Psychedelics Influenced Early Christianity? Theologian Responds to Brian Muraresku & Lex Fridman

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1. 00:00

   Brian Muraresku

   In my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. This is again why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's Gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus.

2. 00:14

   Michael Horton

   This is a view that really attracts people when they first hear it. It sounds plausible, but you have to ask, so far, what evidence has he given to actually make a connection? It's a non sequitur. It doesn't follow. The second point doesn't follow from the premise. And it's the same in the ancient world.

3. 00:43

   Michael Horton

   Hi, I'm Mike Horton. I teach theology and apologetics, and I'm going to take a look at some of the comments that were made in a conversation between Lex Fridman and Brian Muraresku. And Brian Muraresku has written on the relationship between psychedelics and the origins of Christianity. So let's take a look at this.

4. 01:06

   Lex Fridman

   So let's look at this book, Immortality, what's the story that you tell in this book? Which part of human history are you studying?

5. 01:13

   Brian Muraresku

   It's my 12-year search for the hard scientific data for the ritual use of psychedelics in classical antiquity. So we're talking about the ancient Greeks and Romans and the paleo-Christians. So the generations that would give birth to the largest religion the world's ever known. Christianity today with 2.5 billion people. The big question for me is, were psychedelics actually involved? There was a lot written about this in the '60s. John Marco Allegro. The book that I follow was published in 1978, before I was born, The Road to Eleusis by Gordon Wasson, who we talked about already, Albert Hofmann, who famously discovers LSD or synthesizes it from ergot, and Carl Ruck, who is still a professor of classics at Boston University, the only surviving member of that renegade trio, and now 85 years old. So this all predates us. The book is essentially my search for that data and the eventual uncovering of 2, what I think are key pieces of data. One data point shows the ritual use of a psychedelic beer in classical antiquity in Iberia, what today is Spain. And the other shows what looks like a kind of psychedelic wine just outside Pompeii from the first century AD, at the right place at the right time when the earliest Christians were showing up in Italy.

6. 02:35

   Michael Horton

   Yep, this is something actually I studied for my first volume of Shaman and Sage, and there was quite a bit of this going on. In fact, in the Asclepius cult, which was a healing cult, Asclepius being the god of medicine and healing, they would go to spas. They'd have a spa day. And boy, was it a fun spa day. It's sort of spa day in Haight-Ashbury. They would have cocaine and it would fill the room with steam. There was LSD. There was—they have found numerous bowls of poppy in caves where mystery religions emerged and where people met for these mystery religions. So there definitely was some help, let's say, a little magic in the room for some of these groups. But this connection with Christianity, well, let's listen a little further.

7. 03:41

   Lex Fridman

   Speaking of early Christians, what role do you think psychedelic-infused wine could have played in the life of Jesus Christ?

8. 03:51

   Brian Muraresku

   I've been saying recently that–and I hope this doesn't sound obscurantist–but I think it's impossible to understand Jesus and the birth of Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek. If you look at the literature from the 1st century AD, Dioscorides, for example, he writes this, this massive treatise at the exact same time the Gospels are being written. And Dioscorides, in just one of his books, talks about 56 detailed recipes for spiking wine with all kinds of things like salvia and hellebore and frankincense and myrrh, these spiced perfumes, but also more dangerous things like henbane and mandrake, which he says in Greek can be fatal with just one cupful. And in Book 474 of his Materia Medica, he talks about black nightshade producing “phantasias ou aeideis,” not unpleasant visions. What today we would say is psychedelics. And so if it's impossible to understand paleo-Christianity in the absence of ancient Greek, I think it's equally difficult in the absence of the sacred pharmacopeia or wine itself, right? Just think about wine at the time. I think that the ancient Greek audience would've heard that in a very different way from us. And so they're referring to it maybe as a pharmakon, but the followers of Dionysus, which precedes Jesus, and in some cases, the story of Jesus is kind of a recapitulation of the mysteries of Dionysus. But when you think about Dionysus, maybe from your high school mythology, you think about him as the god of theater or the god of wine, which is typically what it is, or the god of ecstasy. Again, Dionysus is not the god of alcohol. There's no concept of fermented grapes. The power of Dionysus and the ability to commune with Dionysus through his blood—and before Christianity, the blood of Dionysus is equated to his wine. The sacramental drinking of the wine was interpreted—and classicists write about this, including Walter Burkert—it was interpreted as consuming the god himself in order to become one with the god. This is where we get the idea of enthusiasm, because the language matters. Enthusiasm, to be filled with the spirit of the god so that you became identified with Dionysus and acquired his divine powers.

9. 06:11

   Michael Horton

   Okay, so Dionysus, first of all, he had his followers going around pricking each other with wands that had a pine cone and a needle at its tip. Not sure exactly what was on the needle, but it may have been a little ecstasy. That is possible, but look at the early Christians. First of all, all of the warnings against paganism, against magic. These practices were considered worthy of being excommunicated if you participated in them. Included in your baptism was a prayer of exorcism because it was assumed that if you were a pagan, you were filled with demons, that you'd participated in these idol feasts. And so there definitely was an antipathy of Christians toward all of these Dionysian or other sects that we're talking about here. Furthermore, look at the way, for example, the Apostle Paul talks to Gentile Greek Christians in the early church. “Do not be drunk with wine, but be filled with the Spirit.” And what happens when you're filled with the Spirit? Not ecstasy. Love, joy, peace, long-suffering, patience, self-control. Christians wanted to be in control of themselves in public worship because they wanted to hear and understand the Word of God. They wanted to experience God through his Word and through baptism and the Lord's Supper, these tangible means of grace. They weren't drinking their own goblet of wine. They were certainly not getting drunk. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians one of the reasons why they have to suspend communion is because there were people getting drunk. So you just don't have any historical evidence to suggest that there is any link at all between the Dionysian cult or any Greco-Roman cult and Christianity. And by the way, Dionysus was cut up. He came back to life in another incarnation. He was reincarnated three times. That's very different from Jesus, God becoming flesh, assuming our debt, paying our debt, and then rising bodily on the third day. In the same body that he assumed at the incarnation.

