Did Christianity Copy Earlier Pagan Resurrection Stories?

Did Christianity Copy Earlier Pagan Resurrection Stories?

In antiquity, people of the Near Eastern and Greco-Roman worlds believed in life after death, generally as bodiless souls or spirits.[1] In certain Jewish circles later associated with the Pharisees, a belief in the resurrection of the body after death developed.[2] To be certain, the resurrection of Jesus Christ is the essential core of Christianity.

But some have maintained that the resurrection of Christ is patterned after the prototype of Near Eastern “dying and rising gods.” Others have argued that Paul’s interpretation of baptism as an initiation rite, which united believers with the risen Christ, was influenced by Greco-Roman mystery religions.[3]

Dying and Rising Vegetation Gods

The theory that there was a widespread worship of a dying and rising god— Tammuz in Mesopotamia, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Asia Minor, and Osiris in Egypt—was propounded by Sir James Frazer, who gathered a mass of parallels in part IV of his monumental work The Golden Bough (1906, reprinted in 1961).[4] Frazer regarded the name Adonis (Semitic Adon, meaning “Lord”) to be a title for the Mesopotamian Tammuz. In addition, German scholars such as Otto Pfleiderer and Richard Reitzenstein drew explicit comparisons between these “dying and rising gods” and the resurrection of Christ. Reitzenstein’s influential work, Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen (1910), which was not translated into English until 1978, argued that Paul was profoundly influenced by Egyptian and Phrygian mystery religions.[5] Scholars like Reitzenstein and Wilhelm Bousset, who were members of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (“History of Religions School”), exerted a profound influence on the leading German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, who, in writing about Paul’s understanding of baptism, stated: “The meaning of the latter is to impart to the initiates a share of the fate of the cult-deity who has suffered death and reawakened to life, such as Attis, Adonis, or Osiris.”[6]

In the 1930s, three influential French scholars, M. Goguel, C. Guignebert, and A. Loisy, also interpreted Christianity as a syncretistic religion formed under the influence of Hellenistic mystery religions.

According to Loisy, Christ was “a saviour-god, after the manner of an Osiris, an Attis, a Mithra…Like Adonis, Osiris, and Attis he had died a violent death, and like them he had returned to life…”[7]

Many who little realize its fragile foundations have adopted this view. For instance, Hugh Schonfield has declared, “The revelations of Frazer in The Golden Bough had not got through to the masses…Christians remained related under the skin to the devotees of Adonis and Osiris, Dionysus and Mithras.”[8] Furthermore, John H. Randall, emeritus professor of philosophy at Columbia University, has asserted, “Christianity, at the hands of Paul, became a mystical system of redemption, much like the cult of Isis, and the other sacramental or mystery religions of the day.”[9] Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy allege, “Jesus is Osiris-Dionysus thinly disguised as the Jewish Messiah in order to make the Pagan Mysteries accessible to Jews.”[10] What is more, Roland Guy Bonnel and Vincent Arieh Tobin, in comparing Christ and Osiris, state: “In particular the concept of a god who dies and rises again was widespread over the area for many centuries before the advent of Christianity.”[11] They conclude, “With such parallels it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that some form of influence must have been exercised by the Egyptian myth on the development of the Christian tradition.”[12] The explanation of the Christian resurrection by such a comparative-religions approach has even been reflected in official Soviet propaganda.[13]

A reexamination of the sources used to support the theory of a mythical origin of Christ’s resurrection reveals that the evidences are far from satisfactory and that the parallels are quite superficial.

Dumuzi (Tammuz)

The Sumerian name Dumuzi means “the Good Son” (in Akkadian language the name is Tammuz). There were two Sumerian kings called Dumuzi listed in the King List (Sumer is ancient southern Iraq), leading some scholars to think that one of these kings may have been deified. It is noteworthy that early Sumerian kings played the role of Dumuzi in a hieros gamos “sacred marriage” with a cultic prostitute on New Year’s Day.[14]

As a god, Dumuzi was primarily a shepherd. The view of Thorkild Jacobsen that he also represented the power of the date and of the grain has been disputed.[15]

The primary rituals first attested at Mari (eighteenth century BC) concerned the death and disappearance of Dumuzi/Tammuz. These were held in midsummer, coinciding with the diminution of milk from goats and sheep at that season.[16] (The Jewish month Tammuz corresponds to July.)

