The Impure Jewishness of Christianity’s Origin
Syncretism, ancient satire, and the Christ myth theory
Christian apologists maintain that the theory that Jesus wasn’t an historical figure is a nonstarter because that theory tends to associate the gospel narrative with Greco-Roman myths, whereas the apologists follow many New Testament scholars in maintaining that Christianity had a wholly Jewish origin.
After all, as one apologist points out, the New Testament clearly portrays Jesus as a Jew and situates him in Judea. Jesus argued with rabbis at the synagogue and was executed ironically as “King of the Jews.” The New Testament authors also frequently quote from the Jewish scriptures.
Moreover, the notion that Christianity had extensive non-Jewish influences has been discredited, according to many mainstream Jesus scholars who dismiss the Christ myth theory.
Political taboos in Jesus scholarship
As I explain elsewhere, that “discredited” version of the Christ myth theory belonged to the History of Religions School, which was popular in Germany in the late nineteenth century and which was motivated in part by antisemitism. The idea was to explain away Judaism’s role in establishing the global superpower of Christianity because Jews allegedly belonged to an inferior race and couldn’t have produced anything as important as Christianity.
After WWII, any criticism of Judaism was liable to be associated with rank Nazism, so the suggestion that the Jewishness of Christianity’s origin might be only superficial became taboo for historians, if only for political reasons.
That scholarly back-and-forth happens to be a glaring example of how history isn’t a science. Of course, even hard sciences can be politicized, as they were in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Yet those pseudosciences were discredited, not just because of a shift in politics but because Nazi and Soviet models failed scientific tests, and they were replaced by demonstrably superior explanations of the phenomena.
That wasn’t what happened to the Christ myth theory. Instead, Kersey Graves wrote a popular, oversimplified account, called The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors, which was taken effectively as a standard-bearer for the theory, and which allowed apologists to strawman the History of Religions School. In this respect, the dismissal of the Christ myth theory resembles the philosophical repudiation of positivism, which was based largely on a rejection of the popular, bolder promotion of extreme empiricism by AJ Ayer.
In any case, what Kersey did is present many details that various stories of divine saviors supposedly have in common, as though the specifics of how they were born, killed, and resurrected matter more than the structure or deeper meaning of those narratives. Thus, all Christian historians and apologists had to do is emphasize the many inevitable differences in detail to show that the entire Christ myth theory is empty.
On top of that, as I said, there was a world war in which the anti-Jewish side lost. The History of Religions School, then, wasn’t so much refuted as it was deemed passé at best and taboo at worst.
Hellenistic Judaism
Regardless, this apologetical gambit is based on a false dichotomy. There’s no need to choose between saying that Judaism had no impact on Christianity and that Christianity derives exclusively from Judaism. Indeed, positive stereotypes are as racist and questionable as negative ones. The antisemitic German historians were wrong in presuming that nothing worthwhile can come from Judaism, such as Christianity. (Indeed, they’d have been mistaken in presuming that Christianity is especially praiseworthy in the first place.)
For the same reason, though, we shouldn’t put Judaism on a pedestal, as though Jews had nothing to learn from anyone else in the ancient world or that they kept to themselves like saints, pristine in their perfection and immune to foreign cultural influences. Moreover, that protectionist conception of Judaism likely presupposes the existence of a divine presence in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in which case this bit of apologetics begs the question against criticisms of orthodox Christianity such as the Christ myth theory.
From the formative period of 323 BCE to 33 BCE, Judaism was part of the Hellenistic world. Jews would soon thereafter fight for their independence from the Roman Empire, but that doesn’t mean they rejected everything that Greco-Roman culture had to offer. Instead, Jews were evidently divided on the subject since those who did reject that culture hid themselves away in desert caves as ultra-conservative ascetics or rebels. These were the Essenes, the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the terroristic Zealots or Sicarii. But we know they didn’t speak for all Jews of the period because they were just as hostile to the Jewish factions that compromised with the foreign cultures and regimes.
Of course, the monumental impact of Greek culture on Judaism is apparent from the century of Jewish labours in producing the Septuagint, the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek.
