COMMENTS ON THE McFALL-TILL DEBATE

See Farrell Till's article The Pagan Origins of Resurrection and Mark McFall's (ITW) article OH-SIGH-RIS for context.

By Earl Doherty

When Mark McFall asked me if I would contribute my views on the debate over whether or not Jesus’ presumed bodily resurrection was anticipated in the myth of Osiris, I said that there were probably ways in which he was right, and ways in which Farrell Till was right. To illustrate this, I’d like to offer a few generalities to point out similarities and differences between the Osiris cult (along with the mysteries in general) and the Christian cult as we see it in the record of the 1st century CE.

Both were personal salvation religions, and both operated according to some similar principles. Just to state the basics, an experience undergone by a god, almost always involving death and some form of conquest of it, was the source of salvation; the mechanism was a parallel interaction between the god and the devotee; and the means of bringing that interaction into effect was a ritual (often baptism-like) that supposedly joined the believer with the god and guaranteed that the experience of the god would be reflected in the fate of the believer.

Thus, just as the Osiris formula said that "As Osiris died, so has [the believer] died; and as Osiris rose, so shall [the believer] rise," so Paul in Romans 6:1-5, says: "…when we were baptised into union with Christ Jesus we were baptised into his death. By baptism we were buried with him … For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection." Paul’s baptism ritual spells out the workings in the parallel interaction of death, burial and rising (his gospel of 1 Corinthians 15:3-4), unity with the god, and the guarantee of personal salvation based on the god’s experiences. These were all elements common to the pagan and Christian systems.

That system, through many varieties, permutations, and savior divinities, goes back at least two and a half millennia before the beginning of Christianity, to the Pyramid Texts about Osiris, and undoubtedly beyond that into the mists of prehistory. Just when or why the human mind came up with such a system, in its fixation over wanting to conquer death, is a mystery, but it was probably modelled on the cycle of dying and rising plant life and the yearly renewal of the seasons. Christianity as a salvation religion in that great tradition may have had its own unique features, related to other, Jewish aspects of its syncretistic origins, but it was a product of millennia of development-not so much a deliberate "borrowing" from pagan religions, but one more expression of the deep-seated religious philosophy of the era. The dominant ideas of an age inevitably impose themselves on a wide range of practice. To deny that Christianity is also a product of its time is simply to bury one’s head in the historical sands. (Robert Price, in his Deconstructing Jesus, p.86-93, does an excellent job of refuting the apologetic industry which seeks to discredit the clear connection between Christianity and the savior god phenomenon of the ancient world.)

The point is, the resurrection/rejuvenation/survival after death of a savior god like Osiris-however or whenever it took place-accomplished the same basic result for the Osirian devotee as Christ’s resurrection accomplished for the Christian: namely, some form of happy afterlife following death. Exactly what form that resurrection took, both for the god and for the believer, is fundamentally immaterial.

The differences could be said to be determined to a great extent by the cultures involved. The Jews were always very this-world oriented. Prior to the Hellenistic Age they had a weak concept of an afterlife. Considering that Christianity, with its fixation on heaven and hell, claims to be a derivation from Judaism and a continuation of the revelation contained in the Old Testament, it is certainly curious that neither heaven nor hell (in the sense of an afterlife for humans), nor a rising in any form whatever, can be found in the older parts of the Hebrew bible (it first appears in Isaiah). Sheol was little more than a dreary repository for all departed spirits. Once the concept of the Day of the Lord developed after the Exile, the Kingdom of God was envisioned as about to be set up on earth, even if it was a transformed earth, so anyone partaking in it had to possess a "body" that could inhabit such a Kingdom. At the same time, places of reward and punishment in an afterlife also began to emerge in Jewish thinking.

The Greeks, on the other hand, thanks to Orphism and Plato, regarded all things material as inferior, even a prison (Celsus called the body "worse than dung"), and usually had no desire to preserve the body in any form. Their "saved" souls came to be seen as destined for a purely spiritual, celestial afterlife. It follows that in the salvation systems the Greeks developed, there was little impulse to create gods who would overcome death in some form of flesh or body in order to guarantee the same for the initiate, whereas the Jewish mentality leaned toward envisioning resurrection "bodies," whether thoroughly material or some kind of close spiritual counterpart, which is the attitude Paul seems to have adopted and Mark McFall seems to support.

