Concept

Dying and Rising God Motif

Intro

You will sometimes hear, especially around Easter, that Christianity copied Jesus's resurrection from earlier pagan myths about gods who died and came back to life: Osiris in Egypt, Tammuz in Babylon, Adonis in Syria, Attis in Phrygia, Dionysus in Greece, Baal in Canaan.

This idea got famous through a Scottish scholar named James Frazer, whose 1890 book The Golden Bough surveyed world religions and saw what he called a dying-and-rising god pattern everywhere. For about a hundred years it shaped how Western intellectuals talked about ancient religion. It is the backbone of internet videos arguing that Jesus is "just another myth."

The problem is that when modern scholars actually went back and read the source texts of those myths carefully, the pattern fell apart. The decisive blow came from a non-Christian scholar named Jonathan Z. Smith in 1987. His verdict, repeated by specialists ever since, is that none of the supposed dying-and-rising gods actually fit the pattern. Either the god disappears but does not really die, or the god dies but does not really come back, or the "return" is a seasonal cycle in nature rather than a personal coming back to life.

Osiris, for instance, does not return to ordinary life; he becomes king of the underworld. Tammuz descends and his sister tries to free him; the texts are ambiguous about any clear resurrection. Adonis's "return" is annual vegetation. Baal vanishes into Mot's realm and emerges, but the Ugaritic Baal Cycle never describes him as having died.

So the "Jesus is a copy of Osiris" story has been retired in serious scholarship for a generation. It survives mainly in popular freethought books and YouTube videos that have not caught up. This page walks through the rise and fall of the Frazer hypothesis, and shows where each parallel breaks down.

In full

The comparative-religion category, popularized by James George Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890; expanded editions through 1915), of seasonal-fertility deities who die and return to life on an annual cycle, Tammuz/Dumuzi (Sumerian-Babylonian), Adonis (Syro-Phoenician), Attis (Phrygian), Osiris (Egyptian), Baal (Canaanite), Dionysus (Greek). In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scholarship the category was treated as a robust cross-cultural pattern from which the Christian resurrection could plausibly be derived. By the late twentieth century, most decisively after Jonathan Z. Smith's 1987 Encyclopedia of Religion article, the academic consensus shifted, and the Frazerian "dying-and-rising god" type has been substantially abandoned as a real pre-Christian comparative pattern. Each alleged member of the category, examined on its own terms, fails to satisfy the supposed schema. The category survives chiefly in popular freethought literature and in copycat-Christ polemic (Copycat-Christ Hypothesis).

Definition

A "dying-and-rising god," in the Frazerian sense, is a deity whose myth includes:

A genuine death, not merely descent, exile, or eclipse.
A genuine return to life, bodily, durable, not merely cyclical "memory" or symbolic continuation in nature.
A causal connection of the death-and-rising to the cycle of vegetation, fertility, or kingship, i.e., a salvific or cosmically structured significance.

Frazer's claim was that this pattern was sufficiently widespread across ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religion to constitute a type, and that this type provided the cultural grammar within which the Christian resurrection arose.

Frazerian development

1890, James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1st edition, 2 vols.). Argued for a worldwide pattern of "spirit of vegetation" gods who die and revive each year.
1900, Second edition, 3 vols.
1906-1915, Third edition, 12 vols.; volume Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906) is the locus classicus of the dying-and-rising-god category.
The hypothesis was taken up by the History-of-Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule), Wilhelm Bousset, Richard Reitzenstein, the early Rudolf Bultmann, as a backdrop for the Pauline kerygma.
Popularized through Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), and ultimately the late-twentieth-century mythicist literature.

Modern critical-scholarship collapse

The category began to be questioned in mid-twentieth-century specialist work and was decisively dismantled in the 1980s.

Roland de Vaux, The Bible and the Ancient Near East (1971): on Tammuz, "We must avoid speaking, as is too often done, of the 'death and resurrection' of Tammuz."
Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods" article in Mircea Eliade, ed., The Encyclopedia of Religion (1st ed., 1987), vol. 4, pp. 521-27. The standard modern reference. Smith's verdict: "All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case, the deities return but have not died; in the second case, the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity." The widely circulated paraphrase, "all Frazer's evidence has been swept away", captures the substance. (Smith was a non-Christian historian of religion at the University of Chicago, not an apologist.)
Mark S. Smith (different Smith), The Origins of Biblical Monotheism (2001) and The Early History of God (2nd ed., 2002): Baal is not a dying-and-rising god; the Ugaritic Baal Cycle shows him entering and emerging from Mot's realm without a literal death-resurrection sequence.
Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: "Dying and Rising Gods" in the Ancient Near East (2001), a partial reopening of the question; Mettinger argues that some of the figures (notably Melqart and Adonis) might bear restricted parallels to a dying-and-rising motif. But Mettinger himself stresses the disanalogies with the Christian resurrection: the seasonal cycle vs. one-time event; mythic vs. historical claim; the absence of a redemptive theological frame; the absence of bodily-eyewitness attestation.

