RECORDING SCRIPT — Did Jesus Borrow the Feast?

Prepared from the approved narration script. It has not been checked word for word against the recording and may differ from what is heard.

Second Humanity. Did Jesus borrow the feast? A small scrap of papyrus survives from Roman Egypt. It is an invitation to dinner. A man called Chaeremon asks someone to join him “at the table of the lord Sarapis.” There is a place, a day, and a time. Someone is expected. Nearly two thousand years later, we can still recognize the gesture. Come and eat with us. Then we turn to Paul, and another phrase meets us. “The Lord's table.” Bread. A cup. People gathered around a meal that joins them to someone greater than themselves. What are we looking at? Two separate worlds? A common inheritance? Something Christianity received and gave another name? This is one of the questions I have carried into Second Humanity. When we hear that sacred meals, wine, initiation, and promises of life beyond death existed long before Jesus, the question deserves more than a hurried reassurance. We should be able to look at the evidence without feeling that the act of looking is already a betrayal. And we should be able to say where that evidence takes us, and where it leaves us with a question. This is What Are You Seeking. The show takes a question every other Thursday. Today is a special edition, a historical companion to our founding collection, The life we receive, the life we share. The written essay is A World of Sacred Meals: Dionysus, Eleusis, and the Table of Jesus. It belongs in the Anchor, where we return to the sources of the hope we hold. The three foundational essays ask what we hope, how new life is received, and how it is shared. This conversation opens a window onto the world in which those claims first took their shape. Here is the position we will explore. The likenesses are real. The evidence before us does not establish that the meal of Jesus was derived from a mystery rite. A meal takes its meaning from its host, its story, and what those who share it understand themselves to be receiving. We need to attend to all three. For someone trying to understand their faith, a comparison can feel like more than a historical observation. It can sound as though the thing they trusted has been taken away. Or it can promise a sudden explanation: here, at last, is what was hidden from you. Both reactions can move faster than the evidence. We can give ourselves time. A tradition can speak through language it shares with its neighbors and still make a claim we have to consider on its own terms. Discovering the shared language begins that consideration. It does not finish it. First, return to the invitation. It comes from the second century, after Paul's letters. The English translations also bring the two expressions closer than the Greek does. The papyrus uses a word for a couch or banquet. Paul uses the word for a table. So this little invitation cannot prove that Paul lifted a phrase, or a practice, from this particular feast. What it gives us is a glimpse of an inhabited world. The sacred meal belongs to the ordinary arrangements of a life. Paul himself places us in that world. He writes about someone reclining at a meal in an idol's temple. He considers what a believer should do when an unbeliever invites them to dinner. These are practical questions because people are already meeting, eating, and negotiating their loyalties. To follow Jesus did not move a person outside their city. It changed the questions they had to answer within it. In Athens, a stone preserves the rules of a club devoted to Dionysus. Its members were called the Iobacchoi. The stone belongs to the middle of the second century, about a hundred years after Paul's letter to Corinth. There are admission payments and contributions toward the wine. There are rules about speaking, quarrelling, and fighting. There are officers to keep order. There are provisions for honoring members when they die. The detail matters. These people belonged to an association with obligations, ceremonies, and the recurring work of getting along. They cannot be understood only through a painting of wild revelers. The rules also say that someone who has not paid should not enter, while allowing the priest to waive the requirement. That exception belongs in the account. It changes what we can fairly say about the people on the other side of our comparison. We have no reason to turn them into a community without generosity so that ours can appear generous. Other inscriptions show Dionysian groups that included people of different social ranks. Shared membership did not erase all the ranks, but the presence of enslaved people and freed people matters. The ancient world was more complicated than a private religion for the rich followed by the first meal that ever welcomed anyone else. These gatherings could also make authorities uneasy. Long before Christianity, the Roman Senate severely restricted Bacchic associations. Centuries later, a Roman governor named Pliny investigated Christians. He reported that they met before daybreak and sang to Christ as to a god. They also gathered later for food he described as ordinary and harmless. They said they had stopped that later gathering after his prohibition of associations. Their difficulties involved their allegiance to Christ and their refusal to renounce it, as well as official concern about gatherings. The account gives us people trying to live a faith together under scrutiny. Before we compare the beliefs, we should see the rooms. People assembled. They sang. They ate. They remembered the dead. They made promises. Religion was happening between people. What did the mysteries promise those people? In a grave in northern Greece, a woman was buried with small gold leaves shaped like ivy. They were made centuries before Paul. One begins, “Now you died and now you were born.” It speaks of release through Bacchios, a name of Dionysus, and directs the dead woman toward Persephone. Imagine reading those words without