Christian Apologetics Alliance

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Did Christianity Copy from Paganism? (Part 1 of 5)

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By James M. Rochford

Did Christianity Copy from Paganism?Many skeptics claim that the resurrection of Jesus originated from pagan myths about “dying and rising” gods—commonly called the “copycat theory” of Christianity. James G. Frazer popularized this view in his book The Golden Bough (1914),[1] though more recently, others have followed in his footsteps.[2]

Atheistic documentaries like Brian Flemming’s The God Who Wasn’t There (2005), Peter Joseph’s Zeitgeist (2007), and Bill Maher’s Religulous (2008) all have popularized the view that the early Christians borrowed the concept of the resurrection from pagan myths about “dying and rising gods” (e.g. Dionysus, Mithra, Baal, Adonis, Attis, Demeter, Persephone, Aphrodite, Isis, Osiris). To see their case for yourself, see Zeitgeist and begin at 5 minutes into the film.

Did Christianity copy its core doctrines from Pagan myths? What should we think of this common skeptical claim?

In this first installment of a series of articles on the topic, we will begin by merely quoting from skeptics who reject this oft-purported claim.

Dr. Tryggve Mettinger (a Swedish professor at Lund University) has written the most comprehensive account of the dying and rising god motif. He himself affirms the concept of “dying and rising gods.”[3] Yet he concedes that he is in the strict minority: “There is now what amounts to a scholarly consensus against the appropriateness of the concept [of dying and rising gods]. Those who still think differently are looked upon as residual members of an almost extinct species… Major scholars in the fields of comparative religion and the Bible find the idea of dying and rising deities suspect or untenable.”[4] For instance, Jonathan Z. Smith (historian from the University of Chicago) writes, “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.”[5]

Skeptic Matt Dillahunty (of Atheist Experience) writes, “The first third of the film (Zeitgeist) is an unscholarly, sophomoric, horribly flawed, over-simplification that tries to portray Christianity as nothing more than the next incarnation of the astrologically themed religions that preceded it. Like all conspiracy theories, they combine a few facts, focus on correlations and build an intriguing story that seems to fit the pieces together nicely—provided you don’t actually dig below the surface to find out where they might have gone wrong.”

In describing the German higher critical school which gave birth to this entire theory (Religiongeschichtliche Schule), critical scholar Maurice Casey writes that this is “now regarded as out of date” and “significantly mistaken.”[6]

Regarding the Cross and Atonement, atheistic critical scholar Bart Ehrman writes, “Where do any of the ancient sources speak of a divine man who was crucified as an atonement for sin? So far as I know, there are no parallels to the central Christian claim. What has been invented here is not the Christian Jesus but the mythicist claims about Jesus… The majority of scholars agree… there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods.”[7] He adds, “None of this literature is written by scholars trained in the New Testament.”[8]

Conclusion

In order to assess the truth of a claim, we cannot just appeal to what scholars say, but rather to the merits and validity of their arguments. (In further articles, we do exactly this.) However, before we even survey and analyze the evidence, the conclusions of these critics and skeptics above should cause us to pause: If Christianity truly borrowed its central themes from earlier pagan religions, then why do even skeptics and critical scholars reject such claims?

[1] Frazer, James. The Golden Bough. 3rd Edition. Volume 4:1. London. 1914.

[2] See Freke, Timothy, and Peter Gandy. The Jesus Mysteries: Was the “original Jesus” a Pagan God? New York: Harmony, 2000. Harpur, Tom. The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. New York: Walker, 2005.

[3] Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising God’s” in the Ancient Near East. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001. 217.

[4] Mettinger, Tryggve N.D. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising God’s” in the Ancient Near East. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001. 7, 17.

[5] Jonathan Z. Smith. “Dying and Rising Gods.” Eliade, Mircea, and Charles J. Adams. The Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol. 4. New York: Macmillan, 1987. 522.

[6] Casey, Maurice. Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 1.

[7] Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne, 2012. 214, 230.

[8] Ehrman, Bart D. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne, 2012. 2.

