Concept

Mystery Religions

Intro

The mystery religions were a family of ancient Greek and Roman cults that operated alongside the public, civic religion of their day. Civic religion was about the city, the calendar, the standard gods (Zeus, Apollo, Athena). The mystery religions were personal, voluntary, and secret. You chose to join one, you went through an initiation, and what happened inside the rite was not to be told to outsiders.

The most important were the Eleusinian Mysteries (devoted to Demeter and Persephone, centered at the Greek town of Eleusis), the Dionysian or Bacchic mysteries, the cult of Cybele and Attis from Phrygia, the cult of Isis and Serapis from Egypt, and Mithraism, which became hugely popular among Roman soldiers. Each had its own deity, its own myth, its own ritual drama, its own promise of better fortune in this life and a better fate after death.

These religions matter for Christian apologetics because in the early twentieth century, a school of thought called the History-of-Religions School argued that Christianity was essentially a Jewish mystery religion: a dying-and-rising savior, a sacred meal, a baptismal initiation, a personal Lord, the promise of immortality. The claim was that Paul borrowed the structure from the mystery cults around him.

The argument does not hold up well under closer inspection.

The chronology is wrong for most of the supposed parallels. The Roman Mithraic cult flourished in the second through fourth centuries AD, after Christianity was already established. The "rising" of Attis only appears in literary sources from the late fourth century, well after the gospels. The Isiac initiation rite described in Apuleius's novel is from around AD 170, again after the New Testament.

The structural fit is also poor. The mystery religions did not preach a historical figure who lived in a known place in a known year. Their dying-and-rising stories were myths about distant gods, not history about a man named Jesus crucified under Pontius Pilate. The dying-and-rising itself is also not as consistent as the popular argument claims; specialists like Jonathan Z. Smith and Mark Smith have shown that even the supposed parallels (Attis, Adonis, Osiris) do not actually rise in the same sense Jesus does.

The Christian roots are firmly Jewish, not Greek. Paul, Peter, John, James, and the rest of the first generation were Jews steeped in the Hebrew Scriptures. The categories that shape the New Testament (covenant, kingdom, Passover, atonement, resurrection in the Daniel 12 sense) come from there. The mystery religions are an interesting background of the Greco-Roman world Christianity grew into. They are not its source.

Definition The major cults, Eleusinian Mysteries (Demeter and Persephone), Dionysian/Bacchic mysteries, Cybele and Attis (Magna Mater), Isis-Serapis, and Mithras, coexisted with civic Greco-Roman religion as supplementary, individually-chosen religious affiliations. Beginning with the History-of-Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) in the early twentieth century, the mystery religions were widely invoked as the cultural source of distinctive Christian features (sacraments, dying-and-rising savior, communal meal, baptismal regeneration). The chronological and structural objections to that derivation are now substantial.

Definition

A "mystery religion" in the technical sense had four marks:

Initiation rite (telete) involving secret-knowledge transmission, often staged across degrees.
Personal patron deity (Demeter, Dionysus, Cybele, Isis, Mithras) with a mythic narrative of suffering, loss, or descent.
Sacred drama (dromenon) reenacting the patron deity's myth.
Promise of eschatological benefit, better fortune in this life and a privileged status in the afterlife.

The Greek mystēs is "one who closes [the eyes/lips]"; the mystēria are what is hidden from the uninitiated.

The major cults

Eleusinian Mysteries (Demeter and Persephone)

The oldest and most respected, centered at Eleusis near Athens. Annual initiation rites associated with the agricultural cycle and the myth of Persephone's abduction by Hades and partial return. Initiation was a once-in-a-lifetime event; revealing the secrets was a capital offense. Continued from the seventh century BC until suppressed by Theodosius I in 392 AD.

Dionysian/Bacchic Mysteries

Ecstatic rites of Dionysus, involving wine, music, dancing, and (in the more extreme accounts) ritual dismemberment of small animals. Brought to Rome and suppressed by senatorial decree (Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, 186 BC), then revived in muted form. Orphic mysteries are an offshoot with a more developed theology of the soul's reincarnation and purification.

Cybele and Attis (Magna Mater)

Phrygian fertility-cult of the Great Mother and her consort Attis. Brought to Rome in 204 BC during the Second Punic War; characterized by self-castration of priests (galli), the taurobolium (bull sacrifice in which the initiate is showered with the blood), and the spring festival re-enacting Attis's death and (in late sources) restoration. The "rising" of Attis is attested only in late-fourth-century AD sources (Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum, c. 350), after Christianity's establishment.

Isis and Serapis (Hellenistic-Egyptian)

Isis-cult spread from Ptolemaic Egypt across the Mediterranean. The Hellenistic syncretic deity Serapis (Osiris-Apis) was promoted by Ptolemy I as a unifying patron. Apuleius's Metamorphoses book 11 (Golden Ass, c. 170 AD) is the classic literary description of Isiac initiation. The cult features ritual purification, communal meals, and a rich iconography of Isis nursing the infant Horus (often invoked, anachronistically, as a Madonna-and-child source).