All this is generalities, which naturally don’t hold for all times and examples. The further we go back, for example into the Pyramid texts about Osiris, the more the focus seems to be on preserving the body against corruption, as though wanting to resuscitate it in some kind of flesh to inhabit the world beyond. But because the non-Christian record is so piecemeal, spread out over millennia, far less concentrated than the Christian one, it is genuinely difficult to come up with a secure and unified interpretation of how the Osiris cult perceived Osiris’ so-called resurrection. And that perception undoubtedly evolved.

Remember, too, that the original Osiris religion was Egyptian. In Hellenistic times (post-Alexander) it spread throughout the Greek world as a salvation cult of the Hellenistic variety (as did other Oriental ‘mystery’ religions) and underwent further change. To further complicate matters, the way the myths of the savior gods were viewed probably varied between the average devotee and the more sophisticated philosophers, like Plutarch and the 4th century Julian and Sallustius. It is almost entirely the latter whose opinions survive, and their views of the myths as essentially allegorical and symbolic may not have been shared to the same extent by the mass of cultic believers. Finally, the myths of savior gods like Osiris began as stories envisioned to have been ‘historically’ set on earth in some primordial time (where myth generally tends to be placed). But in the Christian era Platonism’s dualistic view of the universe envisioned that the spiritual processes which affected the material world took place in the heavenly world, and this led to transplanting such myths-at least in the minds of commentators whose writings have come down to us-into the heavens and the spiritual realm of reality. The myths, however, were already established, and continued to embody an historical and earthly sounding character.

It is not my intention to discuss every witness to the cult, every description of Osiris’ post-death fate to be found in all the pieces of the record. I’m quite prepared to admit that none of that record paints a picture of physical resurrection to earth in the way the Christian Gospels portray one for Jesus. I agree with Farrell Till that there are clear precedents in the Old Testament for resurrection of the dead to flesh, but I’m not sure that this is germane to the issue, except that insofar as the idea of resurrection to physical life was present in the biblical writings and in contemporary thought (as in Herod’s attitude toward John the Baptist), this would have meant that the expectation or belief that Jesus had risen would not have been completely unusual, or have taken anyone entirely by surprise, so to speak. As I see it, the debate centres on precedents to Jesus in savior-god mythology for physical resurrection to earth. I rather think that in the time of Christianity’s inception, there may not have been such a clear-cut conception in the Osiris cult. They wouldn’t have needed it. The Greeks weren’t looking for bodily resurrection, and mythical thinking in general leaned toward the spiritual and allegorical, though we have no record of just how the devotee-in-the-street regarded it.

What about the pre-Hellenistic phase, as in the Pyramid texts? Well, the rituals clearly imply that the Pharaoh, paralleling Osiris himself, would enjoy a restoration to life in some form very similar to what he enjoyed on earth. But I would have to agree with S. G. F. Brandon (in his article in Savior God: Festschrift for E. O. James, p.23) that "The post-mortem life to which he [Osiris] was thus raised was not, however, identical with that which he had lived before dying; it was a Jenseits [world beyond] existence, but none the less conceived of in completely materialistic terms, involving the use of a reconstituted physical body." The mortuary rituals were, as Brandon says and supported by Till’s quote of Budge, for the purpose of preserving the body from decay and "reanimating" the corpse. And McFall also quotes Budge on the view that for the Egyptians, "the next world was a continuation of the life upon earth, which it resembled closely." To all intents and purposes, this was a concept of physically restoring the body, so one assumes that Osiris was similarly regarded as having undergone the same restoration. Certainly, the texts and bas-reliefs Till quotes (from Frazer) would support Brandon’s judgment that this was regarded as some kind of bodily resurrection.