About James Rochford

James Rochford is the author of Evidence Unseen: Exposing the Myth of Blind Faith, which is a work of Christian apologetics. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School with his Masters in Theological Studies. He is an elder at Xenos Christian Fellowship, where he teaches classes in theology, apologetics, and Christian studies, as well as providing weekly expository Bible teaching. You can find over 1,200 articles on apologetics and theology, as well as several hundred mp3's at www.evidenceunseen.com

Comments

  1. LHRMSCBrown says

    Can truth ever be “borrowed“? For example, morality precedes Sinai, “because God”, just as morality outdistances Sinai, again “because God”. If there is “truth” and so on, well, whatever slice of it happens to be given to the mind of man brings us to, well to what? It brings us to the reality of — in mankind somewhere — the epistemological move upon “X”. But so what? If in fact God exists and therein, say, ought-love is in fact irreducible, is the “first person” or the first “group” to “say-so” the proverbial “ontic-source” of that cosmic fact? Of course not.

    Another way to say it is something like this: IF truth, THEN the mind of mankind is partaking of, not invention, but discovery. Epistemological timelines fail as a substitute for arguments with respect to ontological ownership/fact.

    IF such is found in some culture X, then “that” does not answer the question of veracity. Why? Because the mere fact of that location can’t answer that question. Is the mind of man inventing or discovering? What are the metrics? And so on.

    Much of these straw-men are just that and need not be take seriously, but, if there is this or that “overlap” of this or that nuance — or whatever — then again the ontic — by force of logic — outweighs any epistemic timeline. That is why C.S. Lewis didn’t find “overlap” of any kind summing to, “So much the worse for Christianity” but instead such summed to, “So much the better for Paganism“. From http://www.patheos.com/Topics/Religion-and-Myth/CS-Lewis-on-Christianity-as-the-True-Myth-Michael-Ward-03-09-2016

    Tolkien and Dyson showed him (see Lewis’s letter of 18 October 1931) that doctrines are not the main thing about Christianity. Doctrines are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in “a language more adequate.” The more adequate language was the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ. The primary language of Christianity is not doctrinal — not propositional or systematic — but historical: a lived language, the factual story of someone being born, dying, and living again in a new, ineffably transformed way.

    When Lewis realized this, he began to gain an understanding of what Christianity really meant, because he was already fascinated — he had been fascinated from childhood — by stories of dying and rising gods. In many ancient mythologies there are stories of characters who die and go down into the underworld and whose death achieves or reveals something back here on earth: new life in the crops, for instance, or sunrise, or the coming of spring.

    Lewis had always found the heart of these pagan stories — he mentions those of Adonis, Bacchus, and Balder — to be “profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even though I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant.'”

    The difference between his attitude to Christianity and his attitude to the pagan myths was that, with the pagan myths, he didn’t try officiously to explain them: these stories he considered to be fruitful enough in their own terms. They were myths that had to be accepted as saying something in their own way, not treated as a kind of allegory and translated into something less, something secondary, mere “doctrines.”
    When Lewis understood that Christianity too was to be approached first as a sequence of historical events and only secondarily as a doctrinal system, it was a huge breakthrough for him. Christianity, he began to see, was “the true myth” whereas pagan myths were merely “men’s myths.”

    In paganism, God had expressed himself in an unfocussed way through the images that human imaginations deployed in order to tell stories about the world. But in Christianity God was expressing himself directly through the real, historical life of a particular man, in a particular place, at a particular time — Jesus of Nazareth, crucified under a Roman Procurator named Pontius Pilate, outside Jerusalem, circa A.D. 33.

    That there were certain similarities between pagan myths and the true myth of Christianity did not lead Lewis to conclude, “So much the worse for Christianity”; it led him to conclude “So much the better for Paganism” (see his classic “Is Theology Poetry?”). Paganism contained a good deal of meaningful stuff that pointed to and was realised in the historical story of Christ.

    In a sense, Lewis had found in pagan myths what Christ himself had said could be found in the Old Testament story of Jonah. Jesus told the Pharisees: “No sign will be given this generation except the sign of Jonah: for as Jonah was in the belly of the great fish for three days and nights, so the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth for three days and nights” (Matthew 12:39-40). Jonah’s descent and re-ascent were a meaningful prefiguration of Christ’s own death and resurrection. For Lewis, pagan myths amounted to a similar sort of Christo-typical prefiguration.

    A couple of weeks after his conversation with Tolkien and Dyson, Lewis passed over from being nearly certain that Christianity was true to being certain. He had come to share the view expressed by G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man:

    “[The Incarnation of Christ] met the mythological search for romance by being a story and the philosophical search for truth by being a true story. That is why the ideal figure had to be a historical character as nobody had ever felt Adonis or Pan to be a historical character. But that is also why the historical character had to be the ideal figure; and even fulfill many of the functions given to these other ideal figures; why he was at once the sacrifice and the feast, why he could be shown under the emblems of the growing vine or the rising sun.””

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