JanNock

Celebrating Arthur Darby Nock
Choice, Change, and Conversion
Edited by
Robert Matthew Calhoun, James A. Kelhoffer,
and Clare K. Rothschild
Mohr Siebeck
Digital copy – for author's private use only –

© Mohr Siebeck 2021
Robert Matthew Calhoun is Research Assistant to the A. A. Bradford Chair, Texas Christian
University (USA).
orcid.org/0000-0001-5056-2050
James A. Kelhoffer is Professor of New Testament Studies at Uppsala University (Sweden).

orcid.org/0000-0001-7942-6079
Clare K. Rothschild is Professor of Scripture, Department of Theology, Lewis University (USA)

and Professor Extraordinary, Department of Ancient Studies at Stellenbosch University (South
Africa).
orcid.org/0000-0002-6572-8604
ISBN 978-3-16-161000-4 / eISBN 978-3-16-161001-1

DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-161001-1
ISSN 0512-1604 / eISSN 2568-7476
(Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament)
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie;
detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2021 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com

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Printed in Germany.

Table of Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments ...................................................................... V
List of Abbreviations .................................................................................... IX
Clare K. Rothschild
Introduction: Conversion Since Nock ............................................................. 1
Part One: Responses to Nock’s Conversion

Jan N. Bremmer
Notes on Arthur Darby Nock’s Ideas of Ancient Religion and
the Mysteries in His Conversion ................................................................... 11
John J. Collins
Nock’s Typology of Religion ....................................................................... 39
Carl R. Holladay
A. D. Nock’s Conversion: Some Glosses ..................................................... 49
John S. Kloppenborg
Rethinking Nock’s Conversion ..................................................................... 63
Paula Fredriksen
“Conversion” as “Sea Change”: Re-thinking A. D. Nock’s Conversion ....... 93
L. L. Welborn
Nock on the Exclusiveness of Conversion to Christianity:
A Re-evaluation with Reference to Evidence from Roman Corinth ............113
Michael B. Cover
The Conversion and Return of Simon Peter (Luke 22:31–32) .....................131
Harold W. Attridge
Celebration of Arthur Darby Nock ..............................................................151
Christopher Mount
Conversion and the Success of Christianity in the Roman Empire ..............163

VIII Table of Contents
James A. Kelhoffer
Do ΜΕΤΑΝΟΕΩ and ΜΕΤΑΝΟΙΑ in Second Clement Signify
“Repentence” or a Change in Mindset Tantamount to Conversion? ............177
Carl Johan Berglund

Miracles, Determination, and Loyalty:
The Concept of Conversion in the Acts of John ..........................................211
Meira Z. Kensky
“Thus a Teacher Must Be”: Pedagogical Formation
in John Chrysostom’s Homilies on 1 and 2 Timothy ...................................233
Andrew S. Jacobs
“Coloured by the Nature of Christianity”:
Nock’s Invention of Religion and Ex-Jews in Late Antiquity .....................257
Part Two: Beyond Conversion
John T. Fitzgerald
Arthur Darby Nock and the Study of Sallustius ...........................................279
Dylan M. Burns
The Hermetic Asclepius’s Middle Platonist Teaching on Fate .....................299
David Lincicum
In Search of Nock’s Gifford Lectures: A Dossier of Sources ......................319
Everett Ferguson
Afterword: Reminiscences of Arthur Darby Nock .......................................345
List of Contributors .................................................................................... 349
Bibliography ................................................................................................351
Indices
Index of References .....................................................................................395
Index of Modern Authors ............................................................................417

Notes on Arthur Darby Nock’s Ideas of Ancient
Religion and the Mysteries in His Conversion
Jan N. Bremmer
There can be little doubt that Arthur Darby Nock’s Conversion is one of the
very few pre-War books that is still read by the larger public. And indeed, al-
though published in 1933,1 it still has a certain appeal through its simple style
and lightly worn erudition. The latter is the more impressive as it was a young
man’s book – written only a few years after he had been appointed full profes-
sor at Harvard at age 28! In a rather “harsh portrait” of Nock,2 Simon Price
(1954–2011) ends his study by stating that “even the greatest of historians of
religion necessarily make assumptions drawn from their own times and their
own experience.”3 This is certainly true, and it is therefore right to take a closer
look at the ideas behind his usage of some key terms, such as religion and
paganism, in order to see to what extent his ideas still fit modern critical ap-
proaches of these notions (§B). In addition, I want to scrutinize his usage of
the term “mysteries” and his approach to these, as it is another key term and
subject in his book (§C); in neither of these two paragraphs will I strive for
completeness as that would spring the bounds of an article, but I hope that my
notes will give some idea of Nock’s way of thinking. I will conclude with some
final considerations about his usage of these terms (§D). But before engaging
with them, it is good to notice two aspects of his book that are no longer ac-
ceptable, even though pretty current in his own time (§A).
1 Arthur Darby Nock, Conversion: The Old and New in Religion from Alexander the
Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Clarendon, 1933). For an analysis of the book in ge-
neral, see my “Arthur Darby Nock’s Conversion (1933): A Balance,” in Zwischen Ereignis
und Erzählung: Konversion als Medium der Selbstbeschreibung in Mittelalter und Früher
Neuzeit, ed. Julia Weitbrecht, Werner Röcke, and Ruth von Bernuth, Transformationen der
Antike 39 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 9–29.
2 Thus Renaud Gagné, “The Battle for the Irrational: Greek Religion 1920–1950,” in Re-
discovering E. R. Dodds: Scholarship, Education, Poetry, and the Paranormal, ed. Christo-
pher Stray, Christopher Pelling, and Stephen Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2019), 36–87, 80 n. 219.
3 Simon R. F. Price, “The Road to Conversion: The Life and Work of A. D. Nock,” HSCP
105 (2010): 317–339 (a useful biographical survey with a, rather grudging, appreciation), at
336.

12 Jan N. Bremmer
A. Two Outdated Ideas
First, Price notes Nock’s ambivalent attitude towards women: apparently dis-
liking female students, although emotionally depending on mature women.4 It
was only in the 1920s that women were beginning to be accepted for positions
at Oxford and Cambridge, and this slow acceptance may not have helped to
improve his opinions about female students.5 However this may be, it is also
clear from his writings that for Nock the ancient world was a male universe,
even where this is not immediately obvious or consistent with the sources. Thus
he will write that in “offering religions as we understand religion” (see below),
the Jew and the Christian “were speaking to men”;6 not surprisingly, then, he
also follows Juvenal (6.542–547) in his description of a Jewish female beggar,
whom he describes as a “Jewess among the various religious quacks battening
on women’s superstition,”7 whereas we know very well that both Judaism and
Christianity attracted female followers, especially in the higher strata,8 and the
passage in Juvenal, if read against the grain, is an interesting illustration of this
interest. When speaking about Isis, Nock will note “traditional worship, carried
on generally by men whose priestly functions were incidental,”9 even though
the interest of women in Isis is well attested.10 It is, so Nock, men who are
attracted to the mysteries,11 but we know of women’s participation in the Or-
phic and Eleusinian Mysteries.12 One might think of course that “men” always
4Price, “Road to Conversion,” 330.

5Fernanda H. Perrone, “Women Academics in England, 1870–1930,” History of Univer-
sities 12/1 (1993): 339–367, 347.
6 Nock, Conversion, 16.
8 Christianity: Jan N. Bremmer, “Why Did Early Christianity Attract Upper-Class Wom-
en?,” in idem, Collected Essays, vol. 1: Maidens, Magic, and Martyrs in Early Christianity,
WUNT 379 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 33–41 (with bibliography). Judaism: Shelly
Matthews, First Converts: Rich Pagan Women and the Rhetoric of Mission in Early Judaism
and Christianity, Contraversions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Katell
Berthelot, “To Convert or Not to Convert: The Appropriation of Jewish Rituals, Customs,
and Beliefs by Non-Jews,” in Lived Religion in the Ancient World: Approaching Religious
Transformations from Archaeology, History, and Classics, ed. Valentino Gasparini, et al.
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), 493–515.
10 Sharon Kelly Heyob, The Cult of Isis among Women in the Graeco-Roman World,
EPRO 51 (Leiden: Brill, 1975); Elizabeth J. Walters, Attic Grave Reliefs That Represent
Women in the Dress of Isis, Hesperia Suppl. 22 (Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical
Studies at Athens, 1988); Fabio Mora, Prosopografia Isiaca, 2 vols, EPRO 113 (Leiden:
Brill, 1990), 2:1–29; Johannes Eingartner, Isis und ihre Dienerinnen in der Kunst der römi-
schen Kaiserzeit, EPRO 115 (Leiden: Brill, 1991).
11 Nock, Conversion, 114–115.
12 Cf. Jan N. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World, Münchner Vor-
lesungen zu antiken Welten 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 7 (Eleusis), 69–70 (Orphism).

Notes on Arthur Darby Nock’s Ideas of Ancient Religion 13
includes women, but the context shows that this is rarely the case.13 It is hardly
surprising, then, that women are also virtually absent from Nock’s collected
articles.14
The second aspect that is no longer acceptable is his Orientalism. One need
not go all the way with Edward Saïd (1935–2003) to see that Nock speaks with
a certain dédain about the “Oriental” ways. When talking about the Greek set-
tlers in the East after Alexander, he not only remarks about the Greeks marry-
ing native women: “Their descendants would have more and more native blood
in each generation, and might in time become wholly un-Greek in physical type
and law and custom,”15 but he also states: “On both sides cult was a part of
culture. Accordingly the normal Greek attitude was one of intelligent interest
and acceptance while on the spot, the native was one of indifference, at most
of acceptance of name-equivalents and language.”16 Admittedly, the increasing
interest in the contacts between Greece and the East, as pioneered by Walter
Burkert (1931–2015) and Martin West (1937–2015), was still to come, but
Nock certainly knew of Berossos and Manetho,17 and recent studies have
shown that intellectuals in both Egypt and Mesopotamia did reflect about
Greek culture and religion.18
It is part of this attitude, I think, that in his work, one finds several times the
expression “quack” for people outside the religious establishment.19 One ex-
ample is the female beggar mentioned by Juvenal (above), but he also speaks
of quacks in connection with Orphism,20 whereas nowadays we would see these
13 See also Nock, Conversion, 121, 161, 183, 203.

14 Arthur Darby Nock, Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, ed. Zeph Stewart, 2
vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972): one entry for “women” in the in-
dex, limited to his oldest article, but note idem, “The Development of Paganism in the Ro-
man Empire,” in The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12: The Imperial Crisis and Recovery,
A.D. 193–324, ed. S. A. Cook, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939), 409–
449, 764–766, at 431: “The absence of women deprived it (Mithraism) of the support of what
was in antiquity, as it is to-day, the sex more interested in religious practices of any and
every kind.”
15 Nock, Conversion, 33–34. For “race” and “racial elements,” see also ibid., 6, 18, 33–
34, 36, 47, 81, 95.

17 Arthur Darby Nock, “Early Gentile Christianity and Its Hellenistic Background,” in
idem, Essays on Religion, 1:49–133, 55.

18 Egypt: Ian S. Moyer, Egypt and the Limits of Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2011). Mesopotamia: Kathryn Stevens, Between Greece and Babylonia: Hel-
lenistic Intellectual History in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2019).
19 Nock, Conversion, 30, 71, 78, 83.
20 Nock, Conversion, 30, 71.

14 Jan N. Bremmer
people as religious entrepeneurs.21 Similarly, there is a lot of mention of “su-

perstition” in the book, although the term is now largely abandoned in scholarly
discourse.22 It is applied to beliefs about the efficacy of blood,23 the activities
of a Bacchic entrepreneur in Etruria in connection with the Bacchanalia scan-
dal, or the religious critique of philosophers,24 but the qualification also occurs
several times in quotations of ancient authors that are quoted with clear as-
sent.25 When Nock defines ancient piety as lying in a “calm performance of
traditional rites and in a faithful observance of traditional standards,”26 this
probably fitted his originally Anglo-Catholic sympathies.27
B. Some Key Terms and Ideas
So what was his idea of ancient religion, that is, the religion of the Jews,
Greeks, and Romans as well as early Christianity in the Hellenistic Age and
the Roman Empire? Naturally, for his time, Nock uses the terminology of pa-
gans, Judaism, and Christianity, and we should say a few words about these
terms, which emerged in the course of the second until fourth centuries in
Christian writings,28 whose dominance has given us these terms until today.
The term “pagan” has become increasingly contested in modern literature, but
a generally accepted equivalent has not been offered (yet?). It is obvious that
“pagan” is a term invented by Christians, which grouped together the whole of
21 Cf. Heidi Wendt, At the Temple Gates: The Religion of Freelance Experts in the Roman
Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016); Richard L. Gordon, Georgia Petridou,
and Jörg Rüpke, eds., Beyond Priesthood: Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators in the
Roman Empire, RVV 66 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).
22 Dale B. Martin, Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Richard L. Gordon, “Superstitio, Superstition,
and Religious Repression in the Late Roman Republic and Principate (100 BCE–300 CE),”
Past & Present 199, suppl. 3 (2008): 72–94.
24 Nock, Conversion, 72, 179 (respectively).
25 Nock, Conversion, 78, 82, 127, 183.
27 For Nock’s religious memberships and affinities, see Price, “Road to Conversion,”
330–333.
28 Cf. Francesco Massa, “Nommer et classer les religions aux IIe–IV e siècles: La taxino-
mie ‘paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme,’” RHR 234/4 (2017): 689–715, although his ob-
servations on the earliest appearances of the terms ‘judaïsme’ and ‘christianisme’ (695 n.
18) are in need of correction; cf. Jan N. Bremmer, “Ioudaismos, Christianismos, and the
Parting of the Ways,” in Jews and Christians: Parting Ways in the First Two Centuries
C.E.?, ed. Jens Schröter, Benjamin A. Edsall, and Joseph Verheyden, BZNW 253 (Berlin:
De Gruyter, 2021), 47–77.

Greek and Roman religion.29 Yet it should also be noticed that the term re-
ceived currency fairly late and only in the Latin West.30 It emerged in the fourth
century when Christians rightly felt that they were getting the upper hand, but
only gradually: for example, Jerome still avoids the term in the Vulgate. It may
not be chance that at the same time we can note an increasing coming together
of Greek and Roman religion. In other words, even though the term was un-
doubtedly not meant to be positive, it is the case that Christians will have ob-
served an increasingly uniform religion that was not theirs and developed their
own terminology accordingly.31
The term “Judaism” occurs regularly in Nock. Simon Price argues that
“Nock’s lack of interest in Judaism (and his lack of knowledge of Hebrew)
prevented him from exploring the possible Jewish background of early Chris-
tianity.”32 Now it is certainly true that knowledge of Hebrew would have been
advantageous for Nock, but the emergence of Christianity was not really his
subject, and it is simply wrong to suggest that Nock was not interested in Ju-
daism. A quick look in the index of his Essays on Religion (s.v. Judaism) would
have shown Price that he was mistaken: in fact, Jews and Judaism do occur
several times in Conversion.33 Nock lived in a time in which Christianity and
Judaism were not really part of ancient history, and we have seen their
29 Classic studies: Christine Mohrmann, “Encore une fois: Paganus,” in eadem, Études
sur le latin des chrétiens, vol. 3: Latin chrétien et liturgique, Storia e Letteratura 103 (Rome:
Storia e Letteratura, 1965), 277–289; Carsten Colpe, “Die Ausbildung des Heidenbegriffs
von Israel zur Apologetik und das Zweideutigwerden des Christentums,” in Die Restauration
der Götter: Antike Religion und Neo-Paganismus, ed. Richard Faber and Renate Schlesier
(Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1986), 61–87.
30 This seems clear from recent studies: Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 14–32, somewhat qualified by Rita Lizzi Testa,
“When the Romans Became pagani,” in The Strange Death of Pagan Rome: Reflections on
a Historical Controversy, ed. eadem, Giornale Italiano di Filologia, Bibliotheca 16 (Turn-
hout: Brepols, 2013), 31–52; Thomas Jürgasch, “Christians and the Invention of Paganism
in the Late Roman Empire,” in Pagans and Christians in Late Antique Rome: Conflict, Com-
petition, and Coexistence in the Fourth Century, ed. Michele Salzman, Marianne Sághy, and
Rita Lizzi Testa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115–138.
31 This dialectical process is well sketched by Hartmut Leppin, “Zum Wandel des spät-
antiken Heidentums,” Millennium-Jahrbuch 1 (2004): 59–82; and Peter Van Nuffelen, “Eu-
sebius of Caesarea and the Concept of Paganism,” in The Archaeology of Late Antique “Pa-
ganism,” ed. Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan, Late Antique Archaeology 7 (Leiden: Brill,
2011), 89–109.
32 Price, “Road to Conversion,” 334.
33 Nock, Conversion, 34, 78–79, 196. Note also that Nock supported Jan Hendrik
Waszink (1908–1990) in his efforts to pay more attention to the Old Testament in the Real-
lexikon für Antike und Christentum; see Norbert M. Borengässer, “Briefwechsel Theodor
Klauser – Jan Hendrik Waszink, 1946–1951: Ein zeitgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur Fortführung
des RAC nach dem II. Weltkrieg,” JAC 40 (1997): 18–37, 34 (a fascinating but also depress-
ing epistolary exchange).

16 Jan N. Bremmer
incorporation in the study of late antiquity only gradually taking place in recent
decades, although still not to the extent they deserve.
Like “pagan” and “paganism,” Judaism is also a contested term. Living in
the pre-postmodern era, Nock did not worry about the term Judaism, and we
will follow him in this, as it seems pragmatically the best way to proceed. Still,
a few words should be said. Unlike “pagan/ism,” Judaism is a term invented
by Jews, and gradually taken over by the Jesus followers, who in the second
century (Marcion, Ignatius) used it for those amongst them who wanted to stick
to traditional Judean ways and manners. It is only in Tertullian in the West and
Origen in the East that the term Ἰουδαϊσµός starts to become current for those
who adhere to a system of beliefs and practices that, in their eyes, is no longer
sustainable, even has to be rejected.34 As such, it is not only opposed to Chris-
tianismus / Χριστιανισµός, but since Eusebius (Dem. ev. 1.2.1, 9; Praep. ev.
1.5.12, etc.) it also is combined with Ἑλληνισµός as the great opponents of
Χριστιανισµός.35
In any case, it is clear that we cannot say with Nock for most of the time of
his book that “the Jew and the Christian offered religions as we understand
religion; the others offered cults.”36 We need not rehearse here the big debate,
as initiated by Steve Mason,37 about the question whether we should say Jew
or Judean in order to acknowledge the fact that certainly until the third century
AD the inhabitants of Judea and its emigrants were closely connected with the
land of Judea. To contrast them with the polytheists is right to a certain degree,
but many contemporaries will have seen fewer differences with their own reli-
gious practices than is suggested here by Nock – at least until the destruction
of the Second Temple.
Finally, Christianity. Perhaps due to the lectures that were at the basis of his
book, one cannot help noticing that for Nock Christianity seems to be a clear,
distinct unity, with its baptism, creeds, and Eucharist. There is of course no
34 Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in An-
cient History,” JSJ 38/4–5 (2007): 457–512, 472: “now it contrasts a living system with a
defunct precursor” (Tertullian), 475 (Origen).
35 Cf. Bremmer, “Ioudaismos, Christianismos,” correcting the discussion of the earliest
occurrences of the term in Daniel Boyarin, Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2019), on which see “Daniel Boyarin’s Ju-
daism: A Forum,” Marginalia, 5 July 2019 = https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/
introduction-marginalia-forum-daniel-boyarin-judaism/ (accessed 1 April 2021); Anders
Klostergaard Petersen, “How Should We Understand Ancient Judaism?,” JSJ 52/1 (2021):
105–125.
37 Mason, “Jews, Judaeans,” to be read with Seth Schwartz, “How Many Judaisms Were
There? A Critique of Neusner and Smith on Definitions and Mason and Boyarin on Catego-
rization,” JAJ 2/2 (2011): 208–238; “Jew and Judean: A Forum on Politics and Historiog-
raphy in the Translation of Ancient Texts,” Marginalia, 26 August 2014 = https://marginalia.
lareviewofbooks.org/jew-judean-forum/ (accessed 1 April 2021).

mention yet of “Christianities,” but the reader will also find little evidence of
the pluriformity of early Christianity and the gradual development of its ritu-
als.38 It is obvious that for Nock the later main Church is the norm and that is
why he can so easily speak of it being opposed to “Manichaeism and to gnostic
and other sects.”39 What one misses here, as we saw already in his approach to
Greek religion, is a processing approach combined with attention to the role of
the individual, whose agency has recently been the focus of the Lived Ancient
Religion approach of Jörg Rüpke and his Erfurt équipe.40
After these preliminary observations, we now turn to a closer look at Nock’s
ideas of and approach to ancient religion. Given that I have pointed to some of
his outdated ideas, it should only be fair to begin by noting that in some respects
he was also very modern and ahead of his time. Well before the groundbreaking
study of Lucien Febvre (1878–1956) on the virtual absence of unbelief in the
time of Rabelais and similar studies on the Middle Ages,41 Nock already ob-
served the rarity of atheism and unbelief in antiquity.42 Despite recent attempts
to argue the reverse,43 this position still seems the most probable and persua-
sive. That is not to deny, of course, the occasional unbeliever and expressions
of doubt. Those are well attested,44 but we do not find a sustained and reasoned
denial of the gods that comes even close to the more recent books by the so-
called New Atheists.45
38 This is the stimulating approach of Hartmut Leppin, Die frühen Christen von den
Anfängen bis Konstantin (Munich: Beck, 2018), 2nd ed. (2019), to be read with my review
in ARYS 17 (2019): 402–416.
40 For a good introduction, see Janico Albrecht, et al., “Religion in the Making: The Lived
Ancient Religion Approach,” Religion 48/4 (2018): 568–593; Jörg Rüpke, “Lived Ancient
Religions,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. John Barton (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2019) = https://oxfordre.com/religion/ (accessed 17 January 2020). The
approach comes close to the processing approach of early Christian rituals by Gerard
Rouwhorst, “The Making of Early Christianity: A Processing Perspective on the History of
Its Rituals,” in The Making of Christianities in History: A Processing Approach, ed. Staf
Hellemans and Gerard Rouwhorst, Bibliothèque de la Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 106
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 83–118.
41 Lucien Febvre, Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle: La religion de Rabelais,
Evolution de l’humanité 53 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1942); Dorothea Weltecke, “Der Narr
spricht: Es ist kein Gott”: Studien zu Atheismus, Unglauben und Glaubenszweifel vom 12.
Jahrhundert bis zur Neuzeit, Campus historische Studien 50 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus,
2010).
43 Tim Whitmarsh, Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 2015), to be read with my review in CP 113/3 (2018): 373–379.

