The Da Vinci Fraud: Why the Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction (30 page)

Orpheus, the inspired poet who told of these events, was also party to a resurrection myth. He entered Hades to retrieve his dead wife, Eurydice, and with the permission of the gods, he took her by the hand and led her to the surface. But he failed because he did not obey the gods’ command not to turn and look at her till they reached the surface. He lost her again and forever after lamented the loss in song. The poet swore never to marry again, and the female worshipers of Dionysus, the Maenads, took revenge by tearing him limb from limb, much as the Giants had dismembered Dionysus Zagreus. Forever after, the frenzied worshipers of Dionysus sacramentally reenacted his death by ripping live animals to pieces and devouring their bloody remains.

ATTIS

Attis was a Phrygian youth beloved of Cybele, the Cave Mother. (These seem to have been a local variation on Adam and Eve.) He betrayed her by marrying the local princess of Pessinus (the cult center). Cybele learned of his treachery and appeared, unwelcome, at the wedding, sending all the guests fleeing in terror, including the groom. Attis, awash in bitter self-reproach, sat beneath a tree and in remorse castrated himself, his blood darkening the flowers he sat on and accounting for the purple color of violets from that day forth (just as the death of Jesus reportedly etched the cross in Dogwood blossoms). But, in some versions of the myth, Cybele forgave her lover, whom she found having bled to death. And she raised him from the dead. The resurrected Attis is depicted dancing.

Attis cultists ritually relived his fate by castrating themselves in frenzied public ceremonies, then tossing their testicles into the lap of a silver statue of Cybele, symbolically fertilizing her womb, the womb of nature. In the yearly celebration of his mysteries, his priests would carve a small effigy of Attis and then affix it to a stripped pine trunk. This they would ritually inter in a cave or vault, then keep vigil till, after three days, the Hilaria, the day of rejoicing, dawned. Then they would retrieve the image and announce to the waiting crowd, “Rejoice, you initiates! For your god is saved! And we, too, shall be saved from ills!”

ADONIS

Adonis was a Syrian deity, whose name is obviously another form of Adonai, “Lord,” a biblical name for God. His tale is basically another version of Attis’s, only it is the Greek goddess Aphrodite whom he loves and who loves him. He is unfaithful to her, and she takes revenge, unleashing a fierce boar, which gores Adonis. But she can’t stay mad and raises Adonis from the dead.

DUMUZI/TAMMUZ

Another very ancient, prebiblical myth of the resurrected god comes from Mesopotamia, where it was told to explain the death of vegetation in the fall and its return in the spring. In this one, it is a young god named Dumuzi who dies and descends to the netherworld. He represents the spirit of vegetation, and so his departure causes all greenery to wither. But his lover Ishtar burns with a love stronger than death. She undertakes to make the journey to Sheol alive, and she must face many dangers on the way. In the course of her adventure, she herself is killed but rises from the dead. Finally, she reaches him, and she has more luck than Orpheus. She successfully brings Dumuzi up from the dead, restoring the life of plants, while she takes his place. Every winter he goes back, and she comes up.

Ancient peoples believed they ought to take no chances, so they did not merely commemorate the change of seasons; they cooperated to make sure it kept happening on schedule. So Mesopotamian women would ritually mourn for the slain Dumuzi, anticipating his return. Dumuzi’s worship thrived also in nearby Israel and Judah, where he was called Tammuz, lending his name to one month of the Hebrew calendar. It appears that the Song of Solomon originated as the liturgy of the cult, though the names have been trimmed in light of the evolution toward Jewish monotheism. The only way it could keep its place on the shelf of sacred literature was to omit the names, now considered idolatrous. But it remains pretty easy to recognize Ishtar Shalmith in the “Shulammite” (Song 6:13) and Tammuz in her lover who is also her brother (4:9).

BAAL

Baal (“Lord”) was a title received by the Canaanite and Amorite storm god, also called Aleyan and Hadad. He was the son of El (“God”) and one day set out to defeat the death monster Mot.

In this he failed and was devoured. But when his consort Anath discovered the bloody field (reflected in Matt. 27:8; Acts 1:19) where he had perished, she resolved to bring him back. She mourned and lamented, then got down to business. She descended to hell and freed her lover. Henceforth the resurrected deity reigned alongside his father as lord (“Baal”) of gods and men. He, too, represented fertility, his death symbolizing fall and winter, his return signaling spring and summer.

