If He Did…

Today we celebrate the most important Christian holiday of the entire year. We will do this by painting eggs and eating chocolate bunny rabbits and bizarre mounds of marshmallow and sugar known as peeps. And while scholars, such as myself, are more interested in the origins of the fabled peeps, somehow it seems appropriate that I turn my attention toward the even stickier subject of the origins of Easter.

There is always that danger when digging into the history of any subject that you are going to uncover information which may challenge or shake your faith in long held beliefs. And I am not sure that is a bad thing. It is good for us to have our little worlds shaken from time to time. But what do I know? I live in California. Most people out there, Pat Robertson for one, would like to believe that the entire holiday is wrapped up in the celebration of resurrection of Jesus. Indeed, I have heard time and time that the one thing that makes Christianity different from the other world religions is that Christians have the only religion in which their divine figure suffers and dies and then rises again and ascends to heaven. And as far as modern religions that is true. However, if we dig into some of the ancient religions we find that is not quite the case.

Many, perhaps most, Pagan religions in the Mediterranean area had a major seasonal day of religious celebration at or following the Spring Equinox. Cybele, the Phrygian fertility goddess, had a fictional consort who was believed to have been born via a virgin birth. He was Attis, who was believed to have died and been resurrected each year during the period March 22 to March 25.  About 200 B.C.E. mystery cults began to appear in Rome just as they had earlier in Greece. Most notable was the Cybele cult centered on Vatican hill …Associated with the Cybele cult was that of her lover, Attis (the older Tammuz, Osiris, Dionysus, or Orpheus under a new name). He was a god of ever-reviving vegetation. Born of a virgin, he died and was reborn annually. The festival began as a day of blood on Black Friday and culminated after three days in a day of rejoicing over the resurrection.  In Assyria, Tammuz was the son of the Goddess Ishtar. He was, according to the stories, killed while hunting and then resurrected. His day was celebrated during the Spring by baking small cakes with the letter “T” on them.

And so there has always been this claim that the Christian church only added the death and resurrection stories to the story of Jesus, stealing from earlier myths, to make it more palatable to the Pagan religions of the day. Certainly nearly every religion has some kind of festival at this time of the Vernal Equinox. Spring is, after all, one huge gigantic symbol of the cyclical nature of the universe. The Wiccans consider the Vernal Equinox as one of their eight holy days of celebration (sabbats). The name Easter, itself, most likely derives from the Saxon Goddess, Eostre, according to the ancient British historian, The Venerable Bede. Others claim that it is named for the Goddess Ishtar, from Assyria. Whatever its origins, it has always been a celebration of fertility in most cultures. And so we have Easter bunnies and eggs and peeps, to remind us of Spring and the annual rebirth of nature.

But like all the other Christian holidays, too much can be made of the association with pagan holidays. Some day had to be chosen to celebrate certain events and aligning Christian holidays with pagan holidays just made good sense. And it doesn’t really matter if Jesus rose from the dead during the Passover season or not. When you approach a religion, you have to get down to the core message of faith. You have to strip away all the stories and really ask yourself just what is necessary to the faith. What is it that really matters? In the scope of the Christian message, does it matter if Mary was or was not a virgin? Does it matter if he was betrayed by Judas? Does it matter if he hung on that cross six hours or six days? And it all boils down to this: Did Jesus of Nazareth get up and walk out of that tomb, or not? Even Saint Paul said that if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then being a Christian is a really stupid thing to be.

Because the whole message of Jesus was that there is no way to be God. We can’t be perfect. That we should just do the best we can to love God and one another and not to worry so much about shit. But none of that makes any sense unless there is some kind of eternal life because we look around and we see people who don’t do so great. They get sick and they die. We see good people who suffer miseries and it just doesn’t make sense unless there is more to life than the one we see here on Earth. Because here and now, in this world, the bad guys often win. And there is no good reason to be good and kind and loving, except that somehow, deep in our core, we know that is the right thing to do, regardless of the consequences here on Earth. If there is no life after death, then all the ideas about God and right behavior, regardless of your faith, just sort of collapse like a house of cards. So Jesus came and among other things, said that death is not this big scary thing we think it is. It’s just no big deal. And so all of Christianity boils down to that question, did he rise from the dead or not?

And I believe the whole question can be worked out logically. I won’t get into whether or not Jesus existed, because I’ve written on that topic before. Let us assume for the sake of this topic that Jesus of Nazareth did once exist. We can’t be sure that everything written in the gospels is true since they were written at a minimum of 25 years after the death of Jesus. But we also have the letters, and while many of them were written fairly late, many of them do date from those days following the death of Jesus. There are some clues in the letters. Moreover, after 2000 years, there is this religion which has grown to huge proportions and followed in a way quite unlike the ancient religions. Two thousand years is a very long time. I think it is safe to say that something happened. Something had to happen to change the world view two thousand years ago. The Christian message was so entirely different from anything people believed in the pagan world. The entire idea of mercy and charity, of unity with the godhead, of pacifism, was just inconceivable at the time.