44 Babett Edelmann-Singer, et al., eds., Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean
Religions, WUNT 443 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020).

45 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York:
Norton, 2004); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London: Transworld, 2006);

18 Jan N. Bremmer
Similarly, well before the recent studies about the absence of the notion of
religion in antiquity,46 Nock had already noted: “Classical Greek has no word
which covers religion as we use the term,”47 an observation he probably owed
to Wilamowitz’s then recent study of Greek religion who had made the same
observation.48 But Nock is less convincing when he proceeds by saying: “Eu-
sebeia approximates to it, but in essence it means no more than the regular
performance of due worship in the proper spirit, while hosiotes describes ritual
purity in all its aspects.”49 This is not really right. Εὐσέβεια is older than ὁσιότης
and occurs many times in the fifth century, whereas the latter emerges only in
the fourth century. In meaning, though, the two are rather similar. As an excel-
lent recent analysis concludes:
One attested difference between the two groups of lexemes is a division of labour between
eusebês & cognates and hosios & cognates in their argumentative orientation. Whereas the
former are used more often in positively oriented utterances, the latter more commonly ex-
press that something or someone is not pious. This is the only area in which we can see a
semantic differentiation between these lexemes.50
This difference will also explain why we find hosios & cognates so often in
the Attic orators, who regularly use these terms to praise or vilify people in
court.
Somewhat surprisingly, Nock does not mention the term θρησκεία, which
becomes popular precisely in the Roman Empire since the Augustan period,
although it is first attested in Herodotus (2.18, 37).51 The term refers to cultic
practices, and its frequent usage in Jewish writings, such as the Septuagint,
Philo, Paul, Flavius Josephus, and 4 Maccabees,52 points to the importance of
Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York:
Twelve, 2007).
46 Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2013); Carlin A. Barton and Daniel Boyarin, Imagine No Religion:
How Modern Abstractions Hide Ancient Realities (New York: Fordham University Press,
2016).
48 Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Der Glaube der Hellenen, 2 vols. (Berlin:
Weidmann, 1931–1932), 1:15–16, quoted by Nock, Conversion, 275.

50 Saskia Peels, Hosios: A Semantic Study of Greek Piety, MnemSup 387 (Leiden: Brill,
2015), 106.
51 Cf. J. C. A. van Herten, Threskeia, Eulabeia, Hiketes: Bijdrage tot de kennis der reli-
gieuze terminologie in het Grieksch (Amsterdam: H. J. Paris, 1934); Laurence Foschia, “Le
Nom du culte, θρησκεία, et ses dérivés à l’époque impérial,” in L’Hellénisme d’époque ro-
maine: Nouveaux documents, nouvelles approches (Ier s. a.C. – IIIe s. p.C.), ed. Simone Fol-
let (Paris: De Boccard, 2004), 15–35.
52 Van Herten, Threskeia, 17–21; Daniel Boyarin, “Thrēskeia in 4 Maccabees,” in Sibyls,
Scriptures, and Scrolls: John Collins at Seventy, ed. Joel Baden, Hindy Najman, and Eibert
Tigchelaar, 2 vols, JSJSup 175 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 1:209–224; Jan Willem van Henten,

religious practices and customs as well as keeping to the ancestral laws among
and for the Jews. However, the term was also used by the Romans to translate
religio,53 which also refers to religious practice rather than to religious ideas or
theories.54 It is noteworthy that we also find new cognates of the term in the
later Roman Empire.55 Apparently, there was a growing need for words con-
nected to ritual practices for reasons that are not wholly clear. In any case, it is
only from the third century onwards that we can see the development of terms
for individual religions, such as Judaism and Christianity (above), although in
its modern meaning the concept of “religion” would emerge only in Gibbon’s
time towards the end of the eighteenth century.56
It is much more difficult to follow Nock when he states: “the place of faith
was taken by myth and ritual. These things implied an attitude rather than a
conviction.”57 Somewhat later he argues; “Judaism and Christianity demanded
… the adhesion of the will to a theology, in a word faith, a new life in new
people.”58 Both these statements are hardly convincing. First, it is true that
myth and ritual did not require a conviction, but that does not mean that
they were the Greek equivalent of faith. Admittedly, faith is still an under-
researched term. For example, why is there no evidence for its combination
with a verb (“to have faith”) between the mid-seventeenth and late nineteenth
“Θρησκεία in Josephus: Religie?,” Frons, blad voor Leidse classici 39/5 (2019): 15–17;
Nickolas P. Roubekas, “Thrēskeia: From Etymology to Ideology and the Academic Study of
Ancient Greek Religion,” Journal of Hellenic Religion 12 (2019): 39–59,
53 For religio, see, most recently, Giovanni Casadio, “Religio versus Religion,” in Myths,
Martyrs, and Modernity: Studies in the History of Religions in Honour of Jan N. Bremmer,
ed. Jitse Dijkstra, Justin Kroesen, and Yme Kuiper, SHR 127 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 301–
326; Jörg Rüpke, From Jupiter to Christ: On the History of Religion in the Roman Imperial
Period, trans. David M. B. Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 185–193.
54 Maurice Sachot, “Comment le christianisme est-il devenu religio?,” RevScRel 29
(1985): 95–118.
55 Note θρησκευτής (2nd c.), θρησκευτικός (2nd c.), θρήσκευµα (2nd c.), θρησκεύσιµος (4th
c.) and θρησκευτήριον (5th c.) – all references to be found in the TLG.
56 Cf. Edwin A. Judge, “Was Christianity a Religion?,” Society for the Study of Early
Christianity Newsletter 56 (2006): 4–7, repr. in idem, The First Christians in the Roman
World: Augustan and New Testament Essays, ed. James R. Harrison, WUNT 229 (Tübingen:
Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 404–409; Annemieke D. ter Brugge, “Between Rome and New Jeru-
salem: Christian Citizenship in Some of the Writings of the New Testament and Tertullian
of Carthage” (PhD diss., Protestantse Theologische Universiteit, Kampen, 2009), 169–187.
Concept of religion: Jan N. Bremmer, “‘Religion,’ ‘Ritual,’ and the Opposition ‘Sacred vs.
Profane’: Notes towards a Terminological ‘Genealogy,’” in Ansichten griechischer Rituale:
Geburtstag-Symposium für Walter Burkert, ed. Fritz Graf (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1998), 9–32;
Ernst Feil, Religio: Die Geschichte eines neuzeitlichen Grundbegriffs, 4 vols., Forschungen
zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 36, 70, 79, 91 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1986–2007), 2nd ed. of vols. 3–4 (2012).

20 Jan N. Bremmer
century, as the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v.) says? And why is there no
chapter “faith” in authoritative handbooks of religious terms?59 And why does
English have two terms, faith and belief, whereas German has only Glaube and
French foi? This is not the place for a genealogy of the term, but it should be
noted that “faith” is not a self-evident notion and deserves more interest than
it usually receives.60
In modern parlance, its religious usage comprises both a system (Muslim
faith, etc.) and a personal conviction which one can also lose (my faith in God).
For Nock in Conversion, faith is basically the system,61 but sometimes it has a
more personal touch to it,62 whereby the latter can also be defined in a very
Christian manner: “faith involved personal belief in the central propositions of
Christian theology – the unique power and position of God the Father, the re-
demptive work of Jesus, the life-giving activity of the Spirit,”63 whereby one
may wonder if he does not retroject contemporary ideas of faith onto the early
Jesus followers, most of whom will have hardly had such a theologically de-
fined conviction. I take it that when Nock speaks of myth and ritual taking the
place of faith he thinks of faith as a system, as a religion, but this “faith” clearly
does not imply a theology. Undoubtedly, he wrote here in line with his con-
temporaries and modern handbooks, and not wholly unjustified.
Regarding Rome, Jörg Rüpke notes that “‘religion’ as a concept was not a
topic of theoretical reflection until the late Republic, and even then only in
rudimentary terms.”64 It is only with Varro that we get the more systematic
ideas with his theologia tripartita.65 In Greece, however, there is a long tradi-
tion of theological thinking, but the well-known surveys of Greek religion by
Martin P. Nilsson (1874–1967) and Walter Burkert treat the views of poets and
philosophers only towards the end of their handbooks, which is probably sym-
bolic for the importance they attached to their place in Greek religion.66 In itself
59 Cf. Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998); Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler, eds., The Oxford Handbook of
the Study of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
60 For faith, see Teresa Morgan, Roman Faith and Christian Faith: Pistis and Fides in
the Early Roman Empire and Early Churches (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jörg
Frey, Benjamin Schliesser, and Nadine Ueberschaer, eds., Glaube: Das Verständnis des
Glaubens im frühen Christentum und in seiner jüdischen und hellenstisch-römischen Um-
welt, WUNT 373 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017).
61 Nock, Conversion, 7 (“the faith of his childhood”), 105 (“rival faiths”).
62 Nock, Conversion, 193 (of the martyr, “the faith which is in him”).
64 Jörg Rüpke, Pantheon: A New History of Roman Religion, trans. David M. B. Richard-
son (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 182.

65 Jörg Rüpke, “Varro’s Tria Genera Theologiae: Religious Thinking in the Late Repub-
lic,” Ordia Prima 4 (2005): 107–129.

