Savior
Continuatum a parte quarta.
In the last entry, I began to speak of the fourth “face” of Jesus, the cosmopolitan Jesus, under the heading of the kerygmatic proclamation of Jesus as Lord. The early Christians proclaimed Jesus as Lord in a Near Eastern and Mediterranean worldview where the language carried multiple undertones and connotations of layered meaning to Jews, Greeks, and Romans. What I ran out of space to detail there is that as Christianity traveled beyond the Mediterranean, to lands where it both did attain political power (Western and Northern Europe, Ethiopia, Armenia and Georgia), and where it did not (Persia and the farther East), the Christian presentation of Jesus as Lord frequently adapted to whatever form of social supremacy was most immediately intuitive for the people Christianity was implanting among. In medieval Europe, therefore, one can find a good deal of iconography, hymnography, homiletics, and theology that styles Jesus’ Lordship less by way of reference to Roman domini and imperatores and more by way of reference to the indigenous forms of power, to, for example, the jarl, the thane, the feudal lord, the cyning, etc. Of course, these positions themselves were Romanized by the empire’s presence, but the flavor of them is self-evidently distinct from the more direct continuity of Roman culture in the Eastern Empire headed in Constantinople. And further East, where Christians still had to reckon with emperors at whose pleasure they were permitted to exist and stood at threat of elimination, presenting Jesus as Lord could not assume the same cultural form as in the Christianized Roman oikoumene after the fourth century. But this diversity of social situations permitted two other personae of Jesus (in the classical, pre-Nicene sense) to predominate instead: Jesus as Savior, and Jesus as Teacher.
Once more, then, unto the ancient breach. Soteria, in Greek, means “safety” or “security,” which takes the further connotations of “preservation,” “maintenance,” conservation, and bodily health; its Latin translation, salus, carries the same range of meanings, relating to soundness, welfare, and prosperity. “Salvation” in these senses was part of daily speech in the ancient Mediterranean: as in, for example, Terence’s Adelphoe 519, quod cum salute eius fiat, “may it happen for his welfare.” In Latin, it is etymologically related to the normative greetings, salve, salutatio, “Good health!”; hence, also, “to return health” is to reply to a greeting (salutem reddere; Plautus, Bacchides 2, 3, 11). Soteria can be a means of safe passage or return (e.g., Aeschylus Persae 797); it can be the “maintenance” of dwellings and roads (Aristotle, Politics 1321b21), or the bodily “safety” of individuals (Plato, Laws 908a). For this safety, upon leaving the house, one might pour a libation and invoke Zeus Soter, “Zeus the Savior,” protector of pedestrian travelers, or sacrifice before a voyage to Poseidon Soter, the “savior” of sailors.
Soteria in the sense that it was ordinarily important to people in the Greek world most often had to do, arguably, with bodily health and medicine. Then as now, expert professional medical advice was difficult to come by and very expensive for a populace that was mainly living below what we would consider the poverty line today; and prior to the Hellenistic period, the best such professionals one could often hope to find were usually itinerant Hippocratic doctors and local folk physicians.