As the authors of the “Hellenism” article in the Jewish Encyclopedia imply, the reason the scriptures were translated is that
The Greek language became a common language for nearer Asia, and with the language went Greek culture, Greek art, and Greek thought…The Hellenic influence pervaded everything, and even in the very strongholds of Judaism it modified the organization of the state, the laws, and public affairs, art, science, and industry, affecting even the ordinary things of life and the common associations of the people.
Numerous Greek words passed into Hebrew, such as “synagogue.” The Christian New Testament, too, was written in Greek, and its authors used the Septuagint, not the Hebrew originals of Jewish scripture. The name “Yeshua” or “Joshua” became “Jesus.” The work of the Jewish Middle Platonic philosopher Philo of Alexandria also testifies to the syncretisation between Judaism and Greco-Roman cultures.
And although there were conservative Jews who loathed Greek culture, their very vehemence indicates the impact of Hellenism on Judaism. Here again are the authors of the “Hellenism” article:
By the introduction of Grecian art a door was opened to debauchery and riotous living; and though Judaism was hardly menaced by the introduction of direct idolatry, the connection of this culture with sublimated Greek polytheism became a real danger to the Jewish religion. This well-grounded fear inspired the rise of the Hasidæans and explains the change of sentiment on the part of the Rabbis toward the use of the Greek language.
The conservative’s fear was well-grounded because Greek culture evidently attracted many Jews. Otherwise, there would have been no threat or need to organize a Jewish resistance.
Moreover, we’re misled here by the pro-Jewish propaganda in the Hebrew scriptures. There’s the Hannukah story, for example, that celebrates the Maccabees who revolted against the Seleucid Empire and the Hellenistic influence on Judaism in the second century BCE. Yet however oppressed the Jews were because of a particular anti-Jewish campaign by King Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 168 BCE, we needn’t read the Maccabean rebellion as reflecting Jews’ attitude towards the entire pagan world. Not all ancient Jews were as paranoid and fundamentalistic as the conservative cave-dwellers.
An encyclopedia article on the Maccabees points to the propagandistic exaggerations found in the Jewish scriptural accounts (with my emphases):
The author of the First Book of Maccabees regarded the Maccabean revolt as a rising of pious Jews against the Seleucid king (who had tried to eradicate their religion) and against the Jews who supported him. The author of the Second Book of Maccabees presented the conflict as a struggle between “Judaism” and “Hellenism”, concepts which he coined. Most modern scholars argue that King Antiochus reacted to a civil war between traditionalist Jews in the Judean countryside and Hellenized Jews in Jerusalem…
Needless to say, the Jewish civil war meant that the Maccabees couldn’t have been acting on behalf of all Jews at the time.
And as Erich Gruen says, in “Fact and Fiction: Jewish Legends in a Hellenistic Context,” II Maccabees itself, which presents the Hannukah story,
was composed in Greek and addressed to a readership conversant with the language. Outside that text, one would be hard pressed to find testimony to any conflict between Hellenism and Judaism in contemporary or near contemporary texts. No evidence for cultural strife appears in I Maccabees. It is absent also from the work of Ben Sira, written in the early second century. Ben Sira denounces those who fall away from righteousness, tyrannize the poor, and abandon fear of the Lord or the teachings of the law. But he nowhere contrasts Jews and Greeks or suggests a struggle for the conscience of his fellow-Jews being waged by Hellenizers and traditionalists. Nor can one discern such a struggle in the Book of Daniel, composed at the very time of the Maccabaean revolt. The apocalyptic visions allude to contests among the Hellenistic powers and forecast delivery of the Jews from the foreign oppressor — but no cultural contest for the soul of Judaism. In fact, not even II Maccabees juxtaposes the terms Ioudaismos and Hellenismos [“Judaism” and “Hellenism”] or expresses them as competing opposites. It is a mistake to imagine a zero-sum game, in which every gain for Hellenism was a loss for Judaism or vice-versa. That sort of analysis, as an increasing number of scholars now acknowledge, is simplistic and misleading.
Likewise, we needn’t read the Jewish scriptures’ celebration of monotheism as indicating that the Jews in those early periods were monotheists (rather than Canaanite polytheists), or that they’d agree they ought to have been condemned for wavering from later priestly standards of purity. These scriptures functioned largely as Jewish propaganda since they written or edited in hindsight, and were rewrites of the past according to later Jewish prejudices.
Baal in the belly of Mot
Specifically, we know now that the foundational Jewish myths of Creation, Eden, the Flood, and so forth were borrowed from Sumer, Akkad, Assyria, Babylon, and Egypt. Jewish monotheism emerged from Canaanite henotheism and was influenced by Zoroastrian theology under the Persian captivity in the sixth century BCE.
Take, for example, the famous Jewish concept of the resurrection of the dead. Did Jews invent it?
The early Jewish concept of resurrection was applied to the collective rebirth of the nation of Israel, as in Hosea 6, Isaiah 26, and Ezekial 37, which reflected Jewish hopes during the Assyrian conquest of the Northern Kingdom in the eighth century BCE, and during the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century BCE.
Hosea’s is the oldest Jewish depiction, and we can detect its derivation from the Canaanite myth of Baal’s death and resurrection, when Hosea says that the Lord has “torn us to pieces” like a lion tears its prey (5:14).
Similarly, in the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Mot, the god of death and the devourer of the hero Baal is represented as having “the appetite of lions in the wild.” Mot threatens Baal at length: “Now surely, indeed, you must descend into the throat of Divine Mot, El’s son, Death, into the watery depths…One lip down to the earth, one lip to the heavens; Mot stretches tongue to the stars. Ba’al must enter his innards; and must descend into his mouth, like an olive-stuffed bread, like the produce of earth, the fruit of the trees.” Again, “Approach not close El’s son, Mot, who is Death, lest he make you like a lamb in his mouth, lest like a kid in his gullet!”
Mot goes on to describe his killing of Baal: “I arrived at the pleasant place, the steppe-land, at a beautiful field in the Realm of Death. I approached Mightiest Baal. I took him like a lamb in my mouth, crushed him like a kid in the chasm of my throat.” And in Volume II of their commentary, Mark Smith and Wayne Pitard say, “Note here the imagery of Mot stalking Baal in the steppe-land, very much like a lion.” They point to Isa. 38:13 as having similar language: “Like a lion he breaks all my bones.”
Hosea celebrates the healed and restored nation of Israel by saying, “he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (6:3), and he repeats the natural fertility theme in 14:5–7: “I will be like the dew to Israel; he will blossom like a lily. Like a cedar of Lebanon he will send down his roots; his young shoots will grow. His splendor will be like an olive tree, his fragrance like a cedar of Lebanon. People will dwell again in his shade; they will flourish like the grain, they will blossom like the vine — Israel’s fame will be like the wine of Lebanon.”
Likewise, in the Baal Cycle, El sees in a dream that, “if the Prince, the Master of the Earth, has revived…the heavens oil let rain, the wadis let run with honey. Then I will know that alive is Mighty Ba’al, revived is the Prince, Master of the Earth.”
After all, Baal was the Canaanite god of rain and fertility.
Thus, as John Day says in Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, “the imagery of death and resurrection in Hosea, which likewise refers to Israel’s exile and restoration, is directly taken over by the prophet from the imagery of the dying and rising fertility god, Baal.”
And in Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, Jon Levenson says, “In the Canaanite version, Baal dies, a victim of deified Death (Mot), in the hot, dry summer; nature dies with him. But Death is, in turn, killed, Baal lives anew, and nature flourishes and luxuriates in response. Israelite culture (at least as reflected in the Hebrew Bible) adapts this model to a theology centred on the Lord’s relation to the people Israel in history.”
The prophet Jeremiah builds on Hosea’s theme, speaking of Israel being swallowed whole by Babylon and of Babylon being forced to “spew out what he has swallowed” (51:44). Likewise, Jonah spends three days in the belly of a whale, “deep in the realm of the dead,” but God brings his “life up from the pit” (2:2–6). The Book of Daniel is the first to literalize resurrection for eschatological purposes, taking resurrection of the dead to apply as an everlasting reward for righteous Jews (12:2).
The death and resurrection of Osiris
Are there foreign influences on the Baal Cycle in turn?
