Was Jesus a pagan god?
During Easter week it has become commonplace for skeptics to trot out old arguments from the history of religions school (die Religionsgeschichtlicheschule) about Easter being analogous to, or derived from, older pagan myths and cultic practices. Mistaking the Easter mystery with the myths of Greek and Roman mystery cults is a favorite of online atheists and counter-apologists.
However, it is also a greatly misunderstood approach. Mainly, because those who try to press it into service to support their theories don’t really read much. Thus, it is the duty of any reasonable Christian, or non-Christian, to point out some of the more egregious flaws in this ongoing effort to transform Jesus into a pagan deity. And, to try to do so on or around Easter itself seems appropriate. There are several methodological flaws that “Zeitgeist” inspired skeptics make when employing the pagan Easter line of attack. Let’s look them more closely.
“Parallelomania”: Comparative Religion’s Mysterious Maxim
The first problem is what Samuel Sandmel appropriately referred to as “Parallelomania” in his 1962 JBL article of the same title (although Sandmel admits he first came across the term in 1830). Sandmel crisply defines it as such:
We might for our purposes define parallelomania as that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction.
“Parallelomania” in Journal of Biblical Literature 1962 (81)
The main issue that Sandmel raised was the extravagance with which some scholars eagerly sought out and conveniently found parallels between ancient literary works, usually works of a sacred or religious nature. However, in discovering parallels that are not really there, some scholars made the further error of assuming derivation or source dependence from one text to the other. However, such purported connections were not based on any explicit evidence, but only on the apparent parallel themes or images found in each literary work. It was then further assumed by these same scholars that everyone in the ancient world must have been reading each other books, a phenomenon that, as Sandmel points out, was hardly even the case just a few hundred years ago among men of the same biblical faiths (Catholics, Protestants and Jews).
Positing derivation and borrowing certainly has a place in texts that are closely related. This is not the contention of parallelomania. For example, the four Gospels all clearly tell the same story–even if John is an outlier–about Jesus. No one contests borrowing in these narrow senses. However, attempts to show source derivation based only on vague parallels and shadowy similarities among otherwise unrelated texts, and with no direct evidence for borrowing, have plagued comparative religion studies. Entertaining and curious as parallels may be, even real ones, they do not prove dependence or provenance.
Regarding the “Parallelomania” surrounding Jesus Christ and the Gospel narratives, Komoszewski, Sawyer and Wallace point out five basic, and flawed, assumptions of history of religions parallelomaniacs:
- Parallels between Jesus Christ and pagan deities can be found in any mystery religion.
- Terms used of the Christian message just as naturally fit pagan religions.
- Parallels indicate wholesale dependency.
- Fully developed mystery religions exited before the rise of Christianity
- The purpose and nature of key events are the same in each of these religions
Komoszewksi, Sawyer and Wallace, Reinventing Jesus, 222-223.
Let’s look at each in greater detail.
The 5 Fallacies of Parellelomania
In their analysis, the authors point out five logical fallacies parallelomaniacs make in their attempt to transform Jesus into the Jewish version of Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Mithra or any other number of pagan mystery gods.
The first is the fallacy of composition (Komoszewksi, 223). This happens when lazy historians take features of various mystery cults that existed in disparate cultures and at different times and simply combine them to fabricate a sort of meta-religion, an “artificial unified religion,” which, however, never actually existed at any one place or time. This has been done in an especially egregious way when making comparisons to Christian baptism, as Ronald Nash points out:
We find that there was no pre-Christian doctrine of rebirth for the Christians to borrow….The claim that pre-Christian mysteries regarded their initiation rites as a kind of rebirth is unsupported by any evidence contemporary with such alleged practices. Instead, a view found in much later texts is read back into earlier rites, which are then interpreted quite speculatively as dramatic portrayals of the initiate’s ‘new birth.’ The belief that pre-Christian mysteries used rebirth as a technical term is unsupported by even one single text.
Nash, in Reinventing Jesus, 224.
The second fallacy made by history of religion enthusiasts is the terminological fallacy, or, the intentional application of Christian terms to pagan practices. Historians steeped in Christian theology and biblical studies artificially import decidedly Christian images, thought patterns, and symbols into their analysis of non-christian or pre-christian material. Instead of reading the pagan literature in its own context, parallelomaniacs make the error of eisegesis, or reading Christianity into pagan religion.
One especially awful example produced by parallelomaniacs is the supposed “resurrection” of Osiris. In the most common version of the myth, Osiris is murdered by his brother and his coffin is sunk into the Nile. Isis, Osiris’ wife, discovers the body and returns it to Egypt, but the brother finds it again and this time dismembers Osiris’ body, cutting it into fourteen pieces. Isis eventually recovers the body parts and Osiris comes back to life: Presto! “Resurrection” life! (cf. Komoszewksi, 225). The problems are obvious and many.
The third fallacy is that of dependence. Dependence here suggests that whatever similarities might exist between mystery religion texts and the biblical narratives, it must be on account of dependence (or borrowing) of the one from the other. However, there are stronger and weaker versions of dependence. Strong, or direct, dependence would say that the biblical stories would not exist without direct, literary borrowing from pre-christian texts or practices, i.e., “a strong dependency would mean that the idea of Jesus as a dying and rising savior-god would never have occurred to early believers if they had not become aware of it first in pagan thought” (Komoszewki, 227).
However, there are weaker forms of dependency. For example, the New Testament writers wrote in Greek. Thus, they employed the language of their culture to describe what had happened in the life of Jesus and to explain the meaning of those events. In addition to language, there are simply common human experiences that “underlie specific cultural forms” (Komoszewksi, 228). For example, the many parables of Jesus draw from images that almost any agrarian society would be familiar with. Hugo Rahner calls this kind of dependency, “contact from below,” saying that:
Every religion creates sensible image of spiritual truths: we call such things symbols. Even the revelation of the God-man could only reach men by means of images which they could understand: ‘and without parable he did not speak unto them (Mark 4:34); and when he speaks of matters no longer pertaining to this world, his message is wrapped in terms of fundamental human experience; he speaks of a father, of a king, of light and darkness, of living water and of burning fire, of a pearl and of a seed.
Rahner, Greek Myth and Christian Mystery, 29.
Finally, Paul, John, Peter, the other writers of the New Testament, and early church Fathers like Justin Martyr or Clement of Alexandria are trying to use language and images that have a “missionary motive” (Komoszewksi, 229). They are trying to reach those around them and make the Gospel of Jesus Christ understandable to them in their pagan context. Paul does this explicitly in Acts 17, for example, when he addresses the temple to the unknown god. Consider also the words of Clement of Alexandria:
Oh, come thou bemused dupe! Lean no more upon the thyrsus and cast away the ivy wreath. Remove the fillets from thy brow, throw off the deer-skin; come, be sober! I will show thee the Logos and the mysteries of the Logos, and I will give thee understanding of them by means of images that are familiar to thee. Here is the mountain beloved of God, not, like Cithaeron, a place where tragedies befall, but satisfied in the drama of truth.
Clement, Exhortation to the Heathen, XII (emphasis added).
In short, just as God accommodates the special revelation of the Bible to human language, so do the authors of the Bible and the Bible’s expositors use the particular features of those languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic) to convey divine truth. The use of language, images, and words that Greek and Roman pagans would have understood is what one scholar termed “acquisitive adaptation” (Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery, 20). It is the repurposing of common terms or familiar rituals by investing them with new propositional content and meaning.
The fourth fallacy is the fallacy of chronology. This fallacy is made in two ways, first, by assuming that there was a significant presence of Greek mystery religion in Palestine prior to the writing of the New Testament. However, there is scant evidence to suggest that this was the case. Moreover, there is abundant evidence to suggest the opposite: that second-temple Judaism had an exaggerated concern about religious syncretism of any kind; the residual effects of the Babylonian exile having not ceased in Israel before the time of Christ. Thus, to suggest that Mark, Luke, John, Matthew and the other NT writers borrowed heavily from Greek religion would require some actual evidence; concrete evidence of real borrowing. But, there is none.
In addition, there is another chronological problem. That of borrowing in the opposite direction; of later Greco-Roman mystery cults taking their cue from the emerging cult of Christ. By the third and fourth century, borrowing from Christian theology is quite plausibly the case. The relationship between Christianity and the mystery cults developed over time, like anything else does. If Christians borrowed terminology or symbols to try and convey the Gospel to the pagan, then the pagan also adopted Christian ideas and images to refashion his cult, perhaps hoping to make the cults more appeasing to those abandoning Mithras for Christ. Simply put, as Christianity grew in size and influence, the cults reacted:
And now for the final cause of similarity between Christianity and the cults. That cause is nothing less than the growing influence of Christianity to which in late antiquity the cults themselves began to be subject…by this time [4th century] the relationship between Christianity and the cults had changed, as compared with the centuries of Paul and Clement. The world of the cults is still a rich one, but it is in decay, and it is victorious Christianity that confronts it….It is therefore surely not unreasonable to suppose that–given the growing authority of the Christian Church–Christian practice should have had some sort of influence on what was still a popular institution and that it should have had an effect on the form the disintegrating cults began to assume.
Rahner, Greek Myths, 33.
Thus, in later interactions,
Christianity influenced even its enemies. The Phrygian priests of the Great Mother compared their feast of the vernal equinox to the Christian Easter and ascribed to the blood shed in the taurobolium the redeeming power possessed by that of the Lamb of God.
in Rahner, 34
In sum, according to Komoszewski, Sawyer and Wallace:
Only after the rise of Christianity did mystery religions begin to look suspiciously like the Christian faith. Once Christianity became known, many of the mystery cults consciously adopted Christian ideas so that their deities would be perceived to be on par with Jesus.
Reinventing Jesus, 234.
A final fallacy the authors point out is that of the intentional fallacy. In other words, the intent of Christian belief and practice is utterly other than that of pagan beliefs and practices. There really is no parallel in the “purpose and nature of Christianity” (Komoszewski, 234) when held up against any particular pagan mystery cult, or even the fabricated “meta-religion” of nonchalant scholars.
In this sense, Christianity is the “anti-mystery” religion. It is a faith to be “proclaimed from the rooftops” which is open and available to all. The mystery of God’s revelation is not esoteric or hidden; it is not reserved for a select few. It is revealed mystery, both in the words and the Word of God–Jesus Christ. That does not mean there is nothing mysterious about Christianity. There is. However, that mystery relates not to what is hidden, but to the depth and breadth of that which is revealed. Can anyone truly fathom the mystery revealed in Jesus Christ’s atoning death on the cross? Can we really grasp the fulness of Christ’s resurrection life, and the power of the Holy Spirit to apply both salvation and sanctification to the life of the believer?
These divine mysteries are not like that of Attis, or Adonis or Osiris; obscure and mythical gods incapable of offering real redemption, a historical salvation, and a genuine cleansing of the soul. Gerhard Kittel illuminated the intentional fallacy best, when he contrasted the Gospel of early Christianity with the pagan cult:
The confession of primitive Christianity was this: ‘Now we are justified through faith, and have made peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. I am sure that neither death nor life nor any creature can separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ our Lord.’ Whoever has understood these verses knows wherein lay the unique character, the ‘otherness’ of primitive Christianity; by reason of this he also knows where lay the real depth of its power against all other religions and philosophies of life.
Indeed, whoever knows and has understood these verses knows that Jesus is the true Lord, that this Lord is truly Risen, and that no other religions or philosophy of men has added to this, even if some have foreshadowed His coming.
Happy Resurrection Day!
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