Was the Resurrection of Jesus Borrowed From Pagan Myths (Part 1)

The founding belief of Christianity is that Jesus was raised from the dead as the unique human-divine Son of God. This startling claim seems easy to dismiss as a sad misunderstanding or a deliberate fiction that fooled gullible people thousands of years ago. But if Jesus did not rise, the existence of a false resurrection account raises some questions:

This series will consider the cumulative evidence for the resurrection by exploring four central questions:

Question 1: Did later pagan influence add a resurrection story to the Jesus tradition?

Question 2: Did Jesus’s Jerusalem disciples invent a false resurrection story?

Question 3: What happened to Jesus’s body?

Question 4: Does the resurrection claim meet any criteria for a valid hypothesis?

This first part of this series will investigate the claim of pagan influence.

Question 1: Did later pagan influence add a resurrection story to the Jesus tradition?

PART 1

First-century Greco-Roman culture elevated many dead heroes to the realm of the gods, transforming them into semi-deities through a process known as apotheosis. It has therefore been suggested that Jesus’s first followers in Palestine only considered him to be a human Messiah, but this understanding changed when Jewish preachers took the message to Gentile cities such as Antioch. Members of the growing church in these paganized cultures then enthusiastically raised a human Jesus to the level of a demi-god and invented the story of him rising from death to join God in heaven.

At face value, this appears to be a reasonable suggestion. However, the following facts seriously undermine the argument:

A. Early dating of the resurrection belief

B. Lack of precedent for a bodily resurrection in pagan culture

C. Significant differences between resurrection and apotheosis

D. Communication between the early churches

Let us explore each of these points.

A. Early dating of the resurrection belief

There is clear evidence of early belief in Jesus’s resurrection as the Son of God.

The Roman historian Tacitus (AD 55–120) wrote about Emperor Nero’s action against Christians in AD 64 after the devastating fire in Rome, and he referred to Jesus’s crucifixion and a related superstitious belief among his followers:

“Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, the author of the name, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus. And a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome” (Annals 15.44).

It seems likely that this “mischievous superstition” was belief in Jesus’s deity and his rising from death.

Pliny the Younger (AD 61–113) was a Roman governor in Asia Minor. In a report to Emperor Trajan about his actions taken against Christians, he commented on the “madness” of those who were offering “a form of invocation to Christ, as to a god,” and he noted that some Christians admitted to having worshipped Jesus twenty years previously (Epistles 10.96).

Ignatius (AD 11) On his way from Antioch to martyrdom in Rome around AD 110, Ignatius wrote letters to various churches in which he described how the risen Jesus had invited his disciples to touch him to see he was not a spirit, and he referred to Jesus as the Son of God who had become the physical descendant of David.

The Letter of Barnabas (AD 70–130) significantly used the Jewish term “eighth day” to describe the Sunday “on which Jesus rose again from the dead.” This important letter also called Jesus the Son of God whose blood had provided the remission of sins.

The Apostle Paul. The letters of the Apostle Paul, written within a few decades of Jesus’s death, confirm that the central doctrines of Jesus’s divinity and resurrection were already an established part of church teaching.

These surviving texts provide evidence of an early and widespread belief that Jesus was the resurrected Son of God whose death had atoned for human sin. These doctrines were therefore not late creations.

In his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown claimed that Emperor Constantine elevated Jesus to divinity in AD 325 at the Council of Nicaea, and that until this time Jesus’s followers had only admired him as a human teacher. However, this is totally incorrect, as even the highly skeptical scholar Bart Ehrman points out:

“Everyone at the Council—and in fact, just about every Christian everywhere—already agreed that Jesus was divine, the Son of God. The question being debated was how to understand Jesus’ divinity in light of the circumstance that he was also human” (Truth and Fiction, 14).

There is general scholarly agreement that Jesus was worshipped as a resurrected, divine being very soon after his death, so these beliefs cannot be explained as the result of later pagan influence. Biblical scholar N. T. Wright expresses this understanding clearly:

“The earliest Christians very quickly came to the startling conclusion that they were under obligation, without ceasing to be Jewish monotheists, to worship Jesus. An older assumption, that this could only have happened insofar as they abandoned their Judaism and allowed pagan ideas to creep in surreptitiously, must now be abandoned. The evidence for the phenomenon I am describing is very early, very solid and quite unambiguous” (Challenge, 106).

B. Lack of precedent for a bodily resurrection narrative in pagan culture

You might have read this in The Da Vinci Code: “Nothing in Christianity is original. The pre-Christian god Mithras—called the Son of God and the Light of the World—was born on December 25, died, was buried in a rock tomb, and then resurrected in three days. By the way, December 25 was also the birthday of Osiris, Adonis, and Dionysus. The newborn Krishna was presented with gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (The Da Vinci Code, 232).