The Ugaritic texts date from the thirteenth to the twelve centuries BCE. Covering that period, from the sixteenth to the eleventh centuries, the New Kingdom of Egypt extended to Canaan and Syria (because Egypt wanted to create a buffer zone to deter the Hyksos invaders). Even centuries before that, “Trade had first been established between the Canaanite port city of Byblos and Egypt in c. 4000 BCE and, by 2000 BCE, Egypt was the region’s most important business partner. Burial rituals in Canaan during the Middle Bronze Age mirrored both Egyptian burial and Mesopotamian tradition.”
Like Baal, Osiris, too, the great protagonist of the three millennia-old Egyptian religion, is torn to pieces by his arch enemy Set so that Isis won’t be able to revive him.
Yet she succeeds in partially or temporarily bringing him back to life, managing to magically copulate with his revivified corpse to conceive their son Horus, and to enable Osiris to rule as lord of the underworld and to join with Ra the sun god as Ra makes his daily rounds. Just as Baal loses his prodigious fertility when he’s trapped in Mot, and the land suffers from that loss, Set scatters Osiris’s body parts far and wide, and Isis finds them all except the penis.
The number of pieces Isis must recover varies according to the sources, from fourteen to forty-two. They represent the geographical parts of Egypt or the lunar cycle since Isis was associated with the moon, so the recovery of each body part would have been marked by the moon’s stages of waxing or waning.
(In the Orphic tradition, Dionysus, too, the Greek god of vegetation and fertility, is ripped apart by the chaotic Titans, and his return to life symbolizes the initiate’s escape from reincarnation in the natural realm of the Many and his reunion with the primordial One.)
Moreover, Ezekial’s vivid description of resurrection in the Valley of Dry Bones recalls the Egyptians’ many lurid descriptions of bodily resurrection. Here’s Ezekial 37:4–8:
Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord. So I prophesied as I was commanded; and as I prophesied, there was a noise, and behold, a rattling; and the bones came together, bone to its bone. And as I looked, there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.
And here’s a sample from the litany of similar texts from Egypt, from the ancient culture that was famously obsessed with magically ensuring eternal life via mummification of the corpse:
“Nut has come so that she may join your bones together, knit up your sinews, make your members firm, take away your corruption and take hold of your hand, so that you may live in your name ‘Living One’. May you live for ever!” (Coffin Texts, Spell 850 VII, 54[149]).
“I gather the bones of Osiris together and I make his flesh to flourish daily, I make his limbs hale daily” (Coffin Texts, Spell 80 II, 42[125]).
“They remove the dimness of your sight and the wrinkles which are on your limbs; they open your blind eyes, they extend your contracted fingers” (Coffin Texts, Spell 226 III, 254–56[127]).
“My head has been brought to me, my bones have been gathered together, my members have been made hale for me, and my great magic power has been brought to me with it, I being hale; the offerings for the mouth have been made, the hair has been put together” (Coffin Texts, Spell 392 V, 66[135]).
“Raise yourself upon your iron bones and [golden] flesh, for this [body] of yours belongs to a god; it will not grow mouldy, it will not putrefy, it will not be destroyed. [The warmth which is on your mouth is] that which issued from the nostrils of Seth, and the winds of the sky will be destroyed if the warmth which is on your mouth is destroyed; [The sky] will be deprived [of] the stars if the warmth which is on your mouth is lacking. May your flesh be born to life, and may your life be [more than] the life of the stars in their season of life” (Coffin Texts, Spell 519 VI, 108–09[139]).
“Your libation is poured by Isis, Nephthys cleanses you, (even) your two sisters great of magic. Your bones are knit together for you, your members are collected for you, your eyes are set in your face for you” (Coffin Texts, Spell 754 VI, 384[142]).
“Geb will open for you your blind eyes, he will straighten for you your bent knees, there will be given to you your heart which you had from your mother, your heart which belongs to your body, your soul which was upon earth, your corpse which was upon the ground. There will be bread for your body, water for your throat, and sweet air for your nostrils” (Coffin Texts, Spell 20 I, 56–57[116]).
“O Osiris…I will come and bring you your feet and your testicles; I give you the efflux which issued from you, and by means of it you will not be inert” (Coffin Texts, Spell 936 VII, 139[153]).