Otherwise, people would ordinarily go to the Asklepieion, the temple of Asklepios, where one would, by sacrifice, monetary tribute, and oneiromancy, inquire of the god for a remedy for injury or illness. Upon a successful healing, a ceramic cast of the body part healed would be donated to the temple in thanks, together with whatever was vowed to the deity. This combination of health and religion had a parallel in Egypt, known to the Greeks as an exotic land of ancient religious wisdom: Egyptian priests cultivated magical power and medical knowledge for services rendered to the elites, performing basic treatments combined with apotropaic charms. In the Roman world, Egyptian and Greek religious and professional medicine and the associated gods were also Roman gods; and the Romans, as they often did, also had their own abstract divinity of good health, Salus, with his own temple on the Quirinal Hill; he could be invoked alongside Jupiter himself (e.g., Plautus, Captivi 4, 2, 84: ego tibi nunc sum summus Juppiter, Idem ego sum Salus, Fortuna…). When these official channels offered no aid or were beyond the economic means of individual people, consultation of folk magic, herbalism, itinerant holy men, healers, and magicians was quite popular. Then as now, the promise of miracle cures, special psychosomatic wisdom or esoteric diets and exercises for good health, and the like both offered hope to the desperate and a career path for sages and swindlers alike. Our popular truism, that if one does not have their health, one has nothing, was one that ancient people generally would have affirmed.It is worth considering that for most of ancient history the mundane, quotidian threats to one’s health from disease and injury in a world without widely available and trustworthy healthcare resources but innumerable hazards was only part of the dangers one faced. The threat of suffering the ill-intent of brigands, gangs, bandits, pirates, raiders, and armies were regular fears in the minds of ancient Mediterranean people, no matter where they lived. One could add to this the fear of natural disasters: storms, earthquakes, fires, floods, and the like. There were more atmospheric, climatic threats to human existence, too: the success or failure of crops, the coming of pestilence and plague, the fecundity of land and animals. Politics were their own source of anxiety. In general, premodern people took natural phenomena to be subject to divine intentionality and reflective, insofar as they impinged upon the human world, of divine pleasure or displeasure with human activity, especially with changes to public affairs. When, for example, the members of the First or Second Triumvirate had an argument about something trivial, it could cause a public panic in Rome and Italy: fallouts between powerful people meant the possibility of civil war, in which the ordinary rules of kinship, kith, and social cohesion were untrustworthy and could be dissolved in convenience or catharsis. There were numerous threats to the soteria or salus of the individual, most of which stood outside of anyone’s control, no matter how rich or powerful they were.
This was all the more true when one considers the preternatural element of reality that ancient people were conscious of as ubiquitous. Ancient people believed generally in entities like aerial spirits or godlings (daimonia), Furies, monsters, and ghosts, benign and ravenous; they told stories about and feared the influence of magicians, sorcerers, witches, and necromancers, especially in the form of things like the evil eye.
People made abundant use of magic for protection against ordinary and extraordinary threats and attainment of everyday boons: charms, love potions, curse tablets, and the like. Foul “spirits” (Grk: pneumata), in the sense of “winds” or “airs,” might bring disease, but they might also bring profound mental corruption, in the earliest sense of what we traditionally think of as demonic possession. Cosmic sympatheia meant that threats of this otherworldly sort might target one without one’s knowledge; Plotinus, famously, was thought to have at least once psychically resisted such a magical attack from afar. Less sinisterly, Tyche or Fortuna, goddess of luck, was fair-weather friend to all; Ananke or Necessitas, whether caused by malicious stars or determined by the inexorable movements of the cosmic mind, might doom one no matter what lesser powers acted on one’s behalf, unless directly overruled by some act of providence (Grk: pronoia). Particularly from the Hellenistic period onwards, ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern people often had a pervasive sense of cosmic paranoia about the instability and chaos of the world.When one considers that, on top of this, traditional mythology and public cult offered little in the way of some kind of solace at life’s conclusion, it is understandable why ancient people so frequently sought the aid of other religious, magical, and philosophical avenues to a satisfying estate after this life. The mystery religions were the most ancient and publicly respectable form of longing for immortality and divinity, particularly the Eleusinian Mysteries of Demeter and Kore; more recent, and more controversial in both the Greek and Roman spheres of influence, were the Dionysian or Bacchic rites, as well as the Orphic. Due to Hellenistic Expansion to Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and Persia, other popular rites, like those of the Great Mother, Isis and Osiris, and Mithras, filtered Westward and Northward throughout the Macedonian kingdoms and the imperium Romanum. These rites offered soteria and salus of a different sort to ancient initiates: protection and divine patronage of their new lords and ladies, certainly, but also the promise of ultimate security in the form of deification.
Salvation (Heb: yeshuah, with the ending he, not to be confused with the name of Jesus) in the world of Early Judaism intersected with many of these nested senses of personal, communal, and cosmic security and welfare. YHWH was the Savior of Israel (Isa 43:3, 11) as the one who had rescued Israel and Judah from danger in the past and promised future restoration and redemption. But in the Second Temple period, as YHWH became gradually more transcendent in Jewish consciousness, the individual work of providing salvation to faithful Jews fell to angels. One of the better representations of this idea can be found in the Book of Tobit: Tobit is an Israelite, according to the book, living in Nineveh in the aftermath of the Assyrian Exile of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. Despite a lifetime of good works and moral righteousness in accordance with Israel’s tradition, Tobit has fallen blind and bemoans his fate. Meanwhile, his kinswoman, Sarah, has now lost seven husbands to a demon, Asmodeus, that keeps assaulting them on her wedding night, and has brought great shame on her family. Both pray to God for death at the same moment, and God commissions the Archangel Raphael (“God heals”) in that moment to go and resolve both of their problems. Raphael goes to Tobit in disguise, and Tobit sends him, together with his son Tobias, to their kinsman on a mission; while there, Tobias falls in love with Sarah and a marriage for the two is arranged. Raphael teaches Tobias a magical ritual to perform on their wedding night which exiles the demon; Gabriel chases it down and binds it so that it cannot come back. The three (Tobias, Sarah, and Raphael) then return to Tobit, whose blindness is healed, and Raphael returns to heaven after revealing himself. Salvation has taken place, for both Tobit and Sarah have been saved from their respective plights by the angel.
