The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion with No Name

by Brian C. Muraresku

Nock acknowledges Euripides’s The Bacchae as our main classical source for the Mysteries of Dionysus. Its rich, descriptive vocabulary offers unique access to the nocturnal “congregations” of god-filled spiritual seekers. In The Dionysian Gospel, published in 2017, Dennis MacDonald of the Claremont School of Theology compares the Ancient Greek of The Bacchae with the Ancient Greek of the Gospel of John to prove that the Evangelist was intimately familiar with these Dionysian “symbols” and “language.” In order to portray Jesus as the consummate Son of God, John knew all the loaded terms that would appeal to any Greek speaker of the time. And he used them throughout his Gospel to depict Jesus as the second coming of Dionysus.