“You have your efflux which issued from Osiris; gather together your bones, make ready your members, throw off your dust, loosen your bonds. The tomb is opened for you, the doors of the coffin are drawn back for you…Do for him what you did for his brother Osiris on that day of putting the bones in order, of making good the soles, and of travelling the causeway” (Pyramid Texts, Utterance 676 § 2007–09, 2016[195]).
Satirical commentary and the normality of religious syncretism
Why have I belaboured the non-Jewish origins of some central Jewish myths and theological concepts? In other words, why have I pointed out that Judaism is the result of syncretism with neighbouring cultures, just as every single religion is the product of such foreign cultural influence?
Because an appeal to what’s alleged to be the pure Jewishness of Christianity’s origin is just an indirect appeal, in part, to the Hellenization of Judaism, and to the older Canaanite and Egyptian influences on Judaism and thus on Christianity. As I pointed out elsewhere, the Mysteries of Isis cult spread the Egyptian fascination with magical rebirth throughout the Mediterranean in the Hellenistic period.
Rather than being pristine and pure, as its redacted scriptural propaganda would have it, Judaism was a human-made religion, subject to cultural influences like any other institution. Judaism, therefore, wasn’t a buffer to protect Christianity from Greco-Roman or Egyptian influences but was a conduit for transmitting those non-Jewish cultures to Christians. Again, to deny that evident humanness of Judaism is to beg the question against criticisms of Christianity. (And in the secular discipline of history, with its historical-critical method, theists have the burden of proof.)
On top of that, whatever initial Jewishness of Christianity there was became irrelevant after 70 CE, when Christians had to demonize Jews and ingratiate themselves with Romans after the First Jewish-Roman War included the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple.
Christianity represents, then, a loosening of Jewish legal restrictions, and a spiritualization of Jewish theology to appeal to foreigners. That’s why Jesus hung around pagans and the impure (the sick and the poor), and that’s why Paul said the Jewish law can be transcended because Jesus’s sacrificial death fulfilled it. That’s why the gospels blame the Jewish elites for Jesus’s execution, whitewashing Pontius Pilate’s involvement.
We know, then, from the collapse of Jewish Christianity after 70 CE that Christianity would so ingratiate itself with Romans, by softening its Jewish origins, that the Roman Empire would eventually adopt that religion as its state ideology in the fourth century.
Why, therefore, wouldn’t we expect that that ingratiation would include superficially Jewish elaborations on Greco-Roman themes, such as that of the trial and tribulation of the hero who triumphs in the end, which includes the mystery religions and their dying or suffering and rising gods and demigods? Wouldn’t Romans and their non-Jewish subjects have been interested in a Jewish take on their familiar myths and folktales? Wouldn’t such syncretism have preserved Christianity in the Roman Empire after the collapse of organized Judaism in the first century CE?
Finally, does the fact that the New Testament populates the Jesus narrative with Jews and sets it in Judea mean that themes from that narrative couldn’t have had non-Jewish sources? Of course not. The Christian apologist might as well argue that because the American edition of “The Office (US)” television show features American characters like Steve Carell and is set in Scranton, Pennsylvania, that show couldn’t have derived from Ricky Gervais’s British original show, “The Office (UK),” which stars British characters and is set in the UK.
As the historian Dennis MacDonald shows, ancient texts often incorporated mimesis, deliberately miming foreign works to implicitly criticize them. Arguably, the satirical point of the Jesus narrative was that there ought to be a dying and rising god for the conquered and downtrodden, not just for the arrogant conquerors. That would have been the Jewish take on the Greco-Roman’s humanistic emphasis on mythic heroism.
The Greco-Roman believed we can save ourselves by following a god or a demigod who conquered death or some other obstacle. And the Christian would have recontextualized that theme with Jewish monotheism, according to which a supreme deity is responsible for everything. Thus, it was Jewish moralistic monotheism and hard-won existential cynicism against Greco-Roman imperial optimism and progressive humanism.
Christianity seems to comment on the mystery religions, the Homeric epics, Egyptian magic, and all the rest — but only by adopting some of their key premises for the sake of argument or satire.
Otherwise, Christians would have just been talking past these pagans.