Just as God commissioned the individual salvation of the family to the archangel, so Early Jews frequently imagined that he had deferred cosmic, national, and postmortem salvation to various mediatory figures, some angelic, some human, many of which we have reviewed in our earlier entry (pars secunda, specifically). In the Hebrew Bible, and still in daily Jewish life, the most ordinary form of salvation to desire was, as in the Greek world, from quotidian threats to health and self, both mundane and extramundane. One’s most immediate protection from such threats was traditionally the cultivation of wisdom, which ensured a good life (at least according to Proverbs; Job and Ecclesiastes dissent, as does Daniel), and the faithful practice of the Torah (e.g., Ps 119:174). Death promised no reward for this patient wisdom apart from the shadowy afterlife of Sheol, the underworld. But in the wake of the Hellenistic conquest of the Near East, traditional worldviews and ethics hit a crisis point across the region of Southwest Asia: Jews, like other neighboring peoples, questioned if divine salvation of the wise through a good life, which did not always or even mostly happen, it seemed, was sufficient to preserve God’s status as Israel’s Savior. This state of affairs required both/either resurrection of the dead and/or immortality of the soul; only by one or both of these doctrines, contended a new wave of scribes, thinkers, and visionaries, could true justice for the righteous dead and real salvation of God’s people beyond this life be said to take place.
And hopefully, that salvation would come hand in hand with a national restoration of Israel, in whatever form a particular individual or group expected that to look like (if they thought it needed to happen at all).This was the landscape of what “salvation” generally meant when Jesus was born, lived, died on a Roman cross, and was proclaimed alive and exalted—in which context he was also proclaimed as “Savior.” Jesus was not the first to receive this title. As already mentioned, it was a frequent epithet of deities; it was also a frequent title of ancient Mediterranean kings and public figures of note. Ptolemy IV Philopator was called Soter; so were a variety of Roman governors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Because, again, “salvation” in this world primarily meant the ability to preserve the established order of something and only secondarily something that we would think of as “religious” in character and content, any preserver was also logically a savior. And, although the New Testament frequently glosses salvation as being from “sin” (more on this below), it is clear enough that Jesus as Savior appealed to its authors and readers in ways that were more traditionally familiar from Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. Consider, for example, Jesus’ itinerant work as a charismatic healer, exorcist, and miracle worker in an ancient world where access to quality healthcare was lacking but sickness and bodily harm were abundant. I am not claiming there was no sacred significance to this activity: as Matthew Thiessen recently proved, the clear point of many of Jesus’ healings and exorcisms in the Gospels is to restore ordinary Jewish women and men to a state of ritual purity so that they could participate once more in the Temple cult.
