What could the apostles possibly have hoped to gain from fabricating the resurrection of their Master, except what most of them actually got: prison sentences, beatings, ostracism from the Jewish community, and ultimately martyrdom. People with religious zeal will give their lives for all kinds of false beliefs and ideologies, beliefs that they do not realize are false. They do not willingly give their lives for something they know very well to be a lie.
Part 28: The Easter Copy-Cat Myth? An Easter Conspiracy?
By Robert Stackpole, STD
In this weekly web series, Dr. Robert Stackpole, emeritus director of the John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy, leads us step-by-step through the life of the Founder of Christianity, from Bethlehem to Galilee to Jerusalem. Along the way, we pause to consider in-depth the historical debate over the gospel stories of the virginal conception and nativity of Jesus, his message of the Kingdom, his embrace of persecution and death on the Cross, and his glorious bodily resurrection from the dead. Finally, we plunge into the great mystery of the Incarnation, and show how it actually shines through the whole gospel story from beginning to end. Read the series from the beginning.
In the two previous installments of this web series, we began to look at alternative theories put forward by some historians to explain the stories of the appearances of the risen Christ found in the New Testament. We continue this time to look at more of these attempts to explain (or more precisely, to explain away) what the gospels tell us about the first Easter.
3) The Gospel writers copied the resurrection tales from available Jewish and Greco-Roman mythology.
The trouble with this theory is that the Gospels show no signs at all of borrowing from any ancient myths that we know of.
For example, from Jewish sources the gospel writers could have borrowed elements from the story of the prophet Elijah’s assumption into Heaven, and from Gentile sources they could have drawn upon the “apotheosis” myths (the raising of a man to divine or semi-divine status, e.g. the stories of Hercules, Oedipus, and Asclepius) — but there are no literary traces of borrowing from any of these tales.
Early in the 20th century some scholars argued that the story of the resurrection of Jesus was simply a copy of the many ancient myths of the dying and rising of the Corn King, the god of the coming of the spring and of new life rising from the ground to produce the annual harvest. But scholars now know that those agricultural myths appeared only very late in antiquity, mostly from the 3rd century AD onward, and it is therefore more likely that they copied themes from Christian sources, than the other way around.
Besides, the authors of the New Testament books, all of whom were of Jewish faith and background, would have been among the least likely people in the ancient world to revere and borrow from pagan myths and legends.
Gary Habermas and Michael Licona sum up the evidence for us:
The first account of a dying and rising god that somewhat parallels the story of Jesus’ resurrection appeared at least 100 years after the reports of Jesus’ resurrection. The earliest versions of the death and resurrection of the Greek mythological figure Adonis appeared after A.D. 150. There are no accounts of a resurrection of Attis, the Phrygian god of vegetation who was responsible for the death and rebirth of plant life, until the end of the third century A.D. or later. Therefore, one cannot claim that the disciples were writing according to a contemporary literary style of dying and rising gods, since there is no literature contemporary to the disciples indicating that this was a genre of the period. …
[T]he ancient Egyptian cult of Osiris is the only account of a god who survived death that predates Christianity. According to one version of the story, and there are several, Osiris was killed by his brother, chopped up into fourteen pieces and scattered throughout Egypt. The goddess Isis collected and reassembled his parts and brought him back to life. Unfortunately, she was only able to find thirteen pieces. Moreover, it is questionable whether Osiris was brought back to life on earth or seen by others as Jesus was. He was given a status as god of the gloomy underworld. So the picture we get of Osiris is that of a guy who does not have all of his parts and who maintains a shadowy existence as god of the mummies. … Osiris’s return to life was not a resurrection, but a zombification. [1]
4) The disciples themselves stole the body from the tomb and invented the story that they had seen Jesus alive.
This theory never dies, although it is hard to understand why it ever lived in the first place.
To begin with, one of the Gospels tells us that the Roman soldiers had posted a guard at the tomb (Mt 27:62-66), so how did the disciples get past that first obstacle? Even if that account is fictitious, this theory leaves us with a multitude of unanswered questions and improbabilities.
For example, there must have been a fairly large number of people involved in this plot (all of the apostles, and many of the women who followed him). Why did none of them ever “crack” under the threat of Jewish persecution and reveal the whole thing as the hoax it (allegedly) was? And how did they convince or trick hardened skeptics into believing Jesus was risen from the dead (such as James, the Lord’s brother, and Saul of Tarsus; on James see Mk 4:21; Jn 7:5; I Cor 15:7)?
How did they dupe more than five-hundred people at once (I Cor 15:6), many of whom, St. Paul says, were still alive in his day, and (by implication) could be questioned about what they saw, so certain were they that they had seen the risen Lord?
Moreover, why did the early Christians begin their (allegedly fictional) Easter stories by telling of an empty tomb discovered by women (given that women were not considered to be fully reliable witnesses in court among the Jews in those days), and of the special appearance to Mary Magdalene (a person who at one time had been possessed by many demons — in other words, at the very least someone with a past history mental health issues)?
In short, if the apostles stole the body and made up the whole Easter narrative, they were incredibly incompetent liars.
Finally, and most importantly, what could they possibly have hoped to gain from fabricating the resurrection of their Master, except what most of them actually got: prison sentences, beatings, ostracism from the Jewish community, and ultimately martyrdom. People with religious zeal will give their lives for all kinds of false beliefs and ideologies, beliefs that they do not realize are false. They do not willingly give their lives for something they know very well to be a lie — again, not without at least some of them attempting to save themselves from persecution and death by revealing the hoax for what it was. But we have no record that any of them ever did so.
Absurdity
Chris Price discusses this theory in depth in his book Radical Hope:
Brave or foolish people may die for things they believe to be true, or for other noble reasons, but no sane individual dies for something they know to be false. It has been pointed out to me that, in the Second World War, members of the French underground would lie to the Nazis and die defending that lie in order to conceal information from their enemy. They fabricated a story and willingly died for the deception. This historical example seems like an exception to my claim, but it actually reinforces the point I am making. The collusion of the members involved in the French underground likely saved countless lives, helping many people escape Nazi deaths squads, and we have acknowledged already that brave individuals will die for noble causes.
The disciples’ situation was entirely different. For the disciples no lives were spared by telling lies about Jesus’ resurrection, rather, lives would only be wasted by this tall-tale, including their own lives, spent frivolously propagating falsehoods until they were silenced by death. [2]
Price then goes on to quote the 4th century historian Eusebius, who fittingly summed up the absurdity of the conspiracy theory with these sarcastic words, which he placed in the mouths of the disciples themselves:
“Let us band together to invent all the miracles and resurrection appearances which we never saw and let us carry the shame even to death! Why not die for nothing! Why dislike torture and whipping inflicted for no good reason? Let us go into all the nations and overthrow their institutions and denounce their gods. Even if we don’t convince anybody, at least we will have the satisfaction of drawing down on ourselves the punishment for our own deceit.” [3]
Next: Part 29: Easter Wishful Thinking and Hallucinations?
Previous article.
Notes
[1] Gary R. Habermas and Michael R. Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004), p. 90-91.
[2] Chris Price, Radical Hope: Resurrection Hope in a Hurting World (Create Space, 2016), p. 59-60.
[3] Ibid., p. 65.
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