Was the Resurrection Copied From Pagan Myths?

An Inconvenient Easter

Imagine you are a devout Jew in Jerusalem around the year 30. You believe, as most of your contemporaries do, that one day God will raise the dead. You picture it vividly: the trumpet, the end of the present evil age, the graves of all the faithful opening at once, the righteous of every generation standing together in renewed bodies in a renewed world. What you do not picture is a single man rising, alone, in the middle of ordinary history, on an unremarkable spring morning, while Caesar still rules and the temple still stands. That category did not exist. There was no slot in the Jewish imagination for it—not the raising of a corpse that would die again (as Lazarus was raised), nor the loose rumour that a prophet like John the Baptist had “come back,” but a single man passing through death into deathless, transformed life ahead of everyone else.

This is the first and most easily overlooked fact about the resurrection claim: the people who made it were not confirming an expectation. They were violating one. And they were saying it early: the formula Paul hands on in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, dated below to within a few years of the crucifixion, already says that Jesus "was raised on the third day" and "appeared." The thesis of this essay is that the early Christian assertion that Jesus of Nazareth rose bodily from the dead is historically sui generis—it cannot be neatly reduced to its Jewish background, to pagan myth, or to ancient stories of heroes whisked up to heaven. Establishing this does not, by itself, prove the claim true. But it dismantles the laziest dismissal—"it's just a recycled myth"—and forces the harder question: where did such a strange idea come from?

The Claim, Stated Carefully

The claim is not that Jesus' soul survived death, nor that his disciples felt his ongoing spiritual presence, nor that he was exalted to heaven as a divine being＊Defining "resurrection," not denying deityIs sayingThe specific claim under study is a bodily rising, distinguished from a merely spiritual survival or exaltation-of-the-soul reading.Not sayingNot a denial of Christ's deity, ascension, or heavenly exaltation — all affirmed across the library. It narrows what "resurrection" asserts, not who Christ is.. The claim, as it surfaces in the earliest sources—the pre-Pauline formula of 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, dated by most scholars to within a few years of the crucifixion—is concrete: Jesus "died," "was buried," "was raised on the third day," and "appeared." The Greek word translated "raised," egēgertai, is a perfect passive that, in its Jewish setting, meant the reanimation and transformation of a corpse. Paul will go on to insist the body is "raised" (1 Corinthians 15:42–44)—changed, glorified, no longer subject to death, but continuous with the body that died. This is not a ghost and not a metaphor.

Resurrection in Second Temple Judaism

The Anglican scholar N. T. Wright, in his massive study The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), surveys the entire spectrum of ancient belief about life after death and arrives at a careful definition: resurrection is "life after life-after-death."¹ Death is real; some interim state follows; and then—only then—comes a return to embodied life. By Jesus' day this hope had developed, especially among the Pharisees, from seeds in Isaiah 26:19 (“your dead shall live; their bodies shall rise”), Daniel 12:2 (“many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake”), and Ezekiel 37’s vision of the dry bones; and it was live enough by the first century to surface at Qumran, where the ‘Messianic Apocalypse’ (4Q521) looks to a coming age in which, on the majority reading, God himself “makes the dead live.” Crucially, Wright observes, when ancient Jews spoke of resurrection they meant something bodily, collective, and future: it would happen to all the righteous together, at the end of the age, as part of God's restoration of the world.²

This is what makes the Christian claim cut against the grain of its own soil. Wright's point is that the first Christians did not abandon the Jewish hope; they radically modified it. They claimed that the resurrection of the dead—an event everyone agreed was reserved for the last day—had happened to one man, in advance, in the middle of history. Nobody, Wright argues, expected one person to rise ahead of everyone else.³ The mutation is so specific, and so unmotivated by prior expectation, that it cries out for explanation.

