Dying Gods?

DYING GODS?

Some skeptics claim that Christians copied their belief in Jesus' atoning death and resurrection from paganism (sometimes called the "copycat hypothesis"). They point to "dying gods" such as Balder and Osirus, calling them "pagan christs" and alleging that they are proof of Christian plagarism.

Did Jesus' early followers really try to "beef up" the image of their executed Master by creating a "Christos mythos" (Christ myth) derived from pagan mythology? Let's examine this theory.

Outmoded Scholarship

The first problem with the copycat hypothesis is that it is based on an outmoded theory of the history of religions. The following quote from the article Was Jesus Christ just a CopyCat Savior Myth? illustrates this:

If one looks at the 'skeptical' literature on the subject, the citations and sources used are generally a century old (!) or more recent 'popular literature' (based on those out-of-date resources) that is NEVER cited in the scholarly works of the past twenty years.
Just for example, the abysmal piece on "Origins of Christianity" cited by some who come through the ThinkTank--besides being riddled with gross errors of fact and method--does not cite a SINGLE scholarly work dealing with primary materials, and its main supports are from works hopelessly out of date (e.g. Joseph Wheless, Kersey Graves, Albert Churchward, Gerald Massey, Robert Taylor). The few recent works cited in the piece either (1) do not even TRY to defend/document their assertions(!)--e.g. Lloyd Graham's Myths and Deceptions of the Bible; or (2) mix such non-documented assertions with statements supported only by secondary materials--e.g. Barbara Walker's The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. [I have been told by a prominent skeptic on the web that these works are considered 'embarrassments' to their cause.]

The author then goes on to quote Mircea Eliade, an expert on traditional religions, who says, "The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts" ("Dying and Rising Gods" The Encyclopedia of Religion [Macmillian: 1987]).

So more current research has largely discredited the theory, so dear to skeptics, that pagans worshiped "dying and rising gods".

Critique of the "Copycat Hypothesis"

Why have modern scholars abandoned this notion? In part because there is no evidence of any pagan god who dies and then rises from the dead!

Take for instance, the myth of Osirus. He does indeed die - he is killed by his trecherous brother, Seth - but never actually rises from the dead. His wife, Isis, regatheres most of his dismembered corpse, but it never "reconstitutes" or comes alive again. Instead, his spirit goes to the underworld, where he becomes judge of everyone who would pass into the afterlife. There is no true resurrection in the myth of Osirus.

The same is true of Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Tammuz and Balder; they all die, but the myths do not present them as returning to life again. So one could hardly call them "dying and rising gods"! There is no real precident for the Resurrection of Christ in pagan mythology.

We should also note that the fact that these divinities could die is nothing unusual. We are so used to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic idea of an eternal God, whom death cannot touch, that we sometimes forget that pagans did not believe that their gods were innately immortal. Their lives often had to be sustained, perhaps by eating a substance which gave them immortality (such as ambrosia), but they could still potentially be killed under particular circumstances.

So the even the deaths of these gods did not necessarily have some deeper meaning, involving some grand sacrifice for the world. They were simply part of the tragic epic of their lives; cruel twists of "Fate", to which pagans believed all are subject, both men and gods.

Contrast this with the death of Christ. First of all, He does not die as God, but as Man. He is immortal in His Deity, and therefore must assume a human nature in order to partake of our mortality. Second, His death is a sacrifice for the salvation of mankind. None of the pagan "dying gods" were ever said to have died for sins, or for anyone else, for that matter. Third, His Crucifixion was part of a greater Divine Plan, not merely a cruel fate.

Critics of the "copycat hypothesis" point out many other differences as well. Jesus' death is an historical fact, while the "dying gods" are just myths with no historical basis. The Lord laid down His life willingly, while the "dying gods" were all slaughtered against their will. And the Crucifixion was a paradoxical triumph, not a defeat like the deaths of the pagan gods. The cult of Tammuz, for instance, was primarily a funeral rite for the god, mourning his fate with no sense of victory in his passing. Contrast that with the strong Christian emphasis on the Resurrection, and the rejoicing of the Paschal Season!

So the surface similarities between Jesus and certain "dying gods" actually mask much deeper differences. When one considers these profound differences, it becomes hard to see how Jesus' sacrificial death for sin could have been copied from paganism.

Once again, as we have pointed out in past articles in this series, early Christians did not like paganism very much. They would never have patterned their Lord after the pagan deities which they detested as demons (I Corinthians 10:18-21). The very notion is strange and incongruent.

Conclusion

So the "copycat hypothesis" simply falls apart under scrutiny. Jesus' historical, vicarious, triumphant and sin-cleansing sacrifice on the Cross is far removed from pagan tales of the senseless killing of certain gods, and His physical Resurrection from the dead has absolutely no parallel in ancient myth. Early Christians did not recycle secondhand pagan legends, rather they proclaimed the divinely-revealed truth about the victory of the Messiah over sin and death.

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