A mythicohistorical (hybrid) approach to Christian origins.

[Ben C. Smith]

More generally, stories of the death and/or disappearance of the God could and did become the basis of mysteries of revelation and salvation. One should note however, that some of the most interesting parallels to Christianity among the pagan mysteries are first attested in the post-Christian period.

I agree with that. But the parallels I am interested in are not the specific ones that one finds in uncritical lists (born in a cave on December 25 or whatnot). The ones that interest me here, at least for the time being, are the more general ones having to do with descent, death, life (again), and ascent, which I believe are attested either before the Christian period or during the very early Christian period.

What bears explaining, I think, is the mystical biography (if you will) of Jesus, attested across numerous Christian texts (including what are regarded as some of the very earliest ones); his activities on earth constitute just a single point along with heaven and the nether realm, and neither his descent nor his ascent can be considered something knowable from ordinary history. So where did that broader narrative come from? There are quite a few candidates, but what strikes me is, on the one side, how often in the gospel materials Jesus' attributes are cleanly and simply taken over from the attributes of Yahweh and, on the other side, how Yahweh's attributes so frequently mirror Ba'al's attributes:

Ba'al	Yahweh	Jesus
sometimes regarded as a son of El	sometimes regarded as a son of El	regarded as the son of God
rider upon the clouds	rider of a chariot of clouds	comes with/on the clouds
a storm god	a storm god	stills a storm
conquers the sea	conquers the sea	treads upon the sea
dies and rises again	???	dies and rises again

It is true that Yahweh is not explicitly named as a dying and rising deity in the Hebrew scriptures; but, if Yahweh and Ba'al are related as tabulated above and the correspondence between "Ba'al is alive" and "Yahweh lives" rings true, then what I am wondering is whether such a mythic story might not have belonged to (a version of) Yahweh, as well, thus filling in a missing link. The reason I connected all of this to the idea of Yahweh as savior is because Psalm 18.46 (18.47 Masoretic, 17.47 LXX; what a confusingly versified chapter!), right after exclaiming that Yahweh lives, blesses the God of salvation (יִשְׁעִֽי) — and Yehoshua, the ultimate origin of the name Jesus, happens to mean "Yahweh saves." Circumstantial evidence, all of it, but it interests me, I must admit.

[Nathan]

Ba'al	Yahweh	Jesus
sometimes regarded as a son of El	sometimes regarded as a son of El	regarded as the son of God
rider upon the clouds	rider of a chariot of clouds	comes with/on the clouds
a storm god	a storm god	stills a storm
conquers the sea	conquers the sea	treads upon the sea
dies and rises again	???	dies and rises again

It is true that Yahweh is not explicitly named as a dying and rising deity in the Hebrew scriptures; but, if Yahweh and Ba'al are related as tabulated above ...

Another debatable point is whether Yahweh was ever considered to be a son of El. As I recall, the basis for that belief is an interpretation of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that has failed to reach the level of consensus among scholars. Paul Sanders, for instance, offers a painstaking treatment of the entire song in The Provenance of Deuteronomy 32, ultimately concluding that Elyon and Yahweh are identical there. He notes in passing that previous scholars such as Albright and Frank Moore Cross had reached the same conclusion. Also, several of the contributors to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible are of the same opinion.

[MrMacSon]

One should note however, that some of the most interesting parallels to Christianity among the pagan mysteries are first attested in the post-Christian period.

What parallels do you have in mind? What period do you have in mind as 'the post-Christian period'?

[Ben C. Smith]

Ba'al	Yahweh	Jesus
sometimes regarded as a son of El	sometimes regarded as a son of El	regarded as the son of God
rider upon the clouds	rider of a chariot of clouds	comes with/on the clouds
a storm god	a storm god	stills a storm
conquers the sea	conquers the sea	treads upon the sea
dies and rises again	???	dies and rises again

It is true that Yahweh is not explicitly named as a dying and rising deity in the Hebrew scriptures; but, if Yahweh and Ba'al are related as tabulated above ...

Another debatable point is whether Yahweh was ever considered to be a son of El. As I recall, the basis for that belief is an interpretation of Deuteronomy 32:8-9 that has failed to reach the level of consensus among scholars. Paul Sanders, for instance, offers a painstaking treatment of the entire song in The Provenance of Deuteronomy 32, ultimately concluding that Elyon and Yahweh are identical there. He notes in passing that previous scholars such as Albright and Frank Moore Cross had reached the same conclusion. Also, several of the contributors to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible are of the same opinion.

I agree the topic is contentious. I have reviewed many arguments on both sides, and I tend to hold with those who argue that El and Yahweh were originally distinct. YMMV.

[Ulan]

I agree the topic is contentious. I have reviewed many arguments on both sides, and I tend to hold with those who argue that El and Yahweh were originally distinct. YMMV.

