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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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Jesus's parable of the rejection of the son of god is playing on preexisting themes from ancient Greek theater. Here is wikipedia's summary of Euripides The Bacchae

If you squint you can kind of see a reference but this is a huge stretch. The only thing that seems the same is the "undercover boss" concept? But this is hardly the only example of such even in Greek mythology.

There's enough symbolism involving wine in the Old Testament, like with Melchizedek, the fact that other surrounding pantheons had gods of wine isn't surprising.

Meanwhile, the parable is an exact reference to Isaiah, the part of Isaiah dating to the 8th century BCE:

Let me sing for my beloved
my love song concerning his vineyard:
My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill.
He dug it and cleared it of stones,
and planted it with choice vines;
he built a watchtower in the midst of it,
and hewed out a wine vat in it;
and he looked for it to yield grapes,
but it yielded wild grapes.

And now, O inhabitants of Jerusalem
and men of Judah,
judge between me and my vineyard.
What more was there to do for my vineyard,
that I have not done in it?
When I looked for it to yield grapes,
why did it yield wild grapes?


And now I will tell you
what I will do to my vineyard.
I will remove its hedge,
and it shall be devoured;
I will break down its wall,
and it shall be trampled down.
I will make it a waste;
it shall not be pruned or hoed,
and briers and thorns shall grow up;
I will also command the clouds
that they rain no rain upon it.

English Standard Version Catholic Edition (n.p.: Augustine Institute, 2019), Is 5:1–6.

I assume Jesus was more familiar with Isaiah than Dionysus in his earthly life.

Paul states plainly that all Israel will be saved.

I agree a lot with what you quoted from Pat Roberson, except for the idea that "Paul states plainly that all Israel will be saved." That relies on a typical Protestant misreading of Paul and Salvation.

The New Law did not abolish the old covenants, it was a practical set of compromises to enable the diffusion of Christianity created by Paul, not Jesus.

I did not say abolish, Jesus said fulfilled. If you do not recognize the difference between the two words then I don't know how much further we can go here.

I tend to agree with Joe Heshmeyer here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tVl5FgXNbws?si=10HXwZshfSsDc8Zr.

I suggest that the right answer on the relationship with Israel and the Church - on the relationship on the old and new covenant - is more nuanced, more subtle, and harder to explain, by virtue of being the right answer. And that you see the difficulty of articulating this even within the pages of the New Testament.

Basically, Judaism is special compared with other religions in that they actually received Special Revelation from God. All religions have some kind of revelation of God through their conscience, reason, and the witness of creation. But God revealed Himself more profoundly in the Old Testament, and the Jewish people today still have access to that special revelation.

Does the old covenant save? There were elements of the Mosaic law that were Preparatory for the Messiah and now the Messiah has come. Those are fulfilled you don't need to observe them and in fact observing them now may be a sign of a lack of fidelity. It maybe a sign that you don't really believe the Messiah has come.

Acts 4:12 says that there is no salvation except through Jesus. In Genesis God tells Abraham that He has made him "a father of many nations." Gentiles are also children of Abraham. The Biblical answer is not that the Jews and the Gentiles are saved though separate means. Nor is it that the Jews are saved by biology. Rather that Jews and Christians are both saved through faith in the one God. Someone who has the Faith of Abraham is the son of Abraham. Christian salvation is tied to Jewish history, however there is no religious pressing need for Jews to have possession of the territory of Israel.

There's enough symbolism involving wine in the Old Testament, like with Melchizedek, the fact that other surrounding pantheons had gods of wine isn't surprising.

They had a god of wine who took human form and visits Thebes claiming to be the son of Zeus, performs miracles, but is rejected by the King who is then torn asunder for denial of the son's divinity.

The NT has a god who takes human form, turns water into wine, visits Jerusalem claiming to be son of Yahweh, gets rejected by the pharisees, and the divine punishment of the pharisees is prophesized in the parables. It's more than an incidental similarity.

In the Bacchae Dionysus escapes prison through a divinely summoned earthquake, in Acts Paul and Silas escape prison from a divinely summoned earthquake, and Jesus's resurrection is associated with a divine earthquake in which Jesus escapes from his tomb.

Ancient Dionysian rites entailed followers consuming the essence of their god:

The wine they drank was for them potent with divine power--it was the god himself, and the very quintessence of divine life was resident in the juice of the grape. This the devotees of Bacchus knew as a matter of personal experience when, after drinking the wine, they felt a strange new life within themselves. That was the life and power of their god. Their enthusiasm was quite literally a matter of having the god within themselves, of being full of and completely possessed by the god. So they themselves described it in their own language (entheos, enthusiasm). They might be intoxicated; but they felt themselves possessed by the god. The drinking of wine in the service of Dionysus was for them a religious sacrament... So Euripides could say that he who knows the Dionysian mysteries "is pure in life, and revelling on the mountains, has the Bacchic communion in his soul."

The devotees of Dionysus had other realistic means of attaining to communion with their god. They had a sacrament of eating as well as a sacrament of drinking. This rite was the "feast of raw flesh." To be an initiate into the mysteries of Dionysus one must be able to avow... "I have .... Fulfilled his red and bleeding feasts."

I assume Jesus was more familiar with Isaiah than Dionysus in his earthly life.

The entire NT was originally written in Greek, I would assume the writers were familiar with myths from the Greek Dionysia.

Acts 4:12 says that there is no salvation except through Jesus. In Genesis God tells Abraham that He has made him "a father of many nations." Gentiles are also children of Abraham.

Esau was a child of Abraham, and his divine inheritance was swindled by Jacob. The early Rabbis associated the descendants of Esau with the nation of Rome.

The parallels with Greek stories would be more intriguing if there weren't the same allusions/foreshadowing from the Hebrew Scriptures which were written earlier than the Greek Stories.

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