Dionysus and Jesus…
Martin Hengel argued Dionysian religion and Christianity to be significantly parallel, stating that “Dionysus had been at home in Palestine for a long time”, and Judaism was influenced by Dionysian traditions.
The modern scholar Barry Powell thinks that Christian notions of eating and drinking the “flesh” and “blood” of Jesus were influenced by the cult of Dionysus. In another parallel Powell adduces, Dionysus was distinct among Greek gods as a deity commonly felt within individual followers. Another example of possible influence on Christianity, Dionysus’ followers, as well as another god, Pan, are said to have had the most influence on the noncanonical depiction of Satan as animal-like and horned.
Wine was important to Dionysus, imagined as its creator; the creation of wine from water figures also in Jesus’s Marriage at Cana. In the 19th century, Bultmann and others compared both themes and concluded that the Dionysian theophany was transferred to Jesus. At Elis during the Thyeia, the festival of Dionysus, three pots would be placed by priests in a sealed room and the following day be found to miraculously be filled with wine. At Andros and Teos water flowing from the spring in the temple of Dionysus changed to wine on his feast days, January 5 and 6; the Marriage at Cana is placed on 6 January in the Christian calendar. Heinz Noetzel’s Christus und Dionysos disagrees, arguing Dionysus never actually did turn water into wine. Martin Hengel replied that opposing traditions would be anachronistic, and that since all Palestinians were familiar with the transformation of water to wine as a miracle, it was expected from the Messiah to perform it.
Peter Wick argues that the use of wine symbolism in the Gospel of John, including the story of the Marriage at Cana at which Jesus turns water into wine, is intended to show Jesus as superior to Dionysus.
Possible parallels have also been suggested between Pentheus’ arrest and questioning of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae and the arrest and questioning of Jesus by Pontius Pilate. Some people have also argued that the attitude of Dionysus is similar to Jesus’ attitude as presented in the Gospels.