66 Martin P. Nilsson, Geschichte der griechischen Religion, 2 vols. (München: Beck,
1941–1950), 3rd ed. (1967), 1:741–783; Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan

this is not so strange, as the ancient Greeks, witness Herodotus, when looking
at the religion of others, such as the Persians and Egyptians, primarily focussed
on their gods and rituals as well as the social aspects of religion, but not on
their theologies.67 And indeed, undoubtedly it is easier to observe religious
customs of other peoples than to start a conversation on their theological ideas
– a conversation for which you need to have linguistic knowledge.
It is only recently that studies have started to stress the importance of theol-
ogy for the Greeks. I am not sure, though, if it is really helpful to say that
“different senses – and strengths – of the term ‘theology’ become appropriate
in different contexts and in relation to different sorts of material.”68 To suggest,
for example, that just speaking of the gods or praying to them, for example,
should be taken as theology, although in a very weak sense, elevates actions
which are natural in any religion to the status of theology, that is, either a sys-
tem or a systematic reflection about themes of a particular religion. It seems
better to keep the two, religion and theology, at least separated on a theoretical
level if the term should serve any methodological use. It is only when we
properly distinguish the two that we can see that the role of theology became
more and more important in the course of the Roman Empire as a consequence
of the increasing literacy. The latter must have been an important factor in the
Intellektualisierung and philosophisation of traditional religion, but also of
emerging Christianity,69 and the shift from orthopraxy to orthodoxy, which as
a corollary increased the importance of theology and created the category of
heresy among Jews, in contemporary philosophy and, above all, among the
Christians.70
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 305–337; no special attention either to
theology in Robert Parker, On Greek Religion, Cornell Studies in Classical Philology 60
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
67 See, most recently, Andreas Schwab, Fremde Religion in Herodots “Historien”: Reli-
giöse Mehrdimensionalität bei Persern und Ägyptern, Hermes: Einzelschriften 118 (Stutt-
gart: Franz Steiner, 2020).
68 Esther Eidinow, et al., “Introduction: What Might We Mean by the Theologies of An-
cient Greek Religion?,” in Theologies of Ancient Greek Religion, ed. Esther Eidinow, Julia
Kindt, and Robin Osborne, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016), 1–11, 3.
69 Polymnia Athanassiadi and Constantinos Macris, “La philosophisation du religieux,”
in Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. Laurent Bricault

and Corinne Bonnet, RGRW 177 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 41–84; Jan N. Bremmer, “How Do
We Explain the Quiet Demise of Graeco-Roman Religion? An Essay,” Numen 68/2–3
(2021): 230–271, 240–244 (with further bibliography).
70 Most recently: Shaye J. D. Cohen, “A Virgin Defiled: Some Rabbinic and Christian
Views on the Origins of Heresy,” in idem, The Significance of Yavneh and Other Essays in
Jewish Hellenism, TSAJ 136 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 534–547; Kendra Eshleman,
The Social World of Intellectuals in the Roman Empire: Sophists, Philosophers, and Chris-
tians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 149–174; Matthijs Den Dulk, “‘One

22 Jan N. Bremmer
Elsewhere in his book, Nock has a wider definition of his views on ancient
religion: “to the ancients, the essence of religion was the rite, which was
thought of as a process for securing and maintaining correct relations with the
world of uncharted forces around man, and the myth, which gave the traditional
reason for the rite and the traditional (but changing) view of those forces.”71
As Robert Parker righty notices, in this respect Nock was more perceptive than
many of his predecessors who saw only ritual as the essence of ancient reli-
gion,72 even though Nock never published on Greek mythology. One notes the
close connection between myth and ritual in this definition of the essence,
which was probably influenced by the Cambridge myth-and-ritual school.73
More importantly, perhaps, Nock realizes that myth is not a static block but
changes with the times, although he could and should have noticed the same
about ritual.
Interestingly, instead of myth and ritual, he also uses the combinations “be-
lief and worship,”74 “cults and beliefs,”75 “belief and practice,”76 and “beliefs
and practices,”77 of which the first combination sounds rather Christianizing;
in fact, worship remains a very popular word all through the book, much more
than in recent studies of ancient religion. What Nock does not do is question in
any way the suitability of the notion of belief, which has become a much-
discussed subject in recent years. It is noteworthy, though, that he rarely uses
“belief” in an absolute sense, although he does occasionally use it as an equiv-
alent of religion as in the expulsion of the Jews and the Chaldaean astrologers
from Rome in 133 BC, although “belief” for the latter is a rather odd usage.78
Mostly, though, Nock prefers to speak of beliefs (plural), and this does indeed
fit better the ancient evidence, as I have recently argued, as neither the Greeks
Would Not Consider Them Jews’: Reassessing Jewish and Christian ‘Heresy,’” JECS 27/3
(2019): 353–381 (with extensive bibliography).
72 Parker, On Greek Religion, 31–32.
73 Cf. William M. Calder III, ed., The Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, Illinois Clas-
sical Studies Suppl. 2 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991); Robert Ackerman, The Myth and Rit-
ual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists, Garland Reference Library of the
Humanities 1282 (London: Garland, 1991), repr. (New York: Routledge, 2002); Jan N.
Bremmer, “Myth and Ritual: A Difficult Relationship,” in idem, Collected Essays, vol. 2:
The World of Greek Religion and Mythology, WUNT 433 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019),
427–445.

nor the Romans defined certain religious propositions within a context in which
others did not believe or followed a different belief.79
Let me conclude this section with one issue that struck me when re-reading
Conversion: the absence of any deeper analysis of the devotion to Jesus. It is
not that Nock does not mention Jesus or Christ in his book, although less than
one might have expected; in fact, Christ is even absent from the index and Jesus
has only a few entries, none pointing to his important role in the emerging Jesus
movement. However, Larry Hurtado (1943–2019) has rightly argued that the
“explosive increase in talk of faith” corresponds with the fact that “Jesus-
devotion appeared quickly and very early, more like a volcanic eruption than
an incremental process.”80 And indeed, it is only the significance of faith for
the self-conception of early Christianity that can explain that the noun πίστις
and the verb πιστεύειν occur over 240 times in the New Testament and the
adjective πιστός 67 times,81 which is only surpassed in the voluminous work of
Plutarch with 530 times for the verb and the noun and 70 for the adjective. It
is, then, hardly surprising that from the pagan contemporary authors Plutarch
seems to come closest to Christianity in his use of these terms.82 In any case, if
we want to speak of conversion, one would have thought the Jesus movement
to be the prime candidate in the first centuries AD. But the index has only a
lemma “conversion from Christianity,” not one to Christianity.
C. The Mysteries
In Conversion, of all the religious features discussed, mysteries and the corre-
sponding initiations are perhaps the most important ones and thus deserve a
closer look. Yet before we do so, we should realize that precisely in this area
we are now able to speak with infinitely more material at our disposal than was
79 Cf. Jan N. Bremmer, “Youth, Atheism, and (Un)Belief in Late Fifth-Century Athens,”
in Edelmann-Singer, et al., Sceptic and Believer, 53–68; see also Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge,
Le Polythéisme à l’épreuve d’Hérodote (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2020), 161–186.
80 Larry W. Hurtado, “Resurrection-Faith and the ‘Historical’ Jesus,” JSHJ 11/1 (2013):
35–52, 35–36.
81 I take these numbers from the informative survey of Benjamin Schliesser, “Faith in
Early Christianity: An Encyclopedic and Bibliographical Outline,” in Frey, Schliesser, and

Ueberschaer, Glaube, 3–50.
82 George van Kooten, “A Non-Fideistic Interpretation of πίστις in Plutarch’s Writings:
The Harmony between πίστις and Knowledge,” in Plutarch in the Religious and Philosoph-
ical Discourse of Late Antiquity, ed. Lautaro Roig Lanzillotta and Israel Muñoz Gallarte,
Studies in Platonism, Neoplatonism, and the Platonic Tradition 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2012),
215–233, corrected by Rainer Hirsch-Luipold, “Religiöse Tradition und individueller
Glaube: Πίστις und πιστεύειν bei Plutarch als Hintergrund zum neutestamentlichen Glau-
bensverständnis,” in Frey, Schliesser, and Ueberschaer, Glaube, 251–273.

24 Jan N. Bremmer
available to Nock at his time.83 To mention a few examples: for Orphism we

now have the many newly discovered Gold Leaves and the Derveni Papyrus
with mentions of µύσται, “initiates,” in its first columns;84 for Mithras we have
had a steady stream of newly discovered Mithraea, also more and more in the
Orient,85 and many innovative studies, especially by Richard Gordon, which
have totally demolished the earlier views of Franz Cumont (1868–1947);86 fi-
nally, more recently, Isis has become the subject of a never-ending industry
which has given us many monographs and a very useful collection of the in-
scriptions pertaining to Isis.87 It is obvious, therefore, that Nock does not pro-
vide us with an up-to-date insight into the meaning and place of the mysteries
in the period he discusses. Nevertheless, it might still be useful to see what he
has to say about the mysteries, as even in his time there was quite a bit of
evidence available on the mysteries, on which he wrote regularly with a real
interest.88
Nock begins by giving a rather peculiar picture of the mysteries in the time
of the spread of Christianity, which, according to him,
promised something like this: “We assume from the fact of your approach to us that you are
not in too bad a state. We will of course give you a preliminary rite or rites of disinfection
which will ensure the requisite ritual purity. That is to be followed by our holy ceremony,
83 For a general survey, see Christoph Auffarth, “Mysterien,” in RAC 25 (2013): 422–
471. For a good, albeit not unbiased, Forschungsgeschichte of the mysteries, see Nicole
Belayche and Francesco Massa, “Mystery Cults and Visual Language in Graeco-Roman An-
tiquity: An Introduction,” in Mystery Cults in Visual Representation in Graeco-Roman An-
tiquity, ed. eidem, RGRW 194 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 1–37, 17–25. It is noteworthy that al-
though both scholars have flooded the market with interesting publications about mysteries
in recent years, they have not, as far as I can see, published a single analysis of a particular
mysteries ritual.
84 Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston, Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bac-
chic Gold Tablets, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2013); Mirjam E. Kotwick, Der Papyrus
von Derveni: Griechisch-Deutsch (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017); Jan N. Bremmer, “The First
Columns of the Derveni Papyrus and Polis Religion,” Eirene 55 (2019): 127–141.
85 Cf. Tommaso Gnoli, “Mitrei del Vicino Oriente: Una facies orientale del culto miste-
rico di Mithra,” Electrum 24 (2017): 191–212.

