The “Gates of Hell” at Caesarea Philippi?

A Bible Just-So Story that Doesn’t Pass the Sniff Test

Photo by Sergio García on Unsplash

In Season 4, Episode 2 of The Chosen, Jesus leads his followers to Caesarea Philippi, where a man wearing a goat mask sacrifices animals before a grotto. This gruesome setting is where Jesus turns to his followers and asks them who he says they are. In response, the disciples voice that he may be a prophet, or John the Baptist, until finally Simon says that Jesus is the Christ. Jesus agrees and names Simon “Peter,” the “rock” on which he will build his church – and the gates of Hell (“Hades,” in Greek) will not overcome it.

This story is drawn from two different accounts of Peter’s confession: one in Mark 8, where the crew is said to be in the area around Caesarea Philippi (Mark 8:27-30) and one in Matthew 16:13-20, where JEsus gives the fuller speech that Peter is the “rock.” But the image in the background, that the disciples are not in the region around Caesarea Philippi but specifically in front of a pagan shrine – that’s actually not in the New Testament.

This is a reference to the idea that Jesus specifically chose the site of the Panion, a shrine to Pan just north of Caesarea Philippi, as the site to declare his messiahship. Jesus’ claim for his messiahship, it is supposed, was made directly in the face of the idols of his day. He went directly to the gates of Hell, the seat of local idolatry, and claimed to be the Messiah.

I recognized the reference in the television show and had dimly remembered hearing this preached in the old days and, after I posted about this scene on Twitter, I started hearing people talk about this story in the comments. In fact, people said, some pagans quite literally believed that this area was the gates of Hades. And it probably looked like it, what with all the weird deviant sex and violent sacrificing going on there.

So this was already sounding “off” to me. First, idol worship is really not a major theme in the Gospels – Jesus’s primary antagonists in the Gospel are religious leaders, and pagan gentiles don’t really show up until the end when they actually flog and crucify Jesus. The idea that Jesus’s messiahship claim would specifically center around a rebuking of pagan idols sounded odd to me. But more to the point – in all my years reading commentaries on Mark and Matthew, I had never seen a commentary suggest that the “gates of Hades” were literally present when Jesus spoke at Caesarea Philippi. And the “gates of Hades,” if it really was a place where people would be performing gruesome acts with animals, didn’t really sound like a place anyone would really want to visit. Including pagans.

So where did this story come from? This story seems to be particularly associated with tour groups and media production companies that lead real or virtual tours around Israel for Christian audiences. As I started to look into this, I noticed that most of my google hits were coming from people who were live blogging their travels in Israel as part of Christian travel. Some of the more widely cited resources I could find for this came from media companies leading tours around Israel — either in person or over screens. 

Let’s start with who I strongly suspect to be the origins of much of this discourse: Ray Vander Laan. Ray Vander Laan is the founder of That The World May Know, which produces media about the history behind Bible stories. A number of his videos are actually filmed in Israel at the site of certain historical events. Here’s Vander Laan on Caesarea Philippi:

To the pagan mind, the cave at Caesarea Philippi created a gate to the underworld, where fertility gods lived during the winter. They committed detestable acts to worship these false gods.

Caesarea Philippi's location was especially unique because it stood at the base of a cliff where spring water flowed. At one time, the water ran directly from the mouth of a cave set in the bottom of the cliff.

The pagans of Jesus' day commonly believed that their fertility gods lived in the underworld during the winter and returned to earth each spring. They saw water as a symbol of the underworld and thought that their gods traveled to and from that world through caves.

To the pagan mind, then, the cave and spring water at Caesarea Philippi created a gate to the underworld. They believed that their city was literally at the gates of the underworld, the gates of hell. In order to entice the return of their god, Pan, each year, the people of Caesarea Philippi engaged in horrible deeds, including prostitution and sexual interaction between humans and goats.

When Jesus brought his disciples to the area, they must have been shocked. Caesarea Philippi was like a red-light district in their world and devout Jews would have avoided any contact with the despicable acts committed there.

It was a city of people eagerly knocking on the doors of hell.

There’s also Barry Britnell with Appian Media, who made this video where at 2:40 where Barry Britnell says that sacrifices happened at Pan’s altar in this way: a goat would be thrown into the water, and if it sank, it was accepted. If it didn’t, it was rejected, so the next offering would be a child.

