The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  “This is like my mom trying to explain thunder to me as a child. They talked about this every year: Baal died and Baal came back. Nobody ever saw it. There were no eyewitnesses. It supposedly occurred in the gray, distant, undated past. It was a fable to explain why there’s no rain in the summer—and nothing more. Now, does that sound anything like the resurrection of Jesus? Absolutely not! It’s totally different. Jesus’ resurrection is supported by strong historical data that is by far best explained by him returning from the dead.”

  That’s just one myth, I thought to myself. There were still others to consider. “How about the other fables that are commonly mentioned?” I asked.

  “Attis? This myth is older than Christianity but the first report we have of a resurrection of Attis comes long after the first century. Adonis is more than a hundred years after Jesus. There’s no clear account in antiquity of Marduk even dying—and so a resurrection is even less clear. Some scholars say Tammuz is an account of a dying and rising god—but that’s disputed, and besides, it’s not a good parallel since there are no reports of an appearance or an empty tomb and this myth was tied to the changing of the seasons.”

  “What about Osiris?”

  “Osiris is interesting,” he said, smiling. “The most popular account says Osiris’s brother killed him, chopped him into fourteen pieces, and scattered them around the world. Well, the goddess Isis feels compassion for Osiris, so she looks for his body parts to give him a proper burial. She only finds thirteen of them, puts them back together, and Osiris is buried. But he doesn’t come back to this world; he’s given the status of god of the netherworld—a gloomy, shadowy place of semiconsciousness. As a friend of mine says, ‘This isn’t a resurrection, it’s a zombification!’ This is no parallel to Jesus’ resurrection, for which there is strong historical support.”

  I spotted an apparent flaw in Licona’s reasoning: one of Christianity’s earliest apologists, or defenders of the faith, was Justin Martyr, who lived from about AD 100 to 164. In a letter he wrote in about 150, he discussed several parallels between Christianity and the rising gods of pagan religions. I pointed this out to Licona and asked, “Isn’t that evidence that Christians recognized that Jesus’ resurrection was merely a form of mythology?”

  Licona was quite familiar with Justin’s writings. “First, we have to look at why Justin was writing this. The Romans were severely persecuting Christians, and Justin was telling the emperor, ‘Look, you don’t persecute people who worship other gods who are similar, so why persecute Christians?’ Basically, he’s trying to use some arguments to defuse the Roman attacks on the church.

  “But look at the parallels he gives. He has to strain to make them. He talks about the sons of Jupiter: Aesculapius was struck by lightning and went to heaven; Bacchus, Hercules, and others rode to heaven on the horse Pegasus. He describes Ariadne and others who ‘have been declared to be set among the stars.’ He even mentions that when the emperor Augustus was cremated, someone in the crowd swore that he saw his spirit ascending through the flames.

  “These aren’t resurrections! I know of no highly respected scholar today who suggests that these vague fables are parallels to the resurrection of Jesus. We only hear this claim from the hyper-skeptical community on the Internet and popular books that are marketed to people who lack the background to analyze the facts critically.”

  Licona’s answers had quickly deflated many of the claims I had heard and read about Jesus’ resurrection having been plagiarized from antiquity. I still had questions, however, about the broader implications of the “copycat” allegations. I decided to seek out a leading scholar of ancient history who also is an expert on Mithraism, a “mystery religion” that was once a major rival to Christianity—and, some charge, the source of many beliefs that Christians took and applied to Jesus.

  My trip to picturesque Oxford, Ohio, was almost cancelled because of torrential winter rains. Local rivers were swelling toward flood stage. But I managed to arrive on one of the last flights of the day. The next morning, using an umbrella to shield me, I knocked on the door of an immaculate green house where Edwin Yamauchi lives with Kimie, his wife of forty-four years.

  INTERVIEW #5: EDWIN M. YAMAUCHI, PH.D.