86 For example, Richard L. Gordon, “Who Worshipped Mithras?,” JRA 7 (1994): 459–
474; idem, “The Roman Army and the Cult of Mithras,” in L’armée romaine et la religion
sous le Haut-Empire romain, ed. Catharine Wolff and Yann Le Bohec, Collection du Centre
d’études et de recherches sur l’occident romain 33 (Lyon: CEROR, 2009), 379–450; and
idem, “Mithras (Mithraskult),” RAC 24 (2012): 964–1009.
87 Good introduction and survey: Laurent Bricault, Les cultes isiaques dans le monde
gréco-romain (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013); see also Valentino Gasparini and Richard
Veymiers, eds., Individuals and Materials in the Greco-Roman Cults of Isis: Agents, Images,
and Practices, 2 vols., RGRW 187 (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Laurent Bricault and Corinne Bon-
net, eds., Les mille et une vies d’Isis: La réception des divinités du cercle isiaque de la fin
de l’Antiquité à nos jours (Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Midi, 2020).
88 See Nock, Essays on Religion, index, s.v. mysteries.

which will confer on you a special kind of blessedness which guarantees to you happiness
after death.”89
There is in fact very little evidence that the mysteries promised a good life after
death, except for the Orphic and Eleusinian ones, as Nock himself realizes.90
There may have been emotional experiences, as the Eleusinian ones in partic-
ular clearly were stage-managed to impress the initiates,91 but we have only
few indications that the mysteries had emotional or intellectual effects after the
initiations. In an unpersuasive and not always reliable historiographical survey
of the relationship between philosophy and the mysteries, Vesperini adduces a
declamation from the rhetor Sopatros who describes his feeling after the initi-
ation: “I came out of the mystery hall surprised at myself.” But this unique
statement from a fictitious case, dating from the very end of the fourth century,
just before the closing of the Eleusinian Mysteries, can surely not be presented
as representative for the thousands of initiates in the preceding millennium.92
However, “perfect passive participles implying a change of status are found in
relation to the rites of Dionysus and the Korybantes (βεβακχευµένος,
κεκορυβαντισµένος), the former in one case at least allowing access to a
privileged burial plot.”93 And despite the missionary Athenian propaganda of
the Eleusinian Mysteries at the times of their empire,94 we cannot see any com-
munity of its initiated.95 Still, Nock perceptively suggested that there might
have been Orphic communities,96 and the mention of a θίασος of initiates in the
Orphic Gold Leaves supports the idea of some kind of organization,97 although

90 Nock, Conversion, 13. See also Theodora Suk Fong Jim, “‘Salvation’ (Soteria) and
Ancient Mystery Cults,” ARG 18–19/1 (2017): 255–281.
91 Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 13–14.
92 Contra Pierre Vesperini, “Philosophie et cultes à mystères: D’une historiographie l’au-
tre,” in Les Philosophes et les mystères dans l’empire romain, ed. Francesco Massa and
Nicole Belayche (Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2021), 29–58, 45 n. 99, who mis-
translates the relevant sentence, ἐξῄειν ἀπὸ τῶν ἀνακτόρων ἐπ’ ἐµαυτῷ ξενιζόµενος (ed. Chris-
tian Walz, Rhetores Graeci, vol. 8 [Stuttgart: Cotta, 1835], 114–115), with “Je sortis de là
devenu étranger à moi-même”; cf. Doreen Innes and Michael Winterbottom, Sopatros the
Rhetor: Studies in the Text of the Διαίρεσις Ζητηµάτων, BICSSup 48 (London: Institute of
Classical Studies, University of London, 1988), 95.
93 Robert Parker and Scott Scullion, “The Mysteries of the Goddess of Marmarini,” Ker-
nos 29 (2016): 209–266, 231, referring to Franciszek Sokolowski, Lois sacrées des cités
grecques: Supplément, École française d’Athènes: Travaux et mémoires 11 (Paris: De Boc-
card, 1962), no. 120 (Dionysus); IG XII/6 1197 (Korybants).
95 Cf. Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), 361 n. 152.

97 Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 75.

26 Jan N. Bremmer
we shouldn’t call these communities sects with Nock and many others.98 But,
as he persuasively suggests, the notion of conversion is not unreasonable in
that case, given the alternative Orphic life style.
Moving to the East after Alexander, Nock notes first the introduction of
mysteries for Isis, of which he rightly observes the difficulty in relating them
to an Egyptian background, the origin of which he dates to “early in the Hel-
lenistic period” at Alexandria.99 This is almost certainly wrong. We have a
Thessalonian inscription from the second century BC mentioning an Osiris
µύστης (IG X/2.1 107 = RICIS 113/0505), but this is a unique occurrence,
which gives no information about “Egyptian” mysteries, which are also not
attested in the sanctuary in which it was found;100 neither does the stele of the
inscription suggest any link with the mysteries.101 Another inscription, from
late second- or first-century BC Bithynia,102 mentions δέµνια λινόπεπλα θεᾶς,
“linen covered beds (couches?) of the goddess,” which are ἄρρητα βεβήλοις,
“unspeakable to the profane.” True, both words are used in connection with
mysteries, the earlier with those of Eleusis but more often with Persephone, the
latter in the famous first verse of the Orphic theogony.103 But what does this
mean? Is it more than a kind of solemn way of saying that the beds were not
accessible to everybody? In any case, the combination of “beds” with “unut-
98 Nock, Conversion, 31. See my discussion in Jan N. Bremmer, “Manteis, Magic, Mys-
teries, and Mythography: Messy Margins of Polis Religion,” in idem, World of Greek Reli-
gion, 125–146, 136, 139.
100 As is rightly observed by Julietta Steinhauer, “Osiris mystes und Isis orgia – Gab es
‘Mysterien’ der ägyptischen Gottheiten?,” in Entangled Worlds: Religious Confluences be-

tween East and West in the Roman Empire; The Cults of Isis, Mithras, and Jupiter Doli-
chenus, ed. Svenja Nagel, Joachim Friedrich Quack, and Christian Witschel, ORA 22 (Tü-
bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 47–78, 61–62.
101 So, rightly, Richard Veymiers, “Les mystères isiaques et leurs expressions figurées:
Des exégèses modernes aux allusions antiques,” in Belayche and Massa, Mystery Cults in
Visual Representation, 123–168, 133–134.
102 Richard W. V. Catling and Nikoletta Kanavou, “The Gravestone of Meniketes Son of
Menestheus: IPrusa 1028 and 1054,” ZPE 163 (2007): 103–117 (= RICIS Suppl. 1.308/
1201); Philip A. Harland, Greco-Roman Associations: Texts, Translations, and Commen-
tary, vol. 2: North Coast of the Black Sea, Asia Minor, BZNW 204 (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2014), 65–71 (no. 102).
103 Eleusis: Hippolytus, Haer. 5.7.34. Persephone: Euripides, Hel. 1307. Orphic: Orph.
fr. 1b (ed. Alberto Bernabé, Poetae epici Graeci testimonia et fragmenta, part 2: Orphicorum
et Orphicis similium testimonia et fragmenta, 2 vols., BSGRT [München: Saur, 2004–2005],
1:2); cf. Bremmer, “First Columns,” 202–203.

terable” is unique. It seems somewhat hazardous, therefore, to conclude mys-

teries from it, and the more so, as we have no other information on the usage
of such beds/couches in the initiation. In fact, the inscription uses rather high-
flying expressions among which a reference to mysteries language would not
be unfitting.104
Having expressed strong doubts, then, about occurrences of Isis mysteries
before the imperial era,105 we can still maintain that there are only a few refer-
ences to those mysteries, unlike what the communis opinio used to think until
the beginning of the twenty-first century.106 In his enumeration of Greek mys-
teries, Nock could also have referred to the mysteries of Serapis,107 but he only
mentions mysteries of Attis, which are also attested only fairly late and of
which he notes the Eleusinian influence.108 Nock pays more attention to the
mysteries of Mithras, which is not surprising as he greatly admired, although
not uncritically, Cumont, their greatest expert in his time.109 After a learned
survey of Persian influence in Asia Minor, where pockets of Magi had survived
104 Contra Veymiers, “Les mystères isiaques,” 135–136, who does note, however, the
absence of any reference to initiation on the bas-relief.

105 Although an origin on 2nd c. BC Delos is argued by Paraskevi Martzavou, “Priests
and Priestly Roles in the Isiac Cults: The Case of Roman Athens,” in Ritual Dynamics in the
Ancient Mediterranean: Agency, Emotion, Gender, Representation, ed. Angelos Chaniotis,
Heidelberger althistorische Beiträge und epigraphische Studien 49 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner,
2011), 61–84, 73–76.
106 As argued by Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 113–114, confirmed by Stein-
hauer, “Osiris mystes,” 74 n. 141; Benedikt Eckhardt and Andrew Lepke, “Mystai und Mys-
teria im kaiserzeitlichen Westkleinasien,” in Transformationen paganer Religion in der rö-
mischen Kaiserzeit: Rahmenbedingungen und Konzepte, ed. Michael Blömer and Benedikt
Eckhardt, RVV 72 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 39–79, 62–63; Veymiers, ‘‘Les mystères isi-
aques,” 155, who, after an extensive survey of the proposed visual evidence, concludes to
“un constat globalement négatif.” Note also M. Heerma van Voss, “The cista mystica in the
Cult and Mysteries of Isis,” in Studies in Hellenistic Religions, ed. M. J. Vermaseren, EPRO
78 (Leiden: Brill, 1979), 23–26, 23: “Concrete evidence concerning the cista mystica of Isis
is indirect only and scarce, dating from Roman times.”
107 Cf. Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 122.
108 ISardBR 17.6 (ca. AD 200); Firmicus Maternus, Err. prof. rel. 18.1; Giulia Sfameni
Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects in the Cult of Cybele and Attis, EPRO 103 (Lei-
den: Brill, 1985), 53–63.
109 Arthur Darby Nock, “Sarcophagi and Symbolism,” in idem, Essays on Religion,
2:606–641; Corinne Bonnet, ed., La correspondance scientifique de Franz Cumont conser-

vée à l’Academia Belgica de Rome, Etudes de philologie, d’archéologie et d’histoire an-
ciennes 35 (Brussels: Institut historique Belge de Rome, 1997), 358–362, who, curiously,
calls Nock a “savant américain.”

28 Jan N. Bremmer
the fall of the Persian Empire,110 he notes that the mysteries of Mithras can be
found “under the Empire.”111
And indeed, we find an explosion of Mithraea after about AD 100, even
though the exact epicentre of the cult remains unclear, with Rome still the
frontrunner,112 but not uncontested.113 The main problem regarding its origin is
the circumstance that we find the explosive spread of the cult in areas far apart,
but all with a relief of Mithras that, with local variations everywhere, contains
the typologically fixed elements of his killing the bull.114 This does point to a
precise place. The earliest inscriptions mentioning the cult of Mithras for Rome
belong to the first decades of the second century, but they do not refer to mys-
teries. These are first mentioned by Justin Martyr in his First Apology (66.4),
undoubtedly written in Rome. What is striking is that he speaks about “the
mysteries of Mithras” (ἐν τοῖς τοῦ Μίθρα µυστηρίοις) as if these are fully known
to the emperors, his (imaginary?) addressees. Apparently, they were familiar
in Rome in the 150s.
Admittedly, Richard Gordon has argued that “the word µυστήρια is only ever
used in connection with the Roman cult in Neoplatonist and Christian contexts
– the latter, I would say, directly dependent on the former.”115 Now I will pass
over the fact that neither Justin nor Celsus were Neoplatonists but, more im-
portantly, there is no evidence whatsoever that Justin was dependent on phi-
losophers for his knowledge of Mithras mysteries. It is also evident that Celsus,
110 Strabo, Geogr. 15.3.15; Tacitus, Ann. 3.60–64; Pausanias, Descr. 5.27.5–6; cf. Ste-
phen Mitchell, “Iranian Names and the Presence of Persians in the Religious Sanctuaries of
Asia Minor,” in Old and New Worlds in Greek Onomastics, ed. Elaine Matthews, Proceed-
ings of the British Academy 148 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 151–171; Gor-
don, “Mithras,” 969–971; Luis Ballesteros Pastor, “Nullis umquam nisi domesticis regibus:
Cappadocia, Pontus, and the Resistance to the Diadochi in Asia Minor,” in After Alexander:
The Time of the Diadochi (323–281 BC), ed. Víctor Alonso Troncoso and Edward M. Anson
(Oxford: Oxbow, 2013), 183–198; Hans Peter Herrmann, “Magier in Hypaipa,” Hyperbo-
reus 8/2 (2002): 364–365, repr. in idem, Kleinasien im Spiegel epigraphischer Zeugnisse:
Ausgewählte kleine Schriften, ed. Wolfgang Blümel (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 231–235;
cf., for Persian influence in Hypaipa, Hatice Kalkan, “New Observations on the Road of
Ephesus-Hypaepa-Sardeis and Persian Royal Road,” International Journal of Human Sci-
ences 1 (2014): 448–456.
112 As persuasively argued by Roger Beck, “The Mysteries of Mithras: A New Account
of Their Genesis,” JRS 88 (1998): 115–128.

