Later writers exaggerated many of the features of the Mysteries, whether as Christians they re- garded them with suspicion and detestation, or in a wider interest supplemented by the help of imagination what history had left vague and obscure.
‘High authorities,’ it has been said (L. Campbell, p. 264), ‘whose gravity and depth of mind cannot be disputed, bear
witness with one voice to the elevating influence of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Sophocles dwells emphatically on the incomparable happiness of the initiated both in life and after death ; and Plato, who had a far clearer vision both of God and immortality than any child of Eumolpus, can find no more fitting vehicle for his most transcendent thoughts than the imagery which he borrows from the contemplatian of the
Mysteries.’ This is not incompatible with the view that
little or nothing of positive doctrine was conveyed in the Mysteries, from the symbolism of which
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each man was left to take what he would, accord- ing to the dictum attributed by Synesius to Aristotle—‘He is of opinion that the initiated learned nothing precisely, but received impres- sions, and were put into a certain frame of mind.’ Much has been done by excavations and the careful examination of contemporary inscriptions to throw light upon this interesting subject, but much more in this direction must be accomplished before we can claim to tread with confidence in a region the character of which rendered it peculiarly liable to be misunderstood and misrepresented.
iii. THE MYSTERIES AND THE NT.—That the writers of the NT have derived much of their language and imagery from the Greek Mysteries, and that a consideration of the different shades of meaning in which μυστήριον is employed in the NT indicates that they have in this reference their unifying element, has been maintained with much ability and ingennit by A. 5. Carman in a paper contributed to the Bibliotheca Sacra for October 1893. The allusions which he recognizes in Scripture are to the following features of the Mysteries :—
‘The word μυστήριον and other derivatives of the verb wim; the word τελετή, or the allied adjective form τέλωος with the idea of maturity or perfection; the word irorrsie and its derivatives with the associated idea of a personal experience of the Divine fellowship ; certain specific allusions to the con- trast of light and darkness with the derived ideas of enlighten- ment, wlumination, and the like; the term silence; the ideas of reservation and revelation of religious truth ; ideas associated with the office of hierophant, kerux, mystagogue, and the like ; and certain formal uses of the expressions touch, taste, handle, behold,—associated with the mystic paradosis’ (p. 623).
Carman refers to similar allusions in classi- eal writers and the Church Fathers, but especially in the works of Philo Judzus, and then examines the principal passages of the NT, printing in italics the words in which allusion is su posed to be de- tected, as in the following Seas He 61: ‘ Let us press on unto perfection. For as touching those who were once enlightened and tasted of the ee gift, and were made partakers of the Holy Ghost and tasted the good word of God, ete., where, on this assumption, reference is made to ‘the perfective aim of the rites, the characteristic idea of enlightenment, the symbolic tasting, and the participation in the Divine nature’ (p. 636).
The attempt thus to trace in the apostolic language direct allusion to the Mysteries is pro- nounced by Anrich, in his careful and scholarl treatise on the connexion of the Mysteries with Christianity, to be ‘wholly unsuccessful’ (p. 143 note). This writer regards the approximation of Christianity and the Mysteries, both in idea and usage, as having been introduced by the Gnostics, whose position in this respect Clement of Alex- andria and Origen sought to legitimate in a modified form within the Church. For the pre- Gnostic use of μυστήριον and allied terms and ideas he turns with Hatch (Essays in Biblical Greek, pp. 57-62) to Jewish literature, especi- ally the apocryphal books of the OT. In these ‘the plans of a king or general are termed μυσ- τήρια ; they are his secrets, in so far that no one knows about them until he communicates them to his subordinates or puts them into operation’ (Anrich, p. 144). ‘This,’ says Hatch, ‘was a strictly Oriental conception. A king’s ‘‘ counsel” was his ‘‘secret,” which was known only to him- self and his trusted friends. It was natural to extend the conception to the secret plans of God’ (p. 58). Hatch applies this conception to the ex- planation of the various passages in the NT, and finds it sufficient in every case except the two passaees in Rev (1 177) and Eph 5*, where he ias recourse to the ‘light which is thrown back- wards on the NT oy Christian writers of the 2nd cent.’ (p. 59), in which light μυστήριον is seen to
have a certain parallelism to σύμβολον, τύπος, or παραβολή.
t is doubtless an excellent rule to interpret NT language by reference to the LXX wherever pos- sible ; it is to adduce a known cause where others, however plausible or probable, have about them more or less of uncertainty. But may not the latter be unduly and unnecessarily ignored? If a writer under ‘the constantly deepening impression produced by prolonged study of the subject that such allusions colour a large portion of those writ- ings of the NT which had Gentile environment’ is apt to push his theory too far, in accounting, for example, for the allusions in Eph and Col by the association of Ephesus with the impure rites of the