Jesus: Just Another Dying-And-Rising Deity?
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Jesus: Just Another Dying-and-Rising Deity? by Catherine Creighton © 2016 Catherine Creighton Introduction Was Christianity just a first and second-century invention? Was there a “Christ conspiracy,” a “forgery and fraud,” a “rehash of older religions,”1 as D. M. Murdoch claims? Did the early Christians borrow Jesus’ death and resurrection from pagan religions? This idea is not new. One can trace it back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century history of religions school (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) where it was first popularized by Sir James Frazer’s 1906 work, The Golden Bough. Following in Frazer’s footsteps, Alfred Loisy claimed that Paul saw Jesus as “a savior-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithra. Like them, he [Jesus] belonged by his origin to the celestial world; like them, he had made his appearance on the earth; like them, he had accomplished a work of universal redemption, efficacious and typical; like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis he had died a violent death, and like them he had returned to life.”2 Over time this theory was heavily criticized by reputable scholars and historians and, consequently, fell out of favor. Recently, however, T. N. D. Mettinger has revived it in his work, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (2001). Skeptics, mythicists and “free thinkers” have followed suit so that books and the Internet have exploded with “parallelomania,” as Samuel Sandmel coined the term.3 Sweeping generalizations are common, like theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss’s claim that 1 D. M. Murdoch, “The Christ Conspiracy,” Truth Be Known (blog), accessed March 23, 2016, http://www.truthbeknown.com/christ.htm. 2 Alfred Loisy, “Christian Mystery,” Hibbert Journal 10 (1911): 51, quoted in Ronald H. Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan/Probe, 1984), 170. 3 Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81 (1962):1-13, accessed March 7, 2016, https://www.sbl-site.org/assets/pdfs/presidentialaddresses/JBL81_1_1Sandmel1961.pdf. Although Sandmel admits that he was not the first one to use this term, current usage seems to trace back to him. resurrection is nothing new. In fact, it is “as old as every god and every creation myth.”4 Theologian Robert M. Price maintains that “the figure of the gospels is the literary deposit of a syncretistic concatenation of myths and religious initiation mysteries.”5 But does the evidence support these copycat theories? This paper will reveal what the primary sources actually say, demonstrating that no significant parallels for Jesus’ death and resurrection existed during Christianity’s infancy. But first I will examine some of the problematic methodologies underlying these theories. Problematic Methodology: Differences One particular problem with copycat theorists is that they marvel at the alleged similarities while ignoring the striking differences. For instance, there is the difference between cyclical versus linear. The resurrection of Jesus, as well as the final resurrection of believers, is a linear, one-time event. Pagan beliefs about rebirth, however, are cyclical. The mystery religions centered round the vegetation cycles. For the Egyptians, sunrise and sunset were seen as cycles of death and rebirth which were reenacted in the Underworld. There is also the difference between a mythical distant past and a definitive historical event. As Bruce Metzger explains, “the deities of the Mysteries…were nebulous figures of an imaginary past” whereas “the Divine Being whom the Christian worshipped as Lord was known as a real Person on earth only a short time before the earliest documents of the New Testament were written.”6 4 Lawrence Kraus, “Life, the Universe, and Nothing (III): Is It Reasonable to Believe There Is a God?” Reasonable Faith (debate), August 16, 2013, accessed March 23, 2016, http://www.reasonablefaith.org/life-the-universe-and- nothing-is-it-reasonable-to-believe-there-is-a-go. 5 Robert Price, “The Christ Myth and the Christian Goddess,” r m p (blog), (2009) accessed March 23, 2016 http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/art_christgoddess.htm. 6 Bruce M. Metzger, “Considerations of Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity,” The Harvard Theological Review 48, no. 1 (Jan., 1955): 12. 