113 Most recent stocktaking: Aleš Chalupa, “The Origins of the Roman Cult of Mithras in
the Light of New Evidence and Interpretations: The Current State of Affairs,” Religio 24/1
(2016): 65–96.
114 Most recently, Dietrich Boschung, Art and Efficacy: Case Studies from Classical Ar-
chaeology, trans. Ross Brendle, Morphomata 44 (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2020), 177–187.
115 Richard L. Gordon, “Persae in spelaeis solem colunt: Mithra(s) between Persia and
Rome,” in Persianism in Antiquity, ed. Rolf Strootman and Miguel John Versluys, Oriens et
Occidens 25 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2017), 289–325, 301.

who was well informed about mysteries (see also below),116 saw the cult of
Mithras as a mystery cult as he compares it to the mysteries of Eleusis and
Hecate on Aegina (Origen, Cels. 6.22). That does not necessarily mean that the
cult had mysteries from the very beginning or that every local cult had the same
rituals. As was the case with early Christianity, we must leave room for local
developments and idiosyncrasies. Still, we need not doubt that there were mys-
teries of Mithras. As Gordon has illustrated in detail,117 but Nock already ob-
served: “here, as with Sarapis and Isis, we have to reckon with something
picked out of a foreign ensemble and adapted to wider circles.”118
Moving from the East to the Greek mainland, Nock can only find one ex-
ample of an “Oriental” mystery cult, although misdated by him.119 In the first
century BC, a benefactor of Messenian Thuria had promised to provide oil
throughout his life for the “days of the mysteries” and, judging by the context,
this must have been for the cult of the Syrian goddess. The benefactor was
granted a front seat at those mysteries and a place of honor in the procession.120
In all probability, though, these mysteries were a local development, most
likely in competition with the much more famous and longstanding ones of
Andania, at the other end of its valley.121 Undoubtedly, these mysteries were
completely Greek, but that is not the case with those, dating probably to the
earlier second century BC, discovered only a few years ago in Thessalian
Marmarini, which contain a number of tangible Near Eastern features. One
would have loved to see a commentary by Nock on that fascinating text.122
There is one last aspect of the mysteries in Greece that Nock mentions that
is not without importance. He notes that they were not for free and “a restricted
privilege.”123 This was in contrast to emerging Christianity, which did not
116 Cf. Jan N. Bremmer, “Early Christianity and the Pagan Mysteries: Esoteric
Knowledge?,” in Apocryphal and Esoteric Sources in the Development of Christianity and

Judaism: The Eastern Mediterranean, the Near East, and Beyond, ed. Igor Dorfmann-
Lazarev, Texts and Studies in Eastern Christianity 21 (Leiden: Brill, 2021), 88–104.
117 Gordon, “Persae in spelaeis solem colunt.”
120 Natan Valmin, Inscriptions de la Messénie, Årsberättelse (Kungl. Humanistika Vet-
enskapssamfundet i Lund) 1928/1929 IV (Lund: Gleerup, 1929), 19–24 (no. 2).

121 Thus, persuasively, J. L. Lightfoot, Lucian, On the Syrian Goddess (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 76. Andania: Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 86–96.
122 See the solid commentaries of Parker and Scullion, “Mysteries of the Goddess of Mar-
marini,” and of Jan-Mathieu Carbon and Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, Collection of Greek

Ritual Norms, no. 225 (http://cgrn.ulg.ac.be/file/225/).
123 Nock, Conversion, 57. For examples, see Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 3–4
(Eleusis); add Plato, Resp. 2, 364c, 3; Derv. Pap. col. 20, l. 9 (ed. Theokritos Kouremenos,
George M. Parássoglou, and Kyriakos Tsantsanoglou, The Derveni Papyrus, Studi e testi per
il Corpus dei papiri filosofici graeci e latini 13 [Florence: Olschki, 2006], 101 = Kotwick,
Der Papyrus von Derveni, §67).

30 Jan N. Bremmer
charge its members for their membership. On the contrary. Christian commu-
nities were free and would even support their poor members. This difference
with traditional cults is regularly stressed in fictional confrontations between
the apostles and magicians,124 but it must have been observed by the poorer
strata of the population, who thus were excluded from the mysteries, but also
from cultic and professional associations.125 Even though the resemblance of
emerging Christianity with those associations has been over-accentuated,126 the
importance of money in the process of conversion should probably not be un-
derestimated.
After Greece, Nock moves to Rome, where he well describes the notorious
Bacchanalia scandal of 186 BC.127 For that scandal he could not make use of
new sources, but that is different with the mysteries of Cybele and the ritual of
the taurobolium, the sacrifice of a bull during the initiation.128 These have been
much discussed in recent decades. Nock notes the gradual development of
these rituals and their Romanization. Against the explicit testimony of Clement
of Alexandria (Protr. 2.15.1–3) and Firmicus Maternus (Err. prof. rel. 18.1),
recent students have argued that the initiatory nature of the “Phrygian myster-
ies” was a Christian invention,129 but there is no proof of that. It is even improb-
124 Jan N. Bremmer, “Magic in the Apocryphal Acts,” in idem, Maidens, Magic, and Mar-
tyrs, 197–217, 200–201.

125 For the costs of memberships, see Andreas Bendlin, “Associations, Funerals, Social-
ity, and Roman Law: The Collegium of Diana and Antinous in Lanuvium (CIL 14.2112) Re-
considered,” in Aposteldekret und antikes Vereinswesen: Gemeinschaft und ihre Ordnung,
ed. Markus Öhler, WUNT 280 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 207–296; John S. Klop-
penborg, Christ’s Associations: Connecting and Belonging in the Ancient City (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 248–262.
126 Jan N. Bremmer, “The Social and Religious Capital of the Early Christians,” in idem,
Maidens, Magic, and Martyrs, 13–31, 14–16; Benedikt Eckhardt, “Who Thought That Early
Christians Formed Associations?,” Mnem 71/2 (2018): 298–314. The same is true for Jewish
communities, see Benedikt Eckhardt, “Synagogues as Associations in the Roman Empire,”
in Synagogues in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods: Archaeological Finds, New Methods,
New Theories, ed. Lutz Doering and Andrew R. Krause, Schriften des Institutum Judaicum
Delitzschianum 11 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020), 313–337.
127 Nock, Conversion, 71–73. For bibliography and non-Livian sources, see John Briscoe,
A Commentary on Livy, Books 38–40 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 230–231;
add Hildegard Cancik-Lindemaier, Von Atheismus bis Zensur: Römische Lektüren in kultur-
wissenschaftlicher Absicht, ed. Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer and Barbara von Reibnitz
(Würzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann, 2006), 33–49; Pilar Pavón Torrejón, “Y ellas fue-
ron el origen de este mal ... (Liv. 39.15.9): Mulieres contra mores en las Bacanales de Livio,”
Habis 39 (2008): 79–95; Darja Šterbenc Erker, Religiöse Rollen römischer Frauen in “grie-
chischen” Ritualen, PAB 43 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2013), 208–244.
129 Francesco Massa, “La notion de ‘mystères’ au IIe siècle de notre ère: Regards païens
et Christian turn,” Mètis n.s. 14 (2016): 109–132, 123; Françoise Van Haeperen, Étrangère
et ancestrale: La Mère des dieux dans le monde romain (Paris: Cerf, 2019), 115.

able. We know that Clement used a handbook on mysteries and what he tells
us seems to be taken from this Hellenistic handbook, which he reproduces
fairly faithfully.130 Nock does not connect the taurobolium to mysteries and the
evidence, which has increased considerably since his writing, is not clear.
There certainly is mysteries vocabulary in our late inscriptions and texts, but it
has not been possible until now to reconstruct a precise ritual. A development
of the cult of the Magna Mater/Cybele into a more mysteries-like ritual in late
antique Rome seems probable, however.131
Having looked at the mysteries in the Greek and Roman world, Nock pro-
ceeds by rightly asking how these cults travelled. This is still a problem that is
not easy to solve, as we have very little evidence in this respect. As indeed
seems probable, Nock sees personal contacts as an important factor,132 but also
visible rites,133 supposed miracles and their literary propaganda, the so-called
aretalogies,134 hymns,135 which became popular in the earlier Empire,136 votive
inscriptions, and missionaries as in the case of the mysteries of Alexander of
Abounoteichos.137 One may wonder, although Nock does not, if Alexander had
not taken the idea of mission from the Christians, whom he knew. However
that may be, Nock rightly suggests that small mysteries must have depended
on personal contacts, but there is no reason to suppose that there was a general
idea that these mysteries “affected the future of your soul,”138 as was noted by
Burkert in his groundbreaking study of the mysteries.139
In fact, Nock sees the promise of an attractive afterlife as an important as-
pect of the appeal of these cults,140 but there is very little evidence for this or
130 Cf. Christoph Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie bei Platon, Philon und Klemens von
Alexandrien, Untersuchungen zur antike Literatur und Geschichte 26 (Berlin: De Gruyter,

1987), 120 (see the quotation below in n. 176).
131 Cf. Cameron, Last Pagans of Rome, 141–153 (late development), 159–163 (taurobo-
lium); Van Haeperen, Étrangère et ancestral, 99–148.

134 Nock, Conversion, 83–92. Cf. Jan N. Bremmer, “Richard Reitzenstein’s Hellenisti-
sche Wundererzählungen,” in Credible, Incredible: The Miraculous in the Ancient Mediter-

ranean, ed. Tobias Nicklas and Janet E. Spittler, WUNT 321 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2013), 1–19; Andrea Jördens, “Aretalogies,” in Shifting Social Imaginaries in the Hellenistic
Period: Narrations, Practices, and Images, ed. Eftychia Stavrianopoulou, MnemSup 363
(Leiden: Brill, 2013), 143–176.
135 Angelos Chaniotis, “Negotiating Religion in the Cities of the Eastern Roman Empire,”
Kernos 16 (2003): 177–190; Nicole Belayche, “L’evolution des formes rituelles: Hymnes et
mystèria,” in Bricault and Bonnet, Panthée, 17–40.
139 Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1987), 23–24.

