Easter Is Not Pagan, And It Has No Parallel

The derivation of the word “Easter” from the name of a pagan goddess is peculiar to English and to German, which got it from Anglo-Saxon missionaries. Those were hardly the first languages in which the Paschal Mystery was ever celebrated. The names of Easter in the Celtic languages have nothing to do with a pagan goddess. It is not even there in Dutch or Frisian, and Frisian is pretty much what English would have been if the Norman Conquest had never happened. Only Saint Bede the Venerable ever mentions Eostre, and even he says that everything to do with her had died out by his day.

Likewise, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is entirely without parallel in mere mythology. The example usually cited is the early Egyptian cult of Isis and Osiris. Osiris is murdered by his brother Seth, who then sinks his coffin in the Nile. Isis, wife of Osiris and most powerful of goddesses, discovers her husband’s body and returns it to Egypt. Seth, however, regains the body, cuts it into 14 pieces, and scatters it abroad. Isis counters by recovering the pieces. How does this resemble the Resurrection Narratives in the slightest? Some much later commentators refer to this as an anastasis, but the fact that they were writing in Greek rather illustrates how far removed they were.

In all the mystery cults, no early text refers to any resurrection of Attis, nor of Adonis, nor, as we have seen, of Osiris. Indeed, according to Plutarch, it was the pious desire of devotees to be buried in the same ground where the body of Osiris was held still to be lying. Of Mithra, popular among Roman soldiers and often invoked at this point, it is not in dispute that stories of death and resurrection were devised specifically in order to counter the appeal of Christianity.

There is no suggestion that any pagan deity was ever held to have risen from the dead never to die again, nor to have appeared in the flesh several times thereafter (and soon thereafter, at that), nor to have been recounted doing so by eyewitnesses, nor even to have lived and died, never mind risen from the dead, at a specific, and quite recent, point in investigable history. The historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth is not in scholarly dispute, and the present point is that, uniquely, any such investigable claim is made at all.

It is also contended that Attis is supposed to have come back to life four days after his death. There is one account of Osiris being reanimated two or three days after his death, though only one, not four. And it is suggested that Adonis may have been “resurrected” three days after his death. In the case of all three, then there is no evidence of any such belief earlier than the second century AD. It is quite clear which way the borrowing went.

Yes, we do indeed have four accounts of the Resurrection. That Saint Mark might intentionally have ended at 16:8 is ridiculous on the face of it. Any lost ending is purely speculative. It is a circular argument that manuscripts without Mark 16:9–20 are older; for presupposed theological reasons, they are assumed to be older because those verses are missing. A Gospel without the Resurrection would obviously be no Gospel at all, and its composition would have been a pointless exercise. The Church would have had no reason to make liturgical or catechetical use of such a text, and indeed every reason not to.

There is, furthermore, no evidence whatever that the mystery religions had any influence in Palestine in the first century. And there is all the difference that there could possibly be between the mythological experience of these nebulous figures and the Crucifixion “under Pontius Pilate”. Hellenism and the Roman Empire did not view the Christian message as merely another legend of a cultic hero, just as neither the philosophical Greeks nor the pragmatic Romans dismissed it as either harmless or ridiculous. Just look at how they did react to it.

As Rousseau said, men who could invent such a story would be greater and more astonishing than its central figure.