Scholars had assumed a resurrection of the god by the goddess (Sumerian Inanna is the same as the Akkadian Ishtar) even though the end of both the Sumerian and the Akkadian texts of the myth of “The Descent of Inanna (Ishtar)” had not been preserved.[17] In 1960, Samuel N. Kramer published a new poem, “The Death of Dumuzi,” which proves conclusively that instead of rescuing Dumuzi from the underworld, Inanna sent him there as her substitute.[18] According to Bendt Alster, “The question whether or not Dumuzi rose from the realms of the dead is perhaps best answered with the claim that since this was not celebrated in a cultic festival, it did not play any significant role in the literature.”[19] The last lines of the preserved Akkadian text of “The Descent of Ishtar” do speak of Tammuz “coming up” with mourners. This is not a reference to his resurrection, but to the common belief that the shades will arise to partake of funerary offerings:

“The dead shall come up and smell the incense offerings.”[20] A line in a fragmentary and obscure text is the only positive evidence that, after being sent to the underworld, Dumuzi may have had his sister, Geshtinanna, take his place for half the year.[21]

In the Old Testament, there is one reference to Tammuz: “Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the LORD, and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz” (Ezekiel 8:14). Origen’s

identification of Tammuz with Adonis was incorporated into the Vulgate: “Adonidem.” According to Jerome, Hadrian desecrated the cave in Bethlehem associated with Jesus’s birth by building a shrine for Tammuz- Adonis.

Adonis

Adonis was the handsome youth beloved of Aphrodite, who was killed by a boar. The hero was transformed into a bright red anemone flower. His premature death was lamented by women in Athens, who planted “gardens of Adonis” with fast-growing vegetation that was placed on rooftops. This vegetation wilted in a week in the hot summer, signifying the death of vegetation (Aristophanes, Lysistrata 708-39).[22] Theocritus, in his Idyll 15, described a ceremony lamenting Adonis’s death. This was held at the palace of Ptolemy II (c. 250 BC) at Alexandria. At the end of the festival, the image of Adonis was cast into the sea.

Tryggve N.D. Mettinger reports: “As far as I can find, there is nothing in the Greek rites for Adonis that implies a celebration of his resurrection.”[23] P. Lambrechts has shown that there is no trace of a resurrection in the early texts or pictorial representations of Adonis; the four texts that speak of his resurrection are quite late, dating from the second to the fourth centuries AD.[24] The earliest is Lucian’s De Syria Dea (“The Syrian Goddess”), which dates from the second century AD. Lucian declared: “As a memorial of his suffering each year they beat their breasts, mourn, and celebrate…but then, on the next day, they proclaim that he lives and send him into the air.”[25] Lucian also reports, “There are some inhabitants of Byblos who say that the Egyptian Osiris is buried among them and that all the laments and the rites are performed not for Adonis but for Osiris.”[26] Lambrechts and other scholars have suggested that the so called “resurrection” of Adonis was due to the influence of Osiris (see below).

Baal After the publication of the important Ugaritic texts (1400–1200 BC) from Ras Shamra in Syria, some scholars applied Frazer’s category of “dying and rising gods” to Baal, the leading god in the pantheon.[27] Though fragmentary, the Baal epic relates how the god Mot (“Death”) caused the death and disappearance of Baal, which resulted in drought and famine for seven years. Then his sister Anat vanquished Death, and Baal and fertility revived again. Baal was not a vegetation deity but a storm god. His myth may indeed be an example of a “dying and rising” god, but one that does not correspond with an annual cycle. There is, however, a noticeable lack of any indication that such a myth had any ritual significance. Mark S. Smith comments, “To my mind, it is especially striking that the rich indigenous corpus of Ugaritic ritual texts does not contain a single indication of the death and rising of Baal.”[28]

Attis Attis was the consort of the mother goddess (magna mater) Cybele of Anatolia.[29] Their cult was never popular in Greece, but when Hannibal of Carthage invaded Italy in 218 BC and kept defeating Roman armies, the Sibylline Oracle advised the Romans to invite Cybele to Rome. Her cult object, a black meteorite stone, was housed in a temple on the Palatine Hill.