ANOTHER CORN KING?

It is altogether natural to wonder whether perhaps the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, in the springtime, is another version of this widespread myth pattern. There are two versions of the theory. One is that there was a first-century CE historical Jesus to whom this myth was sooner or later attached. In chapter 3, “Beyond the Cross,” this possibility is broached. Rudolf Bultmann and others have thought this is what happened. The other, more radical, version is that there simply was no historical Jesus and that the gospel portrait of an itinerant healer and sage is a subsequent attempt to “historicize” the mythic Jesus figure, much as Plutarch supposed that Osiris and Isis had really lived but that they were the first king and queen of Egypt. Herodotus tried to figure out when in the long scope of Greek history Hercules would have lived. But these were later attempts to rationalize. In his book
Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
Paul Veyne concludes that most people did believe the gods and heroes had existed, but in a sort of twilight zone of history before recorded human history began; “Once upon a time.”
¹
That is perhaps what the first Christians believed about the death and resurrection of Jesus.

“Jesus” may simply have been a title or epithet of one of the older deities, and eventually it took over in popular usage, just as Vedic worshipers used to invoke Rudra by name, but they feared his terrible might and so began to call him “O Auspicious One!” And that is what “Siva” means. Eventually the epithet Siva
became
the name, replacing Rudra. In the same way, “Jesus” (Savior) may have replaced the name Osiris or Dionysus.

WHAT DID THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?

Conventional Christian theologians have mounted three arguments against this theory. The first is that there is no true parallel between Jesus and these mythic saviors for the simple reason that Jesus was a historical figure, not merely a poetic embodiment of the change of seasons. But that is just the question up for debate, isn’t it? Isn’t the question whether Jesus may
originally
have been an ahistorical myth? And besides, as we have just seen, most adherents of these other saviors probably pictured them alive in remote history, too. On Crete they even showed tourists the tomb of Zeus.

Second, objectors affirm that there is no pre-Christian evidence of dying-and-rising gods. Thus it might be that pagans liked what they saw in the Christian gospel and decided to borrow the resurrection (and, presumably, the whole system of mystery initiation along with it?). This, it must be said, is nonsense. As we have already seen, belief in the death and resurrection of Osiris, Baal, and Tammuz is amply attested many centuries before Christianity. As for Attis, most of the surviving evidence for belief in his resurrection does happen to be later, once Christianity has begun, but not all of it. One pre-Christian vase depicts him in his classic posture of resurrection, as lord of the dance. But really none of this is necessary. All we need to know is that when the early Christian apologists argued against ancient skeptics, to whom the power of these parallels was already obvious, they resorted to the argument that Satan, knowing in advance about the coming of Jesus, planted counterfeit resurrections in the soil of paganism
ahead of time
, so as to supply ammunition for skeptics! Christian apologists never would have made such an argument if they didn’t acknowledge that the pagan versions were older.

Third, we are often told that Jews would never have borrowed pagan mythemes even if they were available, since Jews were staunch monotheists. This line of reasoning assumes the same error that vitiates Alfred Edersheim’s
The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah
, the uncritical belief that Jews and Judaism in the first century were the same as they would be two and three centuries later, as if Jesus and the Pharisees alike were all Mishnaic, Rabbinic Jews. This is far from the truth, as Jewish scholars now recognize. Just as Christian apologists want to make us think that Jesus, Peter, and Paul all believed in Chalcedonian orthodoxy, traditional Rabbinic Judaism recast first-century CE Judaism in its own image. But the sources do not bear these reconstructions out.

Keep in mind that conservative apologists are also dogmatically opposed to the critical view that Israelite religion originated amid animism and polytheism. Fundamentalists prefer the traditional theological party line that Moses was already a monotheist. But critical scholarship reveals that monotheism first popped up among Jews in the time of Jeremiah and the Second Isaiah, during and after the Babylonian Exile. And even then it was a distinct minority view. It took centuries before it dominated Jewish belief. We read in 2 Maccabees 12:40 how Jewish freedom fighters against the pagan Seleucids wore amulets of the Semitic gods of Jaffa into battle!

