So as far as John’s audience was concerned, this new Dionysus had just upstaged the old Dionysus. And their interpretation of John’s Gospel would have been very different from today’s. The Jesus they would have seen was a Jesus who didn’t come to start a new religion. But a Jesus who came to save the fragile Mysteries with an epic, encore performance. A Jesus who came to open source the magical wine for the masses, and to finish the populist movement he started in Greece. When his name was Dionysus.
