- Empty Tomb, Apotheosis, Resurrection (Mohr Siebeck, 2018), John Granger Cook: The review in this chapter thoroughly justifies the continued use of the category of dying and rising gods. The resurrection of Osiris is the closest analogy to the resurrection of Jesus, although Osiris remains in the netherworld – wherever it is located. Horus’s resurrection is a clear analogy. The rebirth or resurrection of Dionysus also provides a fairly close analogy to the resurrection of Jesus. The revival of Heracles and probably that of Melqart are also strong analogies. Dumuzi’s, Baal’s, and Adonis’s returns from the netherworld are less useful as comparisons, but their power to overcome death is an important analogy to the NT, Lucian was willing to use the image of resurrection for Adonis’s return from Hades. Traditions of a resurrection of Adonis and Attis are later than the Gospels, but are nevertheless in good continuity with those from earlier periods (e.g. that of Osiris). Just as the Greek of the LXX and NT has it’s place in the matrix of classical Greek, so the resurrection of Christ can be placed in the matrix of the bodily resurrections of cult figures from the Mediterranean world. The comments by Justin, Tertullian, Theophilus, and Origen all indicate a willingness to examine pagan analogies to the birth and resurrection of Jesus. Dieter Zeller notes that according to the apologists, the Hellenistic divinities were not unimportant for the acceptance of the proclamation of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus… This brief survey indicates fairly clearly that the category “dying and rising gods” is still useful to describe the vicissitudes of a number of ancient divinities. One does not need to adopt Frazer’s approach using the concept of an annual dying and rising vegetation deity. Consequently, the thesis that the concept is dead cannot be sustained.
- Iesus Deus: The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God (Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2014), M. David Litwa: As I hope to demonstrate in this study, many other Christian writers—including those of the New Testament—consciously or unconsciously re-inscribed divine traits of Mediterranean gods and deified figures into their discourse concerning Jesus. The result was the discursive deification of Jesus Christ… What was true for other gods was also true for the god Jesus: in their gospels, epistles, apocalypses, poems, and apologetic tractates, Christians constructed what it meant for Jesus to be divine using the language, values, and concepts that were common in Greco-Roman culture… Specifically, the type of transformation imagined in Daniel 12 seems to be solely eschatological (i.e., occurring at the end of time) and collective (i.e., featuring groups of people, not an individual)—two features that accord well with the national and apocalyptic consciousness of Daniel’s author. This form of resurrection thus differs from the resurrection of Jesus, which is conceived of as individual and occurring before the general resurrection on the last day. To find a true analogue to the resurrection of Jesus, then, we would expect at least three elements: (1) resurrection as transformation into immortal life that (2) occurs to an individual, (3) before a mass resurrection at the end of the world. Where do we find this analogue? Christian theologians (ancient and modern) have declared that it is not in Judaism. Jesus’ individual, historical resurrection, they urge, is a complete novum in Jewish thought—a surprising and unheard-of act of God. As a result, such a resurrection legitimates the uniqueness of Christian revelation and truth. From an etic perspective, however, although individual corporeal immortalization may have been novel in Judaism, it was not distinctive in Hellenistic culture… To execute my comparison, I will discuss the corporeal transformations of three popular figures: Asclepius, Heracles, and Romulus. In the first century ce, the stories of these men-made-gods were more widely known than the tales of Jesus (whose early obscurity is notorious)… Plutarch also passes on the story of Alcmene (the mother of Heracles), who was buried in Haliartus in Boeotia. Much later, her tomb was reopened at the command of Agesilaus the Spartan king. Agesilaus had intended to remove her remains to Sparta, but no body was found. The excavators discovered only a stone, together with some personal effects of Alcmene: a bronze bracelet and two clay urns (Plut., Gen. Soc. 5 [Mor. 577e-f]). Just as Jesus’ body wrappings and head covering indicate that he was once present (Luke 24:12; John 20:6-7), Alcmene’s bracelet and the two urns show that she also at one time lay there. In this story, it is evident both that Alcmene died and that she was immortalized. Like Jesus, she was transported to a transcendent realm (in this case, the Islands of the Blessed).
