by Michael Haag
Also already in the third century BC the Egyptian priest Manetho said that ‘people often call Isis Athena’. The first-century AD Greek historian Plutarch echoed this when he observed that a statue of Athena in Egypt was identified with Isis and was inscribed, ‘I am all that has been, and is, and shall be, and my robe no mortal has yet uncovered’. Plutarch added that Isis was sometimes called Sophia, the spiritual personification of wisdom, and described her as ‘a goddess exceptionally wise and a lover of wisdom’.
The worship of Isis extended throughout the Roman Empire from Philae in Upper Egypt to Rome and London. This marble statue of Isis from the villa of the emperor Hadrian outside Rome stood at the very heart of imperial rule.
Isis Capitoline. Photograph by Carole Raddato.
By the time Paul reached Rome in about AD 60, the worship of Isis in the imperial capital was widespread, though it had been resisted for political reasons. Following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC, a temple in honour of Isis was decreed, probably with the encouragement of Cleopatra, the mother of Caesar’s son, but the project was suspended by Augustus after his defeat of Cleopatra and Mark Antony in Egypt in 31 BC. Finally a temple was founded in Isis’ honour in Rome by the emperor Domitian during the AD 80s.
A temple to Isis was built in Rome in the AD 80s but nothing remains of it today, only this massive left foot from a colossal temple statue in the Via di Santo Stefano del Cacco; it was removed here in 1878 from the nearby thoroughfare which is still called Via di Piè di Marmo, the street of the Marble Foot. Several small obelisks that once belonged to the temple are distributed around Rome, one in front of the Pantheon close by.
Piè di Marmo. Photograph by Carole Raddato.
But already in the reign of Claudius (AD 41-54) prayers were being offered to the emperor in conjunction with Isis; his predecessor Caligula (AD 37-41) had given state recognition to the Isis cult, had an Egyptian obelisk brought to Italy, and inaugurated the Navigum Isidis, an annual procession in honour of Isis held on 5 March, and according to the historian Josephus, Caligula himself took part in the masked parade dressed as a woman. In Italy the festival was suppressed by the Church in the early fifth century but in Egypt the Navigium Isidis was celebrated for a century longer – and in Catholic and Eastern Orthodox countries its successor is still celebrated today as carnival in the days before Lent.
Just as Paul sailed to Italy in a ship bearing the sign of the Dioscuri, so throughout his missionary journeys Paul was travelling in a world that put its faith in Isis and her companion gods. The very streets in which Paul wandered at Antioch, at Philippi, at Corinth and elsewhere, were thoroughfares for teachers and priests and devotees of Isis, and often he must have met them and talked to them there about the mysteries.
Paul’s deified Jesus might have seemed to them as one more mystery cult to join the pantheon reigned over by Isis. But to Paul there could be no confusion and nothing shared, only salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Isis was the enemy of his new faith.
The Mysteries
The mysteries of the ancient world were religious practices, rituals and beliefs that were kept a fiercely guarded secret, known only to the initiated. ‘Mysteries’ comes from the Greek word mysteria, meaning secret. Isis and Osiris of Egypt, Cybele and Attis of Asia Minor, Aphrodite and Adonis of Lebanon, and Persephone and Demeter of Greece, these were the gods at the heart of the great pagan mysteries. What they all had in common was the story of life and death followed by rebirth. Their outer myths were well known. But their inner drama, the one undergone by their initiates, was a mystery.
The goddess was the essential life force in this ancient drama of death and rebirth. In the second century AD the Latin writer Apuleius, author of The Golden Ass, described his initiation into the Mysteries of Isis as a deeply moving spiritual experience in which he suffered a mystic death and resurrection, and felt bound to the goddess for the rest of his life.
Several Christian writers who heard something about the mysteries and felt no compunction about breaking the taboo of secrecy mentioned a ritual that sounds like ieros gamos, the Greek for holy sexual union or sacred marriage. In the second century AD, Clement of Alexandria referred to reports of a bridal chamber and crawling under a bed. Asterius, a fourth-century bishop of Amaseia in Asia Minor, expressed his horror at ‘the descent into darkness, the venerated congress of the hierophant with the priestess’. And he went on to ask, ‘Are not the torches extinguished and does not the vast and countless assemblage believe that in what is done by the two in the darkness is their salvation?’
Knowing whether this was actually a sexual act is less important than understanding its meaning. At the heart of the various mysteries was the story of death and life, or rather two types of life, for which the Greeks had two different words, zoe and bios. Isis and Aphrodite possessed zoe, eternal life. Osiris and Adonis possessed bios; they were creatures of the seasons who lived and died or were taken away to the land of the dead. All the mysteries involved descent into the underworld where the dead are regenerated, a regeneration that often requires healing from mutilation – Osiris cut to pieces, Adonis gored by a boar, Attis castrated. The sacred marriage was a healing and a resurrection; the individual whose life, bios, is lived within the rhythms of time was united with zoe, the life eternal.
The fundamental experience of these mysteries, which ritually enacted the initiate’s death, may have been that death was an illusion. By submitting himself to death, the initiate was released from the conception of life and death as opposites; he entered into union with the great processes of creation itself. The initiates had forgotten or lost this knowledge, but it was brought back to them by the rituals of the mysteries. Suggestive of such rituals were the anointings that took place between Jesus and the strange woman at Bethany, the woman whom John’s gospel identified as Mary.
The ieros gamos of the mysteries can be traced back to the most ancient beliefs. Here at the temple of Abydos in Egypt a relief from about 1285 BC shows Isis in the form of a bird copulating with her dead husband Osiris, regenerating him as lord of the underworld and bearing his son Horus.
Isis copulating with Osiris. Wikimedia Commons.
The story still retains its power. To this day people want to know if Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, were married, had children; people want it to be so; it is the ancient and recurring story of death and love and rebirth.
The Jesus Mystery
Paul called Jesus the Christ, Christos in Greek, which is the translation used in the Septuagint for the Hebrew messiah, meaning the anointed one, the saviour or liberator of his people. But for Jews the messiah was a political figure who had nothing to do with resurrection nor with paying for people’s sins. Paul lifted the concept of messiah from its Jewish context and presented his christos as a hero of the pagan mysteries whose suffering, death and resurrection are the means to salvation.
Paul spoke the same language as the pagan mystery cults. Just as followers of Isis participated in a ritual drama which led them through a symbolic experience of death to a new life, so in Romans 6:3-4 Paul offers a ritual death which leads to eternal life.
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.
But in one all important respect Paul’s Jesus Mystery was different. In the mysteries of Isis and Osiris, Aphrodite and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, the goddess restores the male to life. He is a seasonal creature, he is bound by time, he is born and dies, and he is only reborn when he is united with the female who possesses zoe, eternal life. (Even in the Eleusinian Mysteries where Persephone is abducted by Hades to the Underworld, she is rescued by a woman, her mother Demeter.)
The Jesus of Paul lives and dies but returns to life because he himself is a god, in fact an aspect of God
himself, the Son of the Father; no woman comes into it, not in Paul’s version of the story. Like Osiris, Adonis and Attis, Jesus is mutilated and dies. On the third day he emerges from the tomb. If this were the mystery of Osiris, then his resurrection would be accomplished by Isis, protector and regenerator of the dead and guardian of tombs.
This may be why Paul makes no mention of Mary Magdalene at the tomb. In the mysteries she would be there; in the mysteries she would have zoe, the power and gift of eternal life. To avoid confusion or any doubt that anyone but Jesus can possess zoe, Paul writes every woman out of his Jesus mystery; Mary Magdalene is not mentioned even once by Paul, nor is Mary the mother of Jesus nor any other woman in Jesus’ life. In Paul’s version of the mysteries, women can have no place; true to Paul’s Jewish monotheistic roots the mystery of rebirth and salvation belongs to Jesus Christ alone.
The Resurrection and the New Testament Canon
The New Testament as we know it only began to be crystalised at the time of Marcion, a wealthy and brilliant theologian from Sinope on the Black Sea who came to Rome around 140. Marcion was a great enthusiast for Paul’s letters, finding in them a God whose love offered salvation in return for faith. But also he went further than Paul, sharing the widespread feeling in Greek culture that Christianity should cut itself free from its origins in Judaism and reject the Old Testament and its wrathful God.
What enabled and encouraged Marcion to do this was the final Jewish disaster, the Bar Kokhba revolt in AD 132-136, which the Romans put down more furiously than the revolt in AD 70, rebuilding Jerusalem as a pagan city with Roman temples while refusing Jews permission to go there. This second revolt in Judaea won the Jews no friends among the gentiles and marked the definitive separation of Christianity and Judaism. Importantly this separation freed gentile Christians from the need to accommodate Jewish beliefs and allowed them to uncompromisingly announce the resurrection of Jesus who now unequivocally became the sacrificial saviour god of Paul’s preachings.
From the masses of Christian texts that had been circulating since the days of Paul’s letters, Marcion set himself the task of selecting those that spoke with authority of the loving God of Jesus. He wanted to create a canon.
What he produced was a selection of letters by Paul which he called the Apostolikon accompanied by a gospel which he called the Evangelikon. The Apostolikon consisted of ten letters of Paul that Marcion decided were authentic (today seven are thought to be authentic), while the Evangelikon was a version of the gospel of Luke. Because Marcion believed that Jesus was not human, his version of Luke is missing the first two chapters, that is the nativity and also the stories about Jesus’ childhood, so that it begins with his baptism in the Jordan by John and the start of his ministry at Capernaum.
The triumphant resurrection of Jesus Christ and his raising of the dead is dramatically illustrated in this Byzantine fresco of about 1320 at the Chora Church in Istanbul.
Anastasis fresco in the Chora Church, Istanbul. Photograph by Michael Haag.
Scholars dispute whether Marcion edited a pre-existing version of Luke or put together what he could find from various sources to write his own gospel which later developed into the Luke accepted into the canon. But the view of Church Fathers such as Tertullian, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus was that Marcion had tampered with Luke’s original text – though it is unclear if any of the Church Fathers had the original text or even if they shared the same text. In 144 Marcion was summoned to Rome and excommunicated. All his writings were destroyed, or they perished, and what we know about Marcion comes from the tracts written against him by Tertullian and the others.
Nevertheless Marcion’s version of Christianity proved very popular and his beliefs, together with his Evengelikon and his Apostolikon, enjoyed an audience for centuries. To counter the popularity of Marcionism the proto-orthodox body of the Church now began to decide upon a canon of its own, what we now have as the New Testament – the four gospels, the letters of Paul, other letters, and Revelation.
Apart from anything else this process of canonisation determined the literary form of the New Testament’s contents, that it should consist of letters and of gospels; the one exception was the apocalyptic Book of Revelation. Gospel writing was an innovation; it was unknown until this time. Teachings, sayings, sermons, all manner of events, were put into a narrative which took a realistic and historical form. Or they were put into letters, which again allowed for clarity of teaching, of argument, and favoured realism and history.
There is significance in the way each of the gospels describes who sees Jesus at the resurrection. Except in the original version of Mark where Mary Magdalene discovers the empty tomb but Jesus makes no appearance to anyone, he always appears to the disciples, sometimes in the most painstakingly physical way, as when Thomas explores the wounds in Jesus’ hands with his finger and thrusts his hand into Jesus’ side. The effect of this bodily resurrection, most definitely no vision, is to validate the role of the disciples as apostles of Jesus who are to take his message to the world, who are to serve as the foundation pillars of his church.
This process continued through the second century and was settled by its end; its proponents are well known as their works have survived – Tertullian, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr chief among them. But these were figures in Rome or areas dependent on Rome. They inhabited that geographical trajectory established by the voyages of Paul, the area encompassed by the Acts of the Apostles. Not one of them came from Egypt, though soon some of the greatest figures in Christianity would indeed come from the vibrant background of Alexandria. But not now. The Church in Europe and Asia Minor determined the canon according to its way of thinking about God and it established clear markings of who was in and who was out, while at the same time establishing an order and a hierarchy of authority and power based on apostolic succession.
Of Egypt on the other hand, populous and wealthy, and Alexandria in particular with one of the largest Greek and Jewish populations in the world, little has been known of how Christianity developed during those first two centuries. What does emerge however is that Christian beliefs were varied and widely inclusive; there was nothing heretical about any of them because the very idea of a single correct point of view was unknown.
Here in Egypt Mary Magdalene thrived.
CHAPTER NINE
The Gnostic Mary Magdalene
EACH OF PAUL’S MISSIONARY journeys pushed westwards, through Asia Minor and into Greece, until eventually with what seems a sense of inevitability he reached Rome – and there according to legend he died a martyr, though the New Testament says nothing about this. There are other legends that Paul went farther westwards; Paul himself wrote of a desire to travel into Spain (Romans 15:24). Paul also wrote that immediately after his conversion he went into Arabia (Galatians 1:17) where he seems to have remained for three years. Arabia in this context is thought to mean among the Nabataean people centred on Petra in present-day Jordan though some prefer imagining Paul retreating into contemplation and solitude in the deserts of the Negev or Sinai. But nothing is known of that beyond Paul’s brief mention of it in Galatians, and at any rate this Arabian period seems merely a prelude to his great missionary journeys to the West.
The movement towards Europe makes itself felt throughout the New Testament, not only in Paul’s letters but in all the other epistles. The narrative of Acts leads inexorably towards Rome. Even the apocalyptic Book of Revelation is set within the historical and geographical bounds of Acts, its seven letters addressed to seven Greek churches, that is Christian communities, in Asia Minor. Also from sources outside the New Testament we have long known a great deal about the spread of Christianity through Asia Minor and into Greece and the rest of Europe.
Egyptian Mystery
But strangely nothing is known about how Christianity reached Egypt apart from the tradition, first recorded by Eusebius in his History of the Church in the early fourth century, that it was brought to Alexandria in the mid-first century by
the Evangelist Mark. But the New Testament itself makes no mention of plans to evangelise Egypt even though it was populous and had important centres of Greek and Jewish settlement. Nor would we know from the New Testament that Christianity existed in Egypt at all were it not for a single reference in Acts which mentions a fellow missionary of Paul’s, ‘a certain Jew named Apollos, born at Alexandria, an eloquent man, and mighty in the scriptures, [who] came to Ephesus. This man was instructed in the way of the Lord; and being fervent in the spirit, he spake and taught diligently the things of the Lord’ (Acts 18:24-25).
There is however a controversial verse in the New Testament that suggests that Christianity was brought to Egypt by the apostle Peter and the evangelist Mark – and also by a woman so well known that it was unnecessary to mention her name.
The question of Egypt turns on the meaning of Babylon in the verse. In 1 Peter 5:13 Peter addresses his fellow Christians in Asia Minor, saying, ‘The church that is at Babylon, elected together with you, saluteth you; and so doth Marcus my son’. Ever since 597 BC when the Babylonian empire conquered Jerusalem and took away many of its leading citizens, Babylon had been used by Jews as a metaphor for captivity and exile. Christians have followed suit, and so Babylon in this verse is commonly taken to mean Rome, the capital of the great empire whose influence pervaded everyone’s lives, and where according to legend Peter would die a martyr’s death – though none of this explains why Peter would conceal the identity of Rome behind a metaphor. The interpretation that Babylon means Rome is regarded with scepticism among some scholars and also among the Copts, that is the Christians of Egypt, who point out that Babylon was a name used in Hellenistic and Roman times and right through the Middle Ages to refer to a place that now lies within the southern quarters of Cairo, the city founded by the Arabs in 969, and is called Misr al Qadima, Old Cairo. The argument that Babylon means Rome is disingenuous, they say, and serves to appropriate Peter to Rome in order there to crown him pope and martyr, legitimising the Vatican’s claim to apostolic supremacy.