2 There are also conceptual differences. New Testament scholar N. T. Wright explains that resurrection meant “a new embodied life,” not “a disembodied ‘heavenly’ life,” or “a redescription or redefinition of death. It was death’s reversal.”7 Moreover, Jesus’ death was voluntary, an act of sacrificial love, whereas in the mystery religions the individual died involuntarily as in the murders of Dionysus and Osiris, or in despair, as in Attis’s suicidal self- castration (see below). But mythicists, like atheist historian Richard Carrier, opine that these differences are “moot” because pagan gods “nevertheless died and rose back to life.”8 However, this is oversimplifying evidence, which Price admits is “fragmentary and unclear in the extreme,”9 to make it fit the mythicist’s speculations. Thus, for Carrier, pagan myths end up sounding “sufficiently similar” to Christianity’s “original beliefs,”10 allegedly promoted by the apostle Paul while Jesus’ this-worldly physical resurrection is seen as a later invention.11 But such speculations ignore how a monotheistic Pharisee like Paul would have fiercely resisted polytheistic paganism rather than borrow from it. Moreover, as Wright observes, the type of “transphysical” body (neither completely immaterial/transfigured, nor completely physical) described in the Gospels regarding the risen Jesus cannot be attributed to a later “Judaizing” embodied version of the story. We “might expect a hellenistic-style ‘spiritualizing’ of the 7 N. T. Wright, “Chapter Two: Shadows, Souls and Where They Go: Life Beyond Death in Ancient Paganism,” in The Resurrection of the Son of God: Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3 (Fortress Press, 2003), under “4. Conclusion: The One-Way Street,” Amazon Kindle edition. 8 Richard Carrier, “Ehrman on Historicity Recap,” FreeThoughtBlogs (blog), July 24, 2012, accessed March 22, 2016, http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1794. 9 Robert Price, “The Christ Myth and the Christian Goddess.” 10 Richard Carrier, “Ehrman on Historicity Recap.” Emphasis in the original. 11 Richard Carrier, “The Spiritual Body of Christ and the Legend of the Empty Tomb, The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave, eds. Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2005), Amazon Kindle edition. 3 tradition, not a re-Judaizing of it.”12 But even worse, Carrier himself admits that “metaphorical resurrections” of pagan gods “are not quite the same thing as a pre-Christian passion story.” That is, “the Jesus story has more to it” than “an agricultural resurrection theme.”13 So if the Jesus story “has more to it,” then how can it be “sufficiently similar” to sustain causal dependence? Chronology and Terminology Clearly differences do, in fact, matter. But there are other methodological problems like the chronological fallacy of drawing on sources for pagan parallels which postdate Christianity’s origins. After all, if Christianity supposedly borrowed from earlier pagan beliefs, then those beliefs need to be demonstrated to have preceded not postdated Christianity’s origins. In fact, not much source material exists for the Hellenistic mysteries until the third century. But reading third century source material back into earlier centuries is bad methodology. The mythicist would argue that such later accounts reflect earlier beliefs. But this ignores how the mysteries evolved over time as well as how many differences existed “between these religions and earlier expressions of such mystery experience (for which adequate information is extremely slim).”14 Another problem in methodology is reading Christian terminology back into pagan myths. As Ronald H. Nash notes, “[i]t is an odd kind of scholarship that first describes a pagan rite in Christian terminology and then marvels at the alleged parallels.”15 Dionysus/Bacchus Krauss demonstrates this terminology fallacy when he marvels that “Dionysus and Jesus are so close to being identical, they were both born from a virgin mother, they both had a divine 12 N. T. Wright, “Chapter Thirteen: General Issues in the Easter Stories,” in The Resurrection of the Son of God, under “3. The Surprise of the Resurrection Narratives: (iii) The Strange Portrait of Jesus in the Stories.” 13 Richard Carrier, “Kersey Graves and The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors,” The Secular Web (blog), 2003, accessed March 5, 2016, http://infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/graves.html. 14 Ronald H. Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan/Probe, 1984), 128. 15 Ibid., 142. 4 father, they both were resurrected, they both transformed wine into water.”16 But the only legitimate comparison here is the divine father, which is not exactly “earth shattering” considering the divine component of mythologies and the sexual promiscuity among pagan gods. In fact, both versions of the myth have Zeus impregnating the mother, either the mortal Semele, or his daughter Persephone (or even Persephone’s mother Demeter).17 Hesiod wrote, “Semele, daughter of Cadmus was joined with [Zeus] in love and bare him a splendid son, joyous Dionysus, – a mortal woman an immortal son. And now they both are gods.”18 Zeus then killed Semele with his lightning because, according to first century Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, he wanted his baby to be born, “not of a mortal woman but of two immortals, and thus should be immortal from its very birth.”19 So Zeus “found for him another womb wherein to rest, for he hid him in his thigh and fastened it with golden pins to conceal him from Hera.”20 Some see this as a second birth or “rebirth.” However, since all these births, including the aforementioned “rebirth,” were the product of a sexual union, none of them can be considered virgin births.