But was it to earth? It’s probably true that no myth of Osiris spells out a sojourn on earth in a physical state, but then we don’t possess organised literary accounts of any savior god myth on a par with the Gospel story, making so many fine points a matter of interpretation. But as the above observations would indicate, the Egyptians of the early 3rd millennium BCE probably did not much differentiate between matter and spirit, or saw the Underworld of the dead as being substantially different in character than the world of the earth’s surface. After all, the myth also says that Osiris transformed his new kingdom (in the Underworld) into a fertile, well-cultivated country.

I think it’s impossible to pontificate. If some mythical reference has Osiris coming back to the land of the living to instruct his son Horus, can we say anything conclusive about the exact state he was regarded as being in? Probably not.

In my view, it’s all something of a tempest in a teapot. The needs and expectations, and the evolution of ideas present in the Christian situation by the 1st century CE, can be acknowledged to be quite different from that of centuries earlier in some other location, or even from other cultural settings and salvation traditions in the same century. But the essence is still the same, there is an essential commonality between Christian views of Jesus’ resurrection and the resurrection of the mystery cult divinities. They both proceed from the same general thought-world and the long history of salvation-religion expression.

That said, however, there are other elements in this debate (I have seen only the most recent issue of "In the Word") which are pertinent to the discussion, and I would like to comment on them. Much is made of the fact that Osiris, after being reassembled by Isis, more or less goes directly to the Underworld where he takes over rulership of the realm of the dead (equivalent to the Christian heaven), with the implication that this is a resurrection to a spirit form and dimension only. There is no parallel, it is claimed, to the Christian belief that Jesus reappeared on earth in some kind of bodily form, interacted for a time with his followers, and then went on to his place in the spiritual heavens.

Unfortunately, it’s not so straightforward as that, as a careful examination of the Christian record will demonstrate. In fact, such an examination will show that there are close similarities between the two myths, at least as portrayed in the non-Gospel record (an important but usually overlooked distinction which I’ll address later).

Consider 1 Peter 3:18-19: "In the flesh he was put to death; in the spirit he was brought to life. And in the spirit he went and made his proclamation to the imprisoned spirits [of the dead]." That’s pretty clearly stated (though it is possible to regard the phrases "in the flesh" and "in the spirit" as references to the realms of these things, which is a distinction that is not germane to this debate). The author of this epistle seems to regard Jesus as resurrected in spirit only. Those who might claim that Jesus’ resurrection was to flesh, but by the power of the Holy Spirit, are pretty well ruled out by verse 19. And why did the writer (purporting to be Peter himself) trouble to talk about a visitation in spirit to the underworld and yet have not a thing to say about the Gospel appearances to his followers on earth, in flesh?

Then there’s the Epistle to the Hebrews. In the opening verses, the Son brings about "the purgation of sins" (by a sacrificial act which chapters 8 and 9 present as one performed in heaven, in a heavenly sanctuary according to Platonic principles), and then immediately takes his seat at the right hand of God. Again, in 10:12: "Christ offered for all time one sacrifice for sin, and took his seat at the right hand of God." Not a hint anywhere in this epistle about a period on earth, appearing to followers in the flesh. In fact, Hebrews 2:14, which McFall points to, refers only to Jesus’ death as the source of salvation. And in 7:16, when the writer refers to "the power of a life that cannot be destroyed," does he mean the resurrection? No, he derives this from a biblical passage about Melchizedek. There is nothing in this epistle’s christology about the resurrection; Jean Hering (Hebrews, p.xi) calls it "an enigma," saying, "Events unroll as though Jesus went up into heaven immediately after death."

The same direct progression is presented in Romans 1:4, a rising out of the dead to being declared-in heaven-to be the Son of God and receiving power (probably meaning over the world, both elements derived from Psalm 2:7-8). The almost consistent picture presented in the epistles is death, followed by a proceeding to the afterworld-in other words, just like the Osiris myth. This pervasive silence in the bulk of Christian correspondence during almost the first hundred years of the movement, a silence on any resurrection in flesh and to people on earth, is highly curious and must be significant. Not a single resurrection anecdote as provided in the Gospels surfaces in the epistles.

Only once is there a possible allusion to such stories, and this passage is constantly appealed to, with no acknowledgement of the perplexing nature of its lonely singularity. If the resurrection of Jesus to bodily flesh, multiple times on earth to witnesses, was a fact of history and the principal impulse to the faith movement, reference and appeal to such events should be found in Christian discussion and debate at many turns. In view of that wider void (outside the Gospels), is there another way to interpret this single passage, 1 Corinthians 15:3-8? I suggest that there is, and the evidence is to be found in Paul’s own words, here and elsewhere.

Paul (followed by those who wrote later in his name) says that Christ, the Son, is an entity who has been revealed after being hidden for long ages, a revelation proceeding from scripture and the Holy Spirit. Romans 16:25-26, Ephesians 3:4-5, Colossians 2:2 and 1:26, and so on. He never places this entity on earth in the recent past, or identifies him as the Jesus of Nazareth of the Gospels. Christ’s death and rising, and human-sounding features such as "born of woman" or "of David’s seed" or the sacrifice by his "blood," do not do this, and can be compared to similar features in the myths of the mystery cult deities, interpreted in the Platonic fashion of spiritual-material world correspondences (which I won’t go into here). The only exceptions are 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16, with its reference to the Jews "who killed the Lord Jesus," a passage which is widely regarded by critical scholars as an interpolation, and 1 Timothy 6:13’s reference to Pilate, contained in the Pastoral epistles, which critical scholarship judges to be the product of the 2nd century, and may even be seen as a possible interpolation as well.

So what does Paul say about his "gospel" in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4? He says he has "received" it, and he uses the phrase "according to the scriptures" which can entail the meaning (I don’t mean literally) of ‘as the scriptures tell us’ rather than ‘in fulfilment of the scriptures,’ the standard way of interpreting the phrase. Giving such a meaning to this phrase would put it perfectly in line with the reference to the scriptures as the source of Paul’s Christ found in Romans 1:2, 16:25 and elsewhere.

And what of the "received" (the verb paralambano)? Well, Paul uses that word in the two senses of receiving through passed-on tradition and receiving through revelation (the latter sense also existed in pagan parlance in the context of receiving revelation from a god). He does this in Galatians 1:11-12 where he adamantly declares that he got his gospel "from no man" but through a revelation of/from Jesus Christ. If Paul is not to be seen as blatantly contradicting himself between the two passages, we must regard Paul’s gospel of Jesus’ death, burial and rising as the product of revelation, not historical tradition passed on to him from others. This would divorce such ‘events’ (which could then be regarded as mythical in the same manner as the mythical traditions of the pagan savior gods) from the list of appearances he appends to his gospel (1 Cor. 15:5-8). And since he adds his own ‘seeing’ of the Christ to that of all the others-something everyone would acknowledge was a visionary experience, not of Christ in flesh-we are led to conclude that all the rest of the seeings are of the same nature as well. These so-called appearances, then, are not related to the Gospel stories, but are visionary experiences of the Christ by apostles in Jerusalem in the time of Paul, long before the Gospels came into existence.

That same meaning of "received" would also apply to the Lord’s Supper scene in 1 Corinthians 11:23f, supported by Paul’s own words which introduce the passage: "For I received from the Lord…" implying personal revelation and not passed-on tradition from others. The similarity of this ‘sacred meal’ scene to those of the mysteries-such as of Mithras who was also said to have established the sacred meal his devotees observed, one involving bread and wine-would place such a scene also in the realm of myth.

But perhaps the most significant evidence in the epistles against any resurrection of Jesus in flesh back to earth, before the Gospels came along, lies later in that same chapter, in a passage which Till and McFall devoted somee space to discussing: 1 Corinthians 15:35-57. Till made some very good observations about it, but I think he was mistaken on one crucial point, which would recast the significance of the entire passage and what we can draw from it.

