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Texts>The Myth of the Resurrection
The Christs That Rose
In the year 384 A.D. a swarthy and remarkable young man of thirty years entered Rome and gazed for the first time upon its splendors and gaieties. He came from Roman Africa, and he was going to make a fortune by teaching rhetoric in Rome. His name Augustinus; and he little dreamed that until about the year 1950 A.D., or thereabouts, he would be known all over the world, and greatly honored, under the quaint name of St. Augustine.
In Life and Morals in Greece and Rome (Little Blue Book No.1078) we may see something of the superb city and wonderful life which Augustine would admire. Here I am going to tell one experience which he described in later years. He was not yet a Christian: neither was Rome, for he tells us that even then, three centuries and a half after the death of Christ, seventy years after the Emperors had begun to make an acceptance of Christianity "the pathway of ambition," still "nearly the whole nobility of Rome"-which means the whole of its educated men-were pagans. Imperial gold had built a church or two, but the great city of a million people scorned the new religion. It had a score of more attractive religions; and it was the very popular annual procession through the streets of one of these that Augustine saw.
This was in March, 385 A.D., the beginning of spring in Rome, and when the priests of Cybele, "the mother of the gods," celebrated their "holy week." It had begun with a procession, on March 17 when priests and devotees carried reeds: as they carry palms in a Catholic church on the first day of Holy Week in our time. Five days later- Sunday to Friday is five days-there was a second solemn procession. The priests bore a sacred emblem through the streets to the temple on the Palatine Hill; and the emblem was the figure of a beautiful young god, pale in death, bound to a small pine tree, which was crowned with violets. Attis was dead, and the procession went its way with ceremonial sadness.
The next day was the "Day of Blood." Attis had bled, and his priests and worshipers must bleed. In the full ritual of the cult of Attis and Cybele, in the east, the priests tore from their bodies the organs of manhood and held aloft their great sacrifice to the mother and divine lover. Rome did not permit this; but priests and worshipers gashed themselves arid made the blood flow; and drums thundered, and howls of lamentation rose, and the eunuch priests rent their flowing robes. Attis was dead: the beautiful Attis.
And on the next day he rose from the dead. It was the Hilaria ("Day of Hilarity"), a very popular Roman festival, when all things were lawful, because your heart rejoiced to know that Attis had come to life again. Two days later was the part of the festival at which Augustine assisted. The priests took the black stone (phallic stone) with a silver head, which represented Cybele, for a ceremonious bath in the Almo; and they return through Rome, with horns blowing and drums throbbing, frantic with rejoicing, while the two great hedges of Roman spectators supported them with an orgy of sexual songs and jokes and embraces. The spirit of love was born again.
It was long years afterwards, when Augustine had become a very solemn and very sour and very puritanical bishop, that he described these things. I need not reproduce his comments. But he hints that at the time the religious life he saw in Rome made him lean to the Academic philosophy (an early type of Agnosticism). His mother Monica was a Christian, and she sought the conversion of her son with all the fire with which she had once sought a lover. But Augustine smiled disdainfully at the Christian Church in Rome.
Although he does not say so explicitly, one reason for his aversion must have been the sight of these two Holy Weeks. In the same month as the pagans the Christians opened a Holy Week with a palm-bearing procession, and five days later they mourned before the figure of a pale young god nailed to a "tree" (as they chanted), and two days later again they went into a frenzy of rejoicing because he had risen from the dead. The one Holy Week was a frank drama of the death and resurrection of love:
the other was, at least in theory, a spiritual and ascetic drama. But Augustine would look from the pale young Attis on his tree to the pale young Christ on his cross, from resurrection to resurrection, and wonder . . . Cybele and Attis were ages older than Jesus.
The modern American Christian who may in some audacious moment open the opulent pages of Sir J. G. Frazer's Golden Bough (especially the volume Adonis, Attis, Osiris) and read about this ancient cult of a slain and resurrected god, has at first a strange fluttering of the heart; then he sets it all aside with a forced laugh. This, he says, is "science." Guessing again: theories. He sees in the footnotes a formidable list of authorities. They are all Greek and Latin and Arabic and German. He can't read a word of them-not even if the books existed in the United States.
So I introduce the matter on the authority of one before whom the Christians must bow in silence. Augustine saw this in Rome, in the year 385; just before paganism was fiercely persecuted and suppressed by the men who wrote pathetic books about the persecutions they had suffered.
And there was in Rome about the same time another very learned man to whose authority every Christian must bow, St. Jerome. In his Commentary on Ezekie1 St. Jerome says (I translate the Latin):
Hence as, according to the pagan legend, the lover of Venus, a most beautiful youth, is said to have been slain, then raised to life again, in the month of June, they call the month of June by his name, and they have a solemn celebration in it every year, in the course of which his death is mourned by the women, and after wards his resurrection is chanted, and praised. (Migne edition of Jerome's works, vol. XXV, col. 82.)
