comments:
Notice the similarities to the Jesus story. Not exact, but shows that the death and resurrection of Jesus is not so original at all. Just examples of gods that went through humiliation, death, resurrection. Inanna is the earliest known resurrected god. For her, a clear-cut death-and-resurrection tale exists on clay tablets inscribed in Sumeria over a thousand years before Christianity, plainly describing her humiliation, trial, execution, and crucifixion, and her resurrection three days later. After she is stripped naked and judgment is pronounced against her, Inanna is “turned into a corpse” and “the corpse was hung from a nail” and “after three days and three nights” her assistants ask for her corpse and resurrect her (by feeding her the “water” and “food” of life), and “Inanna arose” according to what had been her plan all along, because she knew her father “would surely bring me back to life,” exactly as transpires in the story (quotations are from the tablets, adapting the translation of Samuel Noah Kramer in History Begins at Sumer). This cult continued to be practiced into the Christian period, Tyre being a major center of her worship. By then, there is some evidence her resurrection tale was shifted to her consort Tammuz, one of several resurrected deities the Greeks called Adonis. Here is another, with similarities to Jesus that are obvious: Romulus was another widely-known, pre-Christian resurrected god. Not a personal savior, so far as we know, but a national one, in his exalted form named Qurinus. According to ancient sources this demigod was a pre-existent divine being who became incarnate in order to establish a Kingdom, conceiving a body for himself within the womb of a virgin (possibly by sexual means; it’s unclear), who was murdered by the Roman Senate (the Roman equivalent of the Sanhedrin), after which his corpse vanishes, the sun goes out, and people flee in fear and mourn his death; then he returns to earth alive again, resurrected in a new divine body, to preach his gospel to the disciple Proculus before departing to rule from on high. By some accounts Romulus ascended directly to heaven and his mortal body burned away in the sky; but either way, his mortal body dies (“I have finished my mortal life,” he tells Proculus, Dionysius says), and he returns to preach in an immortal body, then ascends to heaven, just like Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:35-50). Our fullest account comes from Plutarch (Life of Romulus 27-28), writing at the end of the 1st century A.D. But Romulus’s death and return to life are attested in numerous pre-Christian sources (Cicero, Laws 1.3 & Republic 2.10; Livy 1.16; Ovid, Fasti 2.491-512 and Metamorphoses 14.805-51; and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 2.63.3-4). There are other examples.