According to myth, Cybele, in a jealous rage, rendered Attis mad, which resulted in his emasculating himself. His priests, the galli, were eunuchs. Romans were not allowed to join the cult until 102 BC. The festivities of the cult, the Megalensia, were held in March. They included a procession of galli, who whipped themselves to the accompaniment of drums and cymbals as they mourned the death of Attis.

The Hilaria, a joyful celebration of the hero’s “resurrection,” is not attested before the middle of the second century AD.[30]

The taurobolium was a bloody rite associated with the worship of Attis (and of Mithras), in which a bull was slaughtered on a grating over an initiate in a pit below, drenching him with blood. This was suggested by Reitzenstein as the basis of the Christian’s redemption by blood and Paul’s imagery in Romans 6 of the believer’s death and resurrection. Günter Wagner points out how anachronistic such comparisons are:

The taurobolium in the Attis cult is first attested in the time of

Antoninus Pius for A.D. 160. As far as we can see at present it only became a personal consecration at the beginning of the third century

A.D. The idea of a rebirth through the instrumentality of the taurobolium only emerges in isolated instances towards the end of the fourth century A.D.; it is not originally associated with this blood-bath.[31]

By the fourth century AD, Christianity may have influenced some mystery religions. Bruce Metzger, in an important essay, notes:

Thus, for example, one must doubtless interpret the change in the efficacy attributed to the rite of the taurobolium. In competing with Christianity, which promised eternal life to its adherents, the cult of Cybele officially or unofficially raised the efficacy of the blood bath from twenty years to eternity.[32]

Osiris

Osiris was the most important Egyptian god concerned with the cult of the dead. Frazer had conceived of him as a vegetation god, but his myth has been shown to have developed from royal ideology.[33] From the Egyptian texts themselves there are but scattered allusions to his myth from the Old Kingdom (c. 2500 BC) Pyramid Texts,[34] and the Middle Kingdom (c. 2000 BC) Coffin Texts.[35] The Book of the Dead, which was developed in the New Kingdom (c. 1500 BC), contained scores of spells to enable the deceased to become divine.[36] From the New Kingdom we have the great

Osiris Hymn (c. 1500 BC), which is “the fullest account” in Egyptian texts extant.[37] The most complete and coherent account of the myth is narrated by a Greek writer from the Roman period, Plutarch (AD 50–129).[38]

According to the myth, Seth tricked his brother Osiris into climbing inside a beautiful chest, which he then tossed into the Nile River. One might assume that Osiris drowned, though no text explicitly states this. In any case, the chest eventually washed up on the shore at Byblos in Phoenicia, where Isis, his sister and wife, discovered it after a long search. She brought it back to Egypt and revived Osiris by magic. But then Seth killed Osiris and cut his corpse into 14 parts and scattered them throughout Egypt. Isis was able to collect all the parts except for his reproductive organ, which had been swallowed by a fish. She fashioned a substitute organ, had intimate relations with the reconstructed Osiris, and bore a son, Horus, whom she secretly raised in the delta until he grew to maturity and was able to defeat Seth in a series of contests. Dramatic festivals and rites were held to commemorate the god’s death, dismemberment, and resuscitation.[39]

Henceforth, Horus became the god of the living, while Osiris became the god of the dead. Pharaohs were identified with Horus while alive, and with Osiris when dead. Osiris is almost always depicted in a mummiform image seated on his throne. Therefore, while Osiris was resuscitated, he was not in the end “resurrected.” Mark S. Smith concludes, “With no resurrection or rising for Osiris, a major cornerstone of Frazer’s theory fails in the face of primary evidence.”[40]

It is a cardinal misconception to equate the Egyptian view of the afterlife with the “resurrection” of Hebrew-Christian traditions. In order to achieve immortality, the Egyptian had to fulfill three conditions:

(1) His body had to be preserved, hence mummification.

