(gentle music)
- [Narrator] It's often said
that in the ancient world
there were many myths about
dying and rising gods.
People sometimes claim
that Christianity borrowed
the story of Jesus rising from the dead
from these pagan myths.
So, is that what happened?
- When you look around
the ancient Near East,
there are various mystery cults.
Mithraism was a popular religion
which was just coming
in at the time of Jesus.
There are various religions in Egypt
which go way back beyond that,
and other parts of the ancient Near East,
which often did speak about
dying and rising gods,
on the analogy that when you
put a seed into the ground,
you sow it in the autumn,
and the winter happens,
and it all appears sad and dark,
and then in the spring the
new green shoots come up.
And so basically, this
is the old fertility myth
which goes way back, that
somehow the gods are involved
with the life of the world
and with sex and marriage
and with the seedtime and
harvest, and all of that.
So, gods are, as it were,
created out of this.
- The claim by scholars
who try to interpret Jesus
as just a myth, was
that in pagan religions
you had parallel myths of
dying and rising deities,
and the disciples somehow,
aware of these myths,
came to apply them to Jesus and believe
that Jesus was similarly risen.
This movement has utterly
collapsed today in scholarship.
It only persists in popular,
sensationalistic
literature on the internet.
It is not a view held by scholars.
- Well, we're all familiar with the boat
about 100 years ago that was
sailing across the Atlantic.
It was regarded as unsinkable,
a passenger liner a
little over 800 feet long.
And on one cold April evening,
about 400 miles off the
coast of Newfoundland
it hits an iceberg, and it sinks,
and more than half of its passengers die
as a result of a lack of lifeboats.
The name of that boat, it was the Titan,
the wreck of the Titan.
Because, you see, there was this novel
named "Futility, The Wreck of the Titan"
that was written in 1898,
14 years prior to the
sinking of the Titanic.
Now, many people would look
at that, and nobody would say
that the Titanic was a fictitious story,
a legend that was made up, a myth,
and we know that because of
the "Wreck of the Titan".
No, some things just have some
very striking similarities.
You have to show the causal connection.
And it's the same thing with
the resurrection of Jesus.
Another thing I would point out
is that you've got to show
more than just similar reports.
For example, we're all aware of a plane
that took off from
Massachusetts early one morning
and just after nine o'clock flew
into one of the largest
skyscrapers in the world
in New York City between
the 79th and 80th floor,
killing everybody on
board, and many people
working in the building at that time.
Well, we know what I'm talking about.
It's when the B-25 flew into
the Empire State Building
in July in 1945.
Yep, that actually happened,
and it's the same exact floors as the 767
that flew into the South Tower on 9/11.
But no one's going to suggest
that because all of these
striking similarities exist
that 9/11 was a myth
that occurred over time.
You can have similarities,
but you have to show a causal
connection between them.
And in the case of Jesus' resurrection,
we have extraordinary historical evidence
to show that it occurred.
We don't have that in the case
of any other of these events
of dying and rising figures in antiquity.
- When you look at these myths closely,
what you discover is that most of them
are just mythical symbols
of the crop cycle,
as the vegetation dies in the dry season
and then comes back to
life in the rainy season.
They've nothing to do with
people literally dying
and rising from the dead.
And so, the parallels turn out
to be quite spurious in fact,
when you look at them closely.
- Well, this idea that there
are these rising and dying gods
is very different from the central claim
of the Christian faith,
because the pagan myths
or the Roman myths are not
claiming to be historical.
There isn't an attachment
to a historical figure.
That's the first difference.
- The thing is, then,
that there is no evidence
that the early Christians
borrowed any of this stuff
from those ancient mythological religions.
On the contrary, in the Jewish world,
they believed in resurrection,
or the Pharisees,
who were in the ascendancy
at the time of Jesus,
believed that all people would be raised
from the dead at the end.
Nobody had imagined for a moment
that it would happen to one
person in the middle of history.
That is one of several
radical innovations,
not within the ancient pagan worldview,
but within the ancient Jewish worldview.
And that's the point where we say,
"Something new has happened here.
"How, as historians, can we explain it?"
- What scholars have found
is that pagan mythology,
Greco-Roman mythology,
is not the right interpretive context
for understanding Jesus of Nazareth.
Jesus of Nazareth was a first
century Palestinian Jew.
And his disciples were, similarly,
first century Palestinian Jews.
And it is against the
background of a Jewish milieu
that Jesus of Nazareth
is to be properly
understood and interpreted,
not against the background
of pagan mythology.
So, those who say this is just a myth
are simply dealing in the wrong
interpretative categories.
- This occurs, this
resurrection claim occurs,
within a Jewish context.
Jesus himself was a Jew, the
first Christians were Jewish,
and the Jews had an idea of resurrection,
but they didn't have the idea
of an individual person
rising from the dead.
They had the idea of a corporate
resurrection from the dead.
So, the well-known scholar, N. T. Wright,
takes this as a crucial piece of evidence
that the resurrection of
Jesus must have happened,
because this idea of a
Jewish individual messiah
rising from the dead
couldn't have been inferred
from anything else, it is
unique, it is staggering.
And those who made the claim
at the time, understood that.
They knew that they were
making an extraordinary claim,
which is why they based
their claim on evidence
and attempted to convince people
and persuade them that this had happened.
- If you have the early
Christians, who are debating
over whether gentile males
need to be circumcised,
whether they can eat
meat sacrificed to idols,
whether Jews can even eat with gentiles.
Do you really think the early Christians
are gonna borrow wholesale
from pagan religions
for their most important doctrine
for the foundation of their faith?
Very unlikely!
- [Narrator] The idea that Christianity
borrowed the story of
Jesus rising from the dead
from pagan myths, doesn't stand up.
We have to look for a different
explanation of the evidence.
Next time we'll look at the possibility
that Jesus never really died on the cross,
that he somehow survived being crucified.
(gentle music)