Why the Bodily, Datable Character Matters

Two features anchor the claim in this world rather than a mythic elsewhere. First, it is tied to an empty tomb. All four Gospels report it, and—a detail many historians find telling—women are the first witnesses, which in a culture that discounted female testimony is an awkward thing to invent. Second, the risen Jesus is portrayed as physical: he eats fish (Luke 24:42–43), invites touch (John 20:27), yet also passes through doors and is transformed. Wright argues that both the empty tomb and the appearances are needed together to account for the rise of Christianity, neither alone being sufficient, and concludes that it is highly probable the tomb was empty and that the disciples really did encounter Jesus, alive again.⁴ Honesty requires flagging up front, though, that the empty tomb is the more disputed half of the case — more contested than the appearances — and that the women-witnesses argument, while suggestive, is itself debated (some note that women were the expected ones to tend a grave). But that does not explain why a movement free to shape its story made them the named first witnesses, when the formal list Paul hands on in 1 Corinthians 15 leaves them out. The point here is narrower: the claim is of the bodily, this-worldly kind, whatever one finally concludes about the tomb.

This datability is decisive for the comparison that follows. A myth that recurs every spring with the vegetation is a different kind of thing from a claim about a named man under a named governor (Pontius Pilate) in a known city in a particular year.

The Dying-and-Rising Gods

The most popular reduction of Easter is that it is a Jewish version of a pan-Mediterranean myth: the god who dies and rises—Osiris in Egypt, Adonis in Syria, Tammuz (Dumuzi) in Mesopotamia, Dionysus in Greece—reborn each year with the crops, celebrated in the mystery cults. The classic statement is Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough (first edition 1890), whose chapters on Adonis, Attis, and Osiris wove these figures into a single grand pattern of the dying-and-reviving god.⁵ In our own day the thesis has been revived by the mythicist Richard Carrier, who argues that dying-and-rising gods were widespread in the Greco-Roman world and that Christianity is a Jewish refraction of that template.⁶

The observation behind it is accurate as far as it goes. There are ancient stories of gods who descend into death and return; the cults did celebrate them; and Christianity did spread in precisely that religious environment. To wave the observation away is intellectually cheap; to grant the inference is another matter.

The Considered Reply

Yet the parallel has not held up under scrutiny—and the strongest critics here are not apologists but historians of religion. The decisive blow came from Jonathan Z. Smith, the eminent (and religiously skeptical) University of Chicago scholar. In his entry "Dying and Rising Gods" for the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), Smith concluded that the category is "largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts."⁷ Examined closely, he argued, the alleged cases collapse into two different groups: gods who disappear but do not truly die, and gods who die but do not truly return. There is, Smith wrote, no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.⁸

The fullest modern treatment is Tryggve N. D. Mettinger's The Riddle of Resurrection (2001). Mettinger, a Swedish Hebrew Bible scholar, deliberately set out to test Smith—and here we must concede what should be conceded. Against Smith's near-total skepticism, Mettinger concluded that some genuine dying-and-rising figures did exist in pre-Christian times: Dumuzi, Baal, and Melqart he judged to be dying-and-rising gods, with Adonis and Eshmun as probable further cases.⁹ This is an important concession; the question is not closed, though Mettinger reached his verdict against what remains the prevailing view.

But Mettinger's verdict on the comparison to Jesus is unambiguous, and it is worth quoting: "There is, as far as I am aware, no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world. While studied with profit against the background of Jewish resurrection belief, the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions."¹⁰ The reasons he gives include these: the pagan figures are gods bound to the seasonal cycle, their "deaths" are mythic and timeless rather than historical and datable, and there is nothing corresponding to the Christian linkage of resurrection with a once-for-all atoning death.¹¹ Where such a figure's “return” is affirmed at all, it belongs to the turning of the seasons; Jesus is claimed to have risen once, on a particular morning, never to die again.

Heroes Taken Up: Romulus and Apollonius

A second class of comparison points not to vegetation gods but to translation and apotheosis—heroes who are caught up to heaven and deified. The great Roman example is Romulus, who, in the accounts of Livy and Plutarch, vanishes in a sudden storm and is later seen by one witness, Proculus Julius, declaring he has become a god.¹² Later still there is Apollonius of Tyana, a wandering sage of the first century whose biography by Philostratus (written more than a century after his death) includes wonders and a heavenly disappearance. But the Apollonius case is weaker even than Romulus's on its own terms. By Philostratus's own admission, the memoir of Apollonius's companion Damis—his principal source, and the only one written by a professed eyewitness—breaks off before Apollonius dies, so neither the sage's death nor any assumption into heaven is recorded by the one witness who could have reported it; Philostratus falls back instead on frankly contradictory "stories" about his end that had circulated for over a century, one of which has him vanish into a temple whose doors close behind him, with only a chorus of maidens heard singing within. Nor is the resemblance likely to run the way a borrowing thesis needs: Philostratus wrote his Life at the commission of the empress Julia Domna; and while that commission was not itself an anti-Christian project, some scholars have nonetheless read the finished work as, in part, a pagan rejoinder to the Gospel story rather than an independent source lying behind it—a debated thesis, like Bowersock's below, not a settled fact, but enough to show that the parallel cannot simply be assumed to run from Apollonius to Jesus.¹³

These differ from resurrection in kind, not merely degree. Romulus does not die and return in his body; he is removed from earth, and no empty tomb is at issue because there was no body to begin with—the storm simply takes him. This is translation, the same pattern as Enoch or Elijah, not resurrection. Wright underscores the distinction: pagan antiquity had plenty of room for souls surviving, for heroes divinized, for ghosts appearing—and precisely because it had those categories, it had no need to invent resurrection and generally regarded the idea of a body returning from the grave as undesirable or impossible.¹⁴ The point was made bluntly on the Athenian stage centuries earlier: in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, the god Apollo declares that once the dust has drawn up a dead man’s blood there is “no resurrection” — the very word, anastasis, the New Testament would later use, here flatly denied (lines 647–648). Even the healing-god Asclepius, whose shrines sent the sick home well, was in the one myth that had him raise the dead struck down by Zeus for the trespass: calling the dead back was a transgression the gods punished, not a hope the culture entertained. And where a resemblance to the Christian story does surface in later pagan writing, the classicist Glen Bowersock has argued — against the older assumption of one-way pagan-to-Christian borrowing — that the debt may run the other way, the “apparent-death” and return motifs of the second-century Greek novels themselves responding to the Gospel accounts rather than furnishing their source. His is a specific and debated scholarly thesis, not a consensus; but it is enough to show that the direction of influence in these late parallels cannot simply be presumed.¹⁴ The Christians were not reaching for the nearest available shelf. They were describing something for which the shelf did not exist.

The Strongest Objections

“But Adonis and Attis came first,” steelmanned

The dying-and-rising objection deserves its strongest form, and that is not the internet version with its virgin births and December birthdays. It runs like this. Even Mettinger, the most careful modern student of the material, concluded that some dying-and-rising gods were real and pre-Christian, as conceded above. Tammuz was mourned at the very gate of Jerusalem’s temple, where Ezekiel saw “women weeping for Tammuz” (Ezekiel 8:14). At Byblos, on Lucian’s report, the rites of Adonis moved from mourning to a day on which his image was “brought out into the light” and “addressed as if alive”—on the day after the funeral offerings (the third day of the rite, on Smith’s reckoning). The spring festival of Cybele set a Day of Blood (March 24) beside a Day of Joy (March 25), a sequence many readers have taken for a pagan Good Friday and Easter in honour of her consort Attis. Osiris was murdered, dismembered, and made whole again. So, the objector concludes, the shape of the Easter story—death, lament, third-day rejoicing—was already on the first Christians’ doorstep, and they had only to borrow it.¹⁵

The answer turns on two questions the parallel never asks: when is each rising first attested, and what, exactly, rises? Take the figures one at a time.