(2) Nourishment had to be provided either by the actual offering of daily bread and beer, or by the magical depiction of food on the walls of the tomb.

(3) Magical spells had to be provided for the deceased.[41] Moreover, the Egyptian did not rise from

the dead; separate entities of his personality such as his ba and his ka continued to hover about his body.[42] Ancient Egyptians did aspire to be identified with Osiris, and to obtain an afterlife with him as his followers.[43]

Mithras

The Persian god Mithras became the focus of a Roman mystery religion known as Mithraism.[44] This became popular among merchants and soldiers who spread this faith to the far ends of the Roman Empire, even to Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. While predominantly male, the sect may not have been exclusively so, as there are some patristic (church fathers) references to female members.[45]

There are incidental references in Christian and pagan writings, but there are no detailed expositions of Mithraic doctrines. There are more than 3,000 dedicatory inscriptions and artistic monuments.[46] The Mithraists worshipped in mithraea—small, underground cave-like structures with benches along the walls. The central image was the tauroctony, Mithras stabbing a bull, which has been interpreted along astrological lines, as have a number of attendant images. More than 500 of these tauroctonies have been uncovered. One of the earliest, now in the Cincinnati Art Museum, dates to AD 160–170, while the mithraea all date to the second or third century AD.[47]

The church fathers were well aware of Mithras and his followers. Justin Martyr (c. 100–165), the first great apologist, who recorded that Jesus was born in a cave, knew that the Mithraists worship in a cave-like structure (Dialogue with Trypho 78). Their cultic banquets he considered a demonic imitation of the Eucharist (First Apology 66). Tertullian of Carthage (c. 160–220) spoke of their initiation “deep in a cavern” (De corona 15). He recorded that their followers placed a mark on their foreheads (De praescriptione haereticorum 40). Origen (c. 185–254) and Jerome (c. 345– 419) both know about the seven grades of their initiation.

Where and when Mithraism developed has been a matter of scholarly debate. The great Belgian scholar Franz Cumont, at the beginning of the twentieth-century, believed that Persian traditions were transmitted through the magi to Anatolia, where the mysteries were developed in the pre- Christian period. He relied in part on a report in Plutarch (c. AD 60–129)

that the Cilician pirates Pompey defeated in 65 BC were followers of Mithraic mysteries. But the reliability of this report has been questioned due to the lack of any archaeological or inscriptional evidence for the mysteries in the first century BC,[48] and Cumont’s theory has been abandoned.[49]

The scholarly consensus today is that Mithraism arose as a Roman phenomenon late in the first century AD at the earliest. The first literary reference to a Mithraic myth is Statius (AD 80). It is highly significant that mithraea have not been discovered at the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum, which were buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, whereas 14 mithraea have been found at Ostia.[50]

Roger Beck, who has proposed a Commagenian origin of Mithraism, speculates that the court astronomer Tiberius Claudius Balbillus (d. 79), who had ties with Commagene, may have supplied the astrological lore so central to Mithraism.[51] The earliest dated inscription is a dedication by a Roman soldier at Nida in Germany, dated c. AD 90.[52]

Given the relatively late formation of Mithraism, there is no possibility that this mystery religion could have influenced nascent Christianity, nor is there any evidence that it did so later. After a thorough survey of the evidence, Gary Lease concludes, “To be specific, it is clear that the few scattered remarks in Christian polemical literature against Mithraism, together with the scanty archaeological remains of the Mithraic religion, simply do not bear out a direct influence of the one religion upon the other.”[53]

Today there are popular books and Internet sites that make unfounded comparisons between Mithras and Christ. For example, Tom Harpur alleges, The birth of the Persian sun god, Mithras, also was held to have occurred in a cave at the winter solstice…His birthday was celebrated on December 25. Mithraism, a contemporary and keen rival of early Christianity, had a Eucharist-type meal, observed Sunday as its sacred day, had its major festival at Easter (when Mithras’ resurrection was celebrated), and featured miracles, twelve disciples, and a virgin birth.[54]

These descriptions are “modern myths.” The reference to December 25 as the dies natalis Soli Invicti (the birthday of the Unconquerable Sun) refers to the emperor Aurelian’s dedication to his god, the Sol Invictus, and not to Mithras, who was sometimes addressed with this title and who was associated with the sun.

