How Christians Misunderstand the Nature of Religion
Myths, history, and the Christ Myth theory
Western mythology is replete with surreal tales of how the world was originally formed, and of the exploits of the gods and of their deaths and sometimes their resurrections.
Some critics of Christianity have pointed out that Jesus’s passion narrative is like some of the latter stories such as those of Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Hercules, Baal, Asclepius, Romulus, and so on. The less informed or more conspiratorial critics contend that the gospels are carbon copies of the older stories. Others say just that all these stories conform to the same ideal type regardless of their surface differences. Either way, the comparisons have made for a Christ myth theory, for elaborations on the hypothesis that the gospels and the Christian creed are fundamentally mythical, not historical.
In response, infuriated Christians implicitly ridicule the suggestion that Christianity is based on a myth, by emphasizing the pagans’ bawdy, childish descriptions of their gods’ death and recreations, which seem not to be present in the gospels.
A Christian Gambit in Response to the Christ Myth Theory
Here, for example, is a typical Christian apologist’s treatment of the comparison between Jesus and Osiris. The apologist just tells the myth of how Osiris was killed, saying “the claim is that Osiris had been dismembered and his body parts scattered throughout Egypt, with each part representing each of the forty-two nomes [territories] of Egypt.”
And the apologist summarizes the part about Isis who “scours Egypt to collect his parts and reassembles him, with the help of some of the other gods, whose powers are needed for the process.” He adds that, “This provides the mythical prototype for the Egyptian practice of mummification”; that according to the myth, Osiris “is able to conceive his son Horus, the earthly embodiment of whom are the Egyptian Pharaohs”; and that “Osiris, on the other hand, lives on to rule Duat, the realm of the dead.”
The apologist concludes this part of his refutation of the Christ myth theory simply by saying, “This is not a resurrection.” You see, a mere recounting of the myth is supposed to speak for itself as being un-Christian because of the obvious mythical nature of its details.
Or take this other apologist’s treatment of the problem, which gives short shrift to the pagan deities, including the resurrection of Dionysus who
was said to be conceived out of an affair between Zeus and a mortal woman, Semele. After Zeus’ wife, Hera, found out she tricked the mortal into demanding that Zeus reveal himself in all his glory. He begrudgingly agreed, knowing that this would kill her. He was, however, able to rescue Dionysus and sewed him (or his heart) into his thigh until he was born. This is the claim for his ‘rebirth’ — a far cry from the death and bodily resurrection of Jesus.
There again the details are supposed to speak for themselves so that all the apologist must do is say the details are “a far cry” from the Christian narrative.
Indeed, you can read an ancient account of this quick succession of Dionysus’ birth, death, and resurrection in Euripides’ “The Bacchae,” from 405 BCE:
Go forth, go forth, ye Bacchanals, bring home the Bromian god Dionysus, child of a god, from the mountains of Phrygia to the spacious streets of Hellas, bring home the Bromian god! whom on a day his mother in her sore travail brought forth untimely, yielding up her life beneath the lightning stroke of Zeus’ winged bolt; but forthwith Zeus, the son of Cronos, found for him another womb wherein to rest, for he hid him in his thigh and fastened it with golden pins to conceal him from Hera. And when the Fates had fully formed the horned god, he brought him forth and crowned him with a coronal of snakes…
Note how preposterous the story sounds to modern ears. And the Christ mythicist alleges that Jesus’s death and resurrection are comparable in some significant way to whatever’s told in the obvious myths of Osiris or Dionysus? Surely that’s just a sheer calumny of Christianity’s good name.
Yet what’s often overlooked in these debates is that the New Testament is silent on the mechanism of Jesus’s resurrection. The gospels say that Jesus was crucified, that he was placed in a tomb which was sealed, and that he emerged alive again a few days later. His resurrected body was somehow physical, as in John’s account with doubting Thomas. But that body was also magical in that his followers couldn’t recognize him, and the risen Jesus could disappear at will (Luke 24:31) and ascend to Heaven.
Thus, to borrow a phrase from a “Seinfeld” episode, the New Testament yadda-yaddas the best part. The apologist is just being churlish, then, in dismissing the pagan myths, when the Christian narratives hide what would have to be the preposterous details of the Christian’s supreme miracle, the cheating of death. If that event were a miracle, any human description of it would have to sound something like an average child’s description of quantum mechanics.
That’s not to say that the gospels read as straightforward history since those narratives are strange in many respects. Jesus performs other miracles, and there’s that weird “young man dressed in a white robe,” sitting in the empty tomb, according to Mark 16:5. But these accounts were written in a conservative, prudish, sanctimonious ancient Jewish context, so they don’t relish the gory or sexual details, unlike, say, the myth of Osiris’s gruesome demise and of his sexual cheating of death via the birth of his son Horus.
