Christian Texts and History • Re: 'Interpreting Pauline soteriology as deification'

Orphic deification is experienced, interestingly, as a postmortem rebirth from the goddess Persephone and consequently an assimilation to Persephone's divine son, Dionysus. As Orphic initiates identified with the god Dionysus, so the Apostle Paul morphed with the divine Christ... That Paul’s version of celestial immortality is also a form of deification is indicated by the fact that glorification involves assimilation to the “super body” of a divine being (Christ). Alan Segal’s interpretation of Philippians 3:21 (“He [Christ] will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to his body of glory”) is elegantly simple: “The body of the believer eventually is to be transformed into the body of Christ.”... It seems, at any rate, safe to conclude that in Phil 3:21, Paul proposes that Christians will share in the “glory body,” or brilliant corporeality of a divine being... Christ as the prototype for believers is not just a human being. He is a divine prototype... For Paul, Christ was the first human being to become “son of God” by his resurrection from the dead (Rom 1:4). Like the God(s) of Plato, Christ is a moral God able to lead his devotees into a virtuous life. All who follow him—in this life and the next—will share the same divine destiny and inheritance: an incorruptible body and power to defeat the Angel of Death.

Paul understood the kingdom as a “cosmic takeover” of the entire universe by the newly born heavenly family—the many glorified children of God with Christ, as firstborn, at their head. Paul taught that when Christ returned in the clouds of heaven, this new race of Spirit-beings would experience its heavenly transformation, receiving the same inheritance, and thus the same level of power and glory, that Jesus had been given (Romans 8:17; Philippians 3:20–21).

As has been pointed out by Alberto Bernabe and others, the revived Dionysos who died and came back to life again was regarded as a divine role model for the Dionysiac initiates and their expectations of a happy afterlife... The god aids the mystes in his transit between life and death, between the human and the divine, to transmute him into a god by means of his action of salvation and liberation: “blessed and fortunate, you will become a god, from the mortal that you were”.

The macarism formulas of the other tablets express the initiate's newly acquired status with greater clarity: 'You have been born a god, from the man that you were. Happy and fortunate, you will be god, from mortal that you were. Come, Caecilia Secundina, legitimately changed into a goddess'... The narrator then refers to “the experience you never had before”. This is not just any experience, but, as indicated by the de nite article, it is “the” experience. Taking the context into consideration (the reference to being converted into a god and the new mention of the mystical phrase of the kid fallen into the milk, which, as we have already seen, evoke rebirth and the happiness of the new of identification with the god), the experience alluded to may be death or initiation, or better yet, as Burkert would have it, both at the same time.

However, there was one important difference between these gods and Osiris. Unlike them, he had triumphed over death, and the ability to do likewise could be conferred upon his followers. The colophon of Pyramid Text Spell 561B states that whoever worships Osiris will live forever, showing that already at this date those who devoted themselves to the god might expect to share in his resurrection... But the crucial significance of Osiris for them lay in what he personally had done and undergone. His life, death, and resurrection were perceived to be particularly momentous in relation to their own fates, and thus they figure more prominently in the textual record than do accounts of the exploits of other divinities. Moreover, because so much importance was invested in the fact that these were events actually experienced by a real individual, and not merely abstractions, personal detail was essential in recounting them...

As we have seen, the colophon of Pyramid Text Spell 561B states that whoever worships Osiris will live forever (section 3.9.1). Moreover, since the worshippers of Osiris were, in the first instance, divine beings themselves, the deceased, by participating in his worship, acquired the same status as them. So it was not just eternal life, but eternal life in divine form that Osiris bestowed upon his followers. This link between worshipping Osiris and attaining the status of a god is made explicit in Coffin Text Spell 789.

We now understand why the embalming ritual had to portray the corpse not just as a lifeless body but as a dismembered one... The myth dramatized this condition, telling how Seth slew his brother Osiris, tore his body into pieces, and scattered his limbs throughout all of Egypt. In the embalming ritual, this myth was played out for each deceased person, even if he had in no way been killed and dismembered but rather had died a peaceful, natural death... In Egyptian mortuary belief, Osiris was the prototype of every deceased individual. Everyone would become Osiris in death and be endowed with life by Isis...

Without an active encounter with his enemy, Osiris cannot come back to life; this encounter is the decisive threshold he must cross in order to conquer death. With his public vindication against his enemy—that is, death as assassin—Osiris regains both rulership and life, for in this image of death, these two things are closely related. The crown that Osiris regains symbolizes eternal life and ultimate salvation from death... The ordinary deceased was a follower of Osiris, was called Osiris and compared to him, and became a member of his following. He came into possession not only of life but also of personal status and recognition. He bore the name of the god, along with his own titles and his personal name, as well as the epithet “justified/vindicated.” He smote Seth, which meant that he had conquered death.