As Halsberghe pointed out in his monograph, these were two distinct deities.[55] Christians at first celebrated Jesus’s birth on January 6, as some Eastern Christians still do. The earliest reference to December 25 as Christ’s birthday was recorded in AD 336, the year before Constantine’s death.

Mithras was not born in a cave. He is most often shown emerging from a rock.[56] There is simply no evidence for Mithras’s virgin birth, his 12 disciples, or his resurrection in Mithraic texts and monuments.[57] These are fabrics of a modern myth.

An Abandoned Paradigm

James Frazer was a distinguished classical scholar, but he was not a specialist in Near Eastern languages. Scholars of comparative religions have abandoned his paradigm of “dying and rising gods.” Even such a confirmed skeptic as Robert M. Price dismisses it as “the older, untenable theory that Jesus’ resurrection was derived from vegetarian cults centering on mythical dying-and-rising deities like Adonis, Sandan, or Attis.”[58] Mettinger, who does believe that there were indeed pre-Christian dying and rising gods in the Levant, such as Baal, concludes, “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.”[59]

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[1] Marvin R. Wilson, “Death and the Afterlife,” in Dictionary of Daily Life in Biblical and Postbiblical Antiquity, eds. Edwin M. Yamauchi and Marvin R. Wilson (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2017), 389-409.

[2] A number of scholars have assumed that the belief in a resurrection among the Jews arose from the influence of Zoroastrianism, but this is a dubious thesis in the light of the lateness of the Persian sources on eschatology. See Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Did Persian Zoroastrianism Influence Judaism?” in Israel—Ancient Kingdom or Late Invention?, ed. Daniel Block (Nashville, TN: B & H Academic, 2008), 282-297. Mark S. Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 12 (1998), 312, comments: “Frazer’s driving motivation to ‘explain’ Jesus’ death and resurrection against the background of ‘dying and rising gods’ entirely misses the background of Jewish resurrection.”

[3] Mystery religions involved initiations and secret rites that were more personally appealing than the Roman state religion. See Joscelyn Godwin, Mystery Religions in the Ancient World (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1981). The scholarly literature on mystery religions is enormous. Bruce M. Metzger, “A Classified Bibliography of the Graeco-Roman Mystery Religions, 1924-1973; with a Supplement, 1974-1977,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römische Welt II.17.3 (1984), 1259-1423, lists 3647 items. For early responses to such allegations, see H.A.A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions (London, UK: Hodder & Stoughton, 1913) and George C. Ring, “Christ’s Resurrection and the Dying and Rising Gods,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 6 (1944), 216-29. For more recent responses, see Bruce M. Metzger, “Considerations of Methodology in the Study of the Mystery Religions and Early Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review 48 (1955), 1-20; Ronald H. Nash, Christianity and the Hellenistic World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1984); and Gary R. Habermas, “Resurrection Claims in Non-Christian Religions,” Religious Studies 25 (1989), 167-177.

[4] For details of Frazer’s various editions, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianity and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1999), 92.

[5] Richard Reitzenstein, Hellenistic Mystery-Religions, trans. John E. Steely (Pittsburgh, PA: Pickwick Press, 1978).

[6] Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (London, UK: SCM, 1950), 140.

[7] A. Loisy, “The Christian Mystery,” Hibbert Journal, 10 (1911), 51. Alfred Loisy was a Catholic modernist, who was excommunicated by Pope Pius X in 1908. See Jeffrey L. Morrow, “Études Assyriologie and 19th and 20th Century French Historical-Biblical Criticism,” Near East Archaeological Society Bulletin 59 (2014), 9-12.

[8] Hugh Schonfield, Those Incredible Christians (New York: Bernard Geiss, 1968), xii.

[9] John H. Randall, Hellenistic Ways of Deliverance and the Making of the Christian Synthesis (New York: Columbia University, 1970), 154.

[10] Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries (New York: Harmony Books, 1999), 206. Cf. Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ (New York: Walker & Company, 2004), 84-85, claims that the figure of Christ is based on Horus.

[11] Roland Guy Bonnel and Vincent Arieh Tobin, “Christ and Osiris: A Comparative Study,” Pharaonic Egypt: The Bible and Christianity, ed. Sarah Israel Groll (Jerusalem, Israel: Magnes Press, 1985), 1.

[12] Bonnell and Tobin, “Christ and Osiris,” 28.

[13] Paul de Surgy, ed., The Resurrection and Modern Biblical Thought (New York: Corpus Books, 1970), 1, 131.

[14] Samuel N. Kramer, The Sacred Marriage Rite (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1969). Cf. Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Cultic Prostitution—a Case Study in Cultural Diffusion,” Orient and Occident, ed. H. Hoffner (Kevelaer: Butzon und Bercker, l973), 213-222.

[15] Thorkild Jacobsen, Toward the Image of Tammuz and Other Essays on Mesopotamian History and Culture, ed. William L. Moran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1970).

[16] Though Dumuzi/Tammuz had a major role in literary texts, the god played only a minor role in cult practice. Only two Mesopotamian temples were dedicated to him. See Rafael Kutscher, “The Cult of Dumuzi/Tammuz,” Bar-Ilan Studies in Assyriology, eds. Jacob Klein and Aaron Skaist (Ramat Gan, Israel: Bar-Ilan University, 1990), 29-44.

[17] Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Descent of Ishtar,” The Biblical World: A Dictionary of Biblical Archaeology, ed. C. Pfeiffer (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, l966), l96-200.

[18] Samuel N. Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture, and Character (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 155-157. See Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Tammuz and the Bible,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 84 (1965), 283-290.

[19] Bendt Alster, “Tammuz,” Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, eds.

Karel van der Toorn, Bob Becking, and Pieter W. van der Horst (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1999), 833. Günter Wagner, Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (Edinburgh, Scotland: Oliver & Boyd, 1967) observes: “As a general rule Tammuz is regarded as a dying and rising god, but his ‘resurrection’ is nowhere directly mentioned or attested.”

[20] Stephanie Dalley, trans, “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld,” The Context of Scripture I, eds. William W. Hallo and K. Lawson Younger, Jr. (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1997), 384. See Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Additional Notes on Tammuz,” Journal of Semitic Studies 11 (1966), 10-15.

[21] Samuel N. Kramer, “Dumuzi’s Annual Resurrection: An Important Correction to Inanna’s Descent,” Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research 183 (1966), 31.

[22] Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1994).

[23] Tryggve N.D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm, Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001), 149.

[24] P. Lambrechts, “La ‘résurrection’ d’Adonis,” Mélanges Isidore Lévy (Bruxelles, Belgium: Éditions de l’Institut, 1955), 207-240.

[25] Harold W. Attridge and Robert A. Oden, eds. De Dea Syria (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 13.

[26] Attridge and Oden, De Dea Syria, 15.

[27] G.R. Driver, trans., Canaanite Myths and Legends (Edinburgh, Scotland: T. & T. Clark, 1956), 73-121; Michael David Coogan, ed. and trans., Stories from

Ancient Canaan (Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1978), 75-115.

[28] Mark S. Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World,” 290.

[29] M.J. Vermaseren, Cybele and Attis (London, UK: Thames and Hudson, 1977).

[30] P. Lambrechts, “Les Fêtes ‘phrygiennes’ de Cybèle et d’Attis,” Bulletin de l’Institut Historique Belge de Rome, 27 (1952), 141-170. Cf. A.T. Fear, “Christ and Cybele,” Cybele, Attis and Related Cults, ed. Eugene N. Lane (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1996), 41.

[31] Günter Wagner, Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries (Edinburgh, Scotland: Oliver & Boyd, 1963), 266. Robert Duthoy, The Taurobolium: Its Evolution and Terminology (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1969), 127, notes that “there are no taurobolium inscriptions from Rome dated before AD 295.”

[32] Bruce M. Metzger, Historical and Literary Studies: Pagan, Jewish and Christian (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1968), 11.

[33] J. Gwyn Griffiths, The Origins of Osiris and His Cult (Leiden, Netherlands:

Brill, 1980).