32 Jan N. Bremmer
for the suggestion that people turned to the mysteries for enlightenment.141
More convincing is the suggestion that people turned to the mysteries from
studio veri.142 This motive is the subject of a dense study by Peter Van
Nuffelen, who has shown that this was an important reason for the studying of
and participating in the mysteries in the late Republican and early Imperial
Period.143 These interests Nock connects with private mysteries among which
he also places practices described by the magical papyri, a connection illumi-
nated by Fritz Graf.144 Yet it is striking that when Nock talks about the success
of the “Oriental religions” he barely mentions the mysteries. The only obser-
vation he makes is that there is very little to seize: “the mysteries gave a reve-
lation but not a dogma.”145 Yet he should have noted the enormous rise of mys-
teries related language and functions in many cults in western Asia Minor in
the second century. These cults show that there was another motive that Nock
does not mention, although highly important, namely, that the municipal elites
created mysteries or modified existing cults into ones with mysteries charac-
teristics in order to symbolically stress and advertise their social superiority,
an approach which succeeded in forging closer ties with the emperors and the
imperial cult.146 A search for truth and the need of social capital, then, increased
interest in the mysteries in the second century.
After an analysis of Apuleius’s picture of the initiation of Lucius,147 which
I have discussed elsewhere,148 the mysteries more or less fade from sight in the
book. There are a few references still, but Nock now turns to the spread of
Christianity where the mysteries clearly are not important for him. He quotes
Celsus’s scornful remark that only people with pure hands and soul were ad-
mitted into the pagan mysteries,149 whereas the Christians promise even sinners
an entry into the Kingdom of God (Origen, Cels. 6.59) and interprets the late
giving of the creed as giving the “entry into the Church a note of seriousness
141Nock, Conversion, 113.

143 Peter Van Nuffelen, Rethinking the Gods: Philosophical Readings of Religion in the
Post-Hellenistic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); see also Jan N.
Bremmer, “Philosophers and the Mysteries,” in Philosophia in der Konkurrenz von Schulen,
Wissenschaften und Religionen: Zur Pluralisierung in Kaiserzeit und Spätantike, ed. Chris-
toph Riedweg, Philosophie der Antike 34 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 99–126, 101–108, cf.
Vesperini, “Philosophie et cultes à mystères,” 127 n. 3, whose remarks on my article show
that he did not read it.
144 Fritz Graf, Magic in the Ancient World, trans. Franklin Philip, Revealing Antiquity 10
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 96–117.

146 Eckhardt and Lepke, “Mystai und Mysteria,” an important study.
148 Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries, 114–125; idem, “Philosophers and the Mys-
teries,” 107–108.

like that associated with pagan mysteries.”150 But that is all. Somewhat surpris-
ingly, he does not comment on the end of the mysteries.
On the one hand, for example, we can already see a decline of the Mithras
cult in the third quarter of the third century, as archaeology shows. Richard
Gordon has persuasively argued that an important reason must have been the
fragility of small groups, which depend on a few people with money and cha-
risma.151 The economic and climate crisis of the third century would thus have
had a negative effect on the Mithras cult as well as on other private myster-
ies.152 It fits this idea that, with one or two exceptions, the last pagan mysteries
were concentrated in state supported and/or age-old sanctuaries, such as that of
Eleusis, the oldest mystery cult of them all, that of Aegina, and that of the
Magna Mater and Attis on the Phrygianum hill in Rome and other parts of the
city.153
Let me conclude this section with two more observations. First, as a child
of his time, Nock uses the expression “mystery religion.”154 As is well known,
it was Walter Burkert in his Ancient Mystery Cults, who demolished the idea
that we could speak of religions instead of cults.155 Yet it should be noticed that
Nock already observed: “The Oriental mystery religions were not Oriental in
the same sense as Christianity.156 Neither were they religions in the same

151 David Walsh, The Cult of Mithras in Late Antiquity: Development, Decline, and De-
mise, ca. AD 270–430, Late Antique Archaeology Suppl. 2 (Leiden: Brill, 2018), to be read
with the review of Richard L. Gordon, ARYS 17 (2019): 461–475; idem, “Der Mithraskult
im Westen des spätantiken römischen Reiches: Die schleichende Auflösung eines Klein-
gruppenkultes,” in Spätantiker Polytheismus im Westen des Römischen Reiches, ed. Peter
Scherren and Wolfgang Spickerman, Keryx 6 (Graz: Grazer Universitätsverlag, 2021),
forthcoming.
152 Michael McCormick, et al., “Climate Change during and after the Roman Empire:
Reconstructing the Past from Scientific and Historical Evidence,” Journal of Interdiscipli-
nary History 43/2 (2012): 169–220, 184–186; Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate,
Disease, and the End of an Empire, Princeton History of the Ancient World (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2017), 65–159; M. Meier, “Seuche,” RAC 30 (2020): 421–456,
436–445.
153 Cameron, Last Pagans of Rome, 152–153 (Phrygianum); Bremmer, Initiation into the
Mysteries, 99 (Hecate), 163 (Eleusis); Carlos Machado, Urban Space and Aristocratic Pow-
er in Late Antique Rome: AD 270–535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 178–181
(Phrygianum and other parts).
154 Nock, Conversion, 75, 138, 268, 284.
155 Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults, 3–4.
156 For recent views on “Oriental religions,” see Richard L. Gordon, “Coming to Terms
with the ‘Oriental Religions of the Roman Empire,’” Numen 61/5–6 (2014): 657–672; Danny
Praet, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire: The Views of Ernest
Renan and of Franz Cumont on the Transition from Traditional Paganism to Christianity,”
in Religion and Competition in Antiquity, ed. David Engels and Peter Van Nuffelen, Collec-
tion Latomus 343 (Brussels: Latomus, 2014), 285–307.

34 Jan N. Bremmer
sense.”157 Apparently, he could not drop current terminology, but he seems to

have realized that there were problems with the expression.158
Second, Francesco Massa has recently argued that “les ‘mystères païens’
tels que nous les envisageons aujourd’hui sont le produit de la réflexion
théologique des auteurs chrétiens anciens” in the second century.159 As he has
been followed in this by Richard Gordon,160 one of our best experts of the mys-
teries, it is timely to take a closer look at Massa’s arguments. In the second
century, as he argues, no author calls so many rites mysteries as Justin Martyr,
such as those in honor of “la Mère des dieux, de Perséphone, Aphrodite et Attis,
de Dionysos, de Mithra et de Kronos/Saturne.”161 Now it is true that Justin
wrote in a time, as we have seen above,162 that mysteries became extremely
popular and when many cults took on aspects of the mysteries. Still, it should
not be overlooked that Justin was well informed. For example, he knows details
of the Dionysiac initiation (Dial. 69.2) and is one of the first to provide details
about initiation into the Mithraic mysteries (1 Apol. 66.4; Dial. 70.1; 78.6).
Naturally, he mentions mysteries of Persephone (1 Apol. 25.1), which could
refer to the Eleusinian or Orphic mysteries, but those of Aphrodite are much
less known and were probably limited to Cyprus.163 The Mother of the gods (1
Apol. 27.4), or Cybele, had rituals which were regularly called mysteries, but
which were not confined to a particular place, as those of Eleusis and Samo-
thrace.164 Mysteries of Attis we have mentioned above,165 but the only cult for
which no mysteries are mentioned is that of Kronos/Saturnus (2 Apol. 12.5),
which is not surprising as the passage is clearly meant to be sarcastic and not a
report of actual mysteries. I conclude from this that Justin Martyr does indeed
enumerate a number of mysteries but does not invent a single one of them and
strictly keeps to the emic usage.
This is also true for the slightly later Athenagoras, who in his Legatio men-
tions the Athenian mysteries of Agraulos and Pandrosos (1.1), that is, the Ar-
rhephoria, also mentioned among mysteries by Clement (Protr. 2.17.1, see

158Note that in Nock, “Development of Paganism,” 429, he puts the term in quotation
marks.
159 Massa, “La notion de ‘mystères,’” 127.
160 Richard L. Gordon, “Staging Mithras: Mystagogues and Meanings,” Politica Antica 9
(2019): 141–170, 143.

162 See note 146 above.
163 Cf. Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, L’Aphrodite grecque: Contribution à l’étude de ses
cultes et de sa personnalité dans le panthéon archaïque et classique, Kernos Suppl. 4 (Liège:

Centre International d’Étude de las Religion Grecque Antique, 1994), 342–344, where Jus-
tin’s passage has to be added.
164 Cf. Sfameni Gasparro, Soteriology and Mystic Aspects, 20–25.
165 See note 108 above.

below),166 those of Eleusis and Samothrace (Leg. 4.1) and, most likely, those
of the Orphics (32.1). He also quotes Herodotus on the Egyptian mysteries
(22.9; 28.8–9). Again, there is nothing special in this and nothing striking.
Now these Christians were not the only ones who mentioned quite a few
mysteries, as there are several authors attested with books called On the Mys-
teries. Athenian authors, such as Philochoros (FGH 328 F1), Melanthios (FGH
326 F2–4) and, albeit probably in the Roman era, Sotades (FGH 358 T1) began
to write about the Eleusinian Mysteries rather early. We are in the dark if other
authors about the mysteries, such as Stesimbrotos (FGH 107 F12–20, 26–28),
Neanthes (FGH 84 F14) and Hikesios (apud Clement of Alexandria, Protr.
5.64.5), also only wrote about the Eleusinian ones. However, the fact that the
latter, whose date is unknown but evidently predates Clement, compared the
Scythians suggests that he went beyond Eleusis.167
There are two more interesting pagan authors, who show that comparisons
and/or collecting of mysteries were not unusual in the second century. First,
the well-informed Celsus, usually dated to ca. 180 but not taken into account
by Massa, refers a number of times to the mysteries, as we can see from Ori-
gen’s Contra Celsum.168 He mentions the mysteries of Mithras (6.22),169 but
also, although somewhat indirectly, those of the Orphics (also 6.42), Samo-
thrace and Eleusis, as his enumeration of the wisest Greek people shows, which
ends with “Odrysians (i.e., Thracians, the people of Orpheus), Samothracians,
and Eleusinians” (1.14), that is, the people of the most famous Greek mysteries.
In addition, he mentions the Dionysiac mysteries (4.10), those of the Korybants
(3.16) and, finally, the “Egyptian Mysteries of Typhon, and Horus, and Osiris”
(6.42). In short, Celsus certainly mentions no fewer mysteries than Justin Mar-
tyr, and he might well have mentioned even more in the whole of his, unfortu-
nately lost, work.
Second, in his Protreptikos (2.13.1–22.2). Clement of Alexandria enumer-
ates a whole series of mysteries: Aphrodite, Deo (the mysteries of Sabazius in-
cluded),170 Dionysus, Korybants, and Kore-Demeter – most of them belonging
166 Belayche and Massa, “Mystery Cults and Visual Language,” 13, note that the 2nd-c.
grammarian Aelius Herodianus also calls the Arrhephoria “mysteries.”