Mithras (Mithraism)

Roman mystery religion, especially popular among soldiers, that flourished in the late first through fourth centuries AD. Centered on the tauroctony (Mithras slaying a bull). Seven grades of initiation. Ritual meal of bread and wine (or water). Underground sanctuaries (mithraea). The Mithraic mysteries are the cult most commonly invoked in copycat-Christ literature as a source of Christian ritual elements. Crucially: the Roman Mithraic cult is contemporaneous with, not earlier than, Christianity. The Persian deity Mitra (Vedic Mitra, Avestan Miθra) is much older but bears little relation to the Roman cult of Mithras beyond the name.

Historical role in copycat-Christ argument

The History-of-Religions School (Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos, 1913; Richard Reitzenstein, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen, 1910; the early Rudolf Bultmann) argued that Pauline Christianity, on its move from Palestinian Jewish to Hellenistic Gentile cultural matrix, absorbed mystery-religion features: dying-and-rising savior, baptism as initiation, communal meal, "Lord and Savior" titulature, gnōsis of the deity, regeneration through participation.

This thesis has substantially eroded in twentieth-century scholarship.

Christian apologetic engagement

Chronological objections

The Mithraic cult is post-Christian. Roger Beck (The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire, 2006), Manfred Clauss (The Roman Cult of Mithras, 2000), and Franz Cumont's later revisions all date the Roman cult to the late first century AD at the earliest. The earliest mithraea and Mithraic inscriptions are second century. Christianity does not borrow from Mithras; if anything, the influence runs the other way (or, more likely, both draw on common Greco-Roman ritual vocabulary).
The "rising" of Attis is fourth-century. Firmicus Maternus's description postdates the Edict of Milan. The earlier Attis cult (Catullus, Carmen 63) features the death and self-mutilation but no resurrection.
The taurobolium-as-baptism reading is fourth-century. Earlier (second-century) taurobolia were votive rites for the emperor; the regeneration-language ("in aeternum renatus") is a fourth-century Christian-influenced retrofit.
The Isis-Madonna iconographic "borrowing" runs in the wrong direction: Egyptian and Roman Isis-Horus iconography is older, but the Christian Madonna-and-child is not a borrowing, it is independent Marian art that resembles the Isis-Horus type. Where direct artistic borrowing occurs (e.g., the Coptic Madonna), it is fifth- and sixth-century, with Christian content.

Structural objections

Christianity is public, not mystery. Paul preaches in synagogues and the Areopagus; the kerygma is openly proclaimed. There is no degree-based secret initiation. The mystēria of 1 Cor. 2:7 and Eph. 3:3-9 are revealed mysteries, not concealed ones, the Pauline use inverts the mystery-cult sense (compare 1 Cor. 2:6-10).
The Eucharist's Jewish matrix. The Last Supper is a Passover meal (Synoptic chronology) or a meal in Passover week (Johannine). The bread-and-wine ritual descends from the Jewish seder and kiddush, not the Mithraic communal meal.
Baptism's Jewish matrix. Christian baptism descends from the mikveh (Jewish ritual purification) and proselyte baptism, attested at Qumran and in rabbinic sources before the Roman mystery cults' baptismal rites.
The "Lord and Savior" titulature has Septuagintal roots (kyrios = LXX rendering of YHWH) and Roman imperial-cult roots (kyrios kaisar); it is not a mystery-cult borrowing.
First-century Palestinian Judaism was the least syncretistic religious culture in the Roman world. The Maccabean memory and Pharisaic project actively guarded against Hellenistic religious importation. The Christian movement emerged from this milieu.

Contemporary academic shift

Bruce Metzger, "Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity," in Historical and Literary Studies (1968), early statement of the methodological problem: the danger of "parallelomania" (Samuel Sandmel, JBL 81 [1962]: 1-13).
A. D. Nock, Conversion (1933), argued that conversion as a category was Christian, and only weakly attested in the mystery cults.
Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (1990), extended critique of the Frazer-Reitzenstein-Bultmann lineage; argues that the entire edifice of "Christianity-from-mysteries" was built on Protestant-Catholic polemic projected backwards.

Tensions

This is not a denial that early Christianity emerged in a religiously plural Greco-Roman world or that Christian writers adopted and inverted Greco-Roman vocabulary (Justin Martyr's logos spermatikos, the Cappadocians' use of philosophical vocabulary). The objection is to the strong derivation thesis, that the substance of Christian sacrament, savior-figure, and resurrection is borrowed from prior Greco-Roman mystery cults.
The Hellenistic syncretism question is genuinely contested at the boundary cases, Hermetic literature, Gnosticism (which is itself a contested category), the Corpus Hermeticum. The mainstream-Christian apologetic engagement does not need to deny these boundary phenomena; it focuses on the canonical New Testament emerging from a Jewish matrix.
Some early-twentieth-century History-of-Religions readings remain influential in popular religious-studies textbooks despite the specialist literature having moved on.