[34] Jacques Vandier, La Religion Égyptienne (Paris, France: Presses Universitaires de France, 1949). 44-47.

[35] Jan Assmann, Death and Salvation in Ancient Egypt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 59-60.

[36] Foy Scalf, ed., The Book of the Dead: Becoming God in Ancient Egypt (Chicago, IL: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2017). One example, the Papyrus of Ani, in the British Museum, is nearly 80 feet long.

[37] Miriam Lichtheim, trans., Ancient Egyptian Literature II: The New Kingdom (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1976), 81-86.

[38] J. Gwyn Griffiths. Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride (Cardiff, Wales: University of Wales Press, 1970).

[39] See Andrea Kucharek, “The Mysteries of Osiris,” in Scalf, The Book of the

Dead, 117-126.

[40] Mark S. Smith, “The Death of ‘Dying and Rising Gods’ in the Biblical World,” 271.

[41] For the transmission of magical spells over two millennia from the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead to the Demotic Book of Breathings, see Foy Scalf, “From the Beginning to the End: How to Generate and Transmit Funerary Texts in Ancient Egypt,” Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Religions 15 (2015), 202-223.

[42] For details, see Edwin M. Yamauchi, “Life, Death, and the Afterlife in the Ancient Near East,” in Life in the Face of Death: The Resurrection Message of the New Testament, ed. by Richard N. Longenecker (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998), 21-29.

[43] Most Egyptologists, such as Foy Scalf, believe that the Osiris + personal name indicated an identification with the god. However, Mark Smith, Following Osiris (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2017), 159-161, argues that it meant that the person was a follower of Osiris. In either case, the name expressed the hope of an afterlife like Osiris’s, and in his company.

[44] See Edwin M. Yamauchi, Persia and the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 1990), chapter 14, “Mithraism.”

[45] Jonathan David, “The Exclusion of Women in Mithraic Mysteries: Ancient or Modern?” Numen 47 (2000), 121-141.

[46] M.J. Vermaseren, ed., Corpus Inscriptionum et Monumentorum Religionis Mithriacae, 2 vols. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martin Nijhoff, 1956, 1960).

[47] In 1997, excavators from the University of Münster discovered a cave at Doliche, in Commagene, which contained two mithraea. They believe that these may date to the first century AD or even the first century BC, but the only inscription from the cave dates to the third century AD. See Roger Beck,

“Postscript,” Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998), 128.

[48] E.D. Francis, “Plutarch’s Mithraic Pirates,” in Mithraic Studies I, ed. John R.

Hinnells (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1975), 207-210.

[49] E.D. Francis, “Franz Cumont and the Doctrines of Mithraism,” in Hinnells, Mithraic Studies, 215-247. Cf. Roger Beck, “Mithraism Since Cumont,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.17.4 (1984), 2002-2115.

[50] See Samuel Laleuchli, Mithraism in Ostia (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, 1967).

[51] Roger Beck, “The Mysteries of Mithras: A New Account of Their Genesis,” Journal of Roman Studies 88 (1998), 126.

[52] Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras (New York: Routledge, 2000), 21.

[53] Gary Lease, “Mithraism and Christianity: Borrowings and Transformations,”

Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt II.23.2 (1980), 1328.

[54] Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ, 82. Cf. Acharya S., The Christ Conspiracy

(Kempton, IL: Adventure Unlimited, 1999), 119.

[55] Gaston H. Halsberghe, The Cult of Sol Invictus (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1972).

[56] See Edwin M. Yamauchi, “The Apocalypse of Adam, Mithraism and Pre- Christian Gnosticism,” Études Mithriaques, ed. J. Duchesne-Guillemin (Teheran-Liège: Bibliothèque Pahlavi, l978), IV, 557-562.

[57] See M.J. Vermaseren, Mithras: The Secret God (London, UK: Chatto & Windus,

1963). For the origin of these wild claims, see the excellent website The Mithras Project, maintained by Roger Pearse.

[58] Robert M. Price, “Is There a Place for Historical Criticism?” Religious Studies 27 (1991), 383.

[59] Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection, 221.