This is one reason the canonical gospels ignore Jesus’s awkward teen years. Did he go through puberty, and did he have sexual encounters? Pagans might have explored that period in their narratives, whereas Christian orthodoxy evidently deemed them profane.
The Nature of Myths
Why, though, do these pagan myths feature such details? Partly, it’s because those myths are often allegorical, as told in this Encyclopedia article (with my emphasis):
In another story about his birth, Dionysus was the son of Zeus and Demeter, the goddess of crops and vegetation. Hera was jealous of the child and convinced the Titans to destroy him. Although Dionysus was disguised as a baby goat, the Titans found him, caught him, and tore him to pieces. They ate all of his body except his heart, which was rescued by Athena. She gave the heart to Zeus, who gave it to Semele to eat. Semele later gave birth to Dionysus again. The story represents the earth (Demeter) and sky (Zeus) giving birth to the crops (Dionysus), which die each winter and are reborn again in the spring.
But another reason is that the authors of these stories understood what myths were. Myths are what we late modernists would call fictions that use familiar symbols to encode the subjective aspect of universal human experience or to celebrate the meaning of a people’s culture or ethnic identity. Sex and death have been prominent in that experience and in all cultures, as has rebirth or renewal in the form of the cycles of nature (vegetation, the seasons, the life-giving Nile River, the apparently descending and rising sun), so of course those elements were featured in the world’s myths.
These fictions were also shared rather than being the exclusive property of an author or of a jealous institution. The myths were often like fan fictions. Different authors could try their hand at telling the familiar tales, putting their spin on them, and emphasizing different aspects to suit their interpretation of the deeper meaning. Thus, Plutarch’s version of the Osiris myth differs from the story told by Egyptian sources.
Mind you, that’s not to say the ancients thought their gods were unreal. They didn’t think Zeus, Dionysus, or Yahweh were as fake as Spiderman, Harry Potter, or Hamlet. We shouldn’t impose our conception of fiction or of unreality on the ancients.
Although there were some atomists in Greece and extreme skeptics in India (the Charvakas), for example, the predominant view in the ancient world was that reality is already rife with what we would call fictional, subjective elements. For the ancients, the universe is stuffed with meaning, vitality, and divine intention, whereas our late-modern, scientific consensus is that mentality is confined to the brain and to its cultural products, and the gods and their miracles have been chased out of nature.
So when I say that ancient myths were what we would call “fictions,” what I mean is that the gods were real for them, but not in the mere literal, objective way that we take for granted. The gods were part of a naïve, self-indulgent conception of reality that was filled with human projections.
Moreover, to say that the myths were fictions isn’t to say that those stories were empty since we don’t regard even our greatest novels, poems, movies, or songs as hollow. Our fictions, too, can have deep meaning, so even if their characters are unreal, those stories may be true in a deeper sense. The fictional situations and themes are drawn from human experience; likewise, religious myths might have been subjectively true in affirming those patterns.
And fictions are evocative in that we suspend our disbelief to engage properly with them. We pretend the fictional characters are real, for example, so that we can live vicariously through them in our imagination. The ancients would have done the same with the myths of their gods.
Myth’s Literalization and the Roman Empire
In any case, the reason the Christian gospels came to be treated as historical records rather than as myths (or as fictions) is that the gospels were eventually favoured by the Roman Empire, giving the orthodox church’s establishment an awkward, inauthentic, dishonourable origin.
The gospels may originally have been written and read in a healthy, organic way, in a grassroots spiritual movement and indeed in an extended rebellion against the Roman Empire. But their codification was the hallmark of that profoundly pragmatic, unspiritual empire and of cynical Church fathers such as Eusebius and Augustine. Those Church leaders conceded that much of the scriptures should be interpreted allegorically because the events were literally impossible, but they had the temerity to condemn Gnostic Christianity as politically useless.
What burgeoning Christendom wanted, especially as Roman civilization began collapsing around them, was a “catholic,” universal creed, an orthodox narrative that could unify and reassure the masses by scapegoating heretics and unrepentant sinners. The orthodox Christian creed wasn’t a fiction you could have fun with by imagining alternatives. Gnostic Christians were the ones with that healthy, humanistic attitude towards religious content, and the Church demonized them. Indeed, there’s a host of wild apocryphal gospels, including stories of the child Jesus (such as the Gospel of James, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew), which read more like pagan myths.