Adonis. In the Greek myths Adonis dies—killed by a boar, remembered in a flower—and, as Jonathan Z. Smith puts it, “There is no suggestion of Adonis rising.” He goes on: “Only late texts, largely influenced by or written by Christians, claim that there is a subsequent day of celebration for Adonis having been raised from the dead.” The earliest of them, Lucian’s second-century account, is ambiguous: addressing a statue “as if alive” was what any image-using cult of the Mediterranean did, and Lucian adds that the women then cut their hair as a sign of mourning. The clear reports of third-day rejoicing come, in Smith’s word, “considerably later,” from the Christian writers Origen in the third century and Jerome in the early fifth, both commenting on Ezekiel 8:14—and whether they describe an old rite or read the cult through Christian eyes cannot be settled. If the cult did grow a rising of its own in the third and fourth centuries, Smith allows, it may have been “in imitation of the Christian myth.” Mettinger takes these late witnesses more seriously than Smith does; yet even he, his reviewer notes, “resists a conclusive argument on the pre-Roman antiquity of the Near Eastern Adonis’s resurrection.” The older Greek story, in which Adonis is decreed to spend part of the year above and part below, is in Smith’s words a “tradition of bilocation” that “has no suggestion of death and rebirth”—a seasonal alternation of the kind met below with Dumuzi. Every text that has Adonis raised from the dead, in other words, was written after the gospel was already being preached.¹⁶

Attis. The case is weaker still. In the old Phrygian and Lydian versions Attis is killed—by castration or by a boar—and “in neither case,” Smith writes, “is there any question of his returning to life”; later versions deny that he died of his wounds but narrate no rebirth either. The only texts that even hint at one are, in Smith’s phrase, “two late, post-Christian theological reflections”: a Gnostic allegory, the so-called Naassene Sermon, preserved by Hippolytus in the early third century, and the Christian writer Firmicus Maternus, writing around AD 346, whose account mentions only “a pretended resurrection.” The line most often quoted on the other side—“Be of good cheer, you of the mysteries, your god is saved!” (Firmicus, De errore 22.3)—names no god at all; as Smith notes, “the god is unidentified.” As for the Day of Joy, Smith notes that it was a late addition to the festival and that within the cult it “celebrates Cybele”; the one ancient text that connects it with Attis at all is a late-antique biography by the Neoplatonist Damascius, reporting a dream. Smith’s verdict: “Neither myth nor ritual offers any warrant for classifying Attis as a dying and rising deity.” Attis is not among the figures even Mettinger accepts.¹⁷

Osiris. Here the story is early, but the event is different in kind. Osiris is murdered, dismembered, and reassembled—and then, in Smith’s words, “he did not return to his former mode of existence but rather journeyed to the underworld, where he became the powerful lord of the dead.” Mettinger’s reviewer summarises his treatment more bluntly still: Osiris “is fundamentally a ‘dead’ god.” He is revived only to rule the underworld, not restored to earthly life. The Osiris story gives the realm of the dead its king; the Easter proclamation is that Christ came back out of that realm, bodily, “raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20).¹⁸

Tammuz (Dumuzi). Honesty requires saying that the dating argument does not dispose of this one. Dumuzi is far older than Christianity, and he stands on Mettinger’s list. But look at what his “rising” is. In the Sumerian Descent of Inanna he is dragged to the underworld as the goddess’s substitute, and a later-recovered portion of the text arranges for him to spend half the year below while his sister takes his place for the other half. Smith reads this as the opposite of triumph over death: “The myth emphasizes the inalterable power of the realm of the dead, not triumph over it. No one ascends from the land of the dead unless someone takes his or her place.” In the Akkadian version, “Tammuz is dead and remains so,” and his cult was one of lament: “There is no evidence for any cultic celebration of a rebirth of Tammuz apart from late Christian texts where he is identified with Adonis.” Mettinger’s own reviewer, summarising the chapter, grants that “only a few texts refer vaguely to his ‘rising.’” The same holds for Baal and Melqart, Mettinger’s other firm cases: their descent and return are tied, on his own account, to the seasons, and belong to gods in mythic time, not to a man in a known year. And to a Jew the Tammuz rite was not raw material but a scandal: Ezekiel is shown the women weeping for Tammuz as one of the “abominations” committed at the LORD’s own house (Ezekiel 8:13–15).¹⁹