10. 08:54

    Brian Muraresku

    Again, he's not the god of alcohol. He is the god of wine, but he's really the god of madness and delirium and frenzy. And his principal followers are women. They're called the Maenads. And the way they get in touch with him is through the consumption of this sacramental wine. And in my book, I rely a lot on the scholarship of Dennis MacDonald, who writes a fabulous book called The Dionysian Gospel. And this is again why the Greek matters, because once you start to analyze the Greek of John's Gospel, it seems to be a presentation of Jesus very much in the guise of Dionysus. The most obvious example is the wedding at Cana, right? That only occurs in John's Gospel, the famous transformation of water into wine.

11. 09:36

    Michael Horton

    Now, first of all, John shapes all of his Gospel around the festivals of the Jewish calendar. It's a thoroughly Jewish Gospel. Rudolf Bultmann in the 1950s made this argument that the Gospel of John was influenced by Gnosticism. There isn't a respected New Testament scholar who holds that view today. In fact, the book that he was just referring to has been massacred in reviews by scholars, not even necessarily Christians. This is a view that really attracts people when they first hear it. It sounds plausible, but you have to ask, so far, what evidence has he given to actually make a connection? If you say, for example, today, isn't it interesting that there's so much drug use, there's so many people looking for psychedelics in American society in the 21st century, and it just so happens that there are many Christians in America too. It's a non sequitur. It doesn't follow. The second point doesn't follow from the premise. And it's the same in the ancient world. If you want to talk about turning water into wine, if he gets that from Dionysus, Jewish culture was pretty fine about wine. And the imagery of, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” This imagery of wine that “gladdens the heart,” as the psalmist says, goes back centuries in Israel's history. It is a sign of the new kingdom coming, that it's full of gladness and hope. And you see, you find that very positive view of wine in the Old Testament as well. Where there obviously was no influence of the Dionysian cult whatsoever.

12. 11:45

    Brian Muraresku

    Now, again, to any Greek speaker of the 1st century, they would have known about the Greek district of Elis on the Peloponnese. And in Elis, around the Epiphany, every January, the priests of Dionysus would deposit these water basins, empty basins, in the temple of Dionysus. They'd return the next morning and find them magically filled with wine. Now, on the island of Andros, it's even more interesting. Around the same Epiphany date, the God's Gift Day, Dies Theodosia, the wine would emanate from the temple and run like a river for a week. And you can Google the Bacchanal of the Andrians, a wonderful painting by Titian which hangs in the Prado, and you'll see a river of wine behind these people having a great time. This exists for centuries and centuries before the wedding at Cana and before Jesus begins his public ministry with what these scholars call the signature miracle of Dionysus. It would not have been lost on the Greek audience that something very specific is being communicated here. What's being communicated? That you just might find in early Christianity what you hold strong to in these mysteries of Dionysus.

13. 12:55

    Michael Horton

    You know, John's Gospel doesn't even include the institution of the Lord's Supper. It's the only Gospel that doesn't mention Christ's institution of the Lord's Supper with wine and bread. This is my body. This is my blood. Our friend here just simply, he has a—he's obviously brilliant—but has gone down one of these rabbit holes that just is based on pure speculation and sort of what it is, is similarities. Similarities don't mean correlations. Just because there is an analogy that can be drawn to wine being used in Holy Communion and wine being used in Dionysian mysteries doesn't mean that they're connected, just that they're similar in that respect.

14. 13:52

    Brian Muraresku

    There was a perfectly good religion, there were perfectly good mystery cults in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, and here comes this new untested, illegal cult of a dozen or so illiterate day laborers that go on to convert the empire in a few hundred years. The answer to that extraordinary growth is not psychedelics, but I do think it's visionary experiences, and I do think it's this continuity from the pagan world into early Christianity.

15. 14:19

    Michael Horton

    There again, just is no evidence for anything that he's saying here. Actually, the early Christians from the New Testament onward were very sober people. They actually warned people against the sin of un-sobriety, to lose their wits, to be out of their wits. The Apostle Paul was quite aware of people who were enthusiasts in the church in Corinth who were influenced by Greek mystery religions. Very harsh pastoral language he uses, upbraiding them for that. He said, I would rather speak one intelligible word that people can understand than speak with the tongues of angels. Christians weren't meeting to have bacchanalia. They were meeting, quite the contrary, to hear God's word, to pray together, to gather together for the Lord's Supper, and this was a very uncommon thing in the Roman world. You have to remember, John was Jewish. His Gospel is Jewish. It bears all the marks of a Gospel that is speaking to the Jewish world, which was also influenced by the Greek world. To say you have to understand the background of the Greek world is absolutely correct to understand the New Testament, but you have to also recognize how different Christianity was in ancient Rome.