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Jonathan Z. Smith's
Drudgery Divine. On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of
Late Antiquity
University of
Chicago Press, 1990
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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If,
as George Tyrrell said, the Nineteenth-Century questers after the historical
Jesus were seeing their own visage reflected at the bottom of a deep well and
mistaking it for the face of Jesus, we might guess that F.C. Baur, employing
his Tendenzkritik, had similarly
glimpsed in the pages of the New Testament the reflection of axe-grinding
scripture scholarship which persists to this day. In these 1988 Louis H. Jordan
Lectures, Jonathan Z. Smith certainly demonstrates the surprising extent to
which much that has passed for scientific study of early Christianity is more
plausibly to be interpreted as theological apologetics.
It is, in brief, Smith's contention that the
history of the work done by scholars in one particular corner of the vineyard,
the relation of emergent Christianity to the Hellenistic Mystery
Religions,
has often functioned as a proxy-war between denominational super-powers
reluctant to step into open combat. He argues that the earliest attention paid
to the similarities between
Christian
myth and ritual and those of the Mysteries was that paid by Protestants who
wanted to paint Roman Catholicism as an admixture of authentic proto-Protestant
Pauline Christianity with
the
magic sacramentalism of heathenism. Likewise, Rationalists and Unitarians
pressed the syncretistic process further back, making Paul the corrupter of the
earlier, simpler, Jeffersonian
faith
of the Messiah Jesus. Harnack reflects this tradition when he makes
Nicene-Chalcedonian Christianity a bloodless Hellenization of a simple Galilean
gospel.
Just as E.P. Sanders and others have recently
suggested with some force that our reading of the Pauline writings has been
distorted by the lens of Reformation-era polemics, Smith sees the study of Christianity
and the Hellenistic religions as thinly-veiled apologetics. Even if we no
longer share this covert agenda, we are still fighting the same battle as long
as we allow the game to be
played
by the same rules set down by the earlier polemicists. Or by the later ones, for,
as some of us have long suspected and Smith demonstrates, the more recent
apologetic Tendenz is still trying
mightily to distance apostolic Christianity from any touch of the unclean
Mystery Cults (or Gnosticism).
For this purpose Judaism is used as both buffer
and whipping boy. This double, or as Smith says, duplicitous, use of Judaism as
a foil has two moments. First one seizes upon any possible Jewish parallel with
this or that feature of New Testament thought or myth that Bultmann or
Reitzenstein had tagged a Hellenistic borrowing. Such a Jewish precedent is
judged ipso facto preferable to any Hellenistic one. Albert Schweitzer
adopted this course already in Paul and His Interpreters, patching together
from the Pseudepigrapha a vague but thoroughly Jewish, apocalyptic
"mysticism of the Apostle Paul" just so he wouldn't have to yield the
Pauline corpus up to the radical surgery of Pierson, Naber, and Van Manen.
These "Dutch Radicals" saw a Mystery Religion soteriology in the
epistles that could ill be squared with the ostensible Jewishness of the
apostle. The Hellenistic passages had, they judged, to be excised as secondary
interpolations.
W.D. Davies'
Paul and Rabbinic Judaism, hailed as a monument of scholarship, might better be
described as a mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse (a mouse easily
trapped by Hyam Maccoby in his recent Paul
and Hellenism). Precious little in the Pauline letters emerged looking
very Rabbinic. The negligible results of the book demonstrate that the Judaizing
path is a
scholarly
dead end, though its author and many readers did not seem to realize this. One
may speculate that the acclaim given this work as well as that by Davies's
disciple David Daube (a
plastered
cistern that lost not a drop), The New
Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, stems from the imagined utility of both books for
buttressing the bulwark against the incursions of parallels
from
the Mystery Religions.
The Dead Sea Scrolls were and still are
proof-texted gleefully by scholars as a grand excuse to dismiss all the
striking parallels drawn by Bultmann between the Gospel of John and various
Gnostic and Mandaean sources, though it is hard to see how the minimal terminological
agreements between John and the Scrolls can outweigh the sheer number of
striking parallels with the Mandaica.
In all of this the reasoning seems to be that
even a vague Jewish parallel is automatically to be preferred over even a close
Gnostic or Mystery Religion parallel as the source of a New Testament doctrine
or mytheme. And the reason for this bias can only be the traditional
theological desire to have the New Testament grow out of the Old as by a
process of progressive revelation. Let us widen the scope of Jewish origin to
include Rabbinism,
Qumran, and the Pseudepigrapha if we must, but God
forbid we should have to admit that Christianity had non-Jewish roots as well
as
Jewish.
