Mystery Religions

The so-called 'mystery religions' were a variety of religious movements from the eastern Mediterranean that flourished in te early Roman Empire. They offered salvation in a tight-knit community. They were called mystery religions because those who were initiated into them were sworn to secrecy. They had sacred rites, often a common meal, and a special sanctuary.

The oldest of the Mystery Religions would be the Eleusinian cult of Demeter, which was already established in the Archaic Age of Greece, which would be from 800 to 500 BC. The latest, and certainly the most popular in the later Roman Empire, was the mysteries of Mithras, who started as a Persian god. There were also the mysteries of Cybele and Attis, which were restricted to non-Romans until the middle or late first century.

These religions were tied to the vegetation cycle. The group that later popularized the idea that Jesus' resurrection was derived from the worsship of dying and rising fertility gods was a group of scholars known as Religions-geschichtliche schule. The so-called History of Religions School, which flourished at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. The seminal work by Richard Reitzenstein was published in German in 1910 but not translated into English until 1978. He thought the sacrifice of Christ aligned itself wth the killing of a bull by Mithras. Carsten Colpe and others severely criticized the anachronistic use of sources by these scholars.

On the popular level, Sir James Frazer gathered a mass of parallels in his multivolume work called The Golden Bough, which was published in 1906. He discussed Osiris of Egypt, Adonis of Syria, Attis of Asia Minor, and Tammuz of Mesopotamia, and concluded there was a common rising and dying fertility god. Unfortunately, much of his work was based on misreading of the evidence, but nevertheless this helped introduce these ideas to popular culture. Later, in the 1930s, three influential French scholars claimed that Christianity was influenced by the Hellenistic mystery religions.

One of those scholars said Christ was a 'savior-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithras... Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis, he died a violent death, and like them he returned to life.    

Popular writers made the mistake of taking various fragments of information and manufacturing 'a knd of universal Mystery-religion which never actually existed, at least of all in Paul's day. there was a widespread view that there was a general, common mystery religion, but upon a closer examination of the sources, nobody belives that any longer. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as dead.