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The Dionysian Gospel

The Fourth Gospel and Euripides
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"Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them." Dennis R. MacDonald offers a provocative explanation of those scandalous words of Christ from the Fourth Gospel-an explanation that he argues would hardly have surprised some of the Gospel's early readers. John sounds themes that would have instantly been recognized as proper to the Greek god Dionysos (the Roman Bacchus), not least as he was depicted in Euripides's play The Bacchae. A divine figure, the offspring of a divine father and human mother, takes on flesh to live among mortals, but is rejected by his own. He miraculously provides wine and offers it as a sacred gift to his devotees, women prominent among them, dies a violent death-and returns to life. Yet John takes his drama in a dramatically different direction: while Euripides's Dionysos exacts vengeance on the Theban throne, the Johannine Christ offers life to his followers. MacDonald employs mimesis criticism to argue that the earliest Evangelist not only imitated Euripides but expected his readers to recognize Jesus as greater than Dionysos.
Dennis R. MacDonald is John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Claremont School of Theology. He is author of numerous books, including There Is No Male and Female: The Fate of a Dominical Saying in Paul and Gnosticism (Fortress Press, 1987) and two volumes in the new series The New Testament and Classical Greek Literature.
Introduction1. The Beginning of the Johannine Tradition2. The Earliest Gospel Stratum and Euripides's Bacchae: An Intertextual Commentary3. Rewriting the Gospel4. The Final Gospel Stratum and a Johannine CorpusAppendices1. A Conjectural Reconstruction of the Dionysian Gospel2. Euripides's Bacchae3. The Sinful Woman (John 7:53-8:11)BibliographyIndex
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