The second moment in the use of Judaism Smith
describes is the deprecation of Judaism as a sow's ear from which the silk
purse of Christianity was cut. Everywhere we meet with invidious comparisons
leaving Judaism like Moses lonely on
Mount
Pisgah looking wistfully at
the fertile plains of a Promised Land it was destined not to enter, a religion
blindly studying the scriptures
in
which it thinks to have eternal life, but too near-sighted to behold the true
Christian gospel.
I see here a covert use of what I call
"dissimilarity apologetics," borrowing the term from Norman Perrin's
famous criterion of dissimilarity. The idea is that Christianity will seem more
truly
to
be a divine revelation the more we can isolate it from either Judaism or the
Hellenistic world. First we employ Judaism to exorcise suggestions of
Hellenistic influence, then we turn on Judaism and insist on its inferiority
and utter inability to have produced the imagined distinctives of the revealed
gospel. Judaism serves to minimize Christian similarities with the Mystery
Religions, and once it has thus served its purpose, the apologist minimizes the
similarities between Judaism and Christianity.
Yet
for all his acuity in perceiving this agenda, Smith himself almost seems to be
doing his best to seal off Christian origins from the possibility of
syncretism. It is apparent that he so wishes to avoid the error of
superimposing stereotypes of Catholicism onto the evidence of the Mystery
Religions that is unwilling to see any significant similarities between them
and Christianity. And thus I fear he may be selling short some genuine and instructive
parallels between them.
It is wise to seek to explain any religion,
whether ancient Christianity or Mithraism or the Attis religion, on its own
terms and not simply as a function of another religion it may have borrowed
from, but neither is it unreasonable in the case of significant similarities to
suggest borrowing. Is it problematic to suggest, for instance, that Mithraism
borrowed the representation
of
Mithras wearing the Phrygian cap or accompanied by a divine consort from the
Attis cult, or that the Attis cult borrowed the Taurobolium from Mithraism?
Certainly not. And then why should
one
avoid the possible conclusion that Christianity borrowed from its competitors
as well? One fears Smith, having rejected the polemics of an earlier
generation, fears too much being found
guilty
of being "ecumenically incorrect."
Here and elsewhere Smith declares
the famous "dying and rising god" mytheme a modern myth, one
concocted by scholars, not an ancient one. If there was no such myth it would
obviously be vain to claim that Christians had borrowed it for their own
mythos. He seems to admit that Attis was eventually regarded as a resurrected
deity, though he will not grant that Attis was thus pictured in the first
century. It is certainly true that Attis was not always and everywhere regarded
as a risen savior. Many variants have him die and remain dead, or simply
survive his wounds. Much of the clear evidence of a cult of a resurrected Attis
comes from the fourth century (e.g., Firmicus Maternus).
But it seems to me that here, as well as in the
case of Osiris and Tammuz/Dummuzi, Smith is trying too hard to prevent these gods
from rising! He dismisses Maarten J. Vermaseren's citation
of
B.C. iconographic representations of a dancing Attis (his characteristic
resurrection posture in later iconography) as "unpersuasive" but in
doing so gives little idea of the breadth of Vermaseren's refutation of
Lambrechts (Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis,
the Myth and the Cult, Thames & Hudson, 1977, pp. 119-124) on whose
theories Smith seems dependant. Hyam Maccoby's criticisms of Smith at this
point deserve attention, too (Paul and Hellenism.
SCM Press and Trinity Press International, 1991, pp. 69-72).
Smith seems to be taking up the apologetical
arguments of Bruce Metzger and Edwin Yamauchi to the effect that the Mysteries
borrowed the death and resurrection motif from Christians, surely an improbable
notion, as Reitzenstein pointed out long ago: which direction of borrowing is
more likely when one religion is newer and converts from the older faith are
streaming into it bringing cherished elements of their familiar creeds with
them?
Smith notes that it is Christian writers who
make the death and resurrection parallels between their own faith and the
Mysteries clearest, and thus he theorizes Christians may have been projecting
the categories of their own faith onto their rivals'. But this is just the
opposite of what we might expect of embarrassed Christian apologists who
already had to deflect the charge that
Christian
mythemes were copies of pagan ones. Why invite such criticism by suggesting
just such parallels where pagans themselves had not previously seen them?
