Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth Bart Ehrman (books to read in your 20s txt) 📖

It is worth emphasizing that even Mettinger himself does not think that his sparse findings are pertinent to the early Christian claims about Jesus as one who died and rose again. The ancient Near Eastern figures he talks about were closely connected with the seasonal cycle and occurred year in and year out. Jesus’s death and resurrection, by contrast, were considered a onetime event. More-over—this is a key point for him—Jesus’s death was seen as being a vicarious atonement for sins. Nothing like that occurs in the case of the ancient Near Eastern deities.

But there is an even larger problem. Even if—a very big if—there was an idea among some pre-Christian peoples of a god who died and arose, there is nothing like the Christian belief in Jesus’s resurrection. If the ambiguous evidence is interpreted in a certain way (Mettinger’s), the pagan gods who died did come back to life. But that is not really what the early teachings about Jesus were all about. It was not simply that his corpse was restored to the living. It is that he experienced a resurrection. That’s not the same thing.

The Jewish notion of resurrection is closely tied to a worldview that scholars have labeled Jewish apocalypticism. In the next chapter I will explain more about what that worldview entailed. For now it is enough to note that many Jews in the days of Jesus believed that the world we live in is controlled by powers of evil. That is why there is so much pain and misery here on earth: drought, famine, epidemics, earthquakes, wars, suffering, and death. Jews who held to this view, however, believed that at some future point God would intervene to overthrow the forces of evil in control of this world and set up his good kingdom on earth. In that future kingdom there would be no more pain, misery, suffering, or death. God would destroy everything and everyone opposed to him and would reward those who had been faithful to him. These rewards would not only come to those who happened to be living at the time, however. Faithful Jews who had suffered and died would be raised from the dead and given a reward. In fact, death itself would be destroyed, as one of the enemies of God and his people. At the future resurrection, the faithful would be given eternal life, never to die again.

Many Jews who believed in a future resurrection thought it would come very soon, possibly within their own lifetimes. God would crash into history to judge this world, overthrow all his enemies, including sin and death, and raise his people from the dead. And it would happen very soon.

When the earliest Christians claimed that Jesus had been raised from the dead, it was in the context of this Jewish notion of the soon-to-come resurrection. The earliest Christians—as seen from the writings of our first Christian author, Paul—thought that Jesus’s resurrection was important, in no small part, because it signaled that the resurrection had begun. That is to say, they thought they were living at the end of this wicked age, on the doorstep of the coming kingdom. That is why Paul talked about Jesus as the “firstfruits” of the resurrection. Just as farmers gathered in the firstfruits of their crop on the first day of harvest and then went out and harvested the rest of the crop the next day (not centuries later), so too Jesus is the firstfruits of what is now imminent: the resurrection of all the dead, to face judgment if they sided with evil or to be rewarded if they sided with God.

The idea of Jesus’s resurrection did not derive from pagan notions of a god simply being reanimated. It derived from Jewish notions of resurrection as an eschatological event in which God would reassert his control over this world. Jesus had conquered the evil power of death, and soon his victory would become visible in the resurrection of all the faithful.

As I already suggested, Mettinger himself does not think that the idea of pagan dying and rising gods led to the invention of Jesus. As he states, “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.”5

More common among scholars, however, is the view that there is scarcely any—or in fact virtually no—evidence that such gods were worshipped at all. No one was more instrumental in the demise of the views so elegantly set forth by Frazer in The Golden Bough than Jonathan Z. Smith, an eminent historian of religion at the University of Chicago. Most significant was an article that Smith produced for the influential Encyclopedia of Religion, originally edited by Mircea Eliade.6 After thoroughly reexamining Frazer’s claims about pagan dying and rising gods, Smith states categorically:

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.7

Smith backs up these claims by looking at the evidence for such gods as Adonis, Baal, Attis, Marduk, Osiris, and Tammuz or Dumuzi. With respect to ancient reports of the Greek Adonis, for example, there were in antiquity two forms of myth, which only later were combined into a kind of megamyth. In the first form two goddesses, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete