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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6322 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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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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