Was the Resurrection of Jesus Borrowed From Pagan Myths (Part 2)

Did later pagan influence add a resurrection story to the Jesus tradition? In part 1, we explored facts relating to the early dating of the resurrection belief and a lack of precedent for a bodily resurrection in pagan culture. In this article, we will discuss significant differences between resurrection and apotheosis along with communication between the early churches.

Significant differences between resurrection and apotheosis

If belief in Jesus’s resurrection as the Son of God was a form of pagan apotheosis, we would expect to find strong parallels. But on the contrary, there are fundamental differences between apotheosis and the worship of Jesus. For example, deified Roman emperors did not wield any authority after their death, while Jesus’s power over heaven and earth was said to have been attained through his death and resurrection.

And Jesus’s followers did not describe him in the typical pagan way as a separate divinity alongside God: instead, glory given to Jesus went through him to God, and creation was from the Father through the Son (Col 1:16; Heb 1:2; John 1:3). As Fletcher-Louis notes, “the birth of Christianity was not marked by the worship of a new Mediterranean god, but by the belief that the one unique God—Yhwh-Kyrios—had climactically, at the end of Israel’s history, appeared in fully human and a highly personal form” (Jesus Monotheism, 22).

Unlike the process of apotheosis, reverence towards Jesus was not merely a matter of superficial rituals: it involved radical conversion to a way of life that included community righteousness, protection of the weak, and forgiveness of one’s enemies. And as the biblical scholar Martin Hengel points out, veneration of Jesus far exceeded the respect offered to deified pagan heroes:

“How did it come about that in the short space of less than twenty years the crucified Galilean Jew, Jesus of Nazareth, was elevated by his followers to a dignity which left every possible form of pagan-polytheistic apotheosis far behind? Preexistence, Mediation of Creation, and the revelation of his identity with the One God: this exceeds the possibilities of deification in a polytheistic pantheon” (“Christological Titles,” 443).

It is also significant that polytheistic Romans such as Tacitus and Pliny regarded the worship of the crucified Jesus as a harmful, extravagant superstition,[1] which strongly suggests that belief in his resurrection and ascension to heaven was not the result of the well-known and accepted process of pagan apotheosis. In fact, the Gentile world generally did not easily accept the New Testament teaching about Jesus’s divine-human nature, and as a result various groups developed more acceptable concepts, such as a purely human Jesus, a purely spiritual Jesus, or a human Jesus who was adopted to divine sonship.[2]

Overall, the evidence does not suggest that belief in Jesus’s resurrection and divine-human nature was the result of pagan apotheosis.

Communication between the early churches

Jesus is said to have sent out as many as seventy apostles, and other believers would have helped to spread the “good news” about Jesus. Peter’s first converts at the Jewish Feast of Weeks (Pentecost) included many pilgrims from widely dispersed regions outside Palestine, and each year after that, thousands of visitors to the annual Jerusalem festivals would have heard and disseminated the message about Jesus. After his death, Jesus’s brothers taught in other regions (1 Cor 9:5), and when the first martyr Stephen was killed, many believers left Jerusalem to preach in Phoenicia, Cyprus, and Antioch (Acts 11:19).

The early belief in Jesus’s divinity and resurrection, which Paul’s letters confirm to have been in place within a few decades after Jesus’s death, were therefore in circulation at a time when the first disciples were spreading their own message about him outside Palestine. If these doctrines were new developments, how would the creators of these myths have been able to convince Jesus’s other followers to accept such radical changes?

First-century Jerusalem was the center of an extensive network connecting Jews inside and outside Palestine. As a result, there was continuous communication and visitation between the Jerusalem Church and Jesus’s followers in other regions,[3] which would have linked the tradition directly to its origins and provided the scattered Christian groups with a shared corporate memory. It is almost certain that drastic changes to the original Jesus tradition would have been recognized and challenged. And far from being a pagan addition, Jesus’s resurrection and deity were proclaimed in Matthew’s Gospel and the book of Revelation, both of which have strongly Jewish backgrounds.