  With a doctorate in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University, and having taught at Miami University of Ohio for more than thirty-five years, Edwin Yamauchi has been called “a scholar’s scholar.”22 As one admiring colleague put it, he has “dug archaeologically, taught brilliantly, read voraciously, researched meticulously, and published endlessly.”23

  Yamauchi has studied twenty-two languages, including Akkadian, Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Comanche, Coptic, Egyptian, Mandaic, Syriac, and Ugaritic. He has received eight fellowships from Brandeis, Rutgers, and elsewhere; delivered eighty-eight papers on Mithraism, Gnosticism, and other topics at scholarly societies; published nearly two hundred articles and reviews in professional journals; lectured at more than a hundred colleges and universities, including Cornell, Princeton, Temple, Yale, and the University of Chicago; and participated in archaeological expeditions, including the first excavation of the Herodian temple in Jerusalem.

  Yamauchi’s seventeen books include the 578-page authoritative tome Persia and the Bible, which includes his findings on Mithraism, as well as Greece and Babylon, Gnostic Ethics and Mandaean Origins, The Stones and the Scriptures, Pre-Christian Gnosticism, The Archaeology of the New Testament, The World of the First Christians, and Africa and the Bible. In 1975 he was invited to deliver a paper at the Second International Congress of Mithraic Studies in Tehran, a conference hosted by the then-empress of Iran.

  Born into a Japanese Buddhist family but a Christian since 1952, Yamauchi has a sterling reputation in the academic world. One book called him “a scholar known for his extreme care and sober judgment with historical texts.”24 Award-winning historian Paul Maier said Yamauchi wields “crystal logic and hard, potent evidence,” adding:

  No one in the academic world today can better sniff out sensationalism in place of sense, excesses beyond the evidence, and speculation instead of scholarship. Whatever historical or theological fad might come along—and so many have!—one brilliant article by Yamauchi supplies the evidence to skewer any bloated pretensions against the cause of truth.25

  That’s exactly what I needed for this topic, where so many voices of questionable credibility are making such serious claims. And that’s why I interviewed him for my earlier book, The Case for Christ, about the evidence for Jesus in ancient sources outside the Bible.26 At the time, I found him to be unassuming, soft-spoken, thorough, and highly credible. He was not as loquacious as some scholars I’ve questioned, but his statements tended to be heavy with meaning.

  He and Kimie greeted me at the door before she departed to do some volunteer work in the community. Although recently retired from Miami University, Yamauchi continues to teach a few history courses there. Now on the cusp of seventy years of age, the bespectacled scholar was spry and focused, his hair highlighted with silver.

  He walked me down into his basement, much of which was a warren of bookshelves, and we sat at a small table on which I saw stacks of papers. I immediately knew what they were. I had let Yamauchi know in advance the topics I wanted to cover, because I was aware of his penchant to back up his own opinions with scholarly articles by other experts. I could see he was ready for me.

  THE MYSTERY RELIGIONS

  “Maybe you could start by giving me some background on the mystery religions,” I began as we claimed chairs on adjacent sides of the table. “When were they popular? What traits did they have in common?”

  “The so-called ‘mystery religions’ were a variety of religious movements from the eastern Mediterranean that flourished in the early Roman Empire,” he replied, sipping from a cup of coffee. “They offered salvation in a tight-knit community. They were called mystery religions because those who were initiated into them were sworn to secrecy. They had sacred rites, often a
common meal, and a special sanctuary.”27

  “What was the oldest of them?” I asked.

  “That would be the Eleusinian cult of Demeter, which was already established in the Archaic Age of Greece, which would be from 800 to 500 BC. The latest, and certainly the most popular in the later Roman Empire, was the mysteries of Mithras, who started as a Persian god. There were also the mysteries of Cybele and Attis, which were restricted to non-Romans until the middle or late first century.”

  “Were some of these religions tied to the vegetation cycle?” I asked, thinking back to Licona’s comments.

  “Oh, yes, many of them were,” he confirmed.

  Trying to narrow the topic a bit, I asked, “Who popularized the idea that Jesus’ resurrection was derived from the worship of dying and rising fertility gods?”