That's the most likely scenario, yes. The most recent proposal that I read that the term Ba'al meant basically a type god and Yahweh himself was just another Ba'al was from Thomas Römer in his "The Invention of God". In some ways, Römer is rather conservative in the sense that he takes statements from the OT as carrying real information, unlike many of today's OT scholars. One example would be that he takes the OT statements that Yahweh originally came from Edom or Teman seriously. Regarding Ba'al, he points out that the Bible never claims that Ba'al was a foreign god, unlike with Chemosh or Milcom.

[Blood]

Constructions like "dying and rising gods" are basically junk DNA that keep discussions like these bogged down in obsolete 19th century thinking.

In the Ugaritic texts, Ba'al apparently goes down into the underworld, is temporarily overwhelmed by death, but then defeats death and goes back up again. In other texts, Ishtar or Inana descends gate by gate into the lower world, gets hung upon a hook, but then is revived and ascends again to the upper world. Are you happy with "descending and ascending" and simply making a point about my parenthetical "dying and rising" terminology? Or does the terminology of descent and ascent also prick your ears?

I'm just saying Frazer's original terminology and conception "dying and (reviving) gods" should be reexamined and probably abandoned, that's all. His work shouldn't be ignored, there are a lot of interesting ideas in it, but he became overly tendentious with what he thought were Jesus archetypes.

"Lord" is a late middle ages Germanic/English word; it has no relevance whatsoever to ancient religion, it only confuses matters.

Yes, yes, "warden of the loaf" and all that. Are you seriously pretending that I was not simply using the standard English translation of the ancient Greek kurios? I think obtuseness like that is what confuses matters. The same pedantry can be applied to using the term "church" for ecclesia and such. While it might not be a bad idea to use the original language terms for every key concept, avoiding later Germanic terms, it would lead to sentences like this: Paul wrote to the ἐκκλησία in Rome about the δικαιοσύνη and ἀγαθωσύνη of θεός. Such a thing ought to be totally unnecessary on a forum such as this one.

I'm not suggesting using the original language every time. I just think we ought to, perhaps, try to seek new terminology to describe ancient near eastern religious concepts that are not so heavily leaden with late medieval Biblical overtones. Is that really that obtuse? These words are just more junk DNA. Ba'al was 3,000 years ago. He's not "lord" of anything, nor "kurios." He's a figure of religious worship.

[Blood]

Constructions like "dying and rising gods" are basically junk DNA that keep discussions like these bogged down in obsolete 19th century thinking.

In the Ugaritic texts, Ba'al apparently goes down into the underworld, is temporarily overwhelmed by death, but then defeats death and goes back up again. In other texts, Ishtar or Inana descends gate by gate into the lower world, gets hung upon a hook, but then is revived and ascends again to the upper world. Are you happy with "descending and ascending" and simply making a point about my parenthetical "dying and rising" terminology? Or does the terminology of descent and ascent also prick your ears?

The problem is that 'dying and rising gods' is a composite putting together different myths about different deities to arise at a supposed basic concept that is not all that close to any specific known myth.

For example I don't think that the conflict of Baal and Mot provides a good parallel to the hypothetical Yahweh myth you are proposing, nor do I think the descent of Inanna into the underworld provides in itself a good parallel. By selecting elements from the Baal myth and elements from the Inanna myth with maybe elements from some other myths one can doubtless produce a good parallel. However, there are issues about the legitimacy of this procedure.

Obviously the above does not in any way disprove the existence of the pre-Christian yahweh myth you are proposing, but it does raise the question of the evidence for such a myth. (The ability of such a myth to explain Christian origins is not IMO in itself good evidence.)

Andrew Criddle

Frazer never actually used the term "dying and rising gods" in The Golden Bough. This is a common misconception. The term he uses is "dying and reviving gods" because he was convinced that Osiris, Adonis, and Attis (and by implicit suggestion, Jesus) were myths invented to personify the "death" of vegetation/earth in the winter and the "revival" of vegetation/earth in the spring, which ancient peoples thought could only be guaranteed through the worship of certain religious figures.
But this was wrong. There is no "winter" in Egypt; Osiris's murder and resurrection have nothing to do with it. Adonis's death was mourned in the summer, not winter, and only in one text (Lucian's Syrian Goddess) is there the suggestion that he was/is revived after death. And so on. Plus, different cultures adapted and changed the myths to suit them and as times dictated. There wasn't a single "Adonis myth" that stayed static for 1,000 years, as Frazer and the scholars of his time wanted to believe. I have no reason to believe that Ba'al mythology didn't evolve in the same way.

[spin]

I just think we ought to, perhaps, try to seek new terminology to describe ancient near eastern religious concepts that are not so heavily leaden with late medieval Biblical overtones. Is that really that obtuse? These words are just more junk DNA. Ba'al was 3,000 years ago. He's not "lord" of anything, nor "kurios." He's a figure of religious worship.