So the objection fails, and it fails on the specifics. Where the parallel sounds closest—Adonis and Attis—it is late: the rising is attested only after Christianity was already being preached, and largely by Christian writers. Where the figure is genuinely old—Dumuzi, Baal, Melqart—the “rising” is loose: a seasonal alternation of a god in mythic time, not a man leaving a grave. And where the story is both old and vivid—Osiris—it is unlike: the god does not come back to this world at all, but reigns over the dead. None of this denies Mettinger’s finding that some ancient gods were believed to die and return; it denies that any of them is the source of Easter, which is precisely what Mettinger himself denied. The biblical scholar Mark S. Smith went further, titling his 1998 survey, written with special reference to Baal: “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World”—an obituary Mettinger contests for the category itself, but not for the borrowing thesis. And the borrowing thesis still has to explain what no parallel supplies: why Jewish monotheists, whose prophets counted weeping for Tammuz an abomination, proclaimed—in the formula Paul hands on in 1 Corinthians 15, dated by most scholars to within a few years of the crucifixion—that the God of Israel had raised a crucified man bodily, once, within living memory, as the firstfruits of the resurrection they expected at the end of the age. The parallels are late, loose, or unlike a bodily resurrection in history, and none of them can account for that belief. The objection does not hold.²⁰

The borrowing thesis, steelmanned

The mythicist can press: granting that no single pagan story matches, perhaps Christianity assembled its claim from fragments—a death here, a return there, a communal meal from the mysteries—and the very datedness of Jesus' story is the Jewish historicizing contribution. Carrier's case rests not on one clean parallel but on a cumulative atmosphere of syncretism, and he marshals Mettinger's concessions to argue the raw materials were available.²¹

The reply is twofold. First, Carrier leans on Mettinger while Mettinger himself explicitly denied that the materials were used this waySee the evidenceThe evidenceSourceTryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001) — who, even granting that some genuine dying-and-rising figures existed, denied the materials were used to construct the Jesus story, saying it retains its unique character. Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? (HarperOne, 2012), 221–230, presses the same point.Who holds itMettinger — the very scholar the mythicists (Richard Carrier among them) lean on, and no friend of Christian apologetics — explicitly denied that his “dying and rising gods” evidence explains the origin of the Christian resurrection belief. The agnostic New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman has pressed the same tension: the relevant evidence is ambiguous and does not bear the weight mythicism places on it.—a tension Bart Ehrman, himself an agnostic New Testament scholar, has pressed, noting that the relevant evidence is ambiguous and does not bear the weight mythicism places on it.²² Second, the charge of "parallelomania"—Samuel Sandmel's term for the scholarly habit of treating superficial similarity as genetic dependence—applies with full force: a death and a return are not a resurrection unless the specific contours match, and they do not. The environment was syncretistic, and that much is accurate; the burden, though, is to show borrowing rather than coincidence, and that burden remains unmet.

The Gospels as “historicized myth,” steelmanned

The most sophisticated recent form of the borrowing case no longer claims that Christians copied any particular god. The scholar of ancient religion M. David Litwa argues that the Gospels were written and received not as myths but as historical records, and that the evangelists deliberately cast mythic material about Jesus in the form of historical narrative, the form ancient readers found most believable.²³ This form of the case concedes something important: the Gospels present themselves, and were read, as history. Pressed as an objection to the resurrection, then, the question is not about genre but about origin — whether the stories were myth first and history only in form.

That is precisely the question the earliest evidence can test, and the earliest evidence is not the Gospels. The resurrection claim is already a fixed formula in the creed Paul received, 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, dated by most scholars to within a few years of the crucifixion, with named witnesses who were still alive to be asked. The figures usually offered as parallels come to us, by contrast, through writers far removed from them; the only written source for Apollonius’s end, as noted above, was composed more than a century after his death, and it offers conflicting stories rather than the testimony of the eyewitness its author names. A story shaped to look like history within the lifetime of the people it names is a much harder thing to produce than one written up generations later. Litwa’s comparison shows that ancient writers could dress myth as history; it does not show that this is what happened here, and the date of the earliest testimony tells against it.

The visionary reduction, steelmanned

The more serious objection grants the disciples' sincerity and explains it psychologically. Drawing on Leon Festinger's famous cognitive-dissonance study When Prophecy Fails (1956), critics argue that a group whose messianic hopes were shattered by crucifixion would, rather than abandon belief, reinterpret and intensify it.²⁴ The New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann developed the fullest version: Peter, wracked by grief and guilt, experienced a vision of Jesus; this triggered a "chain reaction" of further visions through the community.²⁵ On this account there was no empty tomb to explain and no body—only bereaved minds.

This account at least takes the disciples' sincerity seriously rather than alleging fraud. At its strongest, the objection presses that 1 Corinthians 15 bundles quite diverse experiences under a single formulaic list, and that the two hardest cases are individually explicable—Paul's as a conversion vision, James's as a reconciliation vision born of grief for a brother—so that no one mechanism need cover them all. But the replies are substantial. Gary Habermas and William Lane Craig have argued that grief hallucinations are private and individual, ill-suited to explain the multiple, group, and even hostile appearances (Paul, James) reported in 1 Corinthians 15.²⁶ Moreover, Lüdemann's framework presupposes that the disciples already held a category into which a risen-yet-individual messiah could fit—the very thing Wright shows they lacked. Even granting that Paul and James can be handled one at a time, Wright's missing-category point still blocks Lüdemann's "chain reaction": a community with no slot for a single man risen ahead of the last day is an odd seedbed for visions of exactly that; and the bodily, tangible phenomenology the sources report—eating, being touched—together with the empty tomb resists a clean visionary reduction. Of the naturalistic reconstructions, the visionary theory is the least weak — but it still does not account for the group and hostile appearances, nor supply the category the disciples are shown to have lacked; it is not the best explanation of the full set of data.

The State of the Question

Where does scholarship stand? On the Jewish side, Wright's account of resurrection as bodily, collective, and future is widely accepted even by those who reject his conclusions, though critics such as the historian James G. Crossley have argued (in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus) that Wright overstates the historical security of the empty tomb—a genuinely contested claim.²⁷ On the comparative side, the consensus has shifted decisively away from Frazer: following Jonathan Z. Smith's standard reference treatment, the simple "dying-and-rising god as source of Christianity" thesis is now widely abandoned, while Mettinger, arguing against the prevailing view, has maintained that some such figures genuinely existed. What remains contested is not whether the resurrection claim is unusual—that is broadly granted—but what best explains its origin.

What Uniqueness Does and Does Not Prove

We must be exact here, because the temptation to over-claim is real. Uniqueness is not truth. That an idea is unprecedented does not make it correct; novel false beliefs arise all the time. The argument of this essay establishes something narrower but still significant: the resurrection claim cannot be explained away as the predictable product of its Jewish environment, nor as a Jewish edition of a pagan myth, nor as one more tale of a hero taken up to the gods. Each of those reductions fails on the specifics—and the strongest witnesses against them, Smith and Mettinger, are not friends of Christian apologetics.

What this leaves is not a proof but a question, and it is the right question. If the disciples did not get this idea from Judaism, and did not borrow it from paganism, and were not simply pattern-matching available myths—then where did it come from? Our answer is the one the first witnesses gave: Jesus of Nazareth was raised bodily from the dead. This essay does not prove that on its own. It clears away the borrowing explanation; the positive case rests on the early creed, the appearances, and the empty tomb, argued elsewhere in this Library, and the most natural explanation of those facts together, for anyone not antecedently committed to ruling miracles out, is that Jesus rose from the dead. Even a reader who rejects that answer may no longer reach for the comfortable verdict that it was, after all, just another old story. It was not. It was new.