We have a series of pretty wild claims getting made here: from Vander Laan, that Caesarea Philippi was understood as the gates of the underworld, that Pan was worshiped here because he came back and forth from the underworld, and that Pan was worshiped through ritual prostitution and zoophilia. From Appian Media, we have the even juicer details of how sacrifices to Pan were made – that they involved sinking goats, or children, in water for the sake of Pan.

But is any of this true? Is there any historical reason to suppose this is the case?

What’s the Temple of Pan?

The area of Paneas (the springs and caves at the base of Mount Hermon, about 25 miles north of the Sea of Galilee) was only lightly populated before the Greeks conquered it. It was settled – still quite sparsely – by the Greek Ptolemy forces after the conquest of Alexander the Great, around 200 BCE. After this, the rival Seleucids took the area, and dedicated what was probably already an existing cult site to Pan at the base of the mountain. The shrine was located at a cave, which was also the mouth of a large natural spring. This is the era in which the shrine to Pan was constructed and dedicated.

When the Romans took over, Herod the Great dedicated a second temple at the site to Augustus (Ant. 15.363-64), and later his son Herod Philip selected the area for the construction of a new city, Caesarea Philippi. Before the Greek and Roman areas, the region around Paneas was primarily rural, and devotees would have needed to make a trip there at some considerable difficulty, packing in and out their own food. With the construction of the city, the area became more urban and traffic increased to include daytrippers and devotees of Augustus (Berlin, “Sanctuary of Pan,” 31-32). Temples to Zeus and images of Roma and Nemesis were added in the late first to early second centuries (Berlin, “Sanctuary,” 34). The Gospel authors, if they were familiar with this place (I’ve heard Galilee floated as a provenance for Matthew, but who knows) might have known about these, but during the time of Jesus the site was used for Pan worship and devotion to Augustus. 

According to Vander Laan, the purpose of this shrine was to entice Pan to come from the underworld so he would change the seasons. During the winter, Pan went down to the underworld, to Hades (hence the idea that his shrine was the “Gate of Hades.”) During the winter, Pan would go into the cave, down to Hades, and then come out in the spring. 

So did he? Is that what people in the first century thought happened at this shrine?

Pan and the Underworld 

Before we go any further, perhaps we should say this up front:

There is no literary evidence or archeological evidence that any shrine around Caesarea Philippi was known as the “Gates of Hades,” or that Caesareans believed their city sat at the gates of the underworld. On this point, Vander Laan is simply wrong or he has a source that no one else has.

What might be slightly more plausible is that this is a conclusion Vander Laan came to from other reading about Greco-Roman religion, and applied this with undue certainty to this one particular Pan shrine. So let’s look at the evidence.

The idea that the temple area itself was associated with the underworld probably comes from Michael Heiser, who makes two arguments for this association between this cave and the underworld. The first is that it was a site of Baal worship, who Heiser associates with Baal-Zevuv/Beelzebub (“Lord of Flies”/god of death), and the second is that it’s the base of Mount Hermon, where the Watchers reassemble after God casts these rogue angels out of heaven for seducing women in the extracanonical Book of the Watchers.

I was not able to find a second source that confirmed that the Baal worshiped at Hermon was specifically a Baal of death (remember Baal is a title, and applies to a lot of realms.) The area was sparsely populated so there aren’t many literary references to the area, and most of the archeology reports I could find go back to the Greek era. What I do find more plausible is the idea that Galileans who were familiar with the story of the Watchers may have associated the area with fallen angels.

Heiser’s argument does not draw on Greco-Roman sources that would be relevant for worshippers at a Pan shrine. If people in the first century associated the caverns with fallen angels or Beelzebub (and this is already more in the realm of “possibility” than “fact”), these would have been Semitic people, not Greeks. They didn’t dedicate the shrine to Pan and are probably not the people who would have been worshiping at the site. (The Watchers are villains, remember.) What about the Seleucids, who actually dedicated the place to Pan? The Book of the Watchers didn’t circulate in Greek, as far as we know. It’s not at all clear the Seleucids would have known this story, or that Cesarean settlers and bureaucrats would have proudly claimed “Home of the Fallen Angels!” as a slogan for their city. Whatever was there before, the Greeks turned the area into a shrine to Pan, and the Tetrarch Roman client Philip added a shrine to Augustus. Those are the shrines that were constructed and maintained at the time of Jesus.

So, did the worshippers think of those as gates to the underworld? It probably goes without saying that there’s no reason why a temple to Augustus would be seen as a “gate to Hades.” So that leaves Pan. Vander Laan says that as a fertility god, Pan was associated with the underworld because he would go into the caves in the winter and out in the spring.

But there’s actually just not any literary evidence that suggests this. Pan was a part-goat, part-human minor deity associated with nature, music, shepherds, and now and then, stupefying fear (“panic”). His cult began in rural Arcadia and he was usually worshiped in outdoor shrines (Hard, Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology, 199-200). Pan spent his time chasing nymphs and water-spirits (which fits with the grotto location). His exploits lie behind a number of just-so stories about the natural world. 

Pan’s association with nature, fertility, and spring is well attested. What isn’t well-attested is the idea that as a class, such spirits were associated with the underworld, or traveling back and forth from it. I can find four plausible, but highly speculative links between Pan and the underworld that may be where Vander Laan got this idea. But as we will see, none of them get us very far towards concluding that Pan himself was understood to go back and forth from the underworld, let alone at Caesarea Philippi:

1. Pan and Persephone. Persephone was the goddess of spring, and according to the etiological legend about her and Hades, she went back and forth from the underworld throughout the year which caused the rotation of seasons. In the spring and summer she came to the world with her mother and caused crops to grow, and in the fall and winter went to live with her husband Hades in the underworld. There is artwork that depicts Pan and Persephone together, which makes sense – Persephone is the goddess of spring and Pan is associated with springtime activities, like festivals and herding (Robichaud, Pan, 23). However, there’s no literary evidence that suggests that Pan went with her to the underworld in popular mythology. He is usually portrayed greeting her (and flirting with her) when she comes back. I have not found any evidence that Persephone was invoked at Caesarea Philippi; her mysteries were observed in Eleusis in Greece.

2. Pan and Hermes. Pan is the son of Hermes, who is a soul guide and god of boundaries and crossroads. Hermes is sometimes portrayed as going back and forth from the underworld and leading people back and forth. However, I can’t find any evidence that Hermes was specifically invoked at Caesarea Philippi, nor that Pan ever accompanied Hermes. We should also note that Hermes has a lot of children and I can’t find evidence that they were generally invoked as soul guides.

3. The death of Pan. Plutarch tells a story in his work “The Obsolescence of Oracles” section 17 that during the reign of Tiberius, an Egyptian sailor received an oracle on the wind that Pan had died. This is a text explaining why so many oracles in Greece have failed. There is no other record of this story, and Plutarch seems to be telling the story as a kind of just-so story explanation about oracles in his era. There’s also no indication in the story that Pan can be expected to come back.

4. Pan and Orpheus. There’s some indications that Pan may have been invoked in mystery cults and philosophical schools dedicated to Orpheus, which embraced the idea of descending and reemerging from death, cycling through transformations and death and rebirth (Robichaud, Pan, 43). However, we shouldn’t assume that any of these cults were centralized or standardized in any way, and the invocation of Pan may have been strictly regional.

All this is to say: any evidence that Pan was associated with going and coming from Hades is at best extremely allusive and suggested only. There are some possible links between Pan and the underworld but no clear evidence we should read him this way. I cannot find any literary records that confirm the idea that Pan goes and comes from the underworld. 

So, so much for that. Whatever worshippers thought was happening at the shrine, it does not seem that they believed they were at the gates of Hades calling forth Pan to start the spring. What about Vander Laan’s other claims – that worshippers would engage in ritual prostitution and zoophilia?

Sacred Prostitution and Sacred Zoophilia 

Sacred prostitution is the practice of paying a sex worker, usually employed by a temple or a shrine, for sex. This process would put money in temple coffers and the act itself would be perceived as a religious rite by the practitioners. The idea that people would honor the god Pan, who was infamous for his sexual exploits and chasing after the nymphs, by having sex in his temple has a ring of plausibility to it – after all, Pan is strongly associated with sex and love. It’s harder than you’d think to find reliable literary evidence of sacred prostitution in the ancient world – in general. 

As Stephanie Lynn Budin argued in her book The Myth of Sacred Prostitution (and following a course already charted by Mary Beard), there isn’t literary evidence from the ancient world of cult prostitution that comes from the culture itself that practiced it. We can find evidence of sex workers dedicating a portion of their earnings to the gods, and we can find evidence of sacred sexual practices. But most of the literary evidence for the practice of people doing sex work as temple functionaries, or as part of a religious ritual, is actually fairly difficult to come by. The literary evidence tends to center on jocular, exoticized, or condemnatory references to the practice, ascribed to other countries or groups.

I was not able to find any references to shrine prostitution performed in Pan’s name anywhere in ancient literature. I was certainly not able to find references to it in Caesarea Philippi. The archeology of the site does not suggest that the (very small) complex had space for private rooms for such behaviors, or a place at hand where finances could be securely stored. The shrine to Pan itself was open air. Is it possible that sex workers congregated at places where travelers would be visiting and celebrating? Sure! Any time you have crowds and tourists you’ll find sex workers. But did the sex workers work for the shrine of Pan? Probably not. The Panion itself didn’t have a building, so there was no reliable place to store goods or money (Berlin, “Archeology of Ritual,” 31). By the time an actual temple was constructed there in the early Roman period, it was dedicated to Augustus, and there’s little reason to think that a temple to infamous killjoy Augustus would have featured such services.

What about sex with goats? The origin for this claim, that people carried out zoophilia in Pan’s name, is probably Herodatus. According to Herodatus, in Mendes an Egyptian woman once had public sex with a goat for the purpose of honoring Pan (Histories 2.46.4). It could also be from Strabo, who said that, according to the Greek poet Pindar, the women of Mendes have sex with goats (17.19), though he doesn’t mention Pan. So what should we think about this? First, our only reference to bestiality for Pan is an account from Egypt, not Palestine. Second, both accounts are late and legendary. Third, they both center around this one city in Egypt. Fourth, they’re Greeks talking about Egyptians. 

As near as I can tell, we do not have any literary evidence from any ancient society saying that they themselves have sex with animals for the purpose of honoring any god. Sex between animals and gods, or gods in the form of animals and humans, does appear in ancient mythology, including legends of Pan. But there is no evidence that people thought it was worshipful behavior to do this themselves. There’s an epigram from Martial suggesting this may have been done in an arena, but we should remember that Martial says a lot of things and at any rate people in arenas usually don’t want to be there. (There’s a similar story of forced bestiality in an arena in The Golden Ass, but consider the source.) Like shrine prostitution, this is not behavior people claim for themselves – but we would surely expect them to leave records of it if they believe it to be respectable ritual behavior. The fact that Herodatus says that Egyptians have sex with goats for Pan is not evidence that anyone had sex with goats for Pan – just that Herodatus would be fascinated if weird people in the east did this.

So I have to express skepticism for both of these claims – that at Caesarea Philippi worshippers would practice shrine prostitution, or would have sex with animals to worship Pan. One of these practices does not seem to be associated with Pan, if indeed there is evidence for it anywhere in the world. The latter seems to be legendary and exclusively associated with unreliable accounts from Egypt.

This brings us to Appian Media’s most lurid charge: that the site was a place where human sacrifice occurred. What’s the evidence for this?

Human Sacrifice

According to Appian Media, worshippers at the shrine of Pan would throw a goat into the water, and if it sank the offering was accepted. If it floated, the next offering would be a child.

The origin for this claim is probably Eusebius, who recounts the story of a Roman senator and martyr named Astyrius who lived in Galilee in the third century. Eusebius credits Astyrius with a miracle and exorcism. According to Eusebius, at the grotto of Pan on a feast day, a sacrificial victim (Eusebius doesn’t say what kind) would be tossed into the water and caused to disappear. Astyrius perceived a demon caused this, and prayed to banish it. When he did, the sacrificial victim reappeared, and the false miracle never occurred again (7.17).

You’ll notice that Appian Media’s version is a bit different. First, Eusebius says nothing about the wonder being conditional. It’s an annual event that always occurs. Second, Eusebius doesn’t say anything about the sacrifice being a goat first, then a child – it’s just a sacrifice, probably an animal. (Eusebius would have surely made much of it being a human if he’d heard such a thing!) Third, Appian Media’s version drops the obvious mythological details from the telling. Eusebius’s version is thoroughly supernatural – it’s a saint’s legend. In the Appian Media version, the sacrifice occurs according to the vagaries of nature.

Is there any historical truth to the Appian Media version? I wasn’t able to confirm any of their details. For instance, I cannot find any evidence that goats were sacrificed to Pan. In Herodatus’s account of the Mendesian worshippers of Pan (take it with a grain of salt) the worshippers explicitly did not sacrifice goats out of deference to Pan’s goatish features (Robichaud, Pan, 28). 