I don't think the word "lord" is any problem. It wasn't for Lord Olivier, nor was it for the writers of Star Wars' Lord Vader. It is a term of social significance, often used by social inferiors for their social superiors. It is a term of respect in a stratified society. kurios is a reasonable equivalent, as is adonai in Hebrew. For that matter, so is Ba'al in West Semitic sources. After all "Ba'al" is just the same sort of prestige title (probably at Ugarit for the god Hadad).

[Ben C. Smith]

I'm just saying Frazer's original terminology and conception "dying and (reviving) gods" should be reexamined and probably abandoned, that's all.

The term I used was "descending and ascending" — I added "dying and rising" in parentheses because both Ba'al and Jesus literally die and literally rise in their respective stories. This is simple communication. You are importing your own universe into it.

I'm not suggesting using the original language every time. I just think we ought to, perhaps, try to seek new terminology to describe ancient near eastern religious concepts that are not so heavily leaden with late medieval Biblical overtones.

What would you suggest in this case? Which English word would convey to an Anglophonic readership the approximate meaning of the ancient words ba'al and kurios?

Is that really that obtuse?

Yes.

[Giuseppe]

About the ''Origin of the Mythical Christ'' section,

I have found another point of interest in the Ben's view that sees me soundly disagreeing (I write as someone whoose opinions the people care ) :

Once the Messiah is said to have already exercised at least part of his salvific work, or to have already been revealed in some meaningful way, I would call the belief that espouses him Christian.

Sincerely, I disagree. The reason is that the Odes of Salomon are a pre-christian text (both the mythicist Gordon Louis Rylands and the historicist Stevan L Davies think so) and Robert M. Price writes in his book on Paul:

The son of Adamas was also called Logos, symbolized in Hermes, the messenger of the gods, as well as in the dying and rising Attis. Eventually Jesus was added to the mix, but the inner Son of Man (not a historical being) had already been dubbed the Christ.

(The Amazing, p. 94)

This difference of view about this topic has strong implications, I think.

If you think that the essentia of the original myth is an angel YHWH/Joshua dying and rising, then for you ''Christ'' is only a title added later to describe this angel. This is the view of Richard Carrier, too. Note that Carrier has need of doing so because he wants to resolve the ''sperm of David'' passage in Paul as mere implication of the title ''Christ'' added on Jesus.

But I think that the ''dying and rising'' affair was originally a feature only of the mythical Christ.

A mythical Joshua, if he existed as imagined figure and distinct from ''Christ'', surely was not a dying and rising angel.


This mythical Christ became the Joshua for the process explained so well by Price in the following note of the his book:

Does not the phenomenon of the Ebionites demand that there had been an historical Jesus? They speak of Jesus as the True Prophet, lately come to reveal the false pericopae of the Torah. Was he not, then, a recent figure? It is always possible that they envisioned him as speaking prophetically through their own teacher of righteousness, not incarnate as a separate individual. But essentially, ”Jesus” functioned for them as a personification of the “law-reviser,” the new exegesis of their sect, just as Moses had long functioned (fictively) as Law personified for other Jews. Why the name “Jesus,” then? I cannot help suspecting that their “Jesus” was originally supposed to be Joshua, immediate successor of Moses, whom the Book of Joshua shows making a covenant for Israel, not merely making a copy of the old one (24:25-26). He would have made his own Torah shortly after Moses. The “Jesus” of the Ebionites would, then, have been the Old Testament Joshua, successor to Moses. Subsequently, at the point of federating with the other sects of the Gnostic Jordan Schwärmerei, they simply identified their “Jesus” with that of their Christian brethren. In fact, what the heresiologists say of the ostensible/inferred founder, “Ebion,” may have been true of the one they claimed as their founder, Jesus! He didn’t exist but was just a name for a new set of scriptural exegeses.

(Robert M. Price, The Amazing Colossal Apostle, p.152, note 57, my bold)

Therefore for me the process is contrary:

before a mythical Christ (Odes of Salomon), later a mythical Jesus Christ (Paul), and later the invented ''historical'' Jesus ''so-called'' Christ (Mark & company).

This would resolve a strange contradiction in the relation between Paul and the Pillars.

If you see the Pillars as the original ebionites, then they were the first ones not to hallucinate the mythical Christ, but the first ones to merge the (suffering) mythical Christ of a previous community with the popular hopes about (the only victorious) Joshua redivivus. Therefore the Pillars were in minority against the rest of the Christians (having only Christ and not ''Joshua Christ''), and the latter were more inclined to accept the ''Jesus Christ'' of Paul than the former.

Something as:
1) there were pre-christian worshippers of a suffering Christ not named Jesus (Odes of Salomon)
2) the Pillars coopted this Christ figure and merged it with the popular Joshua myth (the same myth behind the fool military hopes of Theudas, the Egyptian Prophet, etc).
3) Paul coopted the ''Jesus Christ'' of the Pillars - against their desire - and preached him among the same pre-christians of the point 1. Paul had only to proclaim among these communities that their suffering Christ was to be named Joshua from that moment. These communities did agree.




Therefore the problem is : what was behind the mythical Christ of the Odes of Salomon community? But this is matter of another thread.