Jesus in comparative mythology

Syncretisms in late antiquity

Mithraism

Around the same time that Christianity was expanding, the cult of the god Mithras was also spreading throughout the Roman Empire. Very little is known for certain about the Mithraic cult because it was a "Mystery Cult", meaning its members were forbidden from disclosing the cult's beliefs to outsiders. No Mithraic sacred texts have survived, if any such writings ever existed. Consequently, it is disputed how much influence Christianity and Mithraism may have had on each other. Michael Patella states that the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism are more likely a result of their shared cultural environment rather than direct borrowing from one to the other. Christianity and Mithraism were both of Oriental origin and their practices and respective saviour figures were both shaped by the social conditions in the Roman Empire during the time period.

Most of what is known about the legendary life of Mithras comes from archaeological excavation of Mithraea, underground Mithraic sanctuaries of worship, which were found all across the Roman world. Like Jesus, Mithras was seen as a divine saviour, but, unlike Jesus, Mithras was not believed to have brought his salvation by suffering and dying. Mithras was believed to have been born fully-grown from a rock, a belief which is confirmed by a vast number of surviving sculptures showing him rising from the rock nude except for a Phrygian cap, clutching a sword in his right hand and a torch in his left. In many depictions, the rock is also encircled by a snake. In Mithraic cults primarily from the Rhine-Danube region, there are also representations of a myth in which Mithras shoots an arrow at a rock face, causing water to gush forth. This myth is one of the closest parallels between Mithras and Jesus. Both Christians and Mithraists used water as a symbol for their respective saviours. In the New Testament, Jesus is referred to as the "water of life" and a votive altar to Mithras from Poetovio proclaims him as the fons perennis ("the ever-flowing stream").

In the center of every Mithraeum was a tauroctony, a painting or sculpture showing Mithras as a young man, usually wearing a cape and Phrygian cap, plunging a knife into the neck or shoulder of a bull as he turns its head towards him, simultaneously turning his own head away. A dog laps up the blood pouring from the bull's wound, from which emerges an ear of corn, as a scorpion stings the bull's scrotum. Human torchbearers stand on either side of the scene, one holding his torch upright and other upside-down. A serpent is also present. The exact interpretation of this scene is unclear, but the image certainly depicts a narrative central to Mithraism and the figures in it appear to correspond to the signs of the zodiac. The closest parallel between Jesus and Mithras is the use of a ritual meal. After slaying the bull, Mithras was believed to have shared the bull's meat with the sun-god Sol Invictus, a meal which is shown in Mithraic iconography and which was ritually reenacted by Mithraists as part of their liturgy. Manfred Clauss, a scholar of the Mithraic cult, speculates that the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism may have made it easier for members of the Mithraic cult to convert to Christianity without having to give up their ritual meal, sun-imagery, candles, incense, or bells, a trend which might explain why, as late as the sixth century, the Christian Church was still trying to stamp out the stulti homines who still paid obeisance to the sun every morning on the steps of the church itself.

A few Christian apologists from the second and third centuries, who had never been members of the Mithraic cult and had never spoken to its members, claimed that the practices of the Mithraic cult were copied off Christianity. The second-century Christian apologist Justin Martyr writes in his First Apology, after describing the Christian Eucharist, that "...the wicked devils have imitated [this] in the mysteries of Mithras, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn." The later apologist Tertullian writes in his De praescriptione haereticorum:

The devil (is the inspirer of the heretics) whose work it is to pervert the truth, who with idolatrous mysteries endeavours to imitate the realities of the divine sacraments. Some he himself sprinkles as though in token of faith and loyalty; he promises forgiveness of sins through baptism; and if my memory does not fail me marks his own soldiers with the sign of Mithra on their foreheads, commemorates an offering of bread, introduces a mock resurrection, and with the sword opens the way to the crown. Moreover has he not forbidden a second marriage to the supreme priest? He maintains also his virgins and his celibates.

According to Ehrman, these writers were ideologically motivated to portray Christianity and Mithraism as similar because they wanted to persuade pagan officials that Christianity was not so different from other religious traditions, so that these officials would realize that there was no reason to single Christians out for persecution. These apologists therefore intentionally exaggerated similarities between Christianity and Mithraism to support their arguments. Scholars are generally wary of trusting anything these sources have to say about the Mithraic cult's alleged practices.

Iconography

In late antiquity, early Christians frequently adapted pagan iconography to suit Christian purposes. This does not in any way indicate that Christianity itself was derived from paganism, only that early Christians made use of the pre-existing symbols that were readily available in their society. Sometimes Christians deliberately used pagan iconography in conscious effort to show Jesus as superior to the pagan gods. In classical iconography, the god Hermes was sometimes shown as a kriophoros, a handsome, beardless youth bearing a ram or sheep over his shoulders. In late antiquity, this image developed a generic association with philanthropy. Early Christians adapted images of this kind as representations of Jesus in his role of as the "Good Shepherd".

Early Christians also identified Jesus with the Greek hero Orpheus, who was said to have tamed wild beasts with the music of his lyre. The Church Father Clement of Alexandria writes that Orpheus and Jesus are similar in that they have both been subject to admiration on account of their "songs", but insists that Orpheus misused his gift of eloquence by persuading people to worship idols and "tie themselves to temporal things"; whereas Jesus, the singer of the "New Song" brings peace to men and frees them from the bonds of the flesh. The later Christian historian Eusebius, drawing on Clement, also compares Orpheus to Jesus for having both brought peace to men. One unusual possible instance of identification between Jesus and Orpheus is a hematite gem inscribed with the image of a crucified man identified as ΟΡΦΕΩΣ ΒΑΚΧΙΚΟΣ (Orpheos Bacchikos). The gem has long been suspected to be a forgery created in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, but, if authentic, it may date to the late second or early third century AD. If authentic, the gem would represent a remarkable instance of pagans adopting Christian iconography, rather than vice versa as is generally more common. The gem was formerly housed at the Altes Museum in Berlin, but was lost or destroyed during World War II.

Early Christians found it hard to criticize Asclepius because, while their usual tactics were to denounce the absurdity of believing in gods who were merely personifications of nature and to accuse pagan gods of being immoral, neither of these could be applied to Asclepius, who was never portrayed as a personification of nature and whose stories were inscrutably moral. The early Christian apologist Justin Martyr argued that believing in Jesus's divinity should not be hard for pagans, since it was no different from believing in the divinity of Asclepius. Eventually, Christians adapted much of the iconography of Asclepius to suit the miracles of Jesus. Images of Jesus as a healer replaced images of Asclepius and Hippocrates as the ideal physician. Jesus, who was originally shown as clean-shaven, may have first been shown as bearded as a result of this syncretism with Asclepius, as well as other bearded deities such as Zeus and Serapis. A second-century AD head of Asclepius was discovered underneath a fourth-century AD Christian church in Gerasa, Jordan.

In some depictions from late antiquity, Jesus was shown with the halo of the sun god Sol Invictus. Images of "Christ in Majesty" seated upon a throne were inspired by classical depictions of Zeus and other chief deities. By the fourth century AD, the recognizable image of Jesus as long-haired, bearded, and clad in long, baggy-sleeved clothing had fully emerged. This widespread adaptation of pagan iconography to suit Jesus did not sit well with many Christians. A fragment of a lost work by Theodor Lector preserves a miracle story dated to around 465 AD in which the bishop Gennadius of Constantinople was said to have healed an artist who had lost all strength in his hand after painting an image of Christ showing him with long, curly hair, parted in the same manner as traditional representations of Zeus.

Christians also may have adapted the iconography of the Egyptian goddess Isis nursing her son Horus and applied it to the Virgin Mary nursing her son Jesus. Some Christians also may have conflated stories about the Egyptian god Osiris with the resurrection of Jesus. The title of kosmokrateros ("Ruler of the Cosmos"), which was eventually applied to Jesus, had previously been borne by Serapis. The Church Father Jerome records in a letter dated to the year 395 AD that "Bethlehem... belonging now to us... was overshadowed by a grove of Tammuz, that is to say, Adonis, and in the cave where once the infant Christ cried, the lover of Venus was lamented." This same cave later became the site of the Church of the Nativity. The church historian Eusebius, however, does not mention pagans having ever worshipped in the cave, nor do any other early Christian writers. Peter Welten has argued that the cave was never dedicated to Tammuz and that Jerome misinterpreted Christian mourning over the Massacre of the Innocents as a pagan ritual over Tammuz's death. Joan E. Taylor has countered this argument by arguing that Jerome, as an educated man, could not have been so naïve as to mistake Christian mourning over the Massacre of the Innocents as a pagan ritual for Tammuz. During the sixth century AD, some Christians in the Middle East borrowed elements from poems of Tammuz's wife Ishtar mourning over her husband's death into their own retellings of the Virgin Mary mourning over the death of her son Jesus. The Syrian writers Jacob of Serugh and Romanos the Melodist both wrote laments in which the Virgin Mary describes her compassion for her son at the foot of the cross in deeply personal terms closely resembling Ishtar's laments over the death of Tammuz.

Birthdate

The Bible never states when Jesus was born, but, by late antiquity, Christians had begun celebrating his birth on 25 December. In 274 AD, the Roman emperor Aurelian had declared 25 December the birthdate of Sol Invictus, a sun god of Syrian origin whose cult had been vigorously promoted by the earlier emperor Elagabalus. Christians may have thought that they could attract more converts to Christianity by allowing them to continue to celebrate on the same day. 25 December also falls around the same time as the Roman festival of Saturnalia, which was much older and more widely celebrated. Many of the customs originally associated with Saturnalia eventually became associated with Christmas. Early Christians may have also been influenced by the idea that Jesus had died on the anniversary of his conception; because Jesus died during Passover and, in the third century AD, Passover was celebrated on 25 March, they may have assumed that Jesus's birthday must have come nine months later, on 25 December.

General comparisons

Aspects of Jesus's life as recorded in the gospels bear some similarities to various other figures, both historical and mythological. Proponents of the Christ Myth theory frequently exaggerate these similarities as part of their efforts to claim that Jesus never existed as a historical figure. Maurice Casey, the late Emeritus Professor of New Testament Languages and Literature at the University of Nottingham, writes that these parallels do not in any way indicate that Jesus was invented based on pagan "divine men", but rather that he was simply not as perfectly unique as many evangelical Christians frequently claim he was.

Miraculous birth

Classical mythology is filled with stories of miraculous births of various kinds, but, in most cases of divine offspring from classical mythology, the father is a god who engages in literal sexual intercourse with the mother, a mortal woman, causing her to give birth to a son who is literally half god and half man. A possible pagan precursor to the Christian story of the virgin birth of Jesus is an Athenian legend recounted by the mythographer Pseudo-Apollodorus. According to this account, Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, once attempted to rape Athena, the virgin goddess of wisdom, but she pushed him away, causing him to ejaculate on her thigh. Athena wiped the semen off using a tuft of wool, which she tossed into the dust, impregnating Gaia and causing her to give birth to Erichthonius, whom Athena adopted as her own child. Thus, Athena was able to produce a "son" without her losing her virginity. The Roman mythographer Hyginus records a similar story in which Hephaestus demanded Zeus to let him marry Athena since he was the one who had smashed open Zeus's skull, allowing Athena to be born. Zeus agreed to this and Hephaestus and Athena were married, but, when Hephaestus was about to consummate the union, Athena vanished from the bridal bed, causing him to ejaculate on the floor, thus impregnating Gaia with Erichthonius.

Another comparable story from Greek mythology describes the conception of the hero Perseus. According to the myth, Zeus came to Perseus's mother Danaë in the form of a shower of gold and impregnated her. Although no surviving Greek text ever describes this as a "virgin birth", the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr has his Jewish speaker Trypho refer to it as such in his Dialogue with Trypho. Scholars have also compared the story of the virgin birth to the complex narratives revolving around the birth of Dionysus. In most versions of the conception of Dionysus, Zeus was said to have come to the mortal woman Semele disguised as a mortal and had sex with her. Zeus's wife Hera disguised herself as Semele's nurse and persuaded her to ask Zeus to show her his true, divine form. Zeus eventually agreed, but, upon revealing his divine form, Semele was instantly incinerated by his lightning. Zeus rescued the unborn infant Dionysus and sewed him inside his own thigh, giving birth to him himself when it was time. In an alternative version of the story told by the Roman mythographer Hyginus, Dionysus was actually the son of Zeus and Persephone, who was torn apart by the Titans. Zeus rescued Dionysus's heart, ground it up, and mixed it into a potion, which he gave to Semele to drink, causing her to become pregnant with the infant who had been killed.

According to M. David Litwa, the authors of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke consciously attempt to avoid portraying Jesus's conception as anything resembling pagan accounts of divine parentage; the author of the Gospel of Luke tells a similar story about the conception of John the Baptist in effort to emphasize the Jewish character of Jesus's birth. Nonetheless, Litwa argues that the accounts are unconsciously influenced by pagan stories of divine men, despite their authors' efforts to avert this. Other stories of virgin births similar to Jesus's are referenced by later Christian writers. The third-century AD Christian theologian Origen retells a legend that Plato's mother Perictione had virginally conceived him after the god Apollo had appeared to her husband Ariston and told him not to consummate his marriage with his wife, a scene closely paralleling the account of the Annunciation to Joseph from the Gospel of Matthew. Origen interpreted this story and others like it as prefiguring the reality made manifest by Jesus's virginal conception. In the fourth century, the bishop Epiphanius of Salamis protested that, in Alexandria, at the temple of Kore-Persephone, the pagans enacted a "hideous mockery" of the Christian Epiphany in which they claimed that "Today at this hour Kore, that is the virgin, has given birth to Aion."

