Dying and rising Gods in pagan antiquity Part-II

After looking into the writings of the two scholars who advocated the theory of dying and rising gods in the first Part of this blog series now we'll see what the other two scholars have to say who wrote against the idea of dying and rising gods. First one is Jonathan Z. Smith, an eminent historian of religion at the University of Chicago who says- "The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts… All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity". Smith based his claims by carefully looking into the evidences for gods such as Adonis, Baal, Attis, Marduk, Osiris, and Tammuz or Dumuzi. For example there were two forms of myths circulating about the Greek Adonis. These two myths were later combined into a megamyth. In the first form two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete for the affections of the human infant Adonis. Zeus (or in some of the myths Calliope) decides that Adonis will spend part of each year with each divinity, half the year with Aphrodite in the realms above, with the other gods, and the other half with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. There is nothing here to suggest either death or resurrection for Adonis. Part of the year he is in one place (the realm of the living) and part in the other (the realm of the dead). The other more familiar form of the myth comes from the Roman author Ovid. In this account the young man Adonis is killed by a boar and is then mourned and commemorated by the goddess Aphrodite in the form of a flower. In this version, then, Adonis definitely dies. But there is nothing to suggest that he was raised from the dead. It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead. In other words, the Adonis myth did not influence Christian views of Jesus but rather the other way around. Yet even here, Smith points out, there is no evidence anywhere of some kind of mystery cult where Adonis was worshipped as a dying-rising god or in which worshippers were identified with him and his fate of death and resurrection, as happens, of course, in Christian religions built on Jesus. Or take the instance of Osiris, commonly cited by mythicists as a pagan parallel to Jesus. Osiris was an Egyptian god about whom a good deal was written in the ancient world. We have texts discussing Osiris that span a thousand years. None was as influential or as well known as the account of the famous philosopher and religion scholar of the second Christian century, Plutarch, in his work Isis and Osiris. According to the myths, Osiris was murdered and his body was dismembered and scattered. But his wife, Isis, went on a search to recover and reassemble them, leading to Osiris’s rejuvenation. The key point to stress, however, is that Osiris does not—decidedly does not—return to life. Instead he becomes the powerful ruler of the dead in the underworld. And so for Osiris there is no rising from the dead. Smith maintains that the entire tradition about Osiris may derive from the processes of mummification in Egypt, where bodies were prepared for ongoing life in the realm of the dead (not as resuscitated corpses here on earth). And so Smith concludes, “In no sense can the dramatic myth of his death and reanimation be harmonized to the pattern of dying and rising gods.” The same can be said, in Smith’s view, of all the other divine beings often pointed to as pagan forerunners of Jesus. Some die but don’t return; some disappear without dying and do return; but none of them die and return. Another scholar who opposes the theory of dying and rising gods is Mark S. Smith who is a scholar of the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible. Mark Smith makes the compelling argument that when Frazer devised his theory about dying and rising gods, he was heavily influenced by his understanding of Christianity and Christian claims about Christ. But when one looks at the actual data about the pagan deities, without the lenses provided by later Christian views, there is nothing to make one consider them as gods who die and rise again. Smith shows why such views are deeply problematic for Osiris, Dumuzi, Melqart, Heracles, Adonis, and Baal. According to Smith, the methodological problem that afflicted Frazer was that he took data about various divine beings, spanning more than a millennium, from a wide range of cultures, and smashed the data all together into a synthesis that never existed. This would be like taking views of Jesus from a French monk of the twelfth century, a Calvinist of the seventeenth century, a Mormon of the late nineteenth century, and a Pentecostal preacher of today, combining them all together into one overall picture and saying, “That’s who Jesus was understood to be.” We would never do that with Jesus. Why should we do it with Osiris, Heracles, or Baal? Moreover, Smith emphasizes, a good deal of our information about these other gods comes from sources that date from a period after the rise of Christianity, writers who were themselves influenced by Christian views of Jesus and “who often received their information second-hand.” In other words, they probably do not tell us what pagans themselves, before Christianity, were saying about the gods they worshipped. Bart Ehrman concludes "The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places. But as we have seen, scholars such as Mettinger beg to differ. What can we conclude from this scholarly disagreement for the purposes at hand, the question of whether Jesus was invented as a dying and rising god? There are several key points to emphasize. First, it is important to realize that the reason there are disagreements among scholars (at least with someone like Mettinger) is that the evidence for such gods is at best sparse, scattered, and ambiguous, not abundant, ubiquitous, and clear. If there were any such beliefs about dying and rising gods, they were clearly not widespread and available for all to see. Such gods were definitely not widely known and widely discussed among religious people of antiquity, as is obvious from the fact that they are not clearly discussed in any of our sources. On this everyone should be able to agree. Even more important, there is no evidence that such gods were known or worshipped in rural Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, in the 20s CE. Anyone who thinks that Jesus was modeled on such deities needs to cite some evidence—any evidence at all—that Jews in Palestine at the alleged time of Jesus’s life were influenced by anyone who held such views. One reason that scholars do not think that Jesus was invented as one of these deities is precisely that we have no evidence that any of his followers knew of such deities in the time and place where Jesus was allegedly invented. Moreover, as Mettinger himself acknowledges, the differences between the dying and rising gods (which he has reconstructed on slim evidence) and Jesus show that Jesus was not modeled on them, even if such gods were talked about during Jesus’s time". But there is an even more important reason for thinking that Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of a dying and rising god. The earliest Christians did not think that Jesus was God. This last line where Bart says that the earliest Christians did not think that Jesus was God may sound like a very negative statement for us Christians but for the issue at hand this is one of the strongest reasons that disproves the myth that Resurrection of Jesus Christ was borrowed from the pre-Christian pagan deities. In the next post we will continue to explore and expose this notion of dying and rising gods.