Examination of the canonical cases

Tammuz/Dumuzi (Sumerian-Babylonian). Inanna's lover; in Inanna's Descent to the Underworld, Tammuz is dragged to the underworld as Inanna's substitute. Cyclical descent (and partial substitute-return via his sister Geshtinanna), but no death-and-resurrection in the Christian sense. Mourned ritually by women (cf. Ezek. 8:14).
Adonis (Syro-Phoenician). Killed in a hunting accident, gored by a boar. Mourned annually. The "rising" portion of the Adonis cult, i.e., a return-to-life sequel, is attested only in late, post-Christian sources (Lucian, De Dea Syria; Origen, Selecta in Ezechielem); the earlier strata describe only the death and mourning.
Attis (Phrygian). Self-castrated, dies; Cybele preserves his body from corruption. The bodily-resurrection element of Attis is attested only in late-fourth-century sources (Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum, c. 350, after Christianity's establishment), prompting most scholars to read the late Attis "resurrection" as a Christian-era retrofit.
Osiris (Egyptian). Dismembered by Set; reassembled by Isis; reigns as king of the dead in the Duat. Osiris does not return to bodily life on earth; he becomes lord of the underworld. (The "rising" is into a realm of the dead, not a return.)
Baal (Canaanite). In the Ugaritic Baal Cycle, Baal enters and emerges from Mot's realm. Mark S. Smith and others read this as a kingship and storm-cycle myth, not a death-and-resurrection. Frazer's reading does not survive the Ugaritic textual recovery of the 1930s.
Dionysus (Greek). Dismembered by Titans (Orphic version); his heart is preserved and a new Dionysus is born. This is a rebirth-via-replacement, not a personal resurrection.

Christian apologetic engagement

The Christian apologetic engagement is not primarily that no comparative parallels exist (Mettinger's restricted thesis can be granted), but that:

The Frazerian category as a robust pre-Christian type sufficient to ground the New Testament resurrection has been abandoned by the relevant scholarship, citing Jonathan Z. Smith and the post-Ugaritic specialist literature, not Christian apologists.
The Christian resurrection differs structurally from the Frazerian motif:

Historical, not seasonal. A one-time event in datable Roman Judea, not an annual fertility cycle.
Bodily, not symbolic. 1 Corinthians 15 insists on a physical resurrection, with eyewitness lists; the Frazerian gods do not return bodily to a continuing earthly life.
Eyewitness-attested in a Jewish-monotheistic public context, the least syncretistic religious culture in the Roman world.
Soteriologically linked to atoning death, not vegetative renewal.
Public proclamation, not mystery-cult initiation (Mystery Religions).

Where late-antique cults appear to share resurrection-imagery with Christianity (third- and fourth-century Attis, late Adonis, Mithraic taurobolium reinterpretations), the chronology runs from Christianity to the cults, not the reverse.
C. S. Lewis's "true myth" reading (the prefigurement view) treats the Frazerian myths as fragmentary, intuitive anticipations of a structure that the Christian claim asserts as historical reality, a constructive, not a defensive, response to the parallels. (Cf. Miracles, 1947, ch. 11; the 1931 Tolkien-Lewis-Dyson Addison's-Walk conversation.)

Tensions

The status of Mettinger's Riddle of Resurrection (2001) within the field. Mettinger reopens the question for some cases (especially Melqart, Adonis); most subsequent specialists have not followed him to a full restoration of the Frazerian category, but the field is not unanimous.
The "true myth" approach (Lewis, Tolkien, Hugo Rahner, Jean Daniélou's typology of the nations) treats pagan resurrection-fragments as having genuine theological weight in a participatory ontology, a Christian response that does not require the parallels to be denied. Some apologists prefer the harder, "no real parallels exist" line and resist the Lewis approach. Both lines coexist within the broader Christian engagement.
The popular-internet copycat literature (Zeitgeist, Kersey Graves, D. M. Murdock) continues to invoke the Frazerian category long after its scholarly collapse, producing an ironic situation in which professional academic religious studies and Christian apologetics are largely on the same side of the question, against amateur freethought polemic.