The Bacchae (** you do not have permission to see this link **.
The Bacchae is concerned with two opposite sides of man’s natures: There is the rational and civilized side, which is represented by the character of Pentheus, the king of Thebes, and then there is the instinctive side, which is represented by Dionysus. This side is sensual without analysis, it feels a connection between man and beast, and it is a potential source of divinity and spiritual power.** you do not have permission to see this link **
The tragedy is based on the Greek myth of King ** you do not have permission to see this link **
In The Bacchae there are two completely different versions of Dionysus. First there is the god as he is described by the chorus, which is the god of wine and uninhibited joy and instinct. However, Dionysus as appears as a character on the stage, has come for revenge, and is never like this. He is instead deliberate, plotting, angry and vengeful.** you do not have permission to see this link **
The Bacchae is considered to be not only Euripides’ greatest tragedy, but one of the greatest ever written, modern or ancient.** you do not have permission to see this link **
No, Steefen, you cannot just read one book by Dennis MacDonald (Homeric Epics and The Gospel of Mark).
This is from another book:
In Luke and Vergil MacDonald proposes that the author of Luke-Acts followed Mark’s lead in imitating Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but greatly expanded his project, especially in the Acts, but adding imitations not only of the epics but also of Euripides’ Bacchae and Plato’s Socratic dialogues. The potential imitations include spectacular miracles, official resistance, epiphanies, prison breaks, and more. The book applies mimesis criticism and uses side-by-side comparisons to show how early Christian authors portrayed the origins of Christianity as more compelling than the Augustan Golden Age.
Inspired by some content in a post by John76, I’ll think on just selected content.
Think on the similarities between Euripides’ “Bacchae” and The New Testament.
According to the gospels, Jesus is an innocent and just man who, at the instigation of the Jewish high priests, is hauled before the Roman Governor Pilate and condemned to die on spurious charges.
Exactly the same mythological motif is found five centuries earlier in Euripides’ play The Bacchae, about Dionysus. Like Jesus in Jerusalem, Dionysus is a quiet stranger with long hair and a beard who brings a new religion.
In the gospels, the Jewish high priests don’t believe in Jesus and allege that ‘His teachings are causing disaffections amongst the people.’ They plot to bring about his death.
King Pentheus does not believe in Dionysus. He berates him for bringing ‘this new disease to the land’ and sends out his men to capture the innocent godman …
Like the Jewish high priests who are appalled at Jesus’ blasphemous claim to be the Son of God, King Pentheus rants in anger at stories of Dionysus’ divine parentage
Like Jesus, Dionysus passively allows himself to be caught and imprisoned … The guard relates the wondrous things he had witnessed Dionysus perform and warns King Pentheus: ‘Master, this man has come here with a load of miracles.’
The king, however, proceeds to interrogate Dionysus who, like Jesus before Pilate, will not bow to his authority.
When Pilate reminds Jesus that he has the power to crucify him, Jesus replies, ‘You would have no authority at all over me, had it not been granted you from above.’ Likewise Dionysus answers the threats of Pentheus with: ‘Nothing can touch me that is not ordained.’
Like Jesus, who said of his persecutors, ‘They know not what they are doing,’ Dionysus tells Pentheus, ‘You know not what you are doing, nor what you are saying, nor who you are.’
As Jesus is led away to crucifixion, he warns the crowd not to weep for him, but for themselves and their children, who will suffer for the crime of his execution (cf. Luke 23 v 28-30) … As he is led away, Dionysus, likewise, threatens divine vengeance.
Before his death, Jesus celebrates a symbolic ‘Last supper’ of bread and wine. In The Bacchae, Euripides calls bread and wine the ‘two powers which are supreme in human affairs,’ the one substantial and preserving the body, the other liquid and intoxicating the mind.
Joseph Campbell mentioned once, ‘To drink wine in the rites of Dionysus is to commune with the god and take his power and physical presence into one’s body.’
In the Christian rites of the Eucharist Jesus is said to symbolically become the wine drunk by the participant in the ritual. Likewise, Euripides tells us that Dionysus becomes the wine and is himself ‘poured out’ as an offering.