rushing to claim them for Christianity or to use them against it. A human being has died. Those who prepared her burial have placed words of hope beside her. Death, they believed, was a passage for which she could be prepared. We do not have to make her hope identical to ours to take it seriously. At Eleusis, near Athens, the central story concerned Demeter and her daughter Persephone. A daughter taken into the underworld. A mother searching. The loss of the earth's fertility. A return that brings life back to the fields. The rites drew people beyond the circle of Athenian male citizens. Women, enslaved people, and people from other communities could participate. Some parts of the festival were public. Its central initiations were guarded. That secrecy leaves us with an uneven record. We know enough to recognize the importance of the experience, but we cannot confidently reconstruct every movement inside the hall. The Roman writer Cicero credited the mysteries with teaching people to live more humanely and to face death with better hope. There was an ethical claim there, as well as a promise about dying. We should hear it. The mother searching for her daughter brings the promise close to an ordinary grief. We know what it means to want someone returned to us. The harvest gives that longing an image: an earth that has become barren can bear life again. The story holds loss and renewal together, even while the surviving accounts leave much of the initiation hidden. If we treat the whole tradition as a mistake waiting for correction, we will fail to understand why anyone went there. The people who sought these rites brought lives that could be wounded, and a hope that their wounds were not the whole of reality. Dionysus takes us into another range of practices. Wine, theater, celebration, the loosening of ordinary restraint. Sometimes a regulated association with its accounts and officers. Sometimes the frightening power that appears in Greek tragedy. There were different places, centuries, and forms of devotion. Eleusis and Dionysian worship were not a single ceremony with interchangeable gods. What connects the questions is recognizable. How can a person live with suffering? Can the burden of being oneself be lightened? What happens when we die? Is there a life in which fear does not govern everything? Christianity entered a world already asking. It did not invent the human need to which it spoke. Jesus and his first followers also belonged to a particular people within that world. Their Scriptures, prayers, meals, and memories were Jewish. This matters just as much as the Greek evidence. In Second Maccabees, Jews are compelled to join a procession for Dionysus wearing ivy. The account belongs to the memory of persecution under Antiochus. In that story, participation carries the force of an imposed loyalty. Another Jewish work, Third Maccabees, tells of registration and branding with an ivy leaf. Its literary character requires care; we cannot use every feature as a straightforward record of an event. These writings help us understand why Dionysus could mean danger within Jewish memory. They do not tell us how every Jewish person responded to every Greek custom. There was exchange, accommodation, refusal, and disagreement. People shared a Mediterranean world while making different judgments about how to live in it. Greek and Roman observers sometimes thought they recognized Dionysus in Jewish worship. Other observers rejected the identification. Those comparisons tell us about the categories the observers brought with them. They do not settle what Jewish worshippers believed. We need the same care when reading Jesus. John calls him the true vine. Dionysus was associated with the vine, certainly. But Israel was already a vine in Israel's own Scriptures. A reader formed by the Psalms and Isaiah brings that history to the words. A Greek reader might hear further associations. Both deserve examination. Neither permits us to erase the other. The last meal has this same depth of setting. Mark, Matthew, and Luke present it as a Passover meal. John appears to give a different sequence in relation to Passover. Paul gives the earliest surviving account of the bread and cup without explicitly calling that meal a Passover supper. We should let those differences remain visible. Across the accounts, Israel's language of covenant matters. Mark's words about the blood of the covenant recall the covenant made through Moses. Paul's words about a new covenant carry the promise spoken through Jeremiah. These are substantial connections, within the texts themselves. Recognizing them does not seal the room against every Greek influence. It gives us a reason to begin with the story the participants are actually telling. But what about the parallels that seem too close to ignore? Water becoming wine. A god arriving among people who do not recognize him. Death and a return to life. Eating and drinking in relation to a deity. Let us take them seriously enough to distinguish them. John tells of water becoming wine at a wedding in Cana. Stories about Dionysus and wonderful supplies of wine existed before the Gospels. Ancient writers describe wine springing from the earth and vessels found full at a sanctuary. Some reports are earlier than Christianity; others survive in later writers. What someone says they heard and what they say they witnessed also need to remain distinct. The likeness belongs in the discussion. So does the Jewish prophetic picture of abundance, in which the coming restoration is pictured through overflowing wine and a feast provided by God. John's wedding can be heard within that promise. A reader may also hear it in a world that associated miraculous wine with Dionysus. Hearing an association is a beginning for inquiry. It does not, by itself, identify the source of the story. Then consider the unrecognized god. In the Greek play The Bacchae, Dionysus appears in human form in his own city. His authority is resisted. He is arrested and questioned. Those scenes make