Part Two of three

Part One looked at the question Chris Cornthwaite says his field forbids — did early Christianity borrow from the Greco-Roman religions around it? — and at Samuel Sandmel’s 1962 essay “Parallelomania,” whose warning about extravagance hardened, on Cornthwaite’s account, into a border wall against Greco-Roman comparison itself. But Sandmel was not the foundation. The operating rule was already written seven years before his essay — not by a censor, but by one of the most respected scholars of the century, in language so reasonable that almost nobody noticed what it made impossible.

Metzger, 1955: the rule before the famous essay

Bruce Metzger was a Princeton text critic — about as establishment as biblical studies gets — and in January 1955 he published a paper in the Harvard Theological Review laying out how comparisons between the mystery religions and early Christianity ought to be handled. (The paper thanks A. D. Nock, Harvard’s great historian of Greco-Roman religion, for corrections. This was the guild talking to itself, at the highest level.) Cornthwaite names Metzger only through Jonathan Z. Smith’s reading of him, and I’ll keep that chain honest; but the 1955 rules are a matter of print, and they deserve to be heard in their own terms. There are three.

First: many alleged parallels are manufactured — “parallels made plausible by selective description,” composites stitched from scattered sources; Schweitzer’s gibe, quoted by Metzger, was that scholars manufacture “a kind of universal Mystery-religion which never actually existed.” Such parallels “evaporate when they are confronted with the original texts.”

Second: a parallel’s significance “will depend upon whether they are genealogical and not merely analogical parallels.” Resemblance alone — two rites that look alike — proves nothing about connection. What would count is genealogy: an actual historical line from one to the other.

Third: even a genealogical parallel doesn’t settle the direction, because “it is not only possible but probable that in certain cases the influence moved in the opposite direction” — the fading cults imitated the growing church, not the other way round.

Now, fairness first: Metzger was not wrong about the disease. The comparative literature before him contained real extravagance — pasted-together savior charts of exactly the kind his first rule convicts, whose descendants still circulate today. Applied evenly, his rules are good ones.

But watch what the second and third rules do when they run together as a field’s common sense. Rule two sets the bar at genealogy — and genealogy, real documented transmission, is the one thing the surviving evidence for ancient cults can almost never supply, because the cults kept their rites secret and their texts are late and thin. Rule three then supplies the only direction influence is permitted to travel: toward Christianity, from a church already formed. The result is a machine with one reachable verdict. Analogy, always. Borrowing by Christianity, never quite. Borrowing from Christianity, probable. The rules don’t have to forbid the question. They only have to make one answer unreachable and the other two free.

That is what Smith found in Metzger’s own practice, in the example Cornthwaite repeats from him: set Christianity beside Mithraism, and resemblance is permitted in both directions — Mithraism may even have borrowed from Christianity — but the one sentence that never gets written is that Christianity borrowed from Mithraism. Resemblance runs both ways. Borrowing runs one way. Seven years before Sandmel gave the field its warning label, the traffic pattern was already set.

Smith, 1990: the ban gets its theory

Part One introduced Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago as the scholar Cornthwaite is following. In 1990 Smith published Drudgery Divine, a survey of four centuries of scholarship comparing early Christianity with the religions of late antiquity, and his conclusion is the theoretical half of this series. As Cornthwaite reports it, the comparing never quite touches history: all we ever reach is analogy — two things held side by side in the scholar’s head, while the question of whether one came from the other never lands.

You can watch the rule operate in the field’s ordinary habits. Scholars illustrate Paul with rabbinic texts from the third century — two hundred years after Paul, from a Judaism Paul never knew — without a murmur. Set Paul beside the Greco-Roman world he actually lived in, and the tongs come out. The caution is not in any single scholar’s conscience. It is in the water.

But Smith’s book goes one level deeper than method — and this part is not in Cornthwaite’s video; it is Smith’s own argument, credited to the book. Smith asks where the comparative enterprise itself came from, and his answer is: Protestant anti-Catholic polemic. He opens with the correspondence between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over Joseph Priestley’s History of the Corruptions of Christianity — the “corruptions” story, in which a pristine apostolic Christianity was later paganized, its purity buried under ritual accretion. That story was a weapon aimed at Rome: Catholic sacramental religion was Christianity corrupted by paganism. Smith’s claim: when scholars later turned that comparison on the apostolic age itself, they brought the weapon with them. In his words, “the characteristics attributed to ‘Popery’, by the Reformation and post-Reformation controversialists, have been transferred, wholesale, to the religions of Late Antiquity.”

Once you see the transfer, the double lock clicks shut. “Unique” does two jobs at once: if Christianity is unique against the other religions, then apostolic Christianity is also unique against its own later, Catholic forms. Pagan resemblance could be admitted for Catholicism — that was the point of the polemic — and denied for the apostolic age by the same construction. The comparison rules didn’t merely protect Christianity’s uniqueness against the ancient world. They protected a particular story about which Christianity was the real one. On Smith’s account, the ban wasn’t built by fools or villains; it was inherited from a fight between Christians that had nothing to do with the evidence from Eleusis or Mithras.

One more fairness point, because Smith deserves it: he was nobody’s borrowing enthusiast. He never endorsed deriving Christian sacraments from the mystery cults, and his own rules for comparison — drop “uniqueness” as a category, work with similarity and difference — cut against sloppy genealogy claims as hard as against protective ones. Cornthwaite leans on Smith’s diagnosis of the bias, not on a Smith verdict that the borrowing happened, which Smith never gave.

Where Cornthwaite parts company

It would be tidy to end with Smith, but Cornthwaite doesn’t. Smith’s conclusion — that comparison only ever reaches analogy — proves too much for him. As he puts it, every historian works by analogy: comparing Shakespeare with the world of his time is analogy; the comparing always happens in a historian’s mind. That can’t be where the enterprise stops — it’s where every enterprise starts. If analogy is unavoidable, then analogy cannot be the wall. Somewhere past resemblance, a historian has to be allowed to ask the historical question — was there contact, and did anything travel along it? — and take the evidence’s answer, whichever way it falls.

The machine, assembled

So here is the arrangement Part Three will put to work. A rule from 1955: resemblance is safe, genealogy is the bar, and influence, where admitted, flowed into the church, not out of the world into it. A theory from 1990: the rule was inherited from an old Protestant argument about Catholic corruption, and it has been steering comparisons ever since. And a working scholar in 2026 saying it still governs what may be asked.

Tomorrow, in Part Three: we run a single word through the machine — mysterion, “mystery,” the word Paul himself uses — and watch what the machine does with it.

Read more

The video

• C. J. Cornthwaite, “There’s 1 question Bible scholars never ask. Our field forbids it.” (YouTube, Aug 21, 2026): https://youtu.be/NPufqXKILms

Metzger’s rule

• Bruce M. Metzger, “Considerations of Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review 48, no. 1 (January 1955): 1–20 — the three rules in his own words; the analogy/genealogy distinction the whole series turns on.

Smith’s map

• Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (University of Chicago Press, 1990) — the survey of the comparison rules, and the source of the Protestant–Catholic polemic thesis presented above (the thesis is Smith’s book argument; it does not appear in Cornthwaite’s video).
• Joseph Priestley, History of the Corruptions of Christianity — the “pristine original, later paganized” story Smith starts from, via the Adams–Jefferson correspondence.