Many physical ailments and bodily disfigurements were ritually polluting and denied one access to one’s most important religious activities in the ancient world; this was both a Jewish and a gentile thing, as we have similar laws of ritual purity described for us elsewhere. It is not just that many ancient people had to live with the physical discomfort of what diminutions of health they had no recourse for; sickness and injury could also cut them off from the important social, political, and religious forms of participation that were vitally meaningful to them. The Jesus of the Gospels, anyway, showcases his status as "Savior" in this way, of providing healing of all that which separates his people from God. (The other way is by teaching, which will occupy the next entry in the series.)Jesus is also frequently described as the Savior in the New Testament, but what salvation means there depends in no small part on the content we choose to supply the word; it is also not always clear that the cognate group carries the same connotation in every text. In Paul’s undisputed corpus, he calls the gospel the “power of salvation” (Rom 1:16); Paul and his readers “will be saved from wrath” by Jesus’ blood and in his life (5:9-10); a “remnant” of Israel will be saved (9:27); Paul prays for the “salvation” of his people, the Jews (10:1); he describes the salvation that comes from belief in the heart and confession by the mouth in Jesus’ resurrection and Lordship (10:9-11), since, as Joel prophesied, “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (10:13); general Jewish unbelief in Jesus results in “salvation” for gentiles (11:11); all Israel will eventually be saved, after the gentiles (11:26); the hoped for salvation is nearer now than at the first hour of belief (13:11). At the judgment, the one whose works do not remain will still be saved “as though through fire” (1 Cor 3:15); wayward ecclesial members should be delivered to Satan so that their “spirit may be saved” in the Day of the Lord (5:5). Ecclesial sympathy should focus on the common good to ensure “that they be saved” (10:33). Paul insists his tribulations are for the salvation of his Corinthian readership (2 Cor 1:6); now is the scripturally promised day of salvation (6:2); penitent grief brings salvation (7:10). Paul is confident that his efforts will redound to his own salvation (Phil 1:19), and the Philippians’ own consistency is for theirs (1:28); they must work out their salvation with “fear and trembling” (2:12); we await a “savior” from heaven (3:20). Paul goes to preach to the nations “so that they may be saved” (1 Thess 2:16); he writes of the “helm of salvation” (5:8) and of God’s appointment of his readers to the “preservation of salvation” (5:9).
It is relatively clear that for Paul, “salvation” refers decisively to the eschatological rescue from divine judgment and wrath which he thought Jesus was swiftly returning to execute on the evil powers of the world (1 Cor 15:20-28), manifest ultimately in the resurrection and redemption of the body (Rom 8:23), through its metamorphosis from flesh and blood into pure pneumatic glory (1 Cor 15:35-58). At his return, Jesus would defeat the errant gods and their human pawns and come to take the resurrected and metamorphosed saints to heaven to live in the celestial regions with him forever (1 Thess 5:16-18). It is for this reason interesting that the language of salvation changes so much from these letters to those generally deemed Deutero- and Trito-Pauline, that is, pseudepigraphically attributed to Paul by his earlier and later students. In Colossians, there is no mention of a concept of salvation; when it does appear again in Ephesians, it is merely thrice, to speak of “the gospel of your salvation” (Eph 1:13), Christ as the “savior of the body” of the church of which he is head (5:23), and a mention once more of the “helm of salvation” (6:17). Importantly, neither Colossians nor Ephesians mention a future parousia: there is no point for one, since the cosmic supremacy of Christ which Paul associated with the future has in both Colossians and Ephesians been realized already in the cosmic present of his heavenly enthronement, as has, in some sense, the exaltation of the faithful (Col 1:15-20; Eph 1:3-14). There is no apocalyptic war in the future between Christ and the powers; only the present battle of the church against those forces still in rebellion now (Eph 6:10-20). In the Pastorals, “God” is “our savior” (1 Tim 1:1; 2:3), who desires the salvation of all, glossed as coming into “knowledge of the truth” (epignōsin aletheiās; 2:4); women will be saved through childbearing (something the undisputed Paul thinks is better avoided; 2:15). God is in fact “the Savior of all men, but especially of the faithful” (4:10). God has already saved us (2 Tim 1:9) through the epiphany of “our savior Jesus Christ” that has already occurred (1:10); “Paul” labors that the elect might attain “salvation…with aeonian glory” (2:10); salvation comes through faith (3:15). In Titus, again, both God (Tit 1:3; 2:10-11; 3:4) and Jesus (1:4; 2:13; 3:6) are called Savior. If the eschatology of Colossians and Ephesians is mostly realized, it seems entirely so in these texts.
