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Nature of Dissemination: The City Cult

...sacred scriptures, specifically collections written in the Greek language¹¹, that faith (Greek: pistis; Latin: fiducia) in these gods is a personal act of will—a divine power which, grounded in personal experience within the mystery, is explicitly contrasted with philosophical conviction¹²—that preaching has taken on certain forms—we know of prayers of thanksgiving, interpretations of sacred texts, and missionary sermons—that firm confessions of faith hold the communities together, and a rich literature of miracle stories and vision reports serves for both spiritual awakening and edification; when we consider all this, we understand the wonderful attraction that this Hellenistic form of Oriental faith must have exerted on the religiously impoverished West Occident: The Western world, specifically the Roman Empire, which Reitzenstein views here as having lost its traditional religious vitality.

If we wish to correctly appreciate the uniqueness of that faith, we must first cast a glance at the emergence of the communities. Even the relocation of large masses of people—brought about within a world empire or cultural region by a ruler's decree or the peaceful pressure of trade—dissolves the national character of folk religions to a certain degree and influences their nature. I need only remind you of the Jewish Diaspora Diaspora: The dispersion of the Jewish people beyond Israel and that surprising discovery that, as early as the Persian period, a Jewish military colony in Aswan Refers to the Elephantine papyri, which documented a Jewish community in Egypt with its own temple during the 5th century BCE had its own Temple of Yahweh with a strongly syncretistic cult Syncretistic: The merging or attempted merging of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought; a colony that felt itself to be Jewish and remained in contact with the leadership of the national cult in Jerusalem, yet also stood in opposition to it. When Egyptian merchants in Athens formed regional associations at an early stage and founded a sanctuary of Isis as the cultic center of their union, the cult and...