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Texts>The Myth of the Resurrection

The Meaning of the Myth

In dealing with the myth of the virgin birth, we are apt to lose our judgment in this wonderful world of legends and religious fairy tales. If we find, as we do, a new religion appearing in the first century with a story of a slain and resurrected god, and we see clearly that such a story was current all over the world for ages before the first century, we are very prone to conclude at once that the new religion borrowed its story from the old ones.

That is not strictly logical. If, as we saw, the legend could grow up independently in four or five parts of the earth, it could appear independently in a sixth part. We say grow up, but we must remember that legends are not like plants. They do not necessarily require a germ from a previous plant to engender them. The Greek (or pre-Greek), Phrygian, Persian, Egyptian, and Babylonian legends of death (or at least descent into the lower world) and resurrection arose independently. Why not the Christian? We rule out of court the Christian's claim that his story was quite independent because it is based upon a fact. The analysis of the evidence for it in the New Testament, which I made in the second chapter, demolishes that belief. There is only evidence that the belief existed amongst the followers of Jesus some years after his death. But we must reflect before we say that the followers of Jesus merely borrowed what was said of other gods. The story of the resurrection as we have it in the Gospels seems very plainly to have been built up in part out of the older legends. We must, it is true, not strain the parallels and mythical interpretations. Conybeare, the chief rationalist critic of the mythologists, seems to me justified in many of his criticisms. Jesus, they point out, was buried in a cave or rock-tomb. So was Mithra, therefore. . .

Conybeare rightly points out that in stony Judea a man was generally buried in a rock-tomb. Again, it is said that Jesus walked on the water, and that he commandeered two asses on one occasion; and there is a legend that Dionysus once, to cross a river, commandeered one of two asses, and it walked on the water bearing him. It seems very doubtful [that] the ignorant writers of the Gospels knew that not very common legend; and the parallel is, in any case, very imperfect.

But the finished Christian story of the resurrection does seem to have been borrowed. The two days in the tomb are suspicious. The descent into hell is quite plainly pagan. The weeping women are very suggestive of borrowing. The ascent into heaven in a cloud is obviously borrowed from Heracles. And so on. As these things do not appear in the Christian story until after or about the end of the first century, there was plenty of time for the legend to pick up these bits of earlier stories. The early Christian who knew, for instance, that Heracles had risen to heaven in a cloud from the top of a high pyre before his disciples would not mind. "The devil has his Christs," he would say. It was an intelligent anticipation.

How far is it likely that the bald primitive story of the execution and resurrection of Jesus was borrowed? To me it seems that the crucifixion is probably historical: unless we reject the whole of Paul's Epistles. Paul, a few years after the event, living first among the Jews at Jerusalem-who never denied the crucifixion-could hardly be misled on such a point. The actual account of the "passion" is clearly a legendary expansion, but the death itself seems to be part of the human story of Jesus which the Jews, in their early conflict with the Christians, never questioned.

The question whether the early followers of Jesus then, within a few years of his death, borrowed the myth of the resurrection from other religions and applied it to him is not simple as some of the mythologists seem to suppose. Wherever Paul was "converted," he was won by the arguments of Jewish followers of Jesus in Judea; and, if we proceed on patient psychological and historical lines of inquiry, instead of bluntly rejecting the whole story, we have to ask how much the immediate and ignorant followers of Jesus knew about other slain and resurrected gods, and how far, if this knowledge were current in Judea, they would venture to appropriate and apply it. On the whole it seems more scientific and reasonable to suppose that, since the contemporary world was saturated with a resurrection myth, even Galilean fisherman knew some thing about it, and that the Messianic school held that the Messiah would rise from the dead. On the other hand, since the Gospels unanimously represent the disciples as dejected and scattered after the execution of their leader, and quite unwilling to believe in his resurrection-a point in favor of the historicity of the narrative, since later glorifiers of Jesus would hardly concoct such things-it seems clear that they did not then regard him as God.

Working on sober and patient lines, therefore, one is disposed to think that the disciples, or some of them, had come to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, without forming any theory of his divine nature, and that his execution shattered their belief for a time. Then there was the rally which we are accustomed to find in such circumstances. Possibly some of the women thought that they had, like Paul, subjective visions of Jesus; and such things could easily in a few years take objective form. I have traced modern miracles, both Catholic miracles at Lourdes and Spiritualist miracles, through five or six successive writers and copiers to the original documents, and it is curious to see how each amplifies or alters one word and omits others until the story looks quite different. Oral transmission of a story in the imaginative East, in a period of extreme nervous exaltation, would account for the simple story of the resurrection as it first appears in Paul. We have, as I said, no witnesses to the resurrection, so that the truth of the Christian belief is hardly worth discussing; but we have in some way to account for the belief itself. Later writers or Greek Christians could add mythical details, but it seems true neither to human nature nor to history to imagine the earliest Jewish followers of Jesus recalling that Mithra or Osiris had risen again and so saying that Jesus had done the same.