So much for the Pauline school. In the Gospels, “salvation” is eschatological but also present and keyed to the kinds of “health” and “security” ancient people frequently sought. In Matthew, Jesus is so-named because he “will save his people from their sins” (Matt 1:21); the hemorrhaging woman is convinced that if she can touch Jesus’ garment she will be saved (9:21; cf. Mk 5:28); Jesus teaches that the one who endures to the end will be saved (10:22; 24:13; cf. Mk 13:13), and in response to a question about who can be saved, that all things are possible for God (19:25-26; cf. Mk 10:26; Lk 18:25-27); onlookers at the crucifixion wonder if Elijah will come to save him (27:49). In Mark, the archisynagogos asks Jesus to lay hands on his daughter so that she might “be saved and live” (Mk 5:23; cf. Lk 8:50). In Luke, God is first called “Savior” in the Magnificat (Lk 1:47), while Jesus is called in a “horn of salvation” (keras soterias; 1:69) in the Benedictus, bringing “salvation from our enemies” (1:71); John the Baptizer, by contrast, gives “knowledge of salvation” (gnōsin soterias; 1:77) to God’s people. Jesus is first called Savior in Luke 2:11 by the angel announcing to the shepherds: a savior is born, and that savior is “Christ the Lord.” Jesus is the “deliverance” or “token of safety” (soterion) seeing which Symeon is able now to depart this life (2:30); John later says that “all flesh” will see this deliverance (3:6). The Devil seeks to steal away the word lest believing the hearers “may be saved” (8:12). When Zacchaeus repents, Jesus says that “salvation” has come to his house (19:9). While Jesus is on the cross, his onlookers mock: “He saved others, let him save himself” (23:35). In Luke’s sequel, Acts, there is no other name in which “salvation” is offered than Jesus’ (Acts 5:31); God exalted him as “founder,” “chief,” or “leader” (archegos) and “savior” (5:31). God offered salvation through Jesus’ hand (7:25); God made Jesus the “savior” for Israel “according to the promise” (13:23), as a result of which the “word” or “account” of salvation has been sent to Jews in the Diaspora (13:26). But Jesus has also appointed Paul for the salvation of the nations, seemingly in the manner of the Isaianic Servant (13:47). The possessed woman mocks, but speaks truly, that Paul and his companions have come to preach a “road of salvation” to non-Jews (16:17). Paul assures his travel companions that their lack of food is for their salvation (27:34), and once in Rome preaches the “deliverance” or “token of salvation” continually (28:28). In John, God “did not send his son into the kosmos so that he might judge the kosmos, but so that the kosmos might be saved through him” (Jn 3:17; 12:47). Jesus is unambiguous in dialogue with the Samaritan woman that “salvation is from the Jews” or “Judeans” (4:22); the Samaritans later confess him as “savior of the kosmos” (4:42). Jesus describes his mission as one of speaking so that his audience might be saved (5:34); he is “the door,” and “if someone enters in through him he will be saved” (10:9). Jesus’ disciples are certain that Lazarus, if he has only fallen asleep, “will be saved”—that is, he’ll be fine (11:12).
Again, what content we choose to fill language of “salvation” with determines what these texts end up saying to no small degree. Is Jesus the Savior in the Pauline sense of eschatological dispenser of mercy, judgment, and metamorphosis? Or is Jesus the Savior in the sense of the one who restores Israel to bodily and spiritual health, overcoming ritual defilements with contagious holiness to render his people pure and capable of rejoining the Temple cult, as in the Synoptics? Or is he the cosmic Savior of the Deutero-Paulines and John—sent on a mission to make the universe well again? It is best even when we can identify a core set of associations that an author has with salvation to read multiple layers. Paul clearly thinks of Jesus as a Jewish messiah: he also speaks of him, however, in the language of Greco-Roman ideal kingship,
in which "Savior" (Soter) was, as we saw above, a regular epithet of emperors, kings, and other major political figures. The provision of benefaction from a political figure was a regular form of salvation, common grounds for divine honors paid to human beings. In Vergil’s first Eclogue, the slave-shepherd Tityrus explains to his fellow Melioboeus, the latter of whom has been displaced by Octavian’s grant of his confiscated lands to his soldiers (in 42 BCE following the defeat of the conspirators), about the “god” who enabled him to keep his property: “he permitted my cows to wander, as you see, and I myself / to play what I like on my rustic pipe” (ille meās errāre bovēs, ut cernis, et ipsum / lūdere quae vellem calamō