The resurrection - just a myth?

As someone who has a love for stories, films and drama, I have been wrestling with a creeping suspicion over the last decade. It's a doubt that the stories about Jesus - and particularly about his death and resurrection - are just one more form of a "story type" that exists in a huge number of forms in all cultures, and which certainly predates the New Testament. Stories about gods dying and rising seem to be quite common throughout the world.

You see it in the Egyptian myth of Osiris; the Norse myth of Baldr; the Aztec feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl; and even the Japanese story of Izanami. Wikipedia has an article on the theme or "trope" of dying and rising Gods that charts the extensive "lookalike Christ's" throughout history and culture.

But you don't need to go back in history to see this theme played out. Any child devoted to Transformers will tell you the story of how the wise and courageous Optimus Prime, gives his life to save humankind and then comes to life once again; or how the last Superman movie, true to the original stories, is stabbed in the side with Green Kryptonite but rises from "death" on the morning of the third day; or how Gandalf the grey plunges into "hell" wrestling an ancient beast, but is reborn as Gandalf the white. If you have eyes to see, this story is everywhere.

This observation gave rise to serious academic debate throughout the 20th century. Was Jesus just "another" dying and rising God myth that happens to have stuck? It was argued that the New Testament writers were simply reproducing this myth, which was part of the intellectual furniture of the ancient world. Rudolf Bultmann was among many scholars of the period who argued for this, and then proceeded to take the logically questionable step of saying that such parallels discredited the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.

Since then, however, as the Wikipedia article charts, scholarship has moved on considerably. The parallels between the pagan myths of dying and rising gods and the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus are now regarded as remote, to say the least. For example, the New Testament with some care gives the place and the date of both the death and the resurrection of Jesus, as well as identifying the witnesses to both—something myths only ever hint at. Characters in myths are dissociated from time and space and never applied to a historical figure.

It is at this point that the wisdom of C. S. Lewis - who actually knew something about myths - must be acknowledged. Lewis argued that the New Testament accounts of the resurrection of Jesus bore no relation to real mythology, despite the claims of some theologians who had dabbled in the field. Most important, however, was his realization that the gnostic myths - which enthusiastic theologians of his day suggested the New Testament writers took over and applied to Jesus - were to be dated from later than the New Testament. If anyone borrowed any ideas from anyone, it seems it was the gnostics who took up Christian ideas.

So in academic circles, the challenge to the historicity of the resurrection by these theories have passed into history. Two comments:

1. Don't jump on the latest academic bandwagon. In this regard, as in many others, responsible academic scholarship was seen to pose a serious challenge to a central aspect of the Christian faith. It was taken seriously by theologians and popular religious writers. And yet they ignored the fact that "cutting edge scholarship" must always be viewed as provisional. Scholarship proceeds by evaluation of evidence and hypotheses, peer review, testing in conference papers and discussion—a process which often takes decades, and in which things that one generation took as self-evident, is often later demonstrated to be untrustworthy, or just totally wrong. The fate of the resurrection myth is a case in point: in the 1920s, it was treated virtually as an established fact of serious and responsible scholarship; three quarters of a century later, it is regarded as an interesting, but discredited, idea. So we should be cautious in picking feeling threatened by the latest craze in academia.

But we should also be wary of "new discoveries" that seem to back up Christian belief in the trustworthiness of the Bible. Let these things stand the test of time and scrutiny before we deploy them as reliable evidence.

And in the meantime, we should continue to proclaim the resurrection - trusting that the Word of God is as reliable as it ever was and will be.

2. The world is slow to catch on. Visit any atheist site, or the Christian sites where (often aggressive) atheists will deride or mock Christian belief, and you will see frequent reference to this argument. Jesus is "just another dying and rising God" story like hundreds of others - that just happened to strike lucky in the mythology lottery and make it through to today. They have picked up the idea, and promote it as a self-evident truth - even though in academic circles it is now discarded as unreliable.

How ironic that they use an argument about mythology that has now itself attained the status of myth! It is the equivalent of someone arguing that cholera comes from an evil miasma - a medical theory discounted by the discover of germs.