Smith seems to me to have contracted a certain
contagious squeamishness now making the rounds among scholars. Apparently embarrassed
by the bold synthetic visions of Reitzenstein, Bultmann, and others,
contemporary scholars are beginning to practice a kind of theoretic asceticism,
daring to move nary an inch beyond the strictest interpretation of the
evidence. Such
modesty
leads to a mute minimalism. For instance we may compare the marks of the
Mystery Religions listed in S. Angus's The
Mystery-Religions (1928) with the spare and generic taxonomy of Helmut
Koester in his History, Culture, and
Religion of the Hellenistic Age. For Angus the Mystery Religions offered
redemption and purification from sin through sacramental identification of the
initiate with the savior deity, elite gnosis of the gods, cosmological/astrological
lore, the promise of rebirth and immortality, and participation in a syncretic Hellenistic
pantheism or
henotheism.
Little of this survives in Koester, for whom Mystery Religions were marked by
congregational polity, ritual initiation, regular participation in the
sacraments, moral or ascetical
requirements,
mutual aid among members, obedience to the leader, and certain secret
traditions. Is that all? What would exclude the Southern Baptists or the
Knights of Columbus?
One senses here a certain fastidious angst, a hesitancy to make any but the
most innocuous generalizations about the Mystery Religions lest one be accused
of painting with too broad a
stroke,
as some accuse Reitzenstein of doing. Was there really so little of substance
that these exotic faiths shared in common? Koester has fashioned a lowest
common denominator that obscures rather than reveals the distinctiveness of the
Mystery Religions because he will not dare to venture an ideal type (as Angus
and Reitzenstein did). An ideal type is not some box (as Bryan Wilson has
pointed out) into which the phenomenon must be neatly dropped. If it were, then
one might be justified in either whittling away the rough edges of each
religion or of making the box
big
and shapeless enough for all to fit.
But an ideal type is a yardstick abstracted from
the admittedly diverse phenomena which represents a general family resemblance without
demanding or implying any absolute or comprehensive conformity. Indeed the very
lack of conformity to the type by a particular Mystery Religion would serve as
a promising point of departure for understanding its special uniqueness.
In
the same way, Smith seems unwilling to admit the viability of an ideal type of
the dying and rising god mytheme. If the various myths of Osiris, Attis,
Adonis, et. al. do not all conform to
type
exactly, then they are not sufficiently alike to fit into the same box, so
let's throw out the box. Without everything in common, he sees nothing in
common.
And here he seems to me to approach the
apologetical strategy of, e.g., Raymond E. Brown in The Virginal Conception and Bodily Resurrection of Jesus where Brown
dismisses the truckload of Religionsgeschichtliche parallels to the
miraculous birth of Jesus. This one is not strictly speaking a virgin birth,
since a god fathered the divine child on a married woman. That one
involved
physical intercourse with the deity, not the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit.
But, we have to ask, how close does a parallel have to be to count as a
parallel? Does the divine mother have to be named Mary? Does the divine child
have to be called Jesus? Here is the old "difference without a
distinction" fallacy. And it is strange to see Smith making it. He becomes
an improbable but real ally with the apologists he criticizes.
But finally Smith comes down, it seems to me, as
an advocate of the principle of analogy. He champions the creative work of
Burton Mack who, in A Myth of Innocence,
suggests that the Sitzen-im-Leben of
the various gospel pericopes may be as disparate as the pericopes themselves.
That is, they may have emanated from quite different types of Christ cults or
Jesus movements for whom very different aspects of the teaching or stories of
Jesus were important.
Smith asks if this implied diversity does not
parallel the diversity of the Attis myth and cult. There were traditions of an Attis
who did not rise as well as those in which he did. Different groups cherished
them. Can we be sure that, e.g., the Q community believed in a resurrected
Jesus? Perhaps some did and some didn't. It hardly seems that the historical
Jesus was important for the communities of the Pauline epistles. Smith suggests
that we might be able to learn something about emergent Christianities as well
as about the Mystery Religions if we can figure out what social or
psychological factors lead a group to adopt or to dispense with a resurrected
savior. The same factors may prove to have been at work in analogous fashion in
the cases of the Attis cult and of the Christian cult, with or without direct
borrowing.
All of Smith's books are gems, and we as
biblical students should be grateful for the attention given our subject by
this wide-ranging anthropologist and historian of religion.
Copyright©2007 by
Robert M Price
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