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Veteran Member
Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: Ontario, Canada
Posts: 1,435
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I see that I am once again being misrepresented. I have never subscribed to the “Kersey Graves Syndrome” or the mania for parallels, either in The Jesus Puzzle, or on my website, simply because I recognize the controversial nature of the case in its extreme form, although I support it in principle in a limited and qualified fashion. (See my website book review of Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ.)
In regard to the idea of resurrection, this is what I say in The Jesus Puzzle (p.115-16):
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New Testament scholars concerned with minimizing the common ground between Christianity and the mysteries have tended to focus on the matter of resurrection, pointing out that actual physical rising of the pagan deities is (with the possible exception of Dionysos and Adonis) nowhere clearly presented. But this is to a great extent a straw man. The Greeks did not look for the survival of the body, an idea they found repugnant. It was the soul that was the recipient of everlasting life. We should not expect those who had such an outlook to invent gods who were resurrected in flesh in order to bestow the same fate on humans. At a minimum, these deities were seen as having overcome the effects of death in some way, especially of death as a finality or as an eternal fate in some dreary underworld existence…
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In the second edition, this point will be given an expanded discussion. In preparation for that, I have addressed the question in a long response in my upcoming Reader Feedback file on the subject of Cybele and Attis and their relationship to Christianity. Before I quote a draft of that below, I want to ask about the website someone provided a link to above, one titled “Parallel Pagan Saviors Examined.” It purports to offer a response to my views on the subject, but in downloading that page, the final half of it does not come through properly. Most of it just reads “text text” under a series of headings. So I am not able to read what they have said (or more likely, misrepresented) in response to me. Is that page not downloadable in full for everyone? Is there another way of getting the whole of it come in?
Anyway, here is what I will be saying in the final part of the Reader Feedback response I referred to (I should have the file up in a week or so, and it will also contain a long discussion of the Son of Man "problem"):
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Now, it has become crucial to make an important clarification here, one I have mentioned before, including in The Jesus Puzzle (p.115-116). On both sides of the perennial question concerning the similarities between the pagan and Christian salvation cults, there have been excesses. Apologetic websites countering claims that everything in the Jesus story has previous parallels in the mysteries, down to the moles on his skin, are proliferating, and poor old Kersey Graves [Sixteen Crucified Saviors] has become a punching bag. At the same time, less informed skeptics continue to circulate these detailed comparisons between Jesus and savior gods like Osiris, Attis and Mithras which presents the former as nothing more than a plagiarized mirror of the latter. The battle centers particularly on the idea of the god's "resurrection." Yes, on this score the historians of the History of Religions School of the early 20th century did get carried away, though I think it was more in the nature of a semantic miscalculation than a 'factual' one. Both sides need to nuance their focus and stop presenting straw men.
When we speak of a "resurrection" or "resuscitation" in the pagan mysteries, we are not (or should not be) speaking of a return to earth by the god, in flesh, to resume his former life or remain for a time on the material plane. Apologists, and even some mainstream scholars, exercise themselves needlessly over this point, anxious to show that the gods of the mysteries did not rise from their graves to walk the earth again in the way that Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels. This is certainly true. Osiris was not reassembled by Isis to stand on the banks of the Nile once more. Attis did not return to earth after the period commemorated by his mourners; the Hilaria [part of the Attis "passion week" festival] was not a rejoicing to celebrate Attis' return to the fields to tend his sheep and play his pipe. One of the versions of the Attis myth (as recorded by Arnobius) expressly has Zeus refusing to restore him to his previous life.
But no religion has ever celebrated death per se, and certainly not death as a finality. It may be a departing of this world, but the great majority of humanity has always hoped for an afterlife, and preferably a happy one. Osiris and Attis, perhaps the two most prominent 'dying and rising' savior gods of the ancient world, did not need to return to earth. They conquered death to set up shop in the next world, where they welcomed the souls of those who were joined with them and to whom they had shown the way. The future lay in that next world, not in this one, and it was generally regarded as a future in spirit only, the body shed forever.
In ancient Egypt, only the Pharaohs and the nobles could afford to undergo the rites of passage (including proper embalming) that would guarantee survival in the world of the dead. The masses simply perished into oblivion. The mystery religions as a social phenomenon arose in part so that ordinary individuals could take their eternal fates into their own hands and achieve salvation through being initiated into the rites and knowledge that would open the door to the afterlife. Through being linked with the savior, they could join him in a resurrection to a new existence. It was not in flesh and it was not on earth, and thus it did not require that the god be resurrected in that sense as a precedent-setting guarantee.
To some extent, the Jews saw things differently. Though there were a variety of viewpoints about what, if anything, happened after death, Hebrew thought was not strong on afterlife concepts until a couple of centuries before the turn of the era. When the idea of survival after death became popular, it tended to expect God's (or a Messiah's) arrival to set up a Kingdom of God on a transformed earth. Sectarian expressions sometimes deviated from this and saw a heavenly messiah-figure as guaranteeing an ascent to heaven of the righteous where they would assume "thrones and crowns." Paul has a foot in both worlds, which is fitting since Christianity as originally formulated was a syncreticism of the Hellenistic and Jewish. United with the god Christ Jesus through baptism and faith, the devotee is guaranteed resurrection into the kingdom of God, where "we will always be with the Lord" (1 Thess. 4:17); but not in flesh and blood, for "flesh and blood cannot possess the kingdom of God, and the perishable cannot possess immortality" (1 Cor. 15:50). As he says in that passage, Christ himself constitutes the prototype for the resurrected believer's new spiritual body.
And yet Paul in that passage fails to tell us that this "prototype" is a resurrected body that was formerly flesh, dying on earth and rising from his tomb; in fact his entire argument excludes it, despite traditional insistence on reading such a thing into the text. Which leads us to another observation that presents a stark reality no one wants to face. Not only do Paul and other epistle writers fail to tell us that Jesus rose from the dead in flesh, or returned to earth after his resurrection (the "seeings" of 1 Cor. 15:5-8 are better understood as visions), the early Christian writings tell us explicity where Jesus went immediately after his rising from death: to Heaven, to take his place at the right hand of God. 1 Peter 3:18-22, Ephesians 1:20, Hebrews 10:12, the hymns of Philippians 2 and 1 Timothy 3:16, exclude any period on earth. (Can we really believe that if there was such a thing, not a single epistle would make mention of it?) In other words, Jesus after his death (which to judge by the early writers is in myth, not history) is resurrected to the afterworld, there to receive his devotees. That is the resurrection which is the "firstfruits," with the resurrection of believers to follow into the same place. This is all that Paul presents to us. Christ's is a resurrection just like that of Osiris and Attis. Whether that afterworld is located above the firmament or below the earth, or in some unspecified spiritual dimension to which souls go, is essentially a matter of cultural difference, as well as cultural attitudes regarding the worthiness and survivability of material flesh and blood. Apparently, in regard to the latter, Paul sympathizes more with the pagan outlook.
If the myths of the savior gods are essentially rooted in the seasonal cycle of the life, death and renewal of agriculture (and there is little dispute about this), then rising must follow dying. But while plants resurrect on the same earth in which they die, it was clear that not even the Pharaohs came back to the same earth, so they were seen as living on in the next world; their this-world aspect lived on in the succeeding Pharaoh. Since the gods who represented, who were responsible for, the life and death cycle of plants did their work from an invisible realm, it was to that invisible realm, to that other world, that the souls of the dead went who achieved salvation. It would seem that Paul and the early Christian writers had much the same concept, for they make nothing of any rising of Jesus in flesh to appear to his followers, or of any concept that we too will rise in flesh. Instead, both Christ and the believer enter the realm of God following resurrection, both with spiritual bodies.
If properly interpreted, the theme of "dying and rising" is not a misnomer when applied to the mystery deities. Apologists are, as is their wont, apealing to straw men. Frazer and others of his time may have been less than clear on what they meant by resurrection; perhaps they were even less than clear in their own minds, and thus share responsibility for creating the straw man in the first place. But there is no reason why we cannot be fully clear today, and argue both sides on that basis, not on a false one. And if we do not insist on reading the Gospels into the epistles, we can also see that earliest Christianity shared in the same basic concept as the mystery religions. Not that Pauline Christianity was based directly on the cycle of the seasons; it was of too recent vintage for that. But its ultimate ancestry was the same, with the addition of its separate input from Judaism.
The Gospels, once they were misinterpreted as history, turned this whole system on its head. Just as Ignatius wanted Christ to have suffered in the same flesh as he himself inhabited, so too did he need Christ to have been resurrected in flesh to guarantee the same destiny for himself. Today's Christians seem to envision some amalgamation of the two ancient thought-worlds. Heaven will be a place where the flesh lives on, immortalized and transformed into perfection. Many, following in Paul's delusional imaginings, see themselves raptured directly to Heaven, avoiding the unpleasant process of death altogether. But everything that science and empirical observation tells us indicates that life is not about immortalizing the individual. There are no discernible gods that direct the cycle of the seasons, but only nature itself, impersonal processes. The plants that die in the winter are not the same as those that are renewed in springtime. We live on in our progeny (which includes that of our ideas), contributing to an ever evolving-process, not in some paradise where nothing changes and the only activity seems to be the unending worship of an insatiable Deity. Personal salvation has been a life-destroying fantasy, obscuring a reality that is much more complex and ultimately, perhaps, far more profound.
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All the best,
Earl Doherty
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02-04-2007, 02:31 PM