Jerome, who spent a large part of his life in Palestine, is speaking of the east-the whole region of Palestine and Mesopotamia-and the "most beautiful youth" is Tammuz. The goddess whom he calls "Venus," in Roman fashion, is really the Babylonian Ishtar, the Astarte of the Phoenicians and the Hebrews. Attis, to whom I have referred above, was the slain and resurrected god of the Phrygians:
"the Lord," as he was known over all that part of the earth, whether priests called him Tammuz or Attis. "Lord" is in Palestinian language "Adon." Even the Bible some times gives Adonai (really Adoni-"my lord") as a name for God; and the Greeks took it for a proper name and created the beautiful young god "Adonis," the lover of Venus, who died and rose again every year.
And they were not surprised, because they thought nothing of bringing the dead to life. Asclepios had brought so many dead back to life that the monarch of the world of the dead got jealous and had him slain; and, being a god, he in a sense rose from the dead. Anyhow, other gods of Greek mythology had died and risen from the dead; and so, when this fascinating ritual of a holy week came along to Greece from Syria, the women quite generally adopted it.
Thus in every land where Christianity spread the slain and resurrected god, and the dramatic annual celebration of his death and resurrection, were quite familiar. It was Tammuz all over the plains of Mesopotamia, from Ur of the Chaldees to Jerusalem. It was Attis all over the region to the north and northwest of Palestine and through the old Phoenician civilization on the coast of Palestine and Asia Minor. It was Adonis in Greece, then in Rome, and gradually all over the Greco-Roman world. We may be sure that Augustine had seen it in Carthage before he went to Rome. We may almost suppose that the Romans took it with them to Spain and Gaul, if not Britain.
I may seem to have overlooked Egypt; but Egypt was precisely the classic home of the myth of a slain and resurrected god. "I am the Resurrection and the Life" is merely an epitome of what the Egyptians chanted for ages about their great god Osiris, the judge of the dead, one of the oldest and most revered gods of Egypt. He had been slain by "the powers of darkness" embodied in his wicked brother, Set. His sister and wife, Isis, had sought the fragments of his body and put them together again. And he had arisen from the dead, and was enthroned in the world of souls, to judge every man according to his works. The resurrection of Osiris was the basis of the Egyptian's firm hope of eternal life. Every year the fair strip of land along the Nile mourned for days over the slaying of Osiris and then rejoiced exceedingly over his resurrection.
You may nervously say, you may hope, that all this is really later than the death and resurrection of Jesus...Queer how my pen stumbles over that word. It wants always to write "Christ"; and the explanation may be interesting, even instructive.
From forty to thirty years ago I was a monk of the Order of St. Francis, and we were taught never to pronounce the name "Jesus" except in prayer, and to bow our heads whenever it was pronounced. If ever we saw it on a piece of paper that lay about we were reverently to burn the paper. Ten years stamped that so deeply on my nerves that even now, in my learned and blasphemous age, with the entire story of religion through the ages unfolded before my mind, I hesitate a little to use the word Jesus. That is parable. Apply it to religious psychology and the religious instinct and the sentiment of faith. All are the product of education and environment.
You may, then, say impulsively, that somehow the Christian belief in the death and resurrection of Jesus got amongst the pagan religions, and they borrowed it. Many desperate things have been said by religious apologists, but I am not aware that any one of them ever said that. He would have to be very remarkably indifferent to the absurdity of his statements. Augustine and Jerome lived in the fourth century, it is true; but neither they nor any other Christian Fathers dreamed of saying that the pagans had borrowed from Christianity. It took them all their time to defend their own church from the charge of borrowing from the pagans. Every apologist has to meet that scornful charge from Jews and pagans.
However, one must put aside at once any idea of these slain and resurrected gods being modeled on Jesus. It is as absurd as it would be to say that the biography of Julius Caesar was modeled on that of Napoleon!
Cyril (Bishop) of Alexandria refers to the celebration as of very ancient date. It never occurs to him that the pagans borrowed it. He says (Commentary on Isaiah, II, 3):
The Greeks invented a solemnity in which they mourned with Venus for the death of Adonis, and then affected to rejoice when they found returning from the under world him whom they sought; and this ridiculous ceremony took place in the temples of Alexandria down to our own time.
A much earlier Father of the Church was Firmicus Maternus: the most stupid man who ever wrote a valuable book. The book is called The Errors of the Profane Religions, and it is a treasury of the pagan beliefs and ceremonies which the Church Christianized. Firmicus cheerfully concluded that the devil had given the world these legends in advance so as to spoil the chances of Christianity when it came. So all the early Christians thought. He says (Ch. II) of the Egyptians:
They have in a temple an image of Osiris buried, and this they honor with an annual lamentation. They shave their heads . . they beat their breasts. And when they have done this for a few days, they pretend that they have found the fragments of the torn body (of Osiris), and they lay aside their grief and rejoice.