I do not see any intention on Paul’s part to defend or explain Jesus’ resurrection in this passage. He never mentions it. Rather, he is concerned with expounding his own doctrine on the resurrection of the believer. He wants to convince his readers that such a resurrection is possible, and that it will take a certain form. Till was right in calling attention to the fact that Paul believes that ordinary flesh and blood, the state which believers presently occupy, cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. It has to be changed, to take on a different, imperishable quality in order to do so. McFall downplays this "change" by seeking to interpret it as a "transformation" of the same body blueprint, trying to preserve some sense of a rising "in the flesh" in keeping with subsequent Christian doctrine.

Perhaps we’re splitting hairs here, but for Paul, the distinction between the two seems more significant, more exclusive. He differentiates the two states pretty dramatically. The perishable, earthly body he labels "natural/animal/physical", the imperishable is "spiritual/supernatural". Previously, he has been at pains to make the point that there are different kinds of "bodies." One analogy he makes is the distinction between heavenly (i.e., astronomical) bodies and earthly bodies, which would certainly fall into two separate classes; another, somewhat dubiously, is between the planted seed and the raised plant, all with the purpose of claiming that the body we possess on earth will not be the body we will be raised in. That one will have a different nature. Basically, humans will progress from material to spiritual.

Till thought to deduce from this the implication that Christ was being compared to such a sequence, and thus that Christ too, as Paul saw it, had progressed from the material to the spiritual, ruling out in Paul’s mind a resurrection in flesh to earth. But if this were the case, Paul would have spelled out such a comparison in clear terms, something he does not do. And he would only have needed to draw on this supposed progression of Christ from material to spiritual in order to make his comparison, to prove his case. Instead, he does something else.

Paul introduces two separate figures to represent the physical and the spiritual: Adam and Christ. Adam represents the physical, Christ the spiritual. Those two states are exclusive; there is no implied overlap in the case of either figure. If Christ had lived an earthly life in a physical body, that previous state of existence could have served to represent the first half of Paul’s analogy. Look, Paul would have said to the Corinthians, just as Jesus had a physical body like you do, after death he was resurrected into a spiritual body, just as you will. Paul wouldn’t have needed to introduce Adam at all, and his analogy would have been much simpler. At the very least, Paul should have offered Jesus’ resurrection as an additional analogy.

Instead, he needs Adam to represent the physical side, the starting point of the progression, because Christ, in his mind, had never been physical, not in the historical sense of things, and certainly not in recent history. The confusion here is partly caused by translations of verses 44-49 which are determined by Gospel preconceptions. If one looks at the original Greek text, one finds that many of the verbs are missing. Paul has not supplied them; they are ‘understood’. Unfortunately, our own understanding has been influenced by the later Gospels.

That misreading is critical in verse 45. Most translations have it: "The first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam [or man] became a life-giving spirit." The problem lies in the second "became." The Greek has no such verb there, and there are two reasons why it may be invalid to assume it, to presume that Paul has in mind Jesus’ resurrection. One is that he makes no mention or use of such a resurrection in a passage where it would have been very useful indeed, and would have made Adam a redundant element. The second is that it cannot fit properly in parallel with the accompanying statement about Adam.

Adam did not "become" a living soul/being, in the sense of progressing from one state to another. Adam came into existence (one way of translating the Greek ginomai) as a living soul (in the physical sense); that was his created nature. To preserve a parallel at all, we need to read the succeeding thought as "Christ is of the nature of a life-giving spirit" and not that he progressed to that state from some previous one. Only one scholar that I know of has acknowledged this and offered such a meaning in his translation: Jean Hering (1 Corinthians, p.175) renders it: "The first Adam was created to have a living nature, the second Adam to be a life-giving spirit." This places Adam and Christ in two distinct categories, and removes any implied reference to a resurrection of Jesus.

Paul goes on to spell out that the two entities, the two states, are completely different, with no overlap. Verse 47 says that "the first man was (made) out of the earth [meaning, out of earthly material]; the second man is (made) out of heavenly stuff [meaning spiritual material]." Again, if Jesus had previously been in an earthly, material state, this would have thrown a monkeywrench into Paul’s analogy and compromised his clear distinction between Adam and Christ, and he would have had to deal with it. In this verse, too, we have to be careful of the translation. The second phrase is often rendered, "the second man is from heaven," implying the incarnation to earth. But this would again destroy the parallel in meaning with Adam. Adam didn’t come "out of"-in the sense of "from"-anywhere. The preposition is a reference to his inherent created substance (that is, of earthly stuff), and the same Greek preposition used of Christ should refer to his inherent nature. That latter nature is spelled out as being spiritual: Christ is a being of heaven, made of heavenly stuff. Period. There is neither reference nor implication of an earthly nature or body at any previous time.

