[Questioner] So I wondered if you could speak to some of the pre-Christ resurrection myths
in other cultures, and their similarities and parallels. [Craig] And what
myths are you thinking of here? [Questioner] I mean, just like all of them; there are a ton. A
lot of people will, you know, point to these as saying that there may have been
some influence or some inspiration there. [Craig] Ok, yes. In the late 19th century and on into the
early 20th, there was a school within, a school of thought, within German New
Testament scholarship called the "Religionsgeschichtliche Schule" which meant the "History
of Religions School," and what these scholars did was ransack the literature
of ancient mythology, pagan religion, trying to find parallels to Christian
beliefs, including the resurrection. And in some cases they tried to actually
explain the origin of these Christian beliefs through the influence of pagan
mythology and resurrection. You still find this sort of stuff repeated on the
internet by people like Bill Maher, and the
zeitgeist movie, and so forth. What they don't realize is that this is over 100
years out-of-date. The old History of Religion school collapsed in the early
20th century and is no longer taken seriously by New Testament scholars,
principally for two reasons. Number one, it turned out that the supposed
parallels were spurious. When you examine these so-called myths of dying and
rising gods, like Adonis, and Osiris, and Tammuz, and so forth, it turns out that
they really don't concern coming back to earthly life at all. For example, Osiris
lives on in the underground world, in the nether realm of the dead, or in
other cases these are just symbolic ways of portraying the vegetation cycle,
the crop cycle, as the vegetation dies in the dry season and comes back in the
rainy season. In no case does it have anything to do with a historical
individual or actual resurrection from the dead. So that when you do this kind
of comparative religious work, it is extremely important that one be
sensitive to the nuances and the details, and it turns out that there really are,
outside of Judaism, nothing in pagan mythology that is truly parallel to
Jewish belief in the resurrection of the dead.
The second reason it collapsed was not only were the parallel spurious, but
there was no causal connection between those myths and early Christian beliefs.
Jews were familiar with these pagan beliefs and they found them abhorrent,
and so there is no trace in first century Palestine of cults of dying and
rising gods. And in any case, it would simply be unthinkable that people like
Peter, and James, the disciples of Jesus, would actually come to believe this
un-Jewish and outlandish idea that Jesus of Nazareth was risen from the dead because
they had heard stories of Hercules or Osiris or something of that sort, so that
the causal link is simply missing. And so pagan mythology has ceased to be,
actually, a relevant category in the interpretation of the historical Jesus
today. What has happened is what some scholars have called the Jewish
reclamation of Jesus. That is to say, scholars have rediscovered the
Jewishness of Jesus. Jesus, and all the disciples, were Jews, and it's against the
backdrop of first century Judaism that Jesus and the Gospels are to be
understood, not against the background of pagan mythology. And you might have
wondered, how could so obvious a fact have ever been
missed by scholars? Well I was talking to James Crossley, who is a New Testament
scholar at Sheffield University in England, and not a conservative by any
means, and I said to him how could New Testament scholars have been so derailed
as to have missed the Jewishness of Jesus? And he said it was anti-semitism,
German anti-semitism. And that just hit me; I thought wow, it is true that German
theology for decades has led the way in historical Jesus and New
Testament studies, and the same anti-semitism in German culture that
eventually led to the second World War, he thinks, colored historical Jesus
studies so that Jesus needed to be seen as an Arian. It was unthinkable that he
could have been a real Jew, and what has happened now with the Jewish reclamation
of Jesus is that people are reading the Gospels against the background of first
century Jewish thought, and when you do that, as I've said,
then the Gospels come out looking very good as historical sources for the life
of this first century Jew.