In the form of a god: Jesus and Dionysus

At the beginning of Euripides’ play Bacchae, the god Dionysus—the god of “wine-making, orchards and fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity, insanity, ritual madness, religious ecstasy, and theatre,” according to Wikipedia—enters and delivers a monologue. He identifies himself as “son of Zeus,” born to the daughter of Cadmus, Semele, and says that he has exchanged the “form” which he had from a god (morphēn… ek theou) for that of a “mortal” (Euripides, Bacchae 1-5).

Towards the end of the speech, he explains his determination to reveal himself to the Thebans as a god (daimōn or theos) in order to establish his cult in the city, whether they like it or not. But if they resist, he will lead an army of maenads against them, which is “why I have changed my form (morphēn) for the outward appearance (eidos) of a mortal and turned to the nature of a man (andros)” (53-54*).

I didn’t come across Michael Cover’s discussion of the relevance of this passage for Paul’s christology when I was writing In the form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul. In a Harvard Theological Review article, “The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’s Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi,” he makes two main claims: first, that a likely allusion to or echo of the Bacchae supports a pre-existence christology in Philippians 2:6-7; secondly, that there are anti-imperial undercurrents to the parallel.1 Let’s fill that out a bit and then consider the problems with the first claim in particular.

In favour of a christology of pre-existence

1. Cover argues that the Philippians may have heard echoes of this well known portrayal of Dionysus in the opening lines of the supposed Christ “hymn”:

who, though he was in the form of God (en morphēi theou), did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant (morphēn doulou), being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form… (Phil. 2:6-8 ESV)

He thinks that the allusion is quite specific—not to the “more general phenomenon of divine form exchange in popular mythology” but to the particular account of the metamorphosis of Dionysus that we have in the Bacchae. Like Dionysus, Jesus is a “new God” who has entered the world of humans to challenge the established order.

This has implications, Cover suggests, for christology.

When the Euripidean intertext is registered, the evidence begins to tilt clearly in favor of a christology of pre-existence. If one registers the echo of Dionysus’s exchange of (divine) form for human nature in Bacch. 55, Christ’s existence in the form of God… signifies that his own nature is divine prior to kenosis. Being… in the form of God, Christ then “becomes”… in human likeness.

Moreover, Dionysus presents himself as a son of a god, born of a woman, who takes on human nature in order to reveal his divinity and his name, and to ensure that he is worshipped by the people of Thebes.

2. Dionysus was seen as an “anti-tyrannical, anti-Roman…, anti-Apollonian” liberating force (67), reinforcing the “counter-imperial christology” of the passage. The proposed reading of the “Philippians hymn… establishes the Dionysian Christ as a rival or alternative to the predominantly Apollonian portraiture of the Julio-Claudian emperors” (79-80).

Only the gods have forms

Cover is correct to draw attention to the pagan “epiphanic” and “metamorphic” connotations of the expression morphē theou. The language is not remotely Jewish. The word morphē always signifies the outward appearance of an object or person. The God of Israel has no such “form”; only the pagan gods have “forms” or adopt “forms.”

In the Bacchae, Dionysus exchanges one outward appearance for another. We learn from the Chorus that he was born prematurely; Zeus concealed him in his thigh until he came to term, and then “he gave birth to the god with the horns of a bull and crowned him with garlands of serpents” (100-103). As a god, he appears with a “holy garment of fawnskin about him” (137-38), he holds a pine torch (145-46), he has “luxuriant locks” (150), he plays a pipe (160).

When the ecstatic Pentheus is disguised as a maenad, he sees Dionysus in his divine form: “And you seem to be going before me as a bull, and horns seem to have sprouted upon your head! Were you an animal before now? Certainly now you have been changed into a bull” (920-22).

So the morphē that Dionysus had “from a god” was that of a partly bull-like figure. When he visits Thebes, he does not become something other than a god, he does not empty himself of his divinity, he does not become mortal and vulnerable; he only adopts a different outward appearance. He is perceived differently. Much of the drama revolves around Pentheus’ inability to see him for the god he really is.

But if the translation “being in the form of God” is more or less impossible, we must suppose that Paul is saying that Jesus was perceived to have been “in the form of a god,” much as Pentheus eventually came to perceive Dionysus in his divine form—not that it did him much good.

I argue in In the form of a God: The Pre-existence of the Exalted Christ in Paul that the encomium (it’s not a hymn) opens with a pagan-Hellenistic take on the wonder-worker Jesus, who would have appeared to the Greek onlooker as being “in the form of a god.” The obvious template for this is the mistaken identification of Paul and Barnabas as Hermes and Zeus by the people of Lystra because the apostles did what Jesus did and healed a man crippled from birth:

And when the crowds saw what Paul had done, they lifted up their voices, saying in Lycaonian, “The gods have come down to us in the likeness (homoiōthentes) of men!” (Acts 14:11)

Paul and Barnabas refuse to accept divine honours, just as Jesus in the wilderness refused to accept the divine kingship over the nations of the oikoumenē offered to him by Satan (Lk. 4:5-7). At the end of the episode, they are found to be merely human after all: Paul is stoned by the crowds, stirred up by Jews from Antioch, and left for dead outside the city. In the same way, Jesus, despite being in the form of a god, having refused the honours offered to him by Satan, was “found in appearance as a human”—not one of the immortals, liable to suffering and death.

So yes, but mainly no…

I think Cover is right to highlight the relevance of the language of metamorphosis for understanding what Paul says about Jesus being en morphēi theou.

I see no literary reason to think that the metamorphosis of Dionysus has in any direct way influenced Paul’s depiction of Jesus’ kenosis. Jesus takes on the form of a slave, not of a mortal. There is nothing in the story of Dionysus equivalent to Jesus’ refusal to seize the opportunity of gaining divine honours. Generally speaking, the angry, deceptive, violent Dionysus of the Bacchae seems an improbable type for the Christ praised in Philippians 2:6-11.

Cover does not question the translation “in the form of God,” but I would argue that it is next to impossible. To say that Jesus was “in the form of a god,” however, cannot be an affirmation of a heavenly pre-existence. The only way to make sense of it is to suppose that it reflects how pagans might plausibly but mistakenly have assessed Jesus’ Spirit-empowered ministry.

We may still say that Jesus’ existence in the form of a god preceded the self-emptying of “selfish ambition and vainglory” (cf. Phil. 2:3), but this is not a “real” pre-existence. The emphasis in the encomium is on certain dramatic shifts in public perception: he appeared to be in the form of a god; suddenly he is seen to be all too human and servile; but then his name is being acclaimed throughout the Greek-Roman world.

• 1

  Michael B. Cover. “The Death of Tragedy: The Form of God in Euripides’s Bacchae and Paul’s Carmen Christi.” Harvard Theological Review 111.1 (2018) 66-89.