Pagan Origins for the Christian Resurrection Doctrine?
Pagan Origins for the Christian Resurrection Doctrine?
Here, as elsewhere, some scholars have tried to place the source of our basic traditions outside Jewish Palestine.24 That Mack suggests that the “resurrection myth” first originated in Jesus groups in northern Syria and Asia Minor25 is historically incredible.26 Despite divisions in the church over other issues like food laws and later hellenistic questions about the nature of the resurrection, early Christian testimony is unanimous concerning the resurrection and eyewitnesses of the resurrection, including in the pre-Pauline traditions (most notably 1 Cor 15:3-8 with its possible Aramaisms).27
Even apart from this observation, bodily resurrection was a Palestinian Jewish idea. It is difficult to conceive of a rapidly hellenizing Gentile church preaching a dying-and-rising mystery deity triggering Palestinian Jewish Jesus people to adopt a pagan idea and then modify it in a Palestinian Jewish direction (including the specifically Jewish language of “resurrection”). It is far more likely that later Gentiles attracted to a growing Jewish cult would have adopted and transformed a Palestinian Jewish understanding of the resurrection.28
Supposed pagan parallels to the resurrection stories prove weak; Aune even declares that “no parallel to them is found in Graeco-Roman biography.”29 Whether any “parallels” exist depends on what we mean by a “parallel”; but plainly none of the alleged parallels involves a historical person (or anyone) resurrected in the strict sense. This is probably in part because resurrection in its strict (bodily and permanent) sense was an almost exclusively Jewish belief, and among Jewish people was reserved for the future. Most pagans would have preferred to play down a savior’s or demigod’s human death.30 Ancients commonly reported apparitions of deceased persons31 or deities, and hence occasionally those of persons who had become immortal,32 but these are not resurrection appearances.
Even the appearance of Apollonius of Tyana, which exhibits some parallels with the Gospel accounts,33 is not an exception. This story appears in a third-century source, after Christian teaching on the resurrection had become widely disseminated; further and more to our present point, Apollonius proves that he has not died, not that he has risen.34 In another third century CE work probably by the same author, the hero Protesilaos appears to people and lives on; he is said to have “come back to life,” though he refuses to explain the nature of this claim.35 But whatever else his “return” from death might claim, it does not involve bodily resurrection: his body explicitly remains buried.36 Moreover, even claims like this one made for Protesilaos do not predate the rise and proliferation of the Christian teaching about Jesus’ resurrection.37
Nor do stories about magical resucitation of corpses have much in common with the account of Jesus’ resurrection (for example, when a witch drills holes in the corpse to pour in hot blood, dog froth, and so forth).38 Ancient readers never supposed that bodily immortality followed such resucitations, because they did not connect them with any doctrine like the Jewish notion of eschatological resurrection. Celsus, a second-century critic of Christians, was fully able to distinguish bodily resurrection from “old myths of returning from the Underworld,” hence argued instead that Jesus’ resurrection was merely staged, as commonly with apparent postmortem recoveries in novels.39
Most cultures believe in some form of life after death and such cultures frequently accept some form of contact with the spirits of the dead or of some of the dead. Such phenomena may help explain how some ancient Mediterranean hearers may have conceived of Jesus’ resurrection appearances; but to cite them as “parallels” to those appearances, as if they define the latter, stretches the category of parallel too far to be useful. These claims do not normally involve bodily existence. If Jesus’ body was eschatologically transformed in advance of the fulness of the kingdom, how would the disciples know it and proclaim it if he failed to appear to them?