  “In the scholarly world, these comparisons were promoted by a group of scholars called the Religionsgeschichtliche schule,” he said, the German rolling off his tongue. “That’s the so-called History of Religions School, which flourished at the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. The seminal work by Richard Reitzenstein was published in German in 1910 but not translated into English until 1978.28 He thought the sacrifice of Christ aligned itself with the killing of a bull by Mithras. Carsten Colpe and others severely criticized the anachronistic use of sources by these scholars.

  “On the popular level, Sir James Frazer gathered a mass of parallels in his multivolume work called The Golden Bough, which was published in 1906,” Yamauchi continued. “He discussed Osiris of Egypt, Adonis of Syria, Attis of Asia Minor, and Tammuz of Mesopotamia, and concluded there was a common rising and dying fertility god. Unfortunately, much of his work was based on a misreading of the evidence, but nevertheless this helped introduce these ideas to popular culture. Later, in the 1930s, three influential French scholars claimed that Christianity was influenced by the Hellenistic mystery religions.”

  Yamauchi picked up a copy of an article he had written and scanned it for a quote. “One of those scholars,” he added, “said Christ was ‘a savior-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithras…. Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis, he died a violent death, and like them he returned to life.’”29

  I glanced at my notes. “Albert Schweitzer said that popular writers made the mistake of taking various fragments of information and manufacturing ‘a kind of universal Mystery-religion which never actually existed, least of all in Paul’s day.’30 Do you agree?”

  “Yes, there was a widespread view that there was a general, common mystery religion, but upon a closer examination of the sources, nobody believes that any longer,” he replied. “These were quite different beliefs. In fact, by the mid-twentieth century, scholars had established that the sources used in these writings were far from satisfactory and the parallels were much too superficial. It was pretty much of a closed issue in the scholarly community, but it seems to have been revived in recent years among writers on a popular level—sort of like Frankenstein.”

  Yamauchi’s comments reminded me of the words of the late scholar Ronald H. Nash, the highly respected professor with a doctorate from Syracuse University and author of more than thirty books, who said in The Gospel and the Greeks:

  During a period of time running roughly from about 1890 to 1940, scholars often alleged that primitive Christianity had been heavily influenced by Platonism, Stoicism, the pagan mystery religions, or other movements in the Hellenistic world.31 Largely as a result of a series of scholarly books and articles written in rebuttal, allegations of early Christianity’s dependence on its Hellenistic environment began to appear much less frequently in the publications of Bible scholars and classical scholars. Today most Bible scholars regard the question as a dead issue.32

  Nash went on to lament the revival of these discredited theories. He said that a few current textbooks, as well as more popular publications, were “repeating claims and arguments that should have been laid to rest decades ago,” circulating “one-sided and misinformed arguments,” and ignoring “the weighty scholarly opinion” that has already been published to refute their assertions.33 “Efforts to undermine the uniqueness of the Christian revelation via claims of a pagan religious influence collapse quickly once a full account of the information is available,” he insisted.34

  That was precisely what I was determined to investigate as I turned my interview with Yamauchi to issues involving the most commonly cited mystery religion: Mithraism.

  MITHRAISM AND CHRISTIANITY

  To make sure we were on the same page, I asked Yamauchi to provide an overview of Mithraic beliefs. He took a drink of coffee before launching into his reply.

  “Mithraism was a late Roman mystery religion that was popular among soldiers and merchants, and which became a chief rival to Christianity in the second century and later,” he said. “The initiates were all men, though one of my students, Jonathan David, recently published a paper arguing that some women may have been involved.35 The participants met in a cavelike structure called a mithraeum, which had as its cult statue Mithras stabbing a bull, the so-called tauroctony.”

  “How much information about Mithraism exists?”