Yet once Western Christendom weeded out the elitist, allegorical, or therapeutic movements in their religion, and arrived at a catholicized, neutered, mind-numbing storyline, they punished anyone who thought differently about Christianity. Shockingly, this led to the Albigensian crusade against the Cathars who lived relatively Christ-like lives and who thus implicitly repudiated the corrupt Church.
In The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels even points to a direct connection between the Church’s political preoccupations and the literalization of the Christian narrative: the Jesus story had to be literalized for the popes to establish their authority by positing a concrete lineage between Jesus and the acceptable Church leaders, from Peter onwards.
If subjective visions were sufficient to confer authority, as the Gnostics said, there could be no exclusive Christian institution since anyone could claim to have had private insights into the meaning of Christianity, just by dreaming or by having an inspiration. Of course, this breakdown in the Church’s chain of command is what eventually happened anyway with the Protestant Revolution.
The Politics of Christianity’s “Literal Truth”
What, then, are the canonical gospels? They’re not historical or eyewitness reports, nor are they myths in the honourific sense; instead, in the context of totalitarian Christendom, the gospels are works of flagrant propaganda. The Church mocked the extravagant claims of the Christian Gnostics for the same reason it mocked the world’s folklore and myths: the Western Church, at least, had no interest in myths because its goal was to preserve its power, not to facilitate widespread spiritual (existential) exploration or growth.
Oh, some Western heretics and Christian monks and mystics may have pursued that loftier purpose, and the Christian masses protected their folklore which the Church kept trying to stamp out or to co-opt. But the Church’s attitude toward its creed was anti-spiritual precisely to the extent that the Church literalized the narrative of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, and turned it into pseudohistory.
Thus, we have another Christian apologist pointing out that the pagan dying-and-rising-god myths “always mimic the seasons of the spring and fall harvest. The Pagan cults would perform plays each year to bring in the spring harvest and yearly cycle of the seasons.” Yet ‘There is a big difference between a person dying and coming back to life and the gods “dying” in the fall and “resurrecting” in the spring each year. These weren’t literal reports of corpses coming back to life; they were metaphors for the yearly crop cycle.’
Of course, this just begs the question at issue. The apologist says the pagan stories are myths because they’re allegories; specifically, those tales refer indirectly to natural cycles. Yet the Christian narrative is linear rather than cyclical, so obviously that narrative couldn’t be a “copycat” of the pagan ones. Indeed, that old, strawman version of the Christ myth theory from Kersey Graves or from the German History of Religions School in the 1890s can be disposed of by adducing some differences in detail such as the cyclical and linear views of time.
But just because the Christian narrative isn’t a “copycat” or isn’t exactly “parallel to” the pagan myths doesn’t mean the Christian story is historical rather than mythical. Indeed, the Gnostics and the more philosophical Eastern Church posited Christian allegories: Jesus’ resurrection represented everyone’s potential for inner transformation due to gnosis or theoria, saving knowledge of our existential predicament in life or contemplation of divine mysteries.
The deeper problem, though, is that this apologist is boasting that the Christian narrative isn’t a myth! What kind of strange religion wouldn’t be based on a myth? All the other religions around the world are proud of their myths, but Christianity is supposed to stand alone as the only religion that’s based instead on historical truth. Yet since when is mere history a fitting subject for priests and theologians? Since when is mere historical, literal truth enough to sustain a healthy spiritual practice?
Evidently, after so many centuries of Christianity’s belittlement of myths and simplification of our existential obligations, Christian apologists just take for granted a pejorative sense of “myth” in their rejection of the Christ myth theory. What they don’t recognize, though, is that they’re thereby highlighting the mere political dimension of Christianity’s so-called literal, historical truths.
This is why the canonical gospels leave out the inane details of how exactly Jesus was supposedly raised from the dead. These gospels appealed to the Orwellian Roman Church because they read more like history than myth. The novelty was in supposing that one of the dying and rising gods was real in a flesh-and-blood sense. Emphasizing the bizarre symbols and allegorical mappings would have defeated that political purpose of unifying the flock around a debased, infantilizing version of the older myths.
Again, even the canonical gospels don’t eliminate all traces of such mythologization. And to the plain pseudohistorical narrative, the Gospel of John adds a welter of labyrinthine theological speculations in lieu of the pagan’s grotesque concrete details.
Yet compared to the pagan myths, the official Christian narratives are indeed mundane. And for a religion, as opposed to a cultish scheme to bewilder the masses, that shouldn’t be a selling point.
If Christianity weren’t a copycat in featuring symbolic expressions of the perennial themes from the world’s religions, that wouldn’t mean Christianity is superior to those religions; on the contrary, it would mean Christianity’s not good enough in religious terms.