Jewish Christian leadership played a dominant role in the mission to the Gentiles, and the authority of the first apostles and the Jerusalem Church was widely recognized. Quispel points out that even far-flung Syrian Christianity did not develop independently from Palestinian influence: “Scholarly research has shown convincingly that Jewish Christianity . . . was instrumental in bringing Christianity to Mesopotamia and further East, thus laying the foundations of a Semitic, Aramaic speaking, Syrian Christianity” (“Judaic Christianity,” 81). As Jean Daniélou argues, it was only in the second century, when the Gospels were already in circulation, that Gentile Christian communities started to adapt their inherited Jewish Christianity to fit Hellenistic thought patterns (Theology of Jewish Christianity, 9–10).

So how likely is it that different Christian communities would have freely adapted the Jesus-tradition, introducing new concepts such as the resurrection? Anthropologist Jan Vansina provides some important insights. While he accepts that a community might modify a tradition to suit its present situation, he offers this important comment: “Some sociologists go further and hold that the total content of oral tradition is only a social product of the present. Oral tradition is created in the present for society, and when the impact of the present is assessed there remains no message at all from the past. This is exaggerated. Where would social imagination find the stuff to invent from?” (Oral Tradition, 94). In other words, although oral transmission might shape a tradition, it does not create it.

A strongly oral community also recognizes specific individuals as official guardians of the tradition. It is therefore highly probable that Jesus’s Jerusalem apostles would have trained others who were close to the tradition to transmit the precious message of salvation. It seems that the Apostle Judas had to be replaced by someone who had known Jesus before and after his resurrection (Acts 1:21), and Paul cited his Damascus experience to establish his credibility, because he had not been one of Jesus’s disciples: “Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Cor 9:1b). After studying first-century rabbinic transmission of tradition, Birger Gerhardsson concluded: “We have good reason for believing that the young church in all its ‘enthusiasm’ was both ordered and organized, and that it recognized some men—and not others—as doctrinal authorities” (Memory and Manuscript, 12).

Early Christians would also have been deeply committed to their new faith. These scattered communities faced increasing animosity from fellow Jews and Roman authorities, and Larry Hurtado described the implications of becoming a follower of Jesus: “To embrace Christian faith in earliest Christianity was to ally oneself with a small, vulnerable religious movement . . . [that] almost certainly courted various forms of disapproval, even hostility, from wider social circles . . . For Gentiles, embracing Christian faith certainly meant cutting themselves out of participation in the civic cults . . . There were costs involved in joining this particular ‘voluntary association’ with its exclusivist demands” (Lord Jesus, 652). Believers would therefore have treasured the shared traditions that united them and defined their unpopular identity, and they would have been strongly motivated to preserve these teachings and minimize their corruption.

It is therefore highly probable that the collective memory about Jesus would have maintained a stable core rather than spiraling into uncontrolled myth-making.

CONCLUSION

We have investigated the suggestion that Jesus was only an admired human teacher, and that the story of his resurrection was an exaggeration that reflected later pagan influence. Overall, this argument is not supported by the cumulative evidence related to early belief in Jesus’s resurrection and deity, the lack of a pagan precedent for the resurrection narrative, differences between apotheosis and Jesus’s resurrection, and the extensive communication between the early churches.

But if the resurrection narrative was not a later addition to the Jesus tradition, is it possible that Jesus’s Jerusalem disciples invented the story, either through sincere error or deliberate fabrication? The next article explores this possibility.

[1]. See Tacitus, Annals 15.44; Pliny, Epistles 10.96. [2]. No one finds it easy to comprehend a being that is both divine and human. The New Testament writers did not even try to explain how this was possible—they simply accepted that this was Jesus’s nature. [3]. See Köstenberger and Kruger, Heresy of Orthodoxy, 59; Wright, Victory, 63; McGrath, Heresy, 44–45. Judaic scholar Alfred Edersheim points out that specialist letter carriers seem to have been used for delivering communications (Life and Times, 92).