This is a time of year that brings with it cheerfulness as the weather warms and nature returns from its winter rest. While winter has been pleasant this year, we still feel a renewed sense of energy as birds, trees, and flowers begin to slowly emerge. It is in this same season that we celebrate Holy Week and its culmination on Easter Sunday—the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is a nice time to sit back and meaningfully reflect on his substitutionary death, and victory over death through his bodily resurrection. We get to enjoy both the arrival of spring and a celebration of Easter around the same time each year. These celebrations have similarities and differences.
They are similar in the sense that we celebrate them annually. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries this similarity led scholars to begin to ponder the potential dependency that Jesus’ resurrection had on other near-eastern seasonal myths. This curiosity was not only expected but important for scholarly research of the classical world. Discussion of dependencies of this kind weren’t limited to the story of Jesus or to religion. Western scholars were learning more and more about other cultures around the world and attempting to consider the possible ways that various areas influenced one another. Philologists like Nietzsche and Heidegger focused on the use of language and myth—the latter with particular focus on India and Aryan influence in language and ideas that existed before Socrates. The similarities in language brought about an over-simplified notion that western language and western ideas were fully borrowed from India so much so that William Durant professed, “India was the motherland of our race, and Sanskrit the mother of European languages: she was mother of our philosophy…. Mother India is in many ways mother of us all.” As our understanding and critical comparisons between Indian ideas and the Sanskrit language with the western world have increased, very few scholars are comfortable with Durant’s claim. More cautious scholars have done work with more qualified comparisons. J. N. Mohanty concludes that many of the claims of western dependency are overstated as he compares similarities and differences in his essays in Reason and Tradition in Indian Thought.
In a similar manner, early studies comparing the resurrection of Jesus with other near-eastern agricultural myths of “dying and rising gods” came to the premature conclusion that Jesus’ resurrection was simply borrowed from these stories. Baal-Mot, Melquart, Adonis, Damu, Osirus, Ishtar, and others were the stories upon which the story of Jesus’ resurrection was based. However, as more researchers began to increasingly study these “dying and rising gods,” most were convinced that there wasn’t such a thing as a “dying and rising god” in near-eastern cultures at all. This area of research reached a point where it was difficult to find a scholar that would endorse the existence of “dying and rising gods” in those cultures. Skeptical of this consensus Tryggve Mettinger began his research of these gods in Mesopotamian cultures, concluding that such “dying and rising” gods did exist, but had no relationship to the resurrection of Jesus. In contrast to Jesus’ resurrection these deities were not resurrected, but went through a process of apotheosis. Mettinger, in The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East, states, “There is no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct, drawing on the myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world. While studied with profit against the background of Jewish resurrection belief, the faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.” The resurrection of Jesus is rooted in a distinctly Jewish expectation for all humanity.
The witnesses of his resurrection understood it as the beginning of the fulfillment of this Jewish expectation, and as ushering in the reign of God in the world through the establishment of a community gathered in renewed fellowship in the Spirit. This community experienced forgiveness of sin due to the substitutionary death of Jesus and new life through union to Jesus and his resurrection. As followers of Jesus Christ, union with him and his resurrection is far more than an interesting, or, for some, boring set of historical inquiries—it is the source of our hope and the empowerment to live in new ways with one another and the world. While we celebrate the resurrection every spring, we recognize he was raised to life once in history. I encourage each of you to think about the power of this season as a reminder of our forgiveness and new life in Christ with a thankful heart. He endured and overcame much not only for us, but for a hurting world in need of his love and life.