worldbridger said:
Does anyone know where I can find more information about this Tarsus school or order?
At the time of St Paul, the city of Tarsus was a prosperous sea-port on the eastern Mediterranean, and the capital of the Roman imperial province of Cilicia. Today, the region of Cilicia is called Çukurova; it covers the eastern bit of the Mediterranean region of Turkey, and shares a border with Syria.
Wikipedia said:
Strabo (64/63 BC – c. AD 24) praises the cultural level of Tarsus in this period with its philosophers, poets and linguists. The schools of Tarsus rivalled Athens and Alexandria … In his time the library of Tarsus held 200,000 books, including a huge collection of scientific works.
The mention of Strabo is interesting. This man, a famous geographer of his time, was taught in Rome by someone called
Athenodoros Cananites (c. 74 BC – AD 7). Athenodoros was a Stoic philosopher, who was born in Canana, a small town or village near Tarsus. This guy was politically very well-connected, being a friend of Cicero, and one of the teachers of Octavian - who was later to become the emperor Augustus. Athenodoros spent a good deal of time in Rome forging relationships with the Roman elite. And he was politically active in Tarsus too: he was instrumental in expelling the government of Boëthus and drafting a new constitution for the city, the result of which was a pro-Roman oligarchy. The suggestion has been made that Athenodoros may have been an influence on St Paul.
Mind you, it’s been suggested also that Mithraism was an influence on St Paul. H.J. Schoeps in “Paul: The Theology of the Apostle in the Light of Jewish Religious History” (originally in German, 1959, Eng. tr. 1961), points out that one of the major cults to use a blood/wine identification was Mithraism, where worship included the symbolic drinking of wine as bull’s blood, and one of the main centres of Mithraism was apparently Tarsus. But of course, as the C’s have indicated, Mithraism looks like a red herring.
The link with Mithraism was made pretty early by Celsus, a 2nd-century philosopher and opponent of Christianity. His critique of Christianity, “The True Word”, was written c. 177. In this text he writes:
Celsus said:
Now the Christians pray that after their toil and strife here below they shall enter the kingdom of heaven, and they agree with the ancient systems that there are seven heavens and that the way of the soul is through the planets. That their system is based on very old teachings may be seen from similar beliefs in the old Persian Mysteries associated with the cult of Mithras.
In 2 Corinthians 12:2, Paul describes himself being “caught up as far as the third heaven”. So there could be a veiled reference here to the possibility that he was a Mithraist. But actually, Mithraism could simply have taken this idea of Seven Heavens from one of the other Mystery religions, e.g. the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Dionysian Mysteries or the Orphic Mysteries. Or, as the C’s imply, something unknown.
Paul may have had some link with the
Hypsistarians, who were active in Cappadocia, just a little way to the north of Tarsus. In the story in Acts 16:17, the slave-girl that Paul and his colleagues meet in Philippi in eastern Macedonia says that “these men are servants of the most high God”. The Hypsistarians worshipped the Hypsistos, which is Greek for the “Most High”. Like Paul, the Hypsistarians rejected the practice of circumcision. It’s been suggested that the existence of these Hypsistarians must have been partially responsible for the astounding swiftness of the spread of Pauline Christianity in Asia Minor.
Other philosophers active in Tarsus round about Paul’s time include:
Antipater of Tarsus (d. 130/129 BC), who was the head of the Stoic school in Athens;
Zeno of Tarsus (fl. 200 BC), also head of the Stoic school in Athens;
Chrysippus of Soli (c. 279 BC – c. 206 BC), another head of the Stoic school in Athens. He was a long-distance runner, a prolific author (500 lines of text per day apparently), and died from laughing too much. His link with Tarsus comes from his father, Apollonius of Tarsus, and from the fact that Soli was a Rhodian colony only a short distance along the coast from Tarsus.
The father of Athenodoros Cananites, whom we met earlier, was another philosopher, whose name was
Sandon. Sandon, though, was an Orphic - as was
his father
Hellanikos. Hellanikos seems to have worked with another Orphic called
Hieronymos in the production of the “Orphic Theogony”, a 2nd century BC text which sought to link together Orphic and Stoic ideas. So we have a strong Stoic and Orphic presence in Tarsus.
It’s interesting too that
Apollonius of Tyana came from Cappadocia, just a short distance to the north. He was a Neopythagorean philosopher, and has often been compared to Jesus. He lived c. AD 15 – c. AD 100. Incidentally, the story of Baucis and Philemon is set by Ovid, in the “Metamorphoses” (completed in AD 8), in the region of Tyana. In this story, Zeus and Hermes are disguised as ordinary peasants, and begin asking the people of the town for a place to sleep that night. They are rejected by everyone until they come to Baucis and Philemon's rustic and simple cottage. Here they are treated well. As a reward, the two are told to escape to the top of a mountain, which is where they go, and escape a catastrophic flood which destroys the town. Baucis and Philemon are the only two left alive. When Paul and Barnabas come through the town of Lystra on their missionary journey, the story in Acts says that the inhabitants proclaimed them to be Hermes and Zeus (14:12). A further echo of this story is told in Genesis 19 – the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah there could well have been taken from Ovid’s source. In that story two angels come along, looking like humans, and the theme of sacred hospitality is excessively prominent. And then Lot and his family are urged to “flee to the hills” (19:17), and the cities get destroyed. Perhaps there’s a northern origin for this story here.
There’s another strange northern connection here: a traveller called
Demetrius of Tarsus related to Plutarch (c. AD 46 - AD 120) the tale of an expedition to the west coast of Scotland in or shortly before AD 83. He stated that it was “a gloomy journey amongst uninhabited islands”, but that he had visited one which was the retreat of holy men. A few further comments on this expedition, and its influence on Plutarch appear here:
Plutarch said:
The theme of the sleeping Cronus may have been suggested to Plutarch by Demetrius of Tarsus, who in the “De Defectu Oraculorum” (419 E – 420 A) is made to say that on an island near Britain Cronus is kept prisoner by the bonds of sleep and is guarded by Briareus and attended by Spirits who are his servitors. This Demetrius appears to have been an historical person who did travel to Britain, whence in the dialogue he is said to have recently returned; and he may have told Plutarch some Celtic legend or superstition which the latter hellenized and wove into the fabric of his myth.
So was this expedition just a one-off? Or had there been regular contact between Tarsus and Scotland for a while?
Anyway, all in all, there in Tarsus we have an enormous library rivalling the libraries of Alexandria and Pergamum, and a whole bunch of prestigious schools – Mithraic, Orphic and Stoic, with possibly some Neopythagorean influence as well. Plus, there’s the Hypsistarian factor to be aware of as well. And there’s also the vague possibility that there was some exchange of ideas between Tarsus and the far North. But who knows what was going on beneath the surface of all this intellectual, exploratory and mystical endeavour. What we have is what was recorded, and has survived. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
edit: clarity