permīsit agrestī; Eclogue I.9-10). For this reason, Tityrus has already confessed, “that man will always be to me a god, and on his altar / a tender lamb from our flocks will often burn” (erit ille mihi semper deus, illius āram / saepe tener nostrīs ab ovīlibus imbuet agnus; I.7-8). Of course, that same year a comet appeared at Julius Caesar’s state funeral and he was proclaimed a god; beginning two years later in 40, Octavian himself self-styled as filius divi, son of a god, for the same reason, but like his adoptive father, was given divine honors for benefactions like those that Tityrus describes already during his lifetime. Likewise, Paul clearly thinks of the charis of God demonstrated through Jesus as demanding a similar response of pistis in the ethical monotheism and divine honors paid to Jesus that he expects of his assemblies and forecasts at the consummation (Phil 2:6-11). For the Gospel authors, writing after several decades of the movement, it is clear that the description of Jesus as Lord and Savior, even if these acclamations do not always immediately, directly invoke their more exalted senses ("Lord" can mean "Sir"; "Savior" can be mundane), the people writing and reading these words do worship Jesus as Lord and Savior in the more exalted sense, so one can and should see something of a retrojection of what Jesus’ followers believed about him in the late first century into his earlier first century bioi. The historical Jesus was periodically thought of as Lord and Savior in the conceptual framework of national, global, and cosmic supremacy and benefaction that some Jews associated with the messiah; the kerygmatic Jesus was consistently, normatively parsed that way.As Christianity moved into the Greco-Roman world, tropes from the Hebrew Scriptures alluded to in the New Testament were emphasized for the potential that it gave to present Jesus as a superior rival to other Greco-Roman Savior figures, especially demigods and heroes. Probably no more serious such development can be found than the early cultivation of a strong belief in and veneration of Christ’s katabasis into Hades on Holy Saturday in the writings of the Church Fathers and early liturgists and hymnographers.
In the faith of Early Christians, Jesus' most significant act of salvation was not simply his death on the cross but his absolute ransack of the underworld, leaving none there save the Devil enchained. Where Herakles, Orpheus, and others had descended into Hades and left Death and Hell intact, Jesus had fundamentally broken and transformed both alike by his own share in them. This was a genuinely novel idea in ancient Mediterranean religion: not death, katabasis, resurrection, and anabasis, which was a common enough pattern in some other myths and religious narratives, but the notion of a pivotal instance of such occurrences.Considering his followers’ belief in his glorification by resurrection, ascension, session, and theonymy, it is also probably appropriate to assume that the title Soter attributed to Jesus held something of a similar sense to that attributed to classic gods like Zeus and Poseidon. Like them, Jesus was now responsible for the preservation (or rectification or dissolution) of the world order; Domine, salvum me fac! could be an invocation to Jesus to rescue one from imminent death with his now transcendent power as much as it could be a request for eschatological salvation. Was Jesus a Savior in the sense of the Greco-Roman mystery cults? Jews prior to Jesus and operative in the Diaspora was willing to adopt this language from time to time to describe Jewishness. Greeks, for their part, sometimes understood Judaism in the language of the mysteries. To their eyes, Judaism was an ancient and venerable if peculiar Eastern cult, on par with those Eastern cults (Cybele, Mithras, Isis and Osiris, etc.) that were flooding the West due to the Hellenistic conquests and the Romanization of the Mediterranean; and sometimes it could be described in the language even of traditional Greek mysteries. In Quaestiones convivales 4.6, Plutarch makes the argument that the Jews worship Dionysos, as evidenced in certain unique particulars of their theology and ritual (especially those associated with Sukkot, which is presently underway). The New Testament, for its part, presents John the Baptizer and Jesus as having instituted particular rites for their communities drawn from preexisting Jewish ritual. Baptism, which the early Jesus Movement adopted from the general practice of ritual bathing in mikvot and the specific twist in meaning afforded it by John’s prophetic career, and the kyriakon deipnon, the “Lord’s Supper” or eucharistia, are the two most salient in the New Testament and Early Christian literature.
