Resurrection Parallels in Myths

When the New Testament’s account of Jesus’ life and resurrection is compared with mytholgies of the Ancient Near Eastern world, some similarities appear. Many scholars regard the whole topic as insubstantial and rather passé, having been thrashed over ever since James Frazer’s 1922 book The Golden Bough. A number of writers consider it a very current and impressive issue, though -- as Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy put it:

The stories told about Osiris-Dionysus will no doubt sound familiar. He is the Son of God who is born to a virgin on the 25th of December before three shepherds. He is a prophet who offers his followers the chance to be born again through the rites of baptism. He is a wonderworker who raises the dead and miraculously turns water into wine at a marriage ceremony. He is God incarnate who dies at Easter, sometimes through crucifixion, but who resurrects on the third day. He is a savior who offers his followers redemption through partaking in a meal of bread and wine, symbolic of his body and blood. The Jesus story is a synthesis of the Jewish myth of the Messiah Joshua (in Greek Jesus) with these Pagan myths of the dying and resurrecting Godman.

But no-one ever worshiped Osiris-Dionysius. This is a composite god the authors have created from several very different religious traditions widely separated in time and space (some post-dating Christianity), while selectively ignoring the differences. They further use Christian terminology and concepts to describe the composite cult which results. The fourth-century church may have been too clever by half in setting Christian festivals on Pagan holidays, but in the Ante-Nicene Fathers there are ten, large, thick volumes of Christian writings which predate such decisions, and which make it very clear the dating "parallels" were a late add-on rather than an early adoption. These and further points are made in the links below, and the reader is encouraged to take the source documents and evaluate for themselves the quality of whichever parallels interest them from the above quote.

Freke and Gandy are the most popular of recent updaters of James Frazer's ideas from The Golden Bough, first published in 1890, which proposed a dying-and-rising-god archetype. The enterprise was long-abandoned in academia by the end of the 20th century, particularly after the 1987 critique of Johnathan Z. Smith and 1998 critique of Mark S. Smith. In 2002 Tryggve N.D. Mettinger made a meticulous study of Ugaritic Baal, Melqart-Heracles, Adonis, Eshmun-Asclepius, Dumuzi-Tammuz, and Osiris -- all the usual suspects. He found some evidence of dying and rising -- more than the Smiths had granted -- but nonetheless concluded:

...as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world. While studied with profit against the background of Jewish resurrection belief, the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.

David Frankfurter, reviewing Mettinger in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review (see links), concluded:

Mettinger has shown, without the pro- or anti-Christian biases of his forebears, the historical existence of some ancient gods apparently believed to die and to be resurrected. Even more, without turning these gods into mere metaphors for the cycle of seasons, he has offered the reader a nuanced appreciation of their seasonal and fertility connections.

But it is precisely in this rigorous attention to differences and to the various meanings of gods' deaths and reappearances that Mettinger's work fractures the very usefulness of the category "dying and rising god." By the end of the monograph, the category emerges as a rather simplistic generalization for a very wide array of gods and a very murky range of rituals. What does it mean, for example, for these gods to "die"? They might descend for a time to the underworld, disappear from agricultural or seasonal experience, or frame ritual traditions of mourning -- in no case identical to "death" as experienced on a regular human (or even royal) scale. Likewise, a god's "resurrection" means vegetative, agricultural, or seasonal emergence, a divine image's "appearance" by procession at a particular temple, or the frame for ritual traditions of celebration -- not the kind of revivification imagined in the biblical tradition (e.g., Ezekiel 37, Daniel 12, 2 Baruch 50-51).

This background, I think, most successfully explains the more-or-less complete neglect of The Jesus Mysteries in academic work over the past decade. Following Mettinger, I would suggest that the best way to form an opinion on this is to read the sources, and compare them with the central example of the resurrection in the gospels (plus 1 Cor 15 and 1 Thess 4 in Paul's writings), and then compare this with the Jewish intertestamental resurrection hope on show in passages such as 2 Maccabees 7. Judge for yourself which looks closer.