What about humans?

The most likely link between Caesarea Philippi and human sacrifice is the Phoenician people. The Phoenicians, who may have called themselves or been identified as Canaanites (Mark 7:24-30; Matt 15:21-28), could be found in Tyre, Sidon, Byblos, and Carthage. There are references to Bronze Age Canaanites sacrificing children to Molech in the Hebrew Bible, but more relevant and recent to the Pan era would be the reports of Carthaginian sacrifice, which appear in some Greek texts. The Phoenicians of Carthage may have practiced human sacrifice and are accused of doing so by some later Greek writers, but many scholars today argue that the Tophet of Carthage was a site for the burial and dedication of stillborn or deceased infants, not the sacrifice of living ones. Phoenicians may have favored the dedication of small clay statues of their children as a votive offering in place of living ones. This is not dissimilar from the Hebrew practice of sacrificing an animal in the place of a firstborn child (Exod 13:13).

Usually, child sacrifice in the ancient world is (say it with me!) something people accuse other people of doing, not something they claim to do themselves. The Romans in particular were horrified at the idea of human sacrifice and regarded it as a monstrous act – as Livy put it, “alien to the Roman spirit” (History of Rome 23.37). Strabo insisted that the Romans put a stop to human sacrifices (Geography 4.1.13) and Caesar reported on Druid sacrifice as part of his portrait of the Celtic people as deserving the genocide he unleashed on them (Gallic Wars 6.16). For the Romans, Greeks, and Jews, the idea that the Phoenicians practiced human sacrifice was simply part of the evidence that this was a strange, foreign, deviant people. If – and it’s a big if – the Phoenician people of Northern Galilee practiced human sacrifice, it’s improbable that the Hellenizing Seleucids allowed it to continue in high-traffic, public spaces.

So in this spirit, it is even more unlikely that in the first century, a Roman client like Herod Phillip maintained a shrine in his capital where human sacrifice was widely practiced. Demographically, it doesn’t make sense. This was a shrine that had historically catered to a rural population, where high birth rates were a key component of maintaining the agrarian labor force – not much sense in sacrificing your children if you’re going to lose half of them to disease and you need every hand you can get for the plough. By the time Paneas became an urban shrine, the new visitors would have largely been drawn from the Greek and Roman bureaucratic class settling the area. They didn’t practice human sacrifice, and human sacrifices would have been particularly inappropriate at the new shrine to Caesar that stood on the grounds. The archeology doesn’t bear out a history of child sacrifice, either. For all the animal bones recovered in Pan’s temple grounds, human skeletons remain elusive – except for the tombs and cemeteries in the area, which is where you would expect to find them. Was there ever human sacrifice at Paneas? Maybe, in the Bronze Age days, but only maybe. In the Greek era, or in Jesus’s day? No.

So what would you actually sacrifice at Paneas? According to the archeological record, lamps. Lots and lots of lamps. According to the archeological record, in the Greek era before the temple to Augustus the site of the shrine was probably a place for ritual dining. We can find a lot of evidence of utensils, animal bones, and dishes left at the site. This probably means that worshippers went to go eat in the presence of Pan. A portion of food would be left for the god, and the rest would be consumed by worshippers at a feast in his honor (Berlin, “Archeology of Ritual,” 30-31). In the Roman era, worshippers seem to have purchased and left votive lamps to either Augustus or Pan (“Archeology of Ritual,” 32). But their kids? Doesn’t seem like it.

Conclusion

I don’t think there’s good evidence to support the idea that Jesus specifically chose the site of Pan’s shrine to declare that he was the messiah, nor that the “gates of Hades” is a reference to the shrine at hand. I also don’t think there’s good evidence for the more lurid claims that have been made about this shrine in the media sources I’ve looked it. It honestly sounds like more of a picnic area. 

Unfortunately, slickly produced media and confident proclamations about history get more traction than academic publications, but the history behind them seems to have largely gone unchecked. I haven’t looked in detail at Vander Laan’s or Appian Media’s other content, but the patterns I found while researching this weren’t promising. 

History matters, and good history matters. I wish I could say with confidence that historical media made for a general audience was reliable and trustworthy, but unfortunately, when sources aren’t provided, it’s hard to know. 

I think this specific historical narration of the Gospels should probably be retired. I simply cannot corroborate the claims made in this media. And that’s frustrating.