Loading...In this post I have the pleasure of discussing one of my all time favorite ancient works of fiction, very funny and quite bawdy, but also showing us an important facet of ancient pagan religion in one of the Mystery Religions. It was written by an important second-century CE author named Apuleius and is sometimes called Metamorphoses but is more commonly known as The Golden Ass. Here is how I talk about it in The Triumph of Christianity (Simon & Schuster).
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The Golden Ass is a hilarious tale, filled with joyous and rather raucous sex, nocturnal magical rites, murderous plots, wild escapades, narrow escapes, and, as it turns out,
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Thank you, Dr Ehrman. Could one argue though, that the book itself, The Golden Ass, was a form of pagan evangelism? I think Apuleius was effectively advertising the benefits of becoming a devotee of Isis and people reading (or hearing) his book might have been tempted to join the cult. So I guess I’m saying that the Golden Ass was a pagan gospel.
Could be. Not sure if you’ve read it, but part of the problem is that Apuleius ends up suspecting some chicanery in the cult.
Oh, definitely read it and studied it at Uni (even translated the Cupid & Psyche section). Probably ‘Gospel’ is too strong a word for, as you rightly point out, Apuleius wasn’t as uncritical of paganism as early Christian writers were of Christianity. But it definitely promotes paganism over Christianity (NB. the Baker’s wife caricature in Book IX, which is often thought to be a side swipe at Christians). The character of Lucius in the Golden Ass is presented as someone who’s ‘seen it all’ but who finally settles on paganism as the real deal.
Hi Prof. Ehrman,
I’ve been reading about Michael Goulder’s lectionary theory, which seems to be largely dismissed because a fixed 1st-century Jewish liturgical calendar is hypothetical.
I wonder if there’s a methodological double standard here. The same framework that rejects Goulder’s hypothetical calendar leans heavily on Q, itself a hypothetical reconstruction. Using Q’s presumed order in Luke to argue Matthew artificially clustered scattered sayings seems circular: one hypothetical document disproving another hypothetical calendar.
The liturgical intuition seems to fit Matthew:
– Torah structure: the five great discourses, with identical transitional formulas, have been read to mimic the Pentateuch as a week-by-week curriculum.
– Mosaic alignment: exodus from Egypt, passing through water, 40 days in wilderness, new Law on a mountain; these map onto sequential Torah themes.
Even setting aside a rigid calendar for something like the Didache hypothesis, I think early Christian liturgy remained anchored in Jewish temporal structures (e.g. fast days shifting from Mon/Thu to Wed/Fri).
Given Second Temple Judaism’s attentiveness to sacred times, might the standard dismissal overlook something? Even if Goulder’s specific reconstruction was flawed, does his core thesis that Matthew was structurally designed for a cyclical Jewish-Christian liturgical reality deserve a second look?
Interesting point. But I’d say these two cases are very different in terms of what kinds of “evidence” there is. We have no record of a set Jewish liturgy within Judaism, and if there was one, surely we would have heard about it in our multiple sources (just in the first century: Philo, Josephus, Dead Sea Scrolls, and other texts). By contrast we do have reference to numerous earlier Gospels (Luke 1:1-4), clear evidence of “sayings Gospels” (Thomas), the reality that Matthew and Luke have extensive verbatim agreements that virtually require that someone was copying someone, and good reasons for thinking neither of them was copying the other. so I don’t see the KIND of evidence as at all comparable. (Matthew’s parallels to Torah are easily his own constructoin and are not liturgical)
Very helpful, Thanks!
Do you think pagans who converted to Christianity expected and/or experienced a vision of Jesus? Are there accounts of visions in the church fathers? Do you think people in this time were inclined to interpret as divine visions things that we might think of as dreams or imagined reenactment or reverie?
No, they based their decisoin on the miracles reportedly done by Jesus’ followers.
Thank you for introducing The Golden Ass. Since it has been out of print in Japan for many years, I was genuinely delighted to learn more about it.
What struck me most was that there is no real “scripture” at the center of the religious experience. Everything is mediated through the protagonist’s own mystical and spiritual encounters. Of course, The Golden Ass itself is not a sacred text, and I doubt many readers become devotees of Isis after reading it. Yet it made me wonder whether the Bible sometimes functions similarly for modern believers—not primarily as a text to be examined historically and critically, but as something interpreted through a preexisting spiritual or emotional framework.
In that sense, the book made me reflect less on early Christianity itself than on aspects of contemporary Christianity, especially some forms of evangelicalism. At times, isolated biblical verses seem to be interpreted through charismatic or spiritual experience, detached from their broader literary and historical context. Such experiences can even appear to be regarded as the only authentic connection to Jesus or Paul.
For a work as extraordinary as the Bible, I feel we owe it a more serious and intellectually honest engagement.
The Golden Ass can be found and downloaded in English as one of “The World’s Greatest Books” on Project Gutenberg (there is also William Addington’s 1566 translation).
The distinction between grammar and claim matters. The Isis material shows that the ancient world already had a rich religious language for salvation, transformation, initiation, and life after death. Christianity did not have to invent that language. But using the same grammar is not the same as saying the same thing. That shared world made Christianity not only understandable but also attractive, it could speak to a hunger for transformation and divine rescue that it had not itself created.
Lucius’s devotion to Isis is intense, but not exclusive. He stays within a pagan world of many divine beings. Christianity asked for something different: conversion, not just adding one more devotion, reorienting the whole person around one God. Yet that exclusivity was not the first thing. The first Christian message was “this happened” before it was “therefore abandon all others.” A specific man, a specific death, and a specific tomb became the place where the universal claim was made.
That does not prove Christianity true. But the mystery religion material explains the stage on which Christianity could be heard. The particular claim still has to be considered on its own terms.
Respectfully,
Tjalling
I was looking forward to the promised bawdy elements! Will have to find this story.
I’ve often wondered what world history would have been like had the Isis cult became the dominant religion over Christianity.