Archetypal folkloric hero

Folklorist Alan Dundes has argued that Jesus fits all but five of the twenty-two narrative patterns in the Rank-Raglan mythotype, and therefore more closely matches the archetype than many of the heroes traditionally cited to support it, such as Jason, Bellerophon, Pelops, Asclepius, Joseph, Elijah, and Siegfried. Dundes sees Jesus as a historical "miracle-worker" or "religious teacher", accounts of whose life were told and retold through oral tradition so many times that they became legend. Dundes states that analysing Jesus in the context of folklore helps explain some of the anomalies of the gospels, such as the fact that none of them give any information about Jesus's childhood and adolescence, which Dundes explains by the fact that this is "precisely the case for almost all heroes of tradition". Other scholars have strongly criticized Dundes's application of the Rank-Raglan mythotype to Jesus, pointing out that Dundes draws the narrative patterns from different texts written centuries apart, without taking care to differentiate between them. Dundes's application has also been criticized due to the Rank-Raglan mythotype's artificial nature and its lack of specificity to Hellenistic culture. Nonetheless, Lawrence M. Wills states that the "hero paradigm in some form does apply to the earliest lives of Jesus", albeit not to the extreme extent that Dundes has argued.

Dying-and-rising god archetype

The late nineteenth-century Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer wrote extensively about the existence of a "dying-and rising god" archetype in his monumental study of comparative religion The Golden Bough (the first edition of which was published in 1890) as well as in later works. Frazer's main intention was to prove that all religions were fundamentally the same and that all the essential features of Christianity could be found in earlier religions. Although Frazer himself did not explicitly claim that Jesus was a "dying-and-rising god" of the supposedly typical Near Eastern variety, he strongly implied it. Frazer's claims became widely influential in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship of religion, but are now mostly rejected by modern scholars.

The main examples of "dying-and-rising gods" discussed by Frazer were the Mesopotamian god Dumuzid/Tammuz, his Greek equivalent Adonis, the Phrygian god Attis, and the Egyptian god Osiris. Dumuzid/Tammuz was a god of Sumerian origin associated with vegetation and fertility who eventually came to be worshipped across the Near East. Dumuzid was associated with springtime agricultural fertility and, when the crops withered during the hot summer months, women would mourn over his death. Tammuz's categorization as a "dying-and-rising god" was based on the abbreviated Akkadian redaction of Inanna's Descent into the Underworld, which was missing the ending. Since numerous lamentations over the death of Dumuzid had already been translated, scholars filled in the missing ending by assuming that the reason for Ishtar's descent was because she was going to resurrect Dumuzid and that the text could therefore be assumed to end with Tammuz's resurrection.

Then, in the middle of the twentieth century, the complete, unabridged, original Sumerian text of Inanna's Descent was finally translated, revealing that, instead of ending with Dumuzid's resurrection as had long been assumed, the text actually ended with Dumuzid's death. The discovery of the Return of Dumuzid in 1963 briefly revived hopes that Dumuzid might once again be able to be categorized as a "dying-and-rising god", but the text ultimately proved disappointing in this regard because it does not describe a triumph over death (as would be necessary for a true Frazerian "resurrection myth") and instead does precisely the opposite and affirms the "inalterable power of the realm of the dead" by the fact that Dumuzid can only leave the Underworld when his sister takes his place.

Frazer and others also saw Tammuz's Greek equivalent Adonis as a "dying-and-rising god", despite the fact that he is never described as rising from the dead in any extant Greco-Roman writings and the only possible allusions to his supposed resurrection come from late, highly ambiguous statements made by Christian authors. Attis is never described as being resurrected either; although many myths surround his death, none of them ever claim that he was resurrected. Osiris was never truly resurrected either; in Egyptian myth, Osiris's brother Set was said to have murdered him, chopped his body into pieces, and scattered them across the land. Osiris's devoted wife Isis collected his dismembered limbs and reassembled them, allowing her to revive Osiris in the Duat, the Egyptian afterlife, where he became the king of the dead.

In the late twentieth century, scholars began to severely criticize the designation of "dying-and-rising god" altogether. In 1987, Jonathan Z. Smith concluded in Mircea Eliade's Encyclopedia of Religion that "The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts." He further argued that the deities previously referred to as "dying-and-rising" would be better termed separately as "dying gods" and "disappearing gods", asserting that before Christianity, the two categories were distinct and gods who "died" did not return, and those who returned never truly "died". By the end of the twentieth century, most scholars had come to agree that the notion of a "dying-and-rising god" was an invention and that the term was not a useful scholarly designation.