Verse 44’s "the physical first, then the spiritual" refers not to an experience by Christ, but to the sequence of appearance/activity from Adam to Christ, a sequence mirroring the progression of the salvation process: the fall followed by the redemption, the role played by Adam followed by the role played by Christ. It is humans that shall go from the physical to the spiritual. "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust [Adam], we will also have the image of the man of heaven [Christ]." It is clear that Paul has no conception of one of those representative halves of the equation having undergone such a progression himself. Christ is the prototype only of the latter half. Thus, not only can a resurrection for Christ from physical to spiritual not be drawn from this passage, a resurrection from flesh to flesh is even more remotely derivable from Paul’s argument.

As for calling Christ "man," we need look no further than the concept, pervasive in contemporary philosophy, of the "Heavenly Man." In the extant literature, this is most clearly found in Philo of Alexandria: "There are two kinds of men. The one is Heavenly Man, the other earthly. The Heavenly Man being in the image of God has no part in corruptible substance, or in any earthly substance whatever; but the earthly man was made of germinal matter which the writer [of Genesis] calls ‘dust’…" (Allegorical Interpretation of the Law 1,31). This "heavenly man" inhabited heaven, not earth; he was a mythical construct in the Platonic thinking of the time.

Paul might have had Philo, who was a Jewish Middle Platonist, open before him when fashioning this 1 Corinthians passage (I mean that ironically), because everything he says mirrors such thinking-though his overall views of Christ certainly enlarge on the concept. Here he has taken Adam as the example of the type of body we humans possess. He has taken Christ as the example of the type of body that resurrected humans will take on after death, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, where Christ dwells. There is no overlap between the two; they are distinct. Not only does Paul’s extended analogy in this passage rule out the concept of a physical resurrection for Jesus, it rules out the concept of Jesus having been, for Paul, a recent human man, an historical figure. (By now, of course, the reader will have realised that I am a Jesus mythicist.)

All the foregoing observations and conclusions could be argued at greater length, but space does not permit, though I have no doubt that McFall, in his response to these remarks, will seek to put a different cast on things, which is his prerogative.

Finally, what happened when the Gospels came along? The first one, Mark, was written some time after 70 and probably before the end of the century. It brought Paul’s mythical Jesus (who lacked any presence in Galilee as a teacher and miracle-working prophet, something the epistles are silent on) into an earthly dimension, had him crucified by Pilate and rising from his tomb. Mark’s Jesus of Nazareth is a literary creation, joining Paul’s type of Christ to some Galilean teaching tradition as embodied in the reconstructed "Q" document. (That there was some kind of Galilean founder figure lying at the root of those Q traditions I would argue against.) Yet not even Mark has his Jesus unmistakably rising in flesh. The first Gospel provides no resurrection appearances at all. (Critical scholarship is almost unanimous that Mark 16:9-20 is a later addition; it certainly sounds like a hodge-podge of cribbings from the later Gospels.) Mark’s original empty tomb scene looks forward to some sort of return of Jesus, but this could be at the impending Parousia, when Jesus would return-in spirit form-as the Son of Man to establish the Kingdom, something perhaps suggested by Jesus’ Last Supper declaration in 14:25.

In any case, the original Mark’s lack of resurrection appearances is an astonishing omission if any such traditions were circulating. There simply is no sensible reason for Mark to have left such things out. And when the later evangelists came to build their Gospels on the Markan precedent, they were left to their own devices following the empty tomb scene and had to compose their own resurrection appearances to illustrate a rising in flesh. This is clear from the fact that they all come up with different anecdotes. There is not a single common resurrection appearance between any of the later three Gospels, an unlikely situation if any of it was based on actual historical traditions. Moreover, there are irreconcilable contradictions between them, notably the fact that Matthew places Jesus’ appearance to his disciples (other than the women) in Galilee, while Luke has all of his appearances take place in Jerusalem (ruling out any travel to Galilee in 24:49).

