Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth

by Bart D. Ehrman

  Although such views about pagan gods were widely held in some circles for years, they met with devastating critique near the end of the twentieth century. There are, to be sure, scholars here or there who continue to think that there is some evidence of dying and rising gods. But even these scholars, who appear to be in the minority, do not think that the category is of any relevance for understanding the traditions about Jesus.

  This is true of the most outspoken advocate for the onetime existence of such gods, Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, whose book The Riddle of the Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East tries to revive the major thesis of Frazer. On the basis of a highly detailed and nuanced study of evidence, Mettinger claims that “the world of ancient Near Eastern religions actually knew a number of deities that may be properly described as dying and rising gods.”3 He does go on to stress, however, that the vocabulary of resurrection (that is, of a dead person being revived to live again) is used in only one known case: Melqart (or Heracles). As examples of such pagan deities in pre-Christian times, Mettinger names, in addition to Melqart, Dumuzi and Baal. Like Frazer before him, he argues that the dying and rising of these gods have “close ties to the seasonal cycle of plant life.”4

  Having read Mettinger’s book carefully, I do not think that it will provide much support for the mythicist view of pagan dying and rising gods. For one thing, even though Mettinger claims that such views were known in Palestine around the time of the New Testament, he does not provide a shred of evidence. He instead quotes passages from the Old Testament (his field of expertise): Ezekiel 8:14; Zechariah 12:11; and Daniel 11:37. But you can look at these passages yourself. None of them mentions the dying and rising of a god. So how do they prove that such a god was known in Palestine? What is more, none of them dates from anywhere near the time of the New Testament but are from hundreds of years earlier. Can anyone cite a single source of any kind that clearly indicates that people in rural Palestine, say, in the days of Peter and James, worshipped a pagan god who died and rose again? You can trust me, if there was a source like that, it would be talked about by everyone interested in early Christianity. It doesn’t exist.

  What is particularly striking about Mettinger’s study of older deities (not in the time of the New Testament but centuries earlier) is just how ambiguous the evidence is, even in cases that he argues for most strenuously. He has to offer an exceedingly nuanced and philologically detailed argument to make the point that any of these deities was thought by anyone at all as dying and rising. So how strong and prevalent a category was it if in fact there are few unambiguous sources, even if we restrict ourselves to centuries before the matter becomes relevant to us?

  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 goddess
es, Aphrodite and Persephone, compete for the affections of the human infant Adonis. Zeus (or in some of the myths Calliope) decides in Solomon-like fashion that Adonis will spend part of each year with each divinity, half the year with Aphrodite in the realms above, with the other gods, and the other half with Persephone, the goddess of the underworld. There is nothing here to suggest either death or resurrection for Adonis. Part of the year he is in one place (the realm of the living) and part in the other (the realm of the dead).

  The other more familiar form of the myth comes from the Roman author Ovid. In this account the young man Adonis is killed by a boar and is then mourned and commemorated by the goddess Aphrodite in the form of a flower. In this version, then, Adonis definitely dies. But there is nothing to suggest that he was raised from the dead. It is only in later texts, long after Ovid and after the rise of Christianity, that one finds any suggestion that Adonis came back to life after his death. Smith argues that this later form of the tradition may in fact have been influenced by Christianity and its claim that a human had been raised from the dead. In other words, the Adonis myth did not influence Christian views of Jesus but rather the other way around. Yet even here, Smith points out, there is no evidence anywhere of some kind of mystery cult where Adonis was worshipped as a dying-rising god or in which worshippers were identified with him and his fate of death and resurrection, as happens, of course, in Christian religions built on Jesus.

  Or take the instance of Osiris, commonly cited by mythicists as a pagan parallel to Jesus. Osiris was an Egyptian god about whom a good deal was written in the ancient world. We have texts discussing Osiris that span a thousand years. None was as influential or as well known as the account of the famous philosopher and religion scholar of the second Christian century, Plutarch, in his work Isis and Osiris. According to the myths, Osiris was murdered and his body was dismembered and scattered. But his wife, Isis, went on a search to recover and reassemble them, leading to Osiris’s rejuvenation. The key point to stress, however, is that Osiris does not—decidedly does not—return to life. Instead he becomes the powerful ruler of the dead in the underworld. And so for Osiris there is no rising from the dead.

  Smith maintains that the entire tradition about Osiris may derive from the processes of mummification in Egypt, where bodies were prepared for ongoing life in the realm of the dead (not as resuscitated corpses here on earth). And so Smith draws the conclusion, “In no sense can the dramatic myth of his death and reanimation be harmonized to the pattern of dying and rising gods.”8 The same can be said, in Smith’s view, of all the other divine beings often pointed to as pagan forerunners of Jesus. Some die but don’t return; some disappear without dying and do return; but none of them die and return.

  Jonathan Z. Smith’s well-documented views have made a large impact on scholarship. A second article, by Mark S. Smith, has been equally informative. Mark Smith is a scholar of the ancient Near East and Hebrew Bible who also opposes any notion of dying and rising gods in the ancient world.9 Mark Smith makes the compelling argument that when Frazer devised his theory about dying and rising gods, he was heavily influenced by his understanding of Christianity and Christian claims about Christ. But when one looks at the actual data about the pagan deities, without the lenses provided by later Christian views, there is nothing to make one consider them as gods who die and rise again. Smith shows why such views are deeply problematic for Osiris, Dumuzi, Melqart, Heracles, Adonis, and Baal.

  According to Smith, the methodological problem that afflicted Frazer was that he took data about various divine beings, spanning more than a millennium, from a wide range of cultures, and smashed the data all together into a synthesis that never existed. This would be like taking views of Jesus from a French monk of the twelfth century, a Calvinist of the seventeenth century, a Mormon of the late nineteenth century, and a Pentecostal preacher of today, combining them all together into one overall picture and saying, “That’s who Jesus was understood to be.” We would never do that with Jesus. Why should we do it with Osiris, Heracles, or Baal? Moreover, Smith emphasizes, a good deal of our information about these other gods comes from sources that date from a period after the rise of Christianity, writers who were themselves influenced by Christian views of Jesus and “who often received their information second-hand.”10 In other words, they probably do not tell us what pagans themselves, before Christianity, were saying about the gods they worshipped.

  The majority of scholars agree with the views of Smith and Smith: there is no unambiguous evidence that any pagans prior to Christianity believed in dying and rising gods, let alone that it was a widespread view held by lots of pagans in lots of times and places. But as we have seen, scholars such as Mettinger beg to differ. What can we conclude from this scholarly disagreement for the purposes at hand, the question of whether Jesus was invented as a dying and rising god? There are several key points to emphasize. First, it is important to realize that the reason there are disagreements among scholars (at least with someone like Mettinger) is that the evidence for such gods is at best sparse, scattered, and ambiguous, not abundant, ubiquitous, and clear. If there were any such beliefs about dying and rising gods, they were clearly not widespread and available for all to see. Such gods were definitely not widely known and widely discussed among religious people of antiquity, as is obvious from the fact that they are not clearly discussed in any of our sources. On this everyone should be able to agree. Even more important, there is no evidence that such gods were known or worshipped in rural Palestine, or even in Jerusalem, in the 20s CE. Anyone who thinks that Jesus was modeled on such deities needs to cite some evidence—any evidence at all—that Jews in Palestine at the alleged time of Jesus’s life were influenced by anyone who held such views. One reason that scholars do not think that Jesus was invented as one of these deities is precisely that we have no evidence that any of his followers knew of such deities in the time and place where Jesus was allegedly invented. Moreover, as Mettinger himself acknowledges, the differences between the dying and rising gods (which he has reconstructed on slim evidence) and Jesus show that Jesus was not modeled on them, even if such gods were talked about during Jesus’s time.

  But there is an even more important reason for thinking that Jesus was not invented as a Jewish version of a dying and rising god. The earliest Christians did not think that Jesus was God.

  Jesus as God

  That the earliest Christians did not consider Jesus God is not a controversial point among scholars. Apart from fundamentalists and very conservative evangelicals, scholars are unified in thinking that the view that Jesus was God was a later development within Christian circles. Fundamentalists disagree, of course, because for them Jesus really is God, and since he is God, he must have known he was God, and he must have told his followers, and so they knew from the beginning that he was God. This view is rooted in the fundamentalist doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture, where everything that Jesus is said to have said, for example in the Gospel of John, is historically accurate and beyond question. But that is not the view of critical scholarship. Whether or not Jesus really was God (a theological, not a historical, question), the earliest followers did not think so. As I indicated at the very beginning of this book, the questions of how, when, and why Christians came to regard Jesus as God will be the subject of my next book, not this one. But I do need to stress the point here: this was a later development in Christian thinking.

  It is striking that none of our first three Gospels—Matthew, Mark, and Luke—declares that Jesus is God or indicates that Jesus ever called himself God. Jesus’s teaching in the earliest Gospel traditions is not about his personal divinity but about the coming kingdom of God and the need to prepare for it. This should give readers pause. If the earliest followers of Jesus thought Jesus was God, why don’t the earliest Gospels say so? It seems like it would have been a rather important aspect of Christ’s identity to point out. It is true that the Gospels consistently portray Jesus as the Son of God.
But that is not the same thing as saying that he was God. We may think it is since for us the son of a dog is a dog, the son of a cat is a cat, and the son of a god, therefore, is a god. But the Gospels were not written by people living in the twenty-first century with modern understandings (or even in the fourth century with fourth-century understandings). The Gospels were written in a first-century context and were ultimately guided by Jewish understandings, especially as these were mediated through the Jewish scriptures, the Old Testament. The Old Testament speaks of many individuals and groups who were considered to be son(s) of God. In no instance were these persons God.

  And so, for example, the king of Israel was explicitly said to be “the son of God” (for example, Solomon, in 2 Samuel 7:11–14). This certainly did not make the king (especially Solomon) God. He was instead a human who stood in a close relationship with God, like a child to a parent, and was used by God to mediate his will on earth. So too the nation of Israel was sometimes called “the son of God” (for example, Hosea 11:1). This did not make the nation divine; Israel was instead the people through whom God mediated his will on earth. When the future messiah was thought of as the son of God, it was not because he would be God incarnate but because he would be a human particularly close to God through whom God worked his purposes. Jesus, for the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, is that human.