system. All the cities had, essentially, free water as a gift from the Empire. The underground pipe was six feet in diameter, with a three-foot thickness on either side made of the famous Roman cement, made with seawater, which could dry underwater and which got harder with time. There are maintenance manholes at regular intervals, and water sinks along the route which allow the water to drop rocks and silt it’s been carrying. These are then used for gravel.
The great Roman roads went crashing through nature in a straight line, brooking no opposition. But the aqueducts, which had to drop the width of a finger every hundred yards–any more and the flow would rupture the walls; any less and the water would lie stagnant–they were obliged to follow the contours of the ground. Their greatest glories, such as the triple-tiered bridge in southern Gaul, the highest in the world, that carried the aqueduct of Nemausus, were frequently far from human view.
page 181
The Villain
Ampliatus is a former slave. His master, who used him as a toy (yes, the Romans were horrible people), set him free in his will at the age of twenty. Ampliatus, by this time a ruthless social climber, began to amass wealth by buying real estate around Pompeii. Several years before the book opens, the city suffered an earthquake. Most of the aristocrats fled, but Ampliatus is unendingly proud of himself because he stayed, bought up a bunch of buildings on the cheap, fixed them up, and became the nouveau riche. By the time the book opens, he has bought his former master’s estate. His bedroom is the one where he used to be molested. He has gotten his former master’s son in debt to him, and is persuading him to marry Ampliatus’s daughter. He is building an ambitious bathhouse in the middle of the city. As Ampliatus says to the aquarius when he’s trying to corrupt him, water is key to civilization.
As a former slave, Ampliatus outdoes the aristocrats he imitates in both cruelty and ostentatiousness. There is a memorable scene of a feast Ampliatus gives, of the kind that historians would probably call sumptuous. It’s held in Ampliatus’ triclinium (dining room) on a swelteringly hot August night, and no one but Ampliatus wants to be there.
And the food! Did Ampliatus not understand that hot weather called for simple, cold dishes … then had come lobster, sea urchins, and, finally, mice rolled in honey and poppy seeds. … Sow’s udder stuffed with kidneys, with the sow’s vulva served as a side dish … Roast wild boar filled with live thrushes that flapped helplessly across the table as the belly was carved open … Then the delicacies: the tongues of storks and flamingoes (not too bad), but the tongue of a talking parrot had always looked to Popidius like nothing so much as a maggot. Then a stew of nightingales’ livers …
pp. 146 – 147
Reader, I have spared you the most disgusting parts of this dinner.
Ampliatus has commissioned a positive prophecy about the city of Pompeii from a sybil–an older female seer–and is keeping it in readiness for the next time he needs to get the people all excited … probably in order to ensure the election to public office of an aristocrat he has in his pocket. And here is what the sybil has said: Pompeii is going to be famous all over the world. Long after the Caesars’ power has faded, people from all over the world will walk Pompeii’s streets and marvel at its buildings. Ampliatus takes this as a very good sign.
The Scholar
Pliny the Elder, an actual historical person, makes an appearance as a prominent side character. Pliny was stationed as a peacetime admiral at Misenum. When Vesuvius started erupting, it was clearly visible across the bay. Pliny, who had written a whole encyclopedia about the natural world, received a message from an older female aristocrat in Herculaneum, begging him to come and save her library. (In Pompeii, this message is delivered by Attilius.) Pliny launched the navy without imperial permission, intending to save the library and also evacuate the towns near the eruption. But pumice falling from the sky, floating on the water, and clogging the bay prevented the ships from approaching the coast. Pliny and his crew were forced to take refuge belowdecks, and their ship was driven across the bay to Stabiae, where they took refuge overnight. Eventually, they had to evacuate on foot, but Pliny, who was fat and was perhaps suffering from congestive heart failure, chose to stay, and ended up dying in the gaseous cloud that swept along the coast.
The remarkable thing is that during this entire time, Pliny had his scribe with him, and he was dictating his observations about the “manifestation.” His notes were saved. It occurs to me that the stereotype of the British absentminded professor who is never rattled by anything, and always keeps his cool and approaches everything with perfect manners and scientific curiosity (and is an incurable snob), may have roots deeper than England itself.
Go read this book right now!
Despite the large amount of detail in this review, I assure you that I have merely scratched the surface and that this review contains very few spoilers for the novel. I really can’t say anything better about it than that it is, in my estimation, the perfect historical novel. Please go read it if you have any interest at all in the genre.
Out of Babel Books 