Luke also adduces that the earliest disciples of Jesus practiced the imposition of hands which had become common in late first-century circles of the movement (e.g., Acts 8:14-19). Each of these rites, again, has a deep connection to already extant Jewish practices of immersion, ordination, and dining, and is presented in the New Testament with textual allusions to the Septuagint's rendition of key scriptural passages that form the basis for those practices. But in the Greco-Roman world beyond the Diaspora, the only social form that the Jesus Movement could feasibly adopt that would retain the apocalyptic, messianic, and mystical associations they drew to these practices in a way intelligible for non-Jews was precisely that of the mystery cult. Nor does this depreciate the degree to which Christianity appeared structured according to the logic of Greco-Roman collegia: mystery cults often had such collegial societies devoted to them in Mediterranean poleis. Throughout late antiquity and the middle ages, the primary sense in which Jesus was Savior, whether the threat identified was Sin, Death, the Devil, Hell, whatever, was cultic in character, because salvation to classical Christianity meant precisely deification, Christ's dispensation of the divine life to human beings through the liturgy and mysteries of the Christian Church. As Jared Ortiz writes of the Western tradition of deification, "Latin Christians were regularly being deified. They were often reminded of this fact in their liturgies and they often reflected upon it in their writings....It was part of the meaning and symbolism of the rites of initiation, a recurring theme in sermons and catechesis, and a topic of the formularies, that is, the prayers of the liturgy which changed from week to week and were used for instruction throughout the year. Latin Christians who had eyes to see and ears to hear would have known that their destiny was to be deified and that this process began the moment they were called to be baptized and lasted throughout their life as they progressed in virtue with the help of the sacraments. They would have known, as Augustine strikingly says, that God 'makes his worshipers into gods.'"As I have detailed in the two previous entries, on Jesus as Son of God and Lord, the Nicene and Chalcedonian definitions of Jesus as consubstantial with God the Father and with humanity, with all of their triumphs and apophatic limits, were worked out to preserve the significance of Jesus as Savior known through the later kerygma and the liturgy in the sense of the one who deifies. The varieties of possible salvation were all collapsed in official Christian liturgical theology into this one, supreme hope: that Jesus would save by deifying. But Christians were not the only ones who offered deification in the ancient world; the Christian path to it was, like other such paths, a teaching, and Christ was Savior in part because he was Teacher. It is there we turn next.
Continuandum in parte sexta.
See, e.g., G.E.R. Lloyd, ed., and J. Chadwick, trans., Hippocratic Writings (New York: Penguin, 1984); and Vivian Nutton, Ancient Medicine, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2012).
Florian Steger, Asclepius: Medicine and Cult, trans. Margot M. Saar (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2018).
See Daniel Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); idem, Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); idem, The Werewolf in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); on the evil eye, John H. Elliott, Beware the Evil Eye: The Evil Eye in the Ancient World, 3 vols. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2015-2016); more broadly, Georg Luck, Arcana Mundi: Magic and the Occult in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Collection of Texts (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2006).
See Jon Levenson and Kevin J. Madigan, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); C.D. Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE-200 CE (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). The argument from crisis is Elledge’s (44-65).
See Thiessen, Jesus and the Forces of Death: The Gospels’ Portrayal of Ritual Impurity within First-Century Judaism (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2021).
See Joshua W. Jipp, Christ is King: Paul’s Royal Ideology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015).
On charis and pistis, see Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in the Early Roman Empire and Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); eadem, The New Testament and the Theology of Trust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).
I am loathe to commend the work of Hilarion Alfeyev, whose response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was too little, too late, but his Christ the Conqueror of Hell: The Descent into Hades from an Orthodox Perspective (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2009) remains the best book on the subject in English.
For a general introduction to both, see Andrew McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2014), 19-64, 135-182; for baptism in particular, see Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009); for the eucharist, there is so vast a literature as to constitute its own discipline, but see the argument of Brant Pitre, Jesus and the Last Supper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015) for the case that the practice of the eucharist really does trace back to Jesus. Pitre’s overall book is interesting, but I do not find every facet of his case credible.
See Marvin W. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 223-254, and Jan N. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 142-165. So argues Bremmer: “there was no such category as ‘Mystery religions’ but only Mystery cults” (164); it is “in the second century AD…that we start to notice a shared interest by both pagans and Christians in the Mysteries,” where pagans were struck by similarities between Christianity and other Eastern cults (164); and the Mysteries did not constitute a special challenge to Christianity (165). I am not certain that Bremmer is fully appreciative of the degree to which Christianity in the second and third centuries CE was a fairly secretive community, enough so at least that pagans could openly accuse Christians of hosting incestuous, cannibalistic orgies behind their closed doors.
On Christians and collegia, see Alistair C. Stewart, The Original Bishops: Office and Order in the First Christian Centuries (Grand Rapids: BakerAcademic, 2014), 75-138.
Jared Ortiz, “Making Worshipers into Gods: Deification in the Latin Liturgy,” in Deification in the Latin Patristic Tradition, ed. Jared Ortiz (Washington, D.C.: CUA Press, 2019), 9. See also the classic study for the East by Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).