So a modern Chinese student might write home to his wondering mother after seeing the Holy Week ceremonies in some Catholic church of the United States today! And notice that Alexandria has two slain and resurrected gods. Cyril has told us, above, of the worship there of Adonis or Tammuz. In fact, it had at least three (and most probably more) annual resurrections, for the worship of the Persian god Mithra flourished there, as everywhere else; and the Mithraists, as Firmicus expressly tells us (I will give the passage later), every year laid a statue of Mithra on a bier, mourned his death, and then, in a blaze of candles, rejoiced at his resurrection. And Alexandria did not differ from the other cosmopolitan cities of the time. It is in Rome that Firmicus describes the Mithraist celebration- Augustine, doubtless, saw that also-and of the Adonis ceremony he says: "In most cities of the east Adonis is mourned as the husband of Venus and . . . his wound is exhibited to the spectators." I have to translate these passages from the Latin or Greek for my readers, as religious writers do not seem anxious to put them before their modern followers. I use the famous Migne edition of the Fathers, the work of the learned Benedictine monks-who at one time really were learned, and correspondingly liberal-and I notice that the monastic editors, finding these constant references to the deaths and resurrections of pagan gods, make this comment in a footnote: "This dramatic representation, in which a dead man (god) was mourned and was honored in the dark, with chanted lamentations, until, the lights being lit, the mourning turned to joy, we find in different forms in almost all the mysteries" (vol. XII, col. 1032). Now, those "mysteries," whether Egyptian, Babylonian, Phoenician, Persian, Phrygian, or Greek, go back to long before the time of Christ. Plutarch, in his Lives ("Alcibiades," XVIII), speaking of the sailing of the Greek fleet for Syracuse in the year 415 B.C., says: "It was an evil omen that the festival of Adonis fell in those days. Numbers of women bore images, like dead bodies, and held mock funerals; and they mourned and chanted the solemn hymns." He wrote also a whole treatise on the Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris.
But the Bible itself takes us back to the fifth century. The passage I quoted from Jerome is in a commentary on Ezekie1, in which we read (VIII, 14): "And behold there sat women weeping for Tammuz." So several centuries before Christ the lamentations over Tammuz, to be followed by jubilation over his resurrection, had spread from the dying empire of Babylon to Judea.
And there is much earlier reference in the Bible which is rarely noticed. The passage I quoted from Cyril of Alexandria is found in his Commentary on Isaiah. The bishop has arrived at this very obscure passage (XVIII, 1-2):
Woe to the land shadowing with wings which is beyond the rivers of Ethiopia: That sendeth ambassadors by the sea, even in vessels of bulrushes upon the waters, saying: Go, ye swift messengers, to a nation scattered and peeled, etc.
This is abominably mistranslated from the Hebrew text. If the reader cares to compare various translations of the Bible in different languages, he will see that none of the translators understood the passage. But Cyril of Alexandria did. The Greek text of the prophet which he uses says plainly, "That sendeth hostages by the sea and letters of papyrus upon the water"-and Cyril tells us what this means.
As I will show in the fourth chapter, the Egyptians said in their legend that the body of Osiris floated to Byblus, on the coast of Syria, and Isis went there to re cover it. Cyril gives the whole legend of Adonis-I will reproduce his words later-and rightly identifies Adonis with Tammuz and even with Osiris. Then, to explain the "letters of papyrus" in Isaiah, he tells us that every year the "friends of Venus" (priestesses of Aphrodite) mourned at Byblus, and the women of the land "beyond the rivers of Ethiopia," the land (to translate the Hebrew text correctly) "of the fluttering of the wings of birds," wrote a letter on papyrus, put it on a raft, and sent it out to sea. It was supposed to float to Byblus and to inform the "friends of Venus" that her lover's body had been found, and so their mourning turned into the joy of the resurrection.
Sir J. G. Frazer has evidently been himself puzzled at this point. He overlooks the important passage in Isaiah, and considers that the connection of Osiris with Byblus (which is given in Plutarch) is a late addition to the legend. "Byblos" is not only the name of the city of Aphrodite in Syria, but it is also the Greek word for "papyrus," the material on which the Egyptians wrote, so Frazer thinks that some Greek writer got confused between the two. If he had carefully studied Cyril of Alexandria, he would have realized how interesting the matter is. Isaiah-the genuine prophet Isaiah, not the forger of the second part- plainly says, about the year 700 B.C., that in his time the women of Egypt-I am confident that he means simply Egypt, and is confused about the geography-sent a letter yearly to the priestesses of Byblus to turn their laments over the death of Adonis into the joy of resurrection. That is full biblical authority for the death and resurrection celebrations of both Osiris and Tammuz seven hundred years before Jesus was born!
But to any properly informed person these biblical references are as superfluous as it would be to quote the authority of President Wilson for the Declaration of In dependence in 1776. The legends and the annual celebrations were already hoary with antiquity when Isaiah and the writer of Ezekie1 referred to them. This we shall see presently. I have given this introduction to the old myths, on the authority of Christian and biblical writers, merely to prepare the reader for a candid examination of the myths of the resurrection which we find in the New Testament.