Although the book is fictional, Dan Brown describes it as being the result of scholarly research, and false statements such as those quoted above have unfortunately come to be widely accepted as historically correct. Many other books and websites also allege that the Jesus narrative was borrowed from pagan mythologies, and it is popularly believed that many of these myths included a resurrected god. However, it is difficult to find a myth that matches the resurrection narrative.

For example, the often-repeated claim that the Egyptian god Horus was crucified and resurrected after three days is a blatant invention that is not found anywhere in the ancient mythologies.[1] And although the god Osiris was linked to natural cycles of renewal, he was never physically resurrected.[2] Brown’s claim that the Roman god Mithra was resurrected is also nonsense, because this god does not die in any of the myths, and specialists in the field have a very different opinion. For example, Manfred Clauss makes the clear statement that Roman Mithraism was not a forerunner of Christianity (Roman Cult of Mithras, 7), and in an extensive 2017 review of ancient sources, professor of Roman history Attilio Mastrocinque reached this adamant conclusion: “We should get rid of the preconceived idea that the mysteries of Mithra were a sort of pagan Christianity” (Mysteries of Mithras, 92).

Despite repeated claims, the god Attis did not have a birthday in December, did not die to save humanity, and was not crucified or resurrected. Only in the second century AD did the myth develop the detail that Zeus preserved Attis’s body from corruption, but even then, he was not revived and was certainly not resurrected. Historian Guilia Gasparro states that “we cannot talk of the youth’s return to life or ‘resurrection’”; “the vicissitudes of Attis, as we have seen, end once and for all in death . . . Attis does not ‘return’ periodically” (Soteriology, 42, 125). And classical historian Jan Bremmer makes the important comment that the idea of Attis surviving death in some way seems to have been borrowed from Christian traditions: “Attis’s ‘resurrection’ is not mentioned before the third century and seems closely connected with the rise of Christianity” (“Attis,” 550).

Some pagan gods were said to disappear and reappear, often related to the seasonal cycles of nature, and in The Golden Bough of 1890, James Frazer generalized these legends into a category of dying-rising gods. But many modern mythologists now criticize this concept as being too simplistic for the variety of details found in different traditions. For example, concerning Attis as a dying-rising god, Jan Bremmer concludes that “the steady increase in new material from the Ancient Near East has refuted this traditional interpretation” (“Attis,” 534).

It is also difficult to find an example of a historical pagan hero who returned from death to appear to his followers. Apollonius of Tyana (AD 40–120) is often mentioned as a wandering Jesus-type teacher who was believed to have joined the gods after death and became the central figure of a healing cult. However, there is no certainly about how or where he died, as there were at least three different versions, and there is no tradition of a physical resurrection. According to a third century text, a visitor to Tyana did have a dream in which Apollonius appeared to him to assure him that the soul was immortal (Philostratus, Life 8.31), but this story has no similarity with Jesus being physically resurrected and interacting with his disciples after his death.

In short, although popular websites make many wild claims, there is no clear parallel to Jesus’s bodily resurrection in the lives of pagan heroes, and experts in ancient mythology do not support the suggestion that the narrative of his death and resurrection was borrowed from a dying-rising nature-god motif. On the contrary, concepts common to Christianity and pagan cults are found in texts written long after its rise, so there is substantial evidence of influence from Christianity on paganism rather than in the other direction.[3]

Part 2 (in a forthcoming article) of this question will explore the differences between resurrection and apotheosis in addition to communication between the early churches.

If you want to explore additional resources on this topic, consider checking out the following old (and FREE) apologetic works:

William Paley. A View of the Evidences of Christianity

John Kennedy. The Resurrection of Jesus Christ an Historical Fact

Charles Row. A Manual of Christian Evidences

[1]. The closest description to Horus being “resurrected” is that, according to Egyptologist Wallis Budge, the Metternich Stella describes Horus being brought back to life after being stung by a scorpion (Legends of the Gods, 45). However, in modern translations, Horus is merely revived from unconsciousness. See Ancient Egypt and Archaeology, http://www.ancient-egypt.co.uk/metropolitan/pages/cippus,%20metropolitan%20museum.htm.

[2]. James Allen, a translator of the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, writes, “Osiris himself was envisioned as a mummy lying in the depths of the netherworld, the region through which the sun was thought to pass at night. In the middle of the night the Sun merged with Osiris’s body; through this union, the Sun received the power of new life while Osiris was reborn in the Sun” (Egyptian Pyramid Texts, 8).

[3]. For example, professor of ancient history Glen Bowersock comments on the “absorption of Christian elements in late antique paganism, especially soteriological elements” related to salvation. (Hellenism, 44).