“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 Gospelan 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 deathand 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.

**Courtney ]. P. Friesen provides the following general comparison: **

[B]oth jesus and Dionysus are the offspring of a divine father and human mother (which was subsequently suspected as a cover-up for illegitimacy); both are from the east and transfer their cult into Greece as part of its universal expansion; both bestow wine to their devotees and have wine as a sacred element in their ritual observances; both had private cults; both were known for close association with women devotees; and both were subjected to violent deaths and subsequently came back to life. By the middle of the second century, observations of such relationships are explicitly made and would later be developed in various directions …. A juxtaposition of jesus and Dionysus is also invited in the New Testament Gospel of john, in which the former is credited with a distinctively Dionysiac miracle in the wedding at Cana: the transformation of water into wine (2:1-ll). ln the Hellenistic world, there were many myths of Dionysus’ miraculous production of wine, and thus, for a polytheistic Greek audience, a Dionysiac resonance in jesus’ wine miracle would have been unmistakable …. John’s Gospel employs further Dionysiac imagery when jesus later declares, “I am the true vine”. John’s jesus, thus, presents himself not merely as a “New Dionysus,” but one who supplants and replaces him

1. Also,
2. Furthermore, the Gospel of john bears a remarkable similarity in plot structure to Euripides’ Bacchae. In both books the protagonist is a god who dons flesh, lives among mortals, and is rejected by his own people. This antagonism drives the plots of both works, but the outcomes are significantly and strategically different. The Bacchae is a tragedy that leaves its main characters either dead or devastated and culminates in the downfall of the Theban ruling family. ln the bitter ending, King Cadmus, who earlier appeared as a figure of piety through his belief in the god, complains to Dionysus, “It is not right that gods resemble mortals in their outrages” (1348), explicitly calling into question the morality of Dionysus’s vengeance. Whereas Dionysus, a god in the flesh, destroys and punishes unbelievers, the jesus of the Fourth Gospel, the Son of God, offers eternal life. Euripides’ violent depiction of Dionysus thus provides a contrast to John’s jesus as an altruistic savior of the world. Several scholars have compared the Gospel of john with Euripides’ tragedy, though none has argued for a direct mimetic connection. For example, Mark W. G. Stibbe lists eleven “very general parallels” between the works but stops short of literary imitation.

Parallels with structure:

1.1-5. The Origin of the Logos (Parallels):

1:6-8. John, the Faithful Witness (Parallels):

1:9-12. The Rejection of the Logos (Parallels):

1.14, 16. The Logo Assumes a Human Body (Parallels):

1.18, The One in the Lap of the Father:

1. Brant:
   • The revelations of the prologue … stand outside the knowledge of the actors or participants in that action. The audience then joins in a sort of collusion with the narrator by sharing privileged knowledge and transcending the finite reality of normal human experience to view what normally cannot be seen: the workings of the cosmic order. The vantage point or “discrepant awareness” between fictional characters and the audience afforded by the prologue allows the audience to enjoy the irony offered by the action of the drama …. As in the prologue to Euripides’ Bacchae, in which Dionysus gives an account of how he came to be in Thebes, the gospel’s prologue explains how the divine came to be striding about Judea and the Galilee. This explanation then provides the conditions for the antagonism that greets jesus. The bold claims of jesus to possess an authority that goes beyond that of a prophet and an ancestry that is other than human will clash with what is known ofjesus’ parentage and birthplace by those who inhabit the story. In Bacchae, Dionysus lays out the tension of claims about his status more baldly …. His incarnation is necessitated by the refusal of some to believe, among them his mother’s sisters, who deny that he is the son of Zeus and accuse Semele of using Zeus to hide her seduction by a mortal (27-29).
2. Macdonald assumes that 1 John came before the Prologue of gJohn and is also claiming that the prologue is branched off of the beginning of 1 John:

If one were to argue that the Prologue of the Gospel came first, one would have to defend the following propositions:

• 1. The elder substituted prose for poetry.
• 2. He substituted the coming of the personified Logos with the neuter “what.”
• 3. He used the phrase “in the beginning” not to refer to the preexistence of the Logos with God but to the career of Jesus.
• 4. He omitted all references to Jesus’s “coming.”
• 5. He omitted Jesus’s taking on a human appearance.
• 6. He omitted the witness of John the Baptist.
• 7. He omitted jesus’s rejection by his own people.

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External Evidence that shows Parallels
These Similarities between the johannine Prologue and the Dionysian speech did not escape notice by Clement of Alexandria. In the following quotation he invites Dionysus to convert. Here the line numbers from Dionysus’s opening speech in the Bacchae appear in square brackets.
Come [�xE; 1], 0 madman, not propped up by a thyrsus [25], not wreathed with ivy [25]! Throw off your headband! Throw off your fawn-skin [24]! Get sober! I will show you the Logos and the mysteries of the Logos, and I will describe them with your own imagery. This mountain [33] is beloved of God and is not subject to tragedies, like Cithaeron [a bacchic mountain prominent in the Bacchae], but exalted by dramas of truth, a sober mountain and shaded by chaste woods [cf. 38]. Reveling here are no maenad [52], daughters of “thunder-stricken” Semele [6], initiates in the disgusting distribution of raw flesh [139]; instead, they are the daughters of God, the beautiful lambs [cifLvcioEc;, a pun on fLCUvaoEc;], who utter the solemn rites [opy<a; 34] of the Logos and gather together a sober chorus. This chorus consists of the righteous, and their song is a hymn to the King of all. Young girls pluck their instruments [cf. 58-59], angels sing praises, prophets speak, the sound of music carries. Quickly they follow the thiasos [56]; those who were called scurry off, longing to welcome the Father. (Protrepticus 12.119.1-2)
Even more impressive is a twelfth-century poem of Jesus’s passion called Christus patiens, which begins with an appeal both to the Gospel of John and Euripides!”
Since you have listened to poems with a pious ear, And seek to hear now pious things but in a poet’s way, Give heed: for now, as would Euripides, I shall tell of a passion that redeemed the world. Here you will find the mysteries fully told, For they come from the mouth of a maid and virgin mother, And the initiate beloved of his teacher. And these then are my drama’s roles: The Ever Holy Mother, the chaste initiate [John the Evangelist], And the attendant maidens of the Mother of the Lord. (Chr. pat. 1-7, 28-30)*

The translator, Arthur Evans, captures the poet’s mimetic method: he “makes Christ, the Virgin Mary, and john (the so-called ‘Beloved Disciple’) the three main characters, putting into their mouths lines once spoken by Dionysos, Agave, and others in Euripides’ Bakkhai.

Parallels with Dionysus, Achilles Tatius, and the Gospels:

John 2.1–1 and Leuc Clit. 2.2-3:

Bacchae and John 4.1-42:

1. Macdonald argues that these following episodes imitated this Euripidean tragedy: