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. 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 Daniel 12:2 ("many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake") and Ezekiel 37. 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). 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 honest reader should feel the force of this. 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 this away is intellectually cheap.

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 most careful and balanced 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; one should not pretend, as some popular apologetics do, that the whole category is empty.

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 Tammuz returns with the grain every year; 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.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 Christians were not reaching for the nearest available shelf. They were describing something for which the shelf did not exist.

The Strongest Objections

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.¹⁵

The reply is twofold. First, Carrier leans on Mettinger while Mettinger himself explicitly denied that the materials were used this way—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.¹⁶ 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. To the critic's credit, the religious environment was syncretistic; the burden, though, is to show borrowing rather than coincidence, and that burden remains unmet.

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.¹⁷ The New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann developed the most rigorous version: Peter, wracked by grief and guilt, experienced a vision of Jesus; this triggered a "chain reaction" of further visions through the community.¹⁸ On this account there was no empty tomb to explain and no body—only bereaved minds.

This deserves respect; it takes the disciples' transformation 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 15.¹⁹ 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.²⁰ 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 it is acknowledged, with Mettinger, 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? The Christian answer is that something happened. One may reject that answer. But one may no longer reach for the comfortable verdict that it was, after all, just another old story. It was not. Whatever it was, it was new.