The Gospels’ empty tomb and post-resurrection scenes have nothing to do with the epistles’ view of their Christ’s rising, including 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. Paul’s list does not agree with any of the Gospels. (If Jesus had really appeared in the body to a group of more than 500 Christians en masse, something that could hardly have taken place indoors, it is inconceivable that all the Gospel writers would have lost sight of such an event, or even contemporary historians.) Neither Paul nor any other epistle writer gives a whisper of the empty tomb circumstances, of disputes with the Jews over whether Jesus’ body had risen or been stolen, about doubting Thomases or Emmaus disciples, much less about any contention over who had seen Jesus, how and when-a contention which should have been present in the early community in view of all the contradictory accounts presented in the Gospels. This is one reason why it is impossible to regard 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 as a "creed" formulated by the early church within a few years of Jesus’ passing. Given the contradictions and omissions when compared with the Gospels, and the oft-cited rationalisation that the women were left out by reason of ‘politically correct’ prejudice, it is highly unlikely that an official "creed" could form under such circumstances, so soon after the events it purports to embody.

Mark refers to the "literary" evidence for Jesus Christ’s resurrection, appealing to multiple attestation. But it is precisely the "literary" dependence of the later Gospels on the first one written (a long-established principle where the synoptics are concerned, along with at least a split decision that John is dependent on Mark, most clearly for his passion story), which eradicates any claim to independent tradition and corroboration among the Gospel stories. They are all following Mark, diverging dramatically in content (the appearances) when they no longer have Mark to work with.

Could an arresting tradition like John’s "Thomas" scene really be historical and yet no other evangelist records it? Can the whole ‘guard at the tomb’ scene in Matthew be anything other than his own invention when no other Gospel mentions it, and it is not even to be found in the supposed traditions about Jesus in the Talmud? Can Luke’s hearing of Jesus before Herod be historical when it is given nowhere else? Is the non-breaking of the legs and the piercing of Jesus’ side with a spear an historical fact, when it can only be found in John, where it fits with that writer’s leanings toward perceived prophecy and his personal theology about Jesus as the "lamb"? Can the pattern of improvement and detail recognisable from the earliest Gospel to later ones, in elements such as the exchange between Jesus and the two thieves, or the character of Joseph of Arimathea, be historical when everything points to literary evolution? By the same token, the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus have "literary" fingerprints all over them. They, like so much of the Gospels, are the product of evolving storytelling and midrash on scripture (almost every detail in Mark’s passion story, along with its overall shape, was lifted from scripture), probably not originally meant to represent history.

It is no surprise that the Osiris cult has given us no equivalent to the Gospels. First, it was forbidden in the mysteries to publicise the rites and their meanings; second, such writings, except by happenstance, would never have survived the destruction of the mysteries in the triumph of Christianity. The development of the Osiris myth, so diffuse and spread out over time, is in stark contrast to the Gospels, which are a unique literary occurrence. McFall refers to their "methodological principle," but this is simply a recognition that they are literary constructions, fashioned by a small number of writers over a very short time period, though their evolution from early to later versions is still evident. We cannot expect to find a comparable "illusion of history" present in the record of the Osiris myth.

Once the Gospels came to be regarded as factual history by the expanding faith movement through the course of the 2nd century, their perpetuation and dominance was assured. For almost 1900 years, this one small portion of the early Christian record has been read into the epistles and other, non-canonical documents of the rest of the record, and in the matter of assuming that they represent historical events, we have all been led down the garden path.

 Earl Doherty

ITW greatly appreciates Earl Doherty for taking the time to write and submit these comments.  Those interested in Doherty's other written efforts can find them as follows:

The Jesus Puzzle website: http://www.jesuspuzzle.com   & http://www.jesuspuzzle.org

Author of the printed works: "The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin With a Mythical Christ?" and  "Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel’s 'Case for Christ'"