Dionysus’ miracle of the vine is not so much a “story” as it was a veneration of a natural phenomenon. Dionysus was specifically the God of the vine and the “miracle” of the grape vine was that it literally seemed to transform water into “wine” (or grape juice at least). This appeared to be a miracle and as such it was assumed that a deity must be responsible for it, and that deity was called Dionyus. The miracle of the vine precedes the deity. The deity is the explanation for the phenomenon. It’s not a narrative story ala Cana.
And Buddha, I think. In some versions of the story.
Then it’s a tenuous, coincidental link at best, whereas I think these presumed stories of Dionysus transforming water into wine are used as a piece of evidence that miracles associated with pagan man-gods were sources for the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles, or at the very least that they predate them. The problem is that–at least in this case–I can’t find any such stories, and the few associations I do find either postdate the Gospels or are different enough IMHO to warrant skepticism.
For example, a similar “miracle of the harvest” could be presumed, one which resulted in the assumption that the goddess Demeter/Ceres was responsible for it. But I agree it would be foolish to think the stories of Christ multiplying the loaves were a direct echo of the grain goddess. You certainly wouldn’t say “The most economical explanations of the loaf-multiplication story would have to include a strong possibility that the gospel writer was comparing Jesus to Ceres”?
This is not to say that the stories are true; like you I agree that the Gospels are so compromised that they cannot be relied upon to tell us much (if anything) authentic about what Jesus did or said. But I don’t think we can say just yet that the story of the wedding at Cana was completely made up, or even that it was told to make people think of some equivalence between Dionysus and Jesus (other than they both seemed to like wine).
I think it’s safe to say that Jesus could not have literally changed water into wine and that the story must therefore have had another purpose other than to report a historical event.
Agree 100%; I’m not qualified to say what that purpose was, other than to say there is little evidence it was to equate Jesus at some level with Dionysus or the acts of this pagan man-god.
Except that changing water into wine was already so strongly associated with Dionysus that the comparison would have been unavoidable. I didn’t mean to say that the story was equting Jesus with Dionysus, by the way, it was more of an “anything the pagan gods can do, Christ can do better” kind of thing. It could be argued that calming the sea showed dominance over Poseidon, for instance.
I’m sure this is not the forum for quibbling over the possibility of miracles, and I think the general drift of this thread is, what-does-who-wrote-the-bible-and-when-tell-us-about-who-Jesus-was-or-was-not, however…
Isn’t the idea of Jesus, son of God, vastly more important? More so even than the idea of Dionysus?
We might be able to look back abstractly now and say that the intention couldn’t have been to record history, but it was definately presented that way and I have to think it was intended as an historical representation.
But my pooint is that even if it was intended to be taken as historical, there had to be a source for the story which was not a historical event. The story HAD to have been made up at some point, and what reason would there be to make up a miracle so strongly associated with a Pagan deity if there was no desire for that comparaison to be drawn by the audience? It would have been impossible for John’s audience to hear that story without thinking of Dionysus and the author had to have known that.
…unless we consider the possibility of a miracle!
Which would be an unscholarly and anti-scientific thing to do without some very strong evidence.
I just can’t win for confusing…
Just because Jesus is mythical, it doesn’t mean he cannot also be historical. When I’m talking about Jesus myths, I’m talking about the narratives featuring Jesus. For the record, I see no reason to doubt that Jesus was a historical figure. It seems far more likely than the alternative. Understanding how myths work is one way of filtering the evidence we do have so that we can get at the historical Jesus.
[Grumbling hijack] It doesn’t help that the technical terms of my field (myth, urban legend, fairy tale) all mean “untrue” in common speech. Nobody uses “particle accelerator” or “cardiology” to mean “untrue.” Nobody gets confused when I say “the biological Jesus.” [/Grumbling hijack]
For the record, I agree with all of this, That’s exactly the angle I’m coming from.
It doesn’t help either that “mythicist” views and “mythological” views of Jesus mean two different things.
Wine itself was strongly associated with Dionysus; if the trick of changing water into wine was “already so strongly associated with Dionysus”, why is there no mention of it in pre-Christian literature?
Essentially, what we’re saying here is that both Dionysus and Jesus did something with wine, and therefore this story is meant to show a comparison between Jesus and Dionysus. Considering the comment at the end–that Jesus’ wine is of such a quality that it should have been served first–we are therefore led to assume that Jesus is a better divinity. That, in my opinion, is a bit of a stretch, one that could be applied to any of the nature-miracle stories, since Greek divinities were commonly associated with natural phenomena. But if such a comparison were really intended, why wouldn’t Christ–for example–use a magic wand or some such accessory to create the wine like Dionysus did in the well-known myths? Why wouldn’t he use this power to more clearly display his divinity, like Dionysus did repeatedly in myth (no mention is made of anyone witnessing the transformation, in fact the master of the house, who first tastes the transformed water-into-wine, doesn’t know where it came from)?
A more likely explanation, IMHO, is that John wrote the story to specifically fulfill OT predictions about the abundance of wine in the time of the Messiah (e.g. Amos 9:14). The fact that a wedding is the scene for this story is also perhaps an echo of language in Isaiah; I’m not sure about this association, but it’s certainly better and more relevant to the context of the region than any explanation for the setting based on a reading of Greek myth.
The stilling of the storm that you mention is in the Synoptics and not in John; odd that John, who as you say “was written in a largely Hellenistic cultural context”, would pass up an opportunity to use this story if it was so “obviously” meant to show Jesus’ dominance over Poseidon.
I’m certainly not saying these stories should be taken as historical fact, but to cast them as some sort of response to the power of pagan divinities is a stretch; the premise itself seems to be a tautology.
That’s just plain endoscopic calligraphy! And you know it!
Dionysus’ miracle predates Christianity – or to be more precise, it was believed that a deity was responsible for an observed natural phenomenon (the grapevine changing water into wine), This belief, in itself, predated any illustrative narrative stories about how he did it, and also predated Christianity.
And the problem with all of the nature miracle stories being comparisons to Pagan gods is…?
Dionysus needed the vine and lots of time to perform his miracle. Jesus did it instantly and needed no vine. Thus he shows his superiority to Dionysus. It doesn’t matter that the master of the house within the story didn’t see it because he wasn’t the audience for the story. The story was told for the benefit of John’s audience not for the benefit of his own invented characters.
John’s audience was Gentile, not Jewish and the Dionysus connection would have been far more obvious and immediate to them than some obscure (and less analogous) allusions to Hebrew scriptures they would have been unfamiliar with.
Why is that odd? Why would you presume that John knew the story?
It’s no stretch at all if the stories were being told TO pagans. Pauline Christianity was essentially a gentile movement, not a Jewish one.
Again, this statement can be made about any miracle story. It also presumes the general belief is more prevalent and well-understood than those stories which made the actions of the god more literal and anthropomorphic. Such pre-christian literature as the Theogony of Hesiod, Apollonius of Rhodes’ Argonautica and Euripedes Bacchae all make this god real and assign him real attributes and miracles. If John is making a clear comparison between Jesus and Dionysus, wouldn’t it make more sense to draw the comparison between the well-know stories about the god rather than the hazy notions that “some divinity” was responsible for water (and dirt, toil, manure, and whatever else goes into viticulture) turing into wine over some lengthy, human-run process? I say the notions are “hazy” because the presumed idea that “everyone knew” Dionysus turned water into wine as part of the wine-making process does not seem to appear in literature of the period, while the clear stories about Dionysus do.
That there is scant evidence for it, that there are better explanations available, and that the premise seems to be self-fulfilling.
Again, there were current stories in which Dionysus produced wine instantly (e.g. from the ground, rocks, etc.), but none where he transformed water into wine. These Dionysus stories would presumably be well-known to the Hellenic audience. If Jesus’ miracle at Cana were to magically produce wine from a spring in the ground (found in Euripedes) or after touching a rock with a wand (Dionysus uses a thrysus), you’d have a better case.
Perhaps the Hellenic audience would not be aware of the OT allusions, or perhaps the idea that the appearance of the Messiah = good times generally (hence the wine) was what John was trying to get across. I truly don’t know, but the setting of the miracle at a wedding to me seems important. In any event, I don’t think the “comparison to Dionysus” explanation is any better, and in fact fails my “common sense” test based on my knowledge of the ancient world.
John may not have been aware of any of the content of the Synoptic gospels, though I’m not qualified to say whether or not thats true (he certainly post-dated them, but that’s about as far as I can go). The claim, however, was that “it could be argued that calming the sea showed dominance over Poseidon.” The fact that the synoptics were not directed at the pagan audience as overtly as John, however, belies the weakness of this argument, and reasonable people could conclude it is being applied willy-nilly, i.e. without supporting evidence.
Glurge (shamelssly copied from Snopes.com
Glurge is a term specific to snopes.com, coined in 1998. Already in its short lifespan it has reached across the Internet and has appeared in the print media a number of times, and it may well soon make the final breakthrough by appearing in dictionaries as a bona fide entry. The word was invented by Patricia Chapin, a member of the urban legends discussion mailing list run in conjunction with this site. At a loss for words to describe the retching sensation this then-unnamed category of stories subjected her to, she fashioned a word that simultaneously named the genre and described its effect.
Glurge (a term which can be used to describe one story or applied to the genre as a whole) is the body of inspirational tales which conceal much darker meanings than the uplifting moral lessons they purport to offer, and which undermine their messages by fabricating and distorting historical fact in the guise of offering “true stories.” Glurge often contains such heart-tugging elements as sad-eyed puppies, sweet-faced children, angels, dying mothers, or miraculous rescues brought about by prayer. These stories are meant to be parables for modern times but fall far short of the mark. Our Glurge Gallery links to all the glurge any human could stand.
What I keep trying to say is that the miracle of the vine was not a “story,” it was simply understood that Dionysus (the God of the vine) was responsible for that natural phenomenon. It wasn’t always framed in terms of a narrative story. By the way, there was also an annual ritual in which the streams from Dionysian temples changed from water into wine (not miraculously, of course, some trick of the priests, but still, it was water into wine).
If a miracle story mirrors pre-existing mythological motifs of the culture to which the story is being told, then that comparison is unavoidable and intentionality has to be regarded as a stronger possibility than coincidence.
Addressed above. Dionysus’ water-into-wine trick was not always framed in terms of a narrative story but as an explanation for an observed natural phenomenon and expressed in terms of ritual (there’s actually even more to that stuff since the harvest of the vine was expressed in terms of a death/rebirth cycle and involved a eucharistic drinking of “the blood of the vine”).
Those same associations of celebration and joy were connected to Dionysus as well, and more to the point, Dionysus was said to have first produced wine and revealed himself as the divine son of Zeus at his own wedding. The wedding of Dionysus was celebrated as an annual feast (with lots of wine).
The point is debatable but he shows no direct dependence on them.
I disagree that the synoptics were not directed to Gentile audiences. Mark and Luke certainly were. Matthew may have been directed at Hellenistic Jews but the calming of the storm is Mark’s story.
Let me start by saying I appreciate this discussion, and hope I’m not coming of as a contrarian nag. I do find the discussion interesting and illuminating.
The claim for this is from Pliny the Elder, NH II.106(103): Andro in insula templo liberi patris fontem nonis ianuariis semper vini saporem fundere Mucianus ter consul credit. - “In the island of Andros, at the temple of Father Liber (Dionysus) a spring always pours forth the flavor of wine on the Nones of January, Mucianus, the three-time consul, believes” (translation mine). That’s it; one temple on Andros (not all Dionysian temples), believed to have a spring which flowed with wine once a year, probably as you guess by a trick of the priests. We don’t even know if this spring was in operation the rest of the time (seems unlikely, since that would involve some engineering effort to add a sluice to an already-running fountain, but not impossible), and this claim is made just before Pliny tells us about a river in Arcadia which “destroys any who drink from it.” If the story is true, it hardly supports the notion of a widespread belief in the power of Dionysus or his temples to change water into wine.
It’s the extent of mirroring I question in this case, not the possibility of it. What we have here is Jesus doing something that involves wine, which would remind people in his target audience of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. That’s all, and I think you’re pressing the association at the expense of the clear details in the story. With all due respect, and I really don’t mean this as an insult, the notion is half-baked; I submit it needs a little more evidence to support it.
This is exactly the kind of conclusion-jumping scholarship tends to avoid. It may seem as though I’m quibbling over a relatively insignificant point (I’ll concede the story of the wedding at Cana and the emphasis on wine might evoke in its Greek audience some associations with Dionysus), but it’s the seed from which highly speculative weeds like this are grown. There likely are precedents for the Eucharist story, but it is a huge, huge leap to tie them with the myth and folklore surrounding Dionysus.
I’d really like a citation for that claim that Dionysus first produced wine and revealed his divine nature at his wedding. Not saying it doesn’t exist, but the familiar story of Bacchus approaching Ariadne on Naxos–mainly taken from Catullus and Ovid–has his divinity already pretty firmly established. Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you here…
I accept that Matthew and Luke are using Mark as a source for this story. I also accept they were familiar with Greek culture, if only because Koine is the language of the NT. I just don’t believe the evidence is there to say they were deliberately using these miracles as a point of comparison with Greek divinities and their associations.
In the three versions of the calming of the storm, all end with witnesses expressing their amazement at the miracle. That, I must concede, argues for use of the story by the evangelists to clearly demonstration Jesus’ divinity, though I’d personally qualify this doesn’t mean they had comparison with Poseidon specifically in mind. Note that the wedding at Cana includes no such acknowledgement of the miracle by any witnesses; in fact the miracle is only strongly implied by the story, not explicit. Kind of a poor way to compare Jesus with a god if you ask me; I really think there’s other reasons why the author of John includes this story.
To be fair, we don’t know that they didn’t write them down, just that, if they did, these accounts haven’t survived (except insofar as they may have been incorporated into the gospels we do have).