  “There are relatively few texts from the Mithraists themselves. We have some graffiti and inscriptions, as well as descriptions of the religion from its opponents, including neo-Platonists and Christians. Much of what has been circulated on Mithraism has been based on the theories of a Belgium scholar named Franz Cumont. He was the leading scholar on Mithraism in his day, and he published his famous work, Mysteries of Mithras, in 1903. His work led to speculation by the History of Religions School that Mithraism had influenced nascent Christianity. Much of what Cumont suggested, however, turned out to be quite unfounded. In the 1970s, scholars at the Second Mythraic Congress in Tehran came to criticize Cumont.”

  Yamauchi dug out a large photograph from the papers on the desk, showing a crowd of scholars at the Congress posing with the Empress of Iran on the front steps of a stately building. I surveyed the faces and quickly picked out Yamauchi in the front row.

  “The Congress produced two volumes of papers. A scholar named Richard Gordon from England and others concluded that Cumont’s theory was not supported by the evidence and, in fact, Cumont’s interpretations have now been analyzed and rejected on all major points.36 Contrary to what Cumont believed, even though Mithras was a Persian god who was attested as early as the fourteenth century BC, we have almost no evidence of Mithraism in the sense of a mystery religion in the West until very late—too late to have influenced the beginnings of Christianity.”

  That was a critically important assessment that would seem to rule out the “copycat” theory. Seeking further clarification, I asked Yamauchi for details concerning when the Mithraic mysteries were introduced in the West. He took another sip of coffee and then answered.

  “The first public recognition of the Mithras in Rome was the state visit of Tiridates, the king of Armenia, in AD 66. It’s said that he addressed Nero by saying, ‘And I have come to thee, my god, to worship thee as I do Mithras.’ There is also a reference earlier to some pirates in Cilicia who were worshipers of Mithras, but,” he noted, “this is not the same as Mithraism as a mystery religion.”

  Settling back into his seat, he continued. “Mithraism as a mystery religion cannot be attested before about AD 90, which is about the time we see a Mithraic motif in a poem by Statius. No mithraea [or Mithraic temples] have been found at Pompeii, which was destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79. The earliest Mithraic inscription in the West is a statue of a prefect under the emperor Trajan in AD 101. It’s now in the British Museum.

  “The earliest mithraea are dated to the early second century. There are a handful of inscriptions that date to the early second century, but the vast majority of texts are dated after AD 140. Most of what we have as evidence of Mithraism comes in the second, third, and fourth centuries AD. That’s basically what’s wrong with the theori
es about Mithraism influencing the beginnings of Christianity.”

  “The timing is wrong,” I observed.

  “That’s correct,” he said, picking up a copy of his hefty Persia and the Bible and leafing through it until he found a reference to Gordon, the senior fellow at the University of East Anglia who has published extensively on history and archaeology. “Gordon dates the establishment of the Mithraic mysteries to the reign of Hadrian, which was AD 117–138, or Antoninus Pius, which would be from 138 to 161,” Yamauchi said. “Specifically, Gordon said, ‘It is therefore reasonable to argue that Western Mithraism did not exist until the mid-second century, at least in a developed sense.’”37

  Then he picked up a photocopy of an article from a scholarly journal called Mithras, published by the Society for Mithraic Studies in the aftermath of the 1974 Iranian conclave of scholars. He read the words of E. J. Yarnold of Oxford University: “The fervor with which historians used to detect wholesale Christian borrowings from the Mithraic and other mysteries has now died down.”38

  Yamauchi looked up at me. “As Ronald Nash and so many other knowledgeable scholars have concluded, the dating disproves that Christianity borrowed its tenets from Mithraism,” he said. Indeed, Nash is emphatic: “The flowering of Mithraism occurred after the close of the New Testament canon, too late for it to have influenced the development of first-century Christianity.”39

  Yamauchi loaded me down with copies of academic articles and books by highly regarded scholars who back up that claim. Manfred Clauss, professor of ancient history at Free University in Berlin, said in The Roman Cult of Mithras that it does not make sense to interpret the Mithraic mysteries “as a fore-runner of Christianity.”40 In his book Mithraism and Christianity, published by Cambridge University Press, L. Patterson concluded there is “no direct connection between the two religions either in origin or development.”41