King Pentheus tries to insult Dionysus by describing him as ‘the god who frees his worshipers from every law [cf. St. Paul],’ but Dionysus replies, ‘Your insult to Dionysus is a compliment.’
A Letter of St. Peter to St. Philip explains that
although from the time of the incarnation Jesus suffered, yet
he suffered as one who was ‘a stranger to this suffering.’
This teaches that the incarnate Higher Self (represented by Jesus) seems to suffer when the eidolon suffers, but in reality is always the untouched witness.
In The Acts of John Jesus explains
‘You heard that I suffered, but I suffered not.
An unsuffering one was I, yet suffered.
One pierced was I, yet I was not abused.
One hanged was I, yet not hanged.
Blood flowed from me, yet did not flow.’
Five hundred years previously Euripides portrayed King Pentheus as binding Dionysus,
while actually he was not.
As Dionysus says:
‘He thought he was binding me;
But he neither held nor touched me,
save in his deluded mind.
In terms of The Bacchae, Price writes
(1) Acts of the Apostles
Pentecost (2:1-4ff)
The whole scene comes, obviously, from the descent of the Mosaic spirit upon the seventy elders in Numbers 11:16-17, 24-25, with an assist from Euripides’ The Bacchae, where we read “Flames flickered in their curls and did not burn them” (757-758), just as tongues of fire blazed harmlessly above the heads of the apostles (Acts 2:3).
Ecstatic speech caused some bystanders to question the sobriety of the disciples, but Peter defends them (“These are not drunk as you suppose” Acts 2:15a),
as does Pentheus’ messenger: “Not, as you think, drunk with wine” (686-687).
Paul’s Conversion (9:1-21)
As the great Tübingen critics already saw, the story of Paul’s visionary encounter with the risen Jesus not only has no real basis in the Pauline epistles but has been derived by Luke more or less directly from 2 Maccabees 3’s story of Heliodorus.
In it one Benjaminite named Simon (3:4) tells Apollonius of Tarsus, governor of Coele-Syria and Phoenicia (3:5), that the Jerusalem Temple houses unimaginable wealth that the Seleucid king might want to appropriate for himself. Once the king learns of this, he sends his agent Heliodorus to confiscate the loot. The prospect of such a violation of the Temple causes universal wailing and praying among the Jews. But Heliodorus is miraculously turned back when a shining warrior angel appears on horseback.
The stallion’s hooves knock Heliodorus to the ground, where two more angels lash him with whips (25-26).
He is blinded and is unable to help himself, carried to safety on a stretcher.
Pious Jews pray for his recovery, lest the people be held responsible for his condition. The angels reappear to Heliodorus, in answer to these prayers, and they announce God’s grace to him: Heliodorus will live and must henceforth proclaim the majesty of the true God.
Heliodorus offers sacrifice to his Saviour (3:35) and departs again for Syria, where he reports all this to the king.
In Acts the plunder of the Temple has become the persecution of the church by Saul (also called Paulus, an abbreviated form of Apollonius), a Benjaminite from Tarsus.
Heliodorus’ appointed journey to Jerusalem from Syria has become Saul’s journey from Jerusalem to Syria. Saul is stopped in his tracks by a heavenly visitant, goes blind and must be taken into the city, where the prayers of his former enemies avail to raise him up.
Just as Heliodorus offers sacrifice, Saul undergoes baptism. Then he is told henceforth to proclaim the risen Christ, which he does …
Luke has again added details from Euripides. In The Bacchae, in a sequence Luke has elsewhere rewritten into the story of Paul in Philippi, Dionysus has appeared in Thebes as an apparently mortal missionary for his own sect. He runs afoul of his cousin, King Pentheus who wants the licentious cult (as he views it) to be driven out of the country. He arrests and threatens Dionysus, only to find him freed from prison by an earthquake [which Dionysus or his father Zeus can create].
Dionysus determines revenge against the proud and foolish king by magically compelling Pentheus to undergo conversion to faith in him (“Though hostile formerly, he now declares a truce and goes with us. You see what you could not when you were blind,” 922-924) and sending Pentheus, in woman’s guise, to spy upon the Maenads, his female revelers. He does so, is discovered, and is torn limb from limb by the women, led by his own mother. As the hapless Pentheus leaves, unwittingly, to meet his doom, Dionysus comments, “Punish this man. But first distract his wits; bewilder him with madness… After those threats with which he was so fierce, I want him made the laughingstock of Thebes” (850-851, 854-855). “He shall come to know Dionysus, son of Zeus, consummate god, most terrible, and yet most gentle, to mankind” (859-861). Pentheus must be made an example,
as must poor Saul, despite himself. His conversion is a punishment.
SparkNotes / The Bacchae / Euripides
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Prologue and Parodos
SparkNotes on The Bacchae
Dionysus, son of Zeus, addresses the audience, describing to us how Thebes is his birthplace and is also the ancestral home of his mortal mother, Semele.
Steefen
Jesus, son of God, has a mortal mother, Mary.
Sorry to interrupt the conversation you are having with yourself Steefen but do you really think it is appropriate for you to highjack Prof Ehrman’s blog to spread your idiosyncratic views? Why don’t you write up your conclusions, submit them to peer review, get them published and then start your OWN blog?
You’re like the bore at the party who drones on and on until eventually he looks around and wonders where everybody went. Well they left to get away from YOU. (But of course if your chief mode of discourse is the monologue you don’t need an audience do you?)
Carry on. I just stepped in for a minute to let you know why everybody else went home. In case you didn’t notice.
Stephen said
Sorry to interrupt the conversation you are having with yourself Steefen but do you really think it is appropriate for you to highjack Prof Ehrman’s blog to spread your idiosyncratic views? Why don’t you write up your conclusions, submit them to peer review, get them published and then start your OWN blog?You’re like the bore at the party who drones on and on until eventually he looks around and wonders where everybody went. Well they left to get away from YOU. (But of course if your chief mode of discourse is the monologue you don’t need an audience do you?)
Carry on. I just stepped in for a minute to let you know why everybody else went home. In case you didn’t notice.
You must be an adversary. I am one member who will note you as such.
Given the rich material here, you post an off-topic reply as that. I am more than grateful I can have my good riddance of you by marking you an adversary.
This thread has a bearing on the notion of Oral Tradition feeding the first folios of the gospels.
We have already seen a problem with oral tradition feeding the gospels: the Gospel of John has the raising of Lazarus while Mark, Luke, and Matthew does not.
Months ago I picked up a book that showed how Romans was a rebuttal to Virgil’s Aeneid.
We know the gospels were written in Greek. Seeing motifs from The Bacchae in the New Testament colors in the knowledge base of those who wrote the gospels in Greek.
gmatthews said
If you’re not careful he’ll make you his adversary (like me) and he’ll never talk to you again. /sarcasm off
Nailed it.
I was just a speed bump in the road. There he goes tooling over the hill, oblivious. Must be nice.
What are the rights and privileges associated with being an adversary? Women desire me and men fear me? Is that how it goes? Or does hair start growing on my palms in the full of the moon?
There was a theater at Sepphoris?
Was The Bacchae by Euripides performed there?
Did the followers of St. Stephen or St. Stephen go to the theater?
A quote from one of my videos/books:
[Testimonium Flavianum]
…Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man [and I say, if it be lawful to call him one man, but more on that later], for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was Christ. (“He was called Christ.” – Antiquities, Book 20, Chapter 9, Section 1, 200)
When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for, he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold [this] and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. The tribe of Christians, so named from him, is not extinct
at this day.
About the same time, also, another sad calamity put the Jews into disorder…
Josephus, The Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18,
Chapter 3, Section 3, 63-64 – Section 4, 65
What is calamitous for Jews about a wonderful Christ and Christians following? Christ and Christians were not exclusively created by Jews. The New Testament was written in Greek with Hellenistic motifs. This would be partly calamitous for Jews who took pride in the Maccabean Revolt against Hellenism.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert