Early Christian Responses to Purported Parallels of Resurrection Myths
(avg. read time: 13–27 mins.)
The claim that stories about Jesus—particularly the gospel story of his resurrection—are in some sense derivative of myths about gods and heroes has been a recurrent trope in scholarly and popular literature. The validity, veracity, and significance of the claimed derivations also continues to be debated, including of the old category of “dying and rising gods.”1 It is also a popular subject in anti-Christian and apologetic polemics.
Among critics of Christianity, the claim that either Christianity derives from myths about dying and rising gods or, at least, that it should be treated in the same fashion has frequently ebbed and flowed in popularity.2 Some also make the connection with mythology for one reason or another without necessarily having the same agenda.3 Christians, especially apologists, have responded to these claims in two overarching fashions. One approach, which seems to be the minority approach, takes for granted the similarities (at least in broad terms, if not in the details) of Jesus’s resurrection with these stories and seeks to explain the commonalities in a fashion amenable to Christ being the unique truth to which the myths point. The most famous exemplar of this response is J. R. R. Tolkien in his “On Fairy-Stories” and in his conversation with C. S. Lewis that led to the latter’s conversion,4 but it also has some more recent advocates.5 The other approach has been to undermine superficial similarities, especially by focusing on the differences between the myths and the Gospels or early Christian gospel proclamation, or by arguing that the relevant developments happened too late to influence Christianity in this regard.6 The stress on discontinuity also appears among sources that are not so apologetically oriented or have a broader focus.7
But there is an aspect of this debate that I do not think has been given sufficient attention to this point. To my knowledge, no one has provided a focused, extensive analysis of how the ancient Christians responded to the posited parallels insofar as they did (e.g., no early Christian responded to the supposed parallel of Mithras or show any awareness of any such story, and we have no reference from ancient sources saying he died and rose).8 They lived in a time when these myths were better known, told, enacted, portrayed, and shaped in a variety of familiar and formal settings.9 As today, these parallels were not a dominant theme in Christian/non-Christian interactions (direct and indirect), but the ancients did address them. What, then, did they have to say on the subject? As a matter of fact, they had a variety of responses. It was a variety that I do not think Robert M. Grant sufficiently grasped when he attempted to explain the early Christian dedication to expressing belief in the resurrection of the flesh: “If they were to defend their faith from critical opponents, they had to insist on the novelty of the resurrection. Other gods died and rose; only Jesus rose in the flesh.”10 As a matter of fact, this consideration does not appear to have influenced the matter of our focus at all.
In the course of my documenting what the ancient authors wrote in the first five centuries of the Church’s history, when “pagan”/Greco-Roman critics and stories were still more frequently addressed in ancient writings for particularly apologetic purposes,11 I argue that one can discern three types of responses to purported parallels of the gospel story of Jesus’s resurrection or of the eschatological resurrection. One type of response assumed belief in these stories for the sake of the argument. A second type of response that has remained the most popular among Christian apologists is to explicitly deny that these stories are equivalent in terms of being relevantly and sufficiently similar. A third type of response is related to the second, except that the denial is implicit, whether because purported parallels are not listed or because they only mention the death of the god or hero despite a resurrection story being attached to them at the time.12
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