2. In time, however, new myths and new forms of worship were added. It is not easy to draw a definite line between the mysteries, strictly so called, and the forms of worship which went on side by side with them. Not only are they sometimes spoken of in common as mysteries, but there is a remarkable syncretist painting in a non-Christian catacomb at Rome, in which the elements of the Greek mysteries of Demeter are blended with those of Sabazius and Mithra, in a way which shows that the worship was blended also.[613] These forms of worship also had an initiation: they also aimed at a pure religion. The condition of entrance was: “Let no one enter the most venerable assembly of the association unless he be pure and pious and good.” Nor was it left to the individual conscience: a man had to be tested and examined by the officers.[614] But the main element in the association was not so much the initiation as the sacrifice and the common meal which followed it. The offerings were brought by individuals and offered in common: they were offered upon what is sometimes spoken of as the “holy table.” They were distributed by the servants (the deacons), and the offerer shared with the rest in the distribution. In one association, at Xanthos in Lycia, of which the rules remain on an inscription, the offerer had the right to half of what he had brought. The feast which followed was an effort after real fellowship.[615] There was in it, as there is in Christian times, a sense of communion with one another in a communion with God.
During the earliest centuries of Christianity, the mysteries, and the religious societies which were akin to the mysteries,[616] existed on an enormous scale throughout the eastern part of the Empire. There were elements in some of them from which Christianity recoiled, and against which the Christian Apologists use the language of strong invective.[617] But, on the other hand, the majority of them had the same aims as Christianity itself—the aim of worshipping a pure God, the aim of living a pure life, and the aim of cultivating the spirit of brotherhood.[618] They were part of a great religious revival which distinguishes the age.[619]
B. The Mysteries and the Church.
It was inevitable when a new group of associations came to exist side by side with a large existing body of associations, from which it was continually detaching members, introducing them into its own midst with the practices of their original societies impressed upon their minds, that this new group should tend to assimilate, with the assimilation of their members, some of the elements of these existing groups.[620] This is what we find to have been in fact the case. It is possible that they made the Christian associations more secret than before. Up to a certain time there is no evidence that Christianity had any secrets. It was preached openly to the world. It guarded worship by imposing a moral bar to admission. But its rites were simple and its teaching was public. After a certain time all is changed: mysteries have arisen in the once open and easily accessible faith, and there are doctrines which must not be declared in the hearing of the uninitiated.[621] But the influence of the mysteries, and of the religious cults which were analogous to the mysteries, was not simply general; they modified in some important respects the Christian sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist—the practice, that is, of admission to the society by a symbolical purification, and the practice of expressing membership of the society by a common meal. I will ask you to consider first Baptism, and secondly the Lord’s Supper, each in its simplest form, and then I will attempt to show how the elements which are found in the later and not in the earlier form, are elements which are found outside Christianity in the institutions of which I have spoken.
1. Baptism. In the earliest times, (1) baptism followed at once upon conversion; (2) the ritual was of the simplest kind, nor does it appear that it needed any special minister.
The first point is shown by the Acts of the Apostles; the men who repented at Pentecost, those who believed when Philip preached in Samaria, the Ethiopian eunuch, Cornelius, Lydia, the jailor at Philippi, the converts at Corinth and Ephesus, were baptized as soon as they were known to recognize Jesus Christ as the Messiah.[622] The second point is also shown by the Acts. It was a baptism of water.
A later, though still very early stage, with significant modifications, is seen in the “Teaching of the Apostles:”[623] (1) no special minister of baptism is specified, the vague “he that baptizeth” (ὁ βαπτίζων) seeming to exclude a limitation of it to an officer; (2) the only element that is specified is water; (3) previous instruction is implied, but there is no period of catechumenate defined; (4) a fast is enjoined before baptism.
These were the simple elements of early Christian baptism. When it emerges after a period of obscurity—like a river which flows under the sand—the enormous changes of later times have already begun.
(i.) The first point of change is the change of name.
(a) So early as the time of Justin Martyr we find a name given to baptism which comes straight from the Greek mysteries—the name “enlightenment” (φωτισμός, φωτίζεσθαι).[624] It came to be the constant technical term.[625]