In sum, I should say that the universal belief in a slain and resurrected god throws light upon the Christian belief by showing us a universal frame of mind which quite easily, in many places, made a resurrection myth. We do not know how many of the obscure "Messiahs" who figure in Jewish history may have had the same or similar stories told of them. But none of them except Jesus had a Saul of Tarsus to spread his cult. But for that fiery and indomitable little man history would probably never have had to record the story of Christianity.

And Paul gave the new gospel its characteristic features: its ascetic and theological features. Jesus, an embodiment of God, died to save men from sin. The modern preacher stresses this aspect, and asks us to smile at all the stories of Osiris and the other slain and resurrected gods. The Christian story is a spiritual story, he says. Is it? In point of fact, the very bases of it are repugnant to the modern mind. If Jesus died to save men from sin, it was, as Paul says, from Adam's sin. On Christian principles the death of Christ does not atone for a man's personal sins. But only the less educated Christians now see anything "spiritual" in the idea that God condemned billions of human beings to eternal torment for the sin of one man. It is not spiritual, but sordid.

That was a mistake, of course, says the Modernist. Paul and everybody else were wrong-until the end of the nineteenth century. The real spiritual significance of the Christian story, its immense distinction from all other death and resurrection myths, is its moral inspiration. And the Modernist is in no better position than the Ancientists. As I have shown, the cult of Isis and Osiris in its latest form, the Greek Mysteries, and the cult of Mithra had exactly the same moral message. The celebration was a rebuke to sin, an exhortation to purity, a promise of personal resurrection. There is nothing unique in the Christian story. What is unique is the fact that of all the struggling cults of that wonderful age Christianity alone survived and conquered the world. I am now devoting a series of books to that. There is, we shall see, no more miracle or mystery in it than in all that we have yet surveyed.

But we are at the same time making a broad study of religious evolution, and a word must be said about the meaning of the general myth of a slain and resurrected god. It used to be thought that it was a fanciful allegory of the annual death (in winter) and restoration to life (in spring) of the sun. It is now more generally thought, with Sir I. G. Frazer, that the phenomenon on which the myth is based is the annual death and spring resurrection of the spirit of vegetation.

We have a natural tendency to make a single theory fit a large number of related facts, but in some cases it is a mistake. Here, in particular, we have two great facts- the decay and restoration of the sun and the decay and restoration of vegetation-in the actual order of nature, and some nations were more impressed by one than the other. The death and resurrection of Mithra, for instance, seems clearly a solar myth. The story of Demeter (mother earth) and her daughter just as clearly refers to vegetation; and the myth of Ishtar and Tammuz, Cybele and Attis, is equally clear. The myth of Isis and Osiris was a sun- god; but the evidence in Frazer and the time of the celebration (November) are against them.

The phenomena of nature's annual pageant are very different in different countries. To the northerner or the dweller on an elevated and temperate region the annual "slaying," or at least mortal illness, of the sun, which leads to the rigors of winter, is much more striking than the slow dying and slow rebirth of nature. To the southerner the waning of the sun in winter is rather a relief; while most of the vegetation is dead during the greater part of the year, and it is the sudden and glorious burst of flowers and corn that impresses. So we get both solar and vegetation myths, and combinations of the two, and, as the season of rain and growth varies considerably, we find the celebration at different times of the year.

But what a consummation! Man in his childhood speculates on the annual pageant of nature. What does it mean? Mother-earth and father-sky never die. They are always there. But the spirit of the sun and the spirit of the corn and tree die or sicken every year, and rise again. Or perhaps they merely pass for a season to the underworld? Man weaves his fairy tales about the great pageant. The son of God or the daughter or lover of earth is slain, or dies, or is dragged to the underworld every year. We mourn with mother-earth; we rejoice in the restoration.

Then the ideas of sin and virtue enter. They come to be regarded as conditions of one's immortal lot. The life beyond had at first been conceived merely as an eternal duplicate of this. The death and resurrection festivals were more or less in the nature of religious magic. They were to promote fertility; and love and feasting promote fertility. Now the drama becomes ethical. The next world is purely spiritual, and you must not go into it with sin on your soul. The robust and wicked old celebrations become "mysteries." At last, by a curious chain of historical accidents, an old Sumerian myth of a fall of man enters the story. The god really dies to atone for the race; and for two thousand years nearly the whole race pretends to shudder in the shadow of the cross. It is fast fading from the earth, in spite of a hundred thousand priests. The pageant of nature has a new interpreter: science. The pageant of religions has a new interpreter: history. We discard myths and legends. We chart our way in the light of new knowledge and the strength of a new consciousness.

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