In vino veritas

 

Credit: Carole Raddato 

We´ll soon resume our regular programming, but I can´t help quoting this! I mean, wtf?!

>>>Importantly, Greeks and Romans often erroneously identified the Jewish god with Dionysus. (Indeed, the Hebrew Bible did portray Yahweh was, among other things, a wine god, and Yahweh required daily wine offerings to him. E.g., Exodus 29:40; Isaiah 5:1-7; Psalm 80:14-15.) 

>>>The Roman historian Tacitus said that some people erroneously thought that the Jews worship Father Liber (Dionysus/Bacchus) since their priests intoned to the flute and cymbals and wore ivy garlands, and because a golden grapevine decorated the entrance to the Jerusalem temple (Histories, 5.5). (Such priestly practices were not normal in Judaism but perhaps did occur during the above-mentioned aberrations; the grapevine decoration did appear on the temple that Herod built. Josephus, Antiquities, 15.11.395). 

>>>In Plutarch’s Table Talk, the dining partners thought that the Jews worshipped Dionysus. As evidence, they pointed to the Jewish wine harvest festival, a festival procession in which people enter the temple each carrying a thyrsus, noisemaking and music making by worshippers, the High Priest wearing a fawnskin (like followers of Dionysus), and a “carved thyrsus” on the pediment of the temple (Moralia, 671C-672C). 

>>>In 139 BCE, since, as noted, Romans erroneously thought that the Jews living in Rome worshipped the god Sabazius, who was equated with Dionysus, the Jews were expelled from Rome, since the authorities considered the cult of Sabazius (and Bacchic mysteries generally) pernicious and corrupting. Given that many gentiles were so inclined to equate the Jewish god with Dionysus, it would make sense for John to engage that audience in Dionysian terms while turning the argument to Jesus’s advantage. 

The Mythology of Wine