167 For these authors, see also Massa, “La notion de ‘mystères,’” 115–116, who is neither
complete nor wholly accurate.

168 See, more in detail, Bremmer, “Early Christianity and the Pagan Mysteries.”
169 Cf. Origen, Cels. 6.22 (ed. Marcel Borret, SC 147:234): ὥς φησι (Celsus), Περσῶν τοῦ
Μίθρου µυστήρια καὶ τὴν διήγησιν αὐτῶν, which clearly refutes the statement by Nicole Be-
layche and Francesco Massa, “Quelques balises introductives: Lexique et historiographie,”
Mètis n.s. 14 (2016): 7–19, 8 n. 3 that the expression “mystères de Mithra … provient des
auteurs chrétiens, puis tardifs, notamment philosophiques.”
170 Initiations in connection with Sabazius are already mentioned by Theophrastus (Char.
27.8, with James Diggle, Theophrastus: Characters, CCTC 43 [Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2004], 481–482). Unfortunately, an inscription from Sardis, which mentions
“mysteries of Sabazius … of Angdistis and of Ma” cannot be dated with certainty, but very

36 Jan N. Bremmer
to the list of the usual suspects. However, Riedweg brilliantly noted that they
are listed in alphabetical order and thus derive from a handbook, which he dates
to the post-classical period and to an Athenian author, with a strong Orphic
influence.171 His observations have been accepted and strengthened by Miguel
Herrero, who notes the similarities with Papyrus Gurob 1 (= Orph. fr. 578),172
which dates to the first quarter of the third century BC.173 Herrero has also
made a good case for an Alexandrian origin and an Orphic poem in the back-
ground. He dates the handbook to the third century BC on the basis of the sim-
ilarities with the Gurob papyrus, but that is hardly decisive. For our purpose, it
seems sufficient to observe that the handbook still circulated at the end of the
second century AD, which proves interest in mysteries at that moment, as
books on papyrus have to be recopied after a longer period of time.174
Now Massa is clearly uneasy with the existence of a pagan mysteries hand-
book in the second century, since this would contradict his thesis of a “Chris-
tian turn.” That is why he has to dismiss this evidence. It is instructive to see
how he reacts. First, without any arguments, he states: “il me semble d’une part
qu’il n’est pas possible prouver l’existence de traits de ce type,” which is a
curious argument, as in that case one would expect him to come up with an
alternative explanation of the alphabetic ordering and the Orphic background,
which is unique in Clement. And he proceeds with: “et d’autre part que, même
si Clément s’est servi d’un texte antérieur, il a certainement retrevaillé sa
source dans le but de créer une image des mystères qui entre dans son objectif
polémique.”175 Yet Massa provides not a single example of this reworking by
Clement, and both Riedweg and Herrero have observed that Clement
much looks like belonging to the Roman era, maybe even to the 2nd c.; cf. Kent J. Rigsby,
“A Religious Association at Sardes,” Ancient Society 44 (2014): 1–23; ISardP 434, with full
bibliography. For Sabazius, see Jean-Marie Pailler, “Sabazios: La construction d’une figure
divine dans le monde gréco-romain,” in Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et ro-
main: Cent ans après Cumont (1906–2006), bilan historique et historiographique, ed. Co-
rinne Bonnet, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, and Danny Praet, Études de philologie, d’archéo-
logie et d’histoire anciennes 45 (Brussels: Belgisch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2009),
257–292.
171 Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie, 117–123.
172 Ed. Bernabé, Orphicorum, 2:150–157.
173 Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, “Las fuentes de Clem. Alex., Protr. II 12–22: Un tratado
sobre los misterios y una teogonía órfica,” Emerita 75 (2007): 19–50. For the papyrus, see
Alberto Bernabé and Ana I. Jiménez San Cristóbal, “Two Aspects of the Orphic Papyrolog-
ical Tradition: PGurob 1 and the Greek Magic Rolls,” in Presocratics and Papyrological
Tradition: A Philosophical Reappraisal of the Sources, ed. Christian Vassallo, Studia Prae-
socratica 10 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 17–43.
174 George W. Houston, Inside Roman Libraries: Book Collections and Their Manage-
ment in Antiquity, Studies in the History of Greece and Rome (Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press, 2014), 257, suggests a shelf life of 100–125 years in normal cases.

reproduced the handbook he used fairly faithfully.176 I conclude, therefore, that

Massa has not established the case for a “Christian turn” in the second century.
As Herrero has shown, it is only with the Byzantine Michael Psellus (eleventh
century) that we really find “the effort to unify the mysteries in a single ritual.”
Admittedly, Psellus followed a tendency which in Christian circles started with
Clement, but the latter, as Herrero demonstrates, was already dependent on
earlier Orphic efforts to unify the mysteries.177 Evidently, the relationship be-
tween Christian and pagan interest in the mysteries was more complicated than
the simple opposition pagan-Christian argued by Massa.
D. Conclusion
What can we conclude from our survey? Naturally, to a certain extent, that is,
Nock shared ideas about women and race with his contemporaries, which are
no longer acceptable, and which were even in his time hardly shared by every-
body, given the suffragettes in the UK and the work of Franz Boas (1858–1942)
in the USA. I cannot prove that he knew of the latter, but it seems not improb-
able, as he was also acquainted with Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) and
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942).178 These prejudices prevented him from
seeing the role of women not only in his own time, but also in the new cults
and religions. It furthermore prevented him from properly evaluating the ways
in which non-Greek intellectuals in the East negotiated the Greek hegemony.
As regards the key terms used for studying the various religions of antiquity
– paganism, Judaism and Christianity – Nock used these terms in much the
same way as do many scholars today. His was a time that did not concern itself
with terminological nuances, unlike today, even though the relevant debates
are hardly always productive. Still, uncritical usage of terms, such as Judaism
and Christianity, can lead us to suppose that they have the same meanings today
as in antiquity and to neglect the development in or changes of meaning. It
seems very much so that Nock was a victim of that belief, as he clearly saw
emerging Christianity as a properly developed church instead of a loosely con-
nected network of communities with many different beliefs and rituals amongst
them. In general, one realizes the value of the Lived Ancient Religion approach
176 Cf. Riedweg, Mysterienterminologie, 120: “… wie Klemens mit seiner Vorlage um-
geht: Er strafft diese zwar im Interesse der Polemik, ist aber in den Sachinformationen recht
genau und zuverlässig”; Herrero de Jáuregui, “Las fuentes,” 28–29: “(Clement) da la impre-
sión de que cuando no hace excursos polémicos no se aparta en exceso de ella, aunque escoja
explayarse.”
177 Miguel Herrero de Jáuregui, Orphism and Christianity in Late Antiquity, Sozomena 7
(Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 152–153.

178 Price, “Road to Conversion,” 324, notes his mention of these anthropologists in n. 1
on p. 275; add the reference to the Trobiand islands (Nock, Conversion, 30).

38 Jan N. Bremmer
better when reading a book like Conversion, even though Nock was too good
a historian not to occasionally observe the role of individuals in the spread of
cults.179 And unlike Cumont, he uses the term “cult” much more often than
“religion” when discussing the spread of the organized worship of divinities
that were not originally Greek or Roman. One can only wonder why Nock paid
so little attention to the nature of faith/πίστις and its importance for emerging
Christianity. Also in his Essays on Religion,180 πίστις is only mentioned once
in connection with pagan miracles, although his definition of πίστις as “sub-
missive reliance in the new δύναµις and its representatives” is well worth a
discussion. In the end, I think, it is the supposed superiority and uniqueness of
Christianity which prevented Nock from integrating it into a picture of late
antiquity – a failure which he shares with many a modern ancient historian.
Regarding the mysteries, Nock’s analysis is in many respects antiquated, not
only because of the terminology he uses, but also on account of the many new
publications of inscriptions and excavations of sanctuaries, which have given
us, for example, an endless stream of new Mithraea. Since he was under the
spell of Cumont, Nock overrated the importance of the mysteries, but he did
not observe the mystical turn in second-century Asia Minor with the mystèri-
sation of many cults, as we noted. It means that he also did not ask what this
development towards more closed cults meant for the rise of Christianity,
which did not shut its doors for the sub-elite and kept on growing, whereas the
mysteries started to decline already in the third century. To integrate these mys-
teries with Judaism and Christianity in their right proportions into a narrative
of religion in late antiquity was clearly too much for Nock. It still remains our
challenge today.181
Nock, Conversion, 93.

179
Arthur Darby Nock, “A Vision of Mandulis Aion,” in idem, Essays on Religion,

180
1:357–400, 377.
181 I am most grateful to Raphael Brendel, Valentino Gasparini, and Clare Rothschild for
information, to Laura Feldt for her thoughtful comments, and to Matt Calhoun for his helpful
correction of my English.


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Celebrating Arthur Darby Nock

Choice, Change, and Conversion

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James A. Kelhoffer is Professor of New Testament Studies at Uppsala University (Sweden).

Clare K. Rothschild is Professor of Scripture, Department of Theology, Lewis University (USA)

ISBN 978-3-16-161000-4 / eISBN 978-3-16-161001-1

© 2021 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com

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Preface and Acknowledgments ...................................................................... V

List of Abbreviations .................................................................................... IX

Part One: Responses to Nock’s Conversion

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Carl Johan Berglund

Part Two: Beyond Conversion

List of Contributors .................................................................................... 349

Index of Modern Authors ............................................................................417

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A. Two Outdated Ideas

4Price, “Road to Conversion,” 330.

lesungen zu antiken Welten 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014), 7 (Eleusis), 69–70 (Orphism).

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13 See also Nock, Conversion, 121, 161, 183, 203.

34, 36, 47, 81, 95.

idem, Essays on Religion, 1:49–133, 55.

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people as religious entrepeneurs.21 Similarly, there is a lot of mention of “su-

B. Some Key Terms and Ideas

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34 Steve Mason, “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in An-

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A. Knopf, 2015), to be read with my review in CP 113/3 (2018): 373–379.

Religions, WUNT 443 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020).

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Weidmann, 1931–1932), 1:15–16, quoted by Nock, Conversion, 275.

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son (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 182.

lic,” Ordia Prima 4 (2005): 107–129.

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in Panthée: Religious Transformations in the Graeco-Roman Empire, ed. Laurent Bricault

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Early Christianity: An Encyclopedic and Bibliographical Outline,” in Frey, Schliesser, and

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available to Nock at his time.83 To mention a few examples: for Orphism we

rico di Mithra,” Electrum 24 (2017): 191–212.

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89 Nock, Conversion, 12.

2005), 361 n. 152.

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‘Mysterien’ der ägyptischen Gottheiten?,” in Entangled Worlds: Religious Confluences be-

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terable” is unique. It seems somewhat hazardous, therefore, to conclude mys-

absence of any reference to initiation on the bas-relief.

2:606–641; Corinne Bonnet, ed., La correspondance scientifique de Franz Cumont conser-

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of Their Genesis,” JRS 88 (1998): 115–128.

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