- There are also deities such as Osiris and Dionysus who conquer death and offer salvation to their followers. Both Osiris and Jesus are the first to conquer death so they become “prototypes” for their followers. Their followers are raised from death in the same way that they were. Paul describes baptism as a ritual reenactment of Jesus’s death and resurrection. The Egyptian mummification ritual was a reenactment of Osiris’s death and resurrection and seems to have influenced the initiation ritual in the Greco-Roman era Isis mysteries. Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia (Oxford University Press, 2017), Mark Smith:
- However, there was one important difference between these gods and Osiris. Unlike them, he had triumphed over death, and the ability to do likewise could be conferred upon his followers. The colophon of Pyramid Text Spell 561B states that whoever worships Osiris will live forever, showing that already at this date those who devoted themselves to the god might expect to share in his resurrection… Osiris is one of the few ancient Egyptian deities of whom it is possible to write even the outline of a biography. More personal details about him are extant than about any other god or goddess. This is not simply an accident of preservation. The Egyptians considered some deities important because of their impersonal attributes and powers, the roles they were believed to play in the maintenance of the cosmos. But the crucial significance of Osiris for them lay in what he personally had done and undergone. His life, death, and resurrection were perceived to be particularly momentous in relation to their own fates, and thus they figure more prominently in the textual record than do accounts of the exploits of other divinities. Moreover, because so much importance was invested in the fact that these were events actually experienced by a real individual, and not merely abstractions, personal detail was essential in recounting them.
- “Resurrection and the Body in Graeco-Roman Egypt,” Mark J. Smith in The Human Body in Death and Resurrection (Walter de Gruyter, 2009), eds. T. Nicklas, F.V. Reiterer, and J. Verheyden: In obtaining justice against Seth, Osiris regained full life, since his death was an injustice. By his justification, he gained total mastery over death. In the same way that Osiris was restored to life and declared free of wrongdoing, so all who died hoped to be revived and justified, as a result of the mummification process and its attendant rituals… Here we have the answer to our question, how could the deceased hope to emulate that god? By being glorified or transfigured in the same manner as he was.
- Dionysos (Routledge, 2006), Richard Seaford: Dionysos, like Jesus, was the son of the divine ruler of the world and a mortal mother, appeared in human form among mortals, was killed and restored to life… a secret of the mystery-cult was that dismemberment is in fact to be followed by restoration to life, and this transition was projected onto the immortal Dionysos, who is accordingly in the myth himself dismembered and then restored to life… this power of Dionysos over death, his positive role in the ritual, makes him into a saviour of his initiates in the next world… Dionysos could be called ‘Initiate’ and even shares the name Bakchos with his initiates, but his successful transition to immortality – his restoration to life and his circulation between the next world and this one – allows him also to be their divine saviour. Plutarch (Moralia 364) compares Dionysos to the Egyptian Osiris, stating that ‘the story about the Titans and the Night-festivals agree with what is related of Osiris – dismemberments and returns to life and rebirths’. Cosmology & Eschatology in Jewish & Christian Apocalypticism (Brill, 1996), Adela Yarbro Collins: In Romans 6: 1-14 the ritual of baptism is explicitly interpreted as a reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus in which the baptized person appropriates the significance of that death for him or herself. In this understanding of the ritual, the experience of the Christian is firmly and vividly grounded in the story of the death and resurrection of Christ. These qualities of reenactment of a foundational story and the identification of the participant with the protagonist of the story are strikingly reminiscent of what is known about the initiation rituals of certain mystery religions, notably the Eleusinian mysteries and the Isis mysteries.
- Yamauchi, Edwin M. “Tammuz and the Bible.” Journal of biblical Literature 84.3 (1965): 283-290. (https://www.jstor.org/stable/3265029)
- Tryggve Mettinger only looked at Near Eastern deities. There are other ancient Mediterranean figures which provide additional comparative material. Also, the concept of “dying and rising” might be too restrictive, it might involve e.g. a salvific aspect, connection to agriculture, regular ritual re-enactment etc. Other scholars advance a different category called “divine translation” which is roughly the idea that a person leaves the realm of ordinary humans for a divine realm where they continue to exist as a divine being deserving worship. This is adjacent to the concept of conditional post-mortem divine translation of religious practitioners themselves, in this case divine translation of Jesus worshippers. For the comparative material, check e.g. M. David Litwa’s work, particularly Becoming Divine, Posthuman Transformation in Ancient Mediterranean Thought, We Are Being Transformed: Deification in Paul’s Soteriology, Desiring Divinity: Self-Deification in Early Jewish and Christian Mythmaking, chapters 5 and 6 of Iesus Deus, chapters 12-14 in How the Gospels Became History, or (2014). “The Deification of Moses in Philo of Alexandria.” The Studia Philonica Annual 26, 1-27.