comparison with the Gospels understandable. Scholars have explored their literary relationships carefully. Literature can echo literature without every event in one account having been invented from the other. A familiar saying can move between stories. A writer can address expectations already present in the reader. We need evidence for the particular connection being proposed. And death? Ancient accounts do tell of Dionysus being dismembered and restored. We can acknowledge that without importing every element of a modern reconstruction into every ancient text. Some elaborate accounts of the myth join evidence from very different periods, and scholars dispute how those pieces belong together. The Christian proclamation places Jesus' death in recent human history, under a Roman governor, within the memory of the first witnesses. Dionysian stories place their events in a different narrative setting. That difference matters to the claims each is making. It does not establish either claim's truth simply by announcing a date. What about eating the god? Dionysian evidence includes references to raw flesh. Those references do not by themselves establish that participants understood themselves to be eating Dionysus. A connection must be demonstrated, not supplied by the force of the comparison. Wine is easier to recognize and harder to make decisive. People drank it at ordinary meals, Jewish meals, and meals associated with many gods. The same material can carry different meanings. You have to listen to what is being said over the cup. These parallels invite reading. They do not spare us the work of reading. There is another possibility that has drawn considerable attention. What if the extraordinary experience at Eleusis came, at least in part, through what people drank? The ancient hymn to Demeter describes a drink made with barley, water, and pennyroyal. Demeter declines wine. The drink is called kykeon. In the twentieth century, researchers proposed that ergot, a fungus that can grow on grain, might have supplied psychoactive compounds. Ergot also contains dangerous toxins. A plausible account therefore has to address more than the presence of a mind-altering substance. In 2026, Romanos Antonopoulos and colleagues examined a version of this hypothesis in a laboratory study published in Scientific Reports. Under selected conditions, treatment involving wood ash changed the balance of compounds in ergot, producing compounds with psychoactive potential while reducing certain toxic ones. That is a result worth studying. It moves part of the chemical question forward. It does not show that a drink was safe for human use. It does not show that the same preparation happened at Eleusis. The researchers themselves call for further toxicological work. No residue securely establishing an ergot preparation from Eleusis is presented by this research, and the authors note the need for systematic investigation there. Absence of that evidence does not settle the question against the hypothesis. It leaves the historical claim awaiting evidence. Brian Muraresku's book The Immortality Key brings these possibilities to a wider audience and explores a connection with early Christianity. The attraction is understandable. It offers a way of reading the language of death and new life through an experience someone might undergo before physical death. The scholar Charles Stang makes a distinction we need to keep. A psychoactive ingredient at Eleusis remains a hypothesis. A psychoactive Christian meal requires its own evidence. We cannot carry a possibility from one setting into another and treat the journey as already established. There are three questions. Could the ingredient have worked? Was it used in this rite? Was that practice transmitted into a Christian meal? A good answer to the first does not answer the second and third. The saying, “If you die before you die, you won't die when you die,” often accompanies this discussion. It has been reported from a Christian monastery on Mount Athos. That report does not establish it as an ancient inscription from Eleusis. The saying can still prompt a serious question about the surrender of a defended life. Its value for reflection does not depend on assigning it an age we cannot demonstrate. Our essay Born from Above follows that question more fully. Here, we should keep it distinct from what the evidence tells us about a particular ancient drink. And we should hear how strong the Christian language already is. In John, Jesus speaks of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. In Paul, the cup and bread are a participation in Christ's blood and body. Christians have understood that participation in different ways. These texts make a religious claim that goes beyond a meal illustrating good behavior. They give us no clear evidence that a hidden chemical ingredient supplied the participation they describe. They direct attention to Jesus. The question is who is being received, and what it means to belong to him. Early Christians knew that their meal resembled other sacred meals. The comparison was already being made inside the Church. In the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr describes bread and a cup of water in the rites of Mithras. He explains the resemblance as a demonic imitation. A later Christian writer, Tertullian, also makes a comparison involving bread. We do not need to hide either the resemblance or the explanation they gave. We do need to recognize the sort of witnesses they are. They are defending Christian worship while arguing against a rival. Their reports are evidence to examine, not neutral descriptions of everything that happened in a Mithraic gathering. Archaeology places meals within that worship too. Its meeting rooms often have benches along the sides. Images show Mithras and the Sun at a feast. Here again are bodies gathered, food shared, and a sacred story giving the meal its meaning. The earliest secure evidence for Roman Mithraism clusters in the later first and early second centuries, after Paul's account of the Christian meal. There is an earlier notice of rites associated with pirates, but its relationship to the later Roman cult remains uncertain, and it does not describe the meal in question. Those dates make a simple story of Christian borrowing difficult to establish. They also do not give us the exact birthday of a religion. The earliest surviving evidence is not necessarily the beginning of the practice. We cannot prove borrowing in either direction merely by placing the surviving objects in order. So where does that leave us? It leaves us in the shared world, with more precise questions. Paul himself compares meals connected with Israel, meals connected with other gods, and the meal of Christ. He treats eating as participation. It joins the eater to an allegiance. Think of how much a shared meal can mean even in our ordinary experience. A meal after a funeral and a meal after a wedding may contain the same food. The people at each table know what they have gathered to do. The event, the words, and the relationships make a difference that a list of ingredients cannot capture. An ancient sacred meal asks for at least that much attention. We need to hear its prayers and remember its story before saying what another meal has in common with it. Paul's argument depends on recognizing a resemblance between these practices, while insisting that the allegiances cannot simply be combined. For Paul, the identity of the host matters. Similar bread does not make every gathering the same gathering. The scholar Jonathan Z. Smith asks readers to examine how comparisons are constructed: which similarities we select, which differences we notice, and what work we want the comparison to do. That applies to us too. If we collect only resemblances, we can make one tradition dissolve into another. If we admit only differences, we can make a human community appear to have no history and no neighbors. The patient reading holds both in view. Christians remembered a recent death. They interpreted it through Israel's Scriptures. They made claims of allegiance to Jesus. They also spoke Greek, lived in Mediterranean cities, and ate in a world already full of sacred meals. These facts belong together. At Second Humanity, we do not take a resemblance itself as evidence of demonic imitation. People in different places can recognize suffering, fear death, seek forgiveness, and long for communion. We can honor those longings without declaring all their answers equivalent. Acts gives us Paul speaking in Athens. He notices an altar. He draws on words known from Greek poetry. He begins within a world his hearers recognize. Then he calls them toward repentance, judgment, and the risen Jesus. Engagement leads to a definite claim. It does not require contempt for the people being addressed, and it does not leave every allegiance untouched. There is a further contrast we should handle carefully. Jesus says, “I spake openly to the world.” His teaching was heard in public places. Eleusis guarded its central rites. That difference matters. It does not mean that Jesus had no private teaching. Mark describes explanations given to his disciples apart from the crowds. Nor was every early Christian meal open to everyone without conditions. The Didache and Justin both describe boundaries involving baptism and belonging. Meanwhile, Eleusis had public processions as well as guarded initiation. We should compare the actual practices. A contrast becomes less truthful when it needs one side to be entirely secret and the other entirely without boundaries. Still, the direction of Christian proclamation is outward. Paul can call something a mystery once hidden and now made known. What is announced is meant to be heard. Second Humanity receives that outward movement as part of our responsibility. The work of returning to the sources should help people understand what we hold and examine it for themselves. It should not make spiritual access depend on our possession of a hidden key. Depth can be shared. A difficult question can be welcomed. We do not have to make obscurity a sign of holiness. And the modern longing for a direct encounter deserves respect. A person may know the words of a faith and still be asking whether those words can become life. We should hear that question before explaining it away. An extraordinary experience can be significant. Its intensity alone cannot settle every claim made about it. We can also ask what follows: what becomes possible in a person's attention, commitments, and relationships. Those questions deserve time. They belong to a life, not just to its most vivid hour. Our third foundational essay, The Life We Share, stays with the hungry neighbor at Corinth and the obligations of a common table. We will leave that full conversation there. The historical comparison adds a discipline to it. We can name what Jesus' meal asks without denying that other communities knew fellowship, generosity, or moral responsibility. The claim we hold should be able to stand without making our neighbors smaller. Return, finally, to the little invitation. Someone has written a name, a place, and a time. Come and eat. The world in which Jesus' followers gathered was already familiar with that gesture. It knew festivals and funerals, invitations and exclusions, gratitude and dread. The fact that others had asked how to live, and how to face death, takes nothing from the seriousness of asking again. Did Jesus borrow the feast? We have found a world of sacred meals and several real resemblances. We have also found distinct stories, commitments, and claims. These sources do not establish the direct derivation that the question sometimes assumes. They ask us to look more closely at the host. Second Humanity receives the table of Jesus through Israel's Scriptures and the life he gave. We can honor the longings expressed at other ancient tables without making their promises identical. We come to this table because of its host, and the life he asks us to share. Second Humanity. What Are You Seeking.