Something had to happen to make all this come about. And that thing which was supposed to happen was the resurrection. That was the icing on the cake. That was something John the Baptist couldn’t top. That was something none of the other religions of the day had to offer. And that was exactly the claim of the early Christians. They didn’t just say that this guy had this new message of hope. They said that he rose from the dead. That’s a pretty good trick, I’d say.

So did he really rise from the dead? What evidence do we have? Well, let’s assume for the moment that he didn’t. If he didn’t rise from the dead then that would mean that the apostles and other followers who wrote in the first century were lying. Now in this situation you have three separate groups. You have the Romans who are trying to administrate this unruly stiff-necked little province. You have the Jewish priests and scribes who are trying to walk this fine line maintaining their limited autonomy while not going too far and pissing off the Romans. And you have the followers of Jesus. Now once you kill Jesus, you have a body. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, something had to happen to the body. Because Jesus kept going around saying he was going to rise from the dead, so if you executed him, you would want to make damn sure that his body stayed the fuck put.

If you were one of the Romans, you don’t want people believing that he rose from the dead because then he could be used as some kind of fucking martyr and if his followers weren’t afraid of dying that would make them pretty formidable enemies. And if you were one of the Jewish priests or scribes, you wouldn’t want people to think he rose from the dead because that would just totally undermine your authority and threaten the status quo vis a vis the Romans. So neither of those groups would want it to get around that Jesus got up and left that tomb.

But then, all they had to do to prove that he didn’t was to produce a body. Take out and display the body of Jesus and there goes the whole movement and they had no problems doing things like this. Bodies used to hang on crosses until they decomposed. But neither group did that. It’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t do that if they had the body to produce. So something must have happened to the body, and indeed the Bible does say that. The tomb was empty. When the two Marys went out to anoint the body with traditional oils, it wasn’t there. One gospel claims an angel told them Jesus had risen, the other says that it was a young boy.

So what happened to the body? If he didn’t rise, then somebody must have stolen it. Well, the Romans and the Jews wouldn’t have taken it, not unless they planned to display it in some way. Taking the body would just substantiate the claims of his followers. But of course his followers might have taken it. They would be the only ones to benefit from a missing body. And, if Jesus did not rise from the dead, then the apostles would have to be lying. But I would have to wonder exactly what we mean by the word “benefit”? If you consider by having to spend your life in constant fear of arrest and having to put up with the cursing and maledictions of the average citizen of Judea, by never being able to return to your old livelihood and way of life a benefit, then yes, I guess they would have some benefit from the missing body of Jesus. So let’s say that the disciples stole the body of Jesus and put forth the lie that he rose from the dead for some reason I cannot fathom. They then proceeded to go about preaching this message throughout the known world from India and Arabia to Britain. They separated and went out into the most hostile regions and spoke about a risen Christ. While doing this they were imprisoned, tortured and most were put to death in ways that would make Dick Cheney’s mouth water. And yet, all they had to do in order to avoid this suffering was to renounce Christ. In fact, this was 40 CE; there was no mass communication, no telephones, no way for any of them to know what the other was doing. They could have renounced Jesus and none of the others would have been any the wiser. But they didn’t.

I think it’s safe to say that at least these people who followed Jesus believed that he did, in fact, rise from the dead. Because there is no way that these guys would have suffered like that for a lie, especially alone. Perhaps if they were all together peer pressure would have kept them united in the same story. But they weren’t together. No, they believed in what they were saying. And you just have to ask yourself, what would make you believe that some guy got up out of the tomb and walked away? You’d have to see it, or talk to somebody you trusted who had seen it. You wouldn’t just let somebody tell you this guy got up from the dead and buy the story hook, line, and sinker without some kind of proof. And if the books are correct, those apostles were providing proof. They gave names. They told people not to take their word for it and to ask certain other people. And according to the story, a large number, several thousands of people actually saw this Jesus guy rise up bodily into the sky. And if all this happened, then the other miracles aren’t really so hard to buy, are they. I mean, if you can believe a guy got up and walked out of the tomb and sailed off into the sky, then walking on water, or healing a few cripples is not such a big deal.

And so this is the message of Easter. Did he do it? Did that actually happen? Either you believe it or you don’t. So when you ask yourself in your own spiritual journey, what do you believe, you have to face this question. Do you believe that there is a universal power that can do this? And in the end, that is the whole of the Christian message and none of the rest of it really matters, whether all the stories happened just like they say or not, whether he walked on water or not, because if he didn’t, none of it makes any sense, but if he did… if he did…