Any reader of the Old Testament knows how attractive Baal worship was to most Israelites for hundreds of years. See Zechariah 12:11, “In that day there will be great mourning in Jerusalem, like the mourning for Hadad-Rimmon in the plain of Megiddo.” This plain is located in Israel, and the god mentioned is Baal Hadad. The mourning was the ritual of his cult. But was he a resurrected deity? Obviously he was from the simple fact that people continued to worship him as a living god, seeing in the storm clouds his mighty chariot. Ezekiel makes it equally clear that Jews worshiped the dying-and-rising Tammuz, not somewhere out in the sticks, but right in downtown Jerusalem! “Then he brought me to the entrance at the gate of Yahweh’s house facing north, and behold, women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz” (8:14). In 2 Maccabees 6:7, we read that Jews were forced by the Seleucid occupiers to join in the festivities of Dionysus, but this represents the embarrassment of the later writer who cringes at the notion that any Jews should have voluntarily apostatized. One Maccabees 1:41-53 tells the truth of the matter: Many Jews gladly paganized. Some Greek writers thought Yahweh was a local version of Dionysus anyway, so these Jews may have thought little was at stake. So it is by no means evident that all first-century Jews would have recoiled in pious disgust at the worship of dying-and-rising savior deities.

THE INVISIBLE WOMAN

The case for heavy influence upon Christianity from the religions of the resurrected gods is a strong one. And the stronger that case is, the stronger also becomes the notion that a Christian goddess originally formed an important part of the myth.

This much is evident from the prominence of the goddess in each of the pagan parallels. The savior is always resurrected
by his consort
. Baal is rescued by Anath, Osiris by Isis, Dionysus by Athena (or Semele, Persephone, or someone else in various versions), Attis by Cybele, Adonis by Aphrodite, Tammuz by Ishtar. One has to wonder if the Christian version conformed to the same pattern. Is there reason to think there might have been a consort of Jesus who saw his death, went searching for the body to anoint it, and witnessed the resurrection? Of course there is. Nor has the evidence vanished. It is hidden in plain sight.

When Luke depicts Paul preaching at the Athenian Areopagus forum, he sounds a strange and discordant note. “Some of the Epicureans and Stoic philosophers met him. And some said, ‘What does he mean by this gibberish?’ Others said, ‘Apparently he is promoting foreign divinities.’ This last because he was proclaiming Jesus and Resurrection” (Acts 17:18). Even ancient commentators on this passage understood the point of it to be that the pagans (mis?)understood Paul to be talking about a divine couple,
Jesus and Anastasis
, surely an apt choice of names, meaning Salvation and Resurrection. Luke holds the very notion up to ridicule. But where did he get the idea in the first place? He may have made it up, having Paul’s opponents mistake him in a grossly literal way, so as to afford Paul the chance to set things straight for the reader’s benefit. John does the same thing with the Pharisees throughout his gospel (“How can he say, ‘I came down from heaven?’ Where’s the airplane?”). Or Luke might be repeating what was actually said on the occasion, though if he did, it would be the only instance of such reporting in the whole of Acts, where all the speeches are plainly dramatic pieces authored by Luke himself.

But what an odd thing to introduce into the narrative out of nowhere! One cannot help wondering if this is another one of those places where Luke is bringing up a popular belief that he doesn’t like in order to make it look false or silly. Similarly, he tells us that Paul was widely believed to flout the Torah and to teach Christian converts to do the same (Acts 21:21-24) and that, of course, it wasn’t so! But
wasn’t
it? He brushes it off as mere slander when Stephen is accused of condemning Temple worship (Acts 6:13) yet writes a speech for him (see 7:47-51) in which he
does
seem to disdain it! So we must wonder whether Luke similarly knew of Christians who placed a goddess beside their new god: Anastasis, who as her very name demands, raised her consort Jesus from the dead.

But then why do we never hear of her elsewhere, say, in the gospels? The gospels and Acts are works of the very late first to mid-second centuries. And by this time Christianity was assuming an increasingly patriarchal character. This is a common process, once a successful, socially radical sect starts relaxing back into worldly conformity and becomes a church. In such a context, it is not much of a surprise that credit for Jesus’s resurrection is transferred from his consort to his Father, is it? But, just as “the Shulammite” holds the place of Ishtar Shalmith in the Song of Solomon, a familiar character holds the place of the old Christian goddess Anastasis in the gospels. She is, of course, represented by Mary Magdalene.