Let me give you the assessment of L Goppelt, German theologian. My typing of it will take longer than your reading, so I consider it a fair offer. CS Lewis with his extensive literary background in mythology would have other contributions to the discussion. (I believe he says that it is not surprising that there are many points of contact and agreement in mythological stories. In fact, that is one of the things that finally attracted him to Christianity, that the mythological aspects of many stories found agreement in a real person. But I may not remember the points of his discussion very well.) But Goppelt is well-acquainted with analogous stories, and offers a historical assessment of them. FWIW: "In the context of the ancient world in which Jesus lived, there are in fact, few analogies for sustained effectiveness after death under comparable conditions. Jesus was condemned not only by the governing powers, but also by his own people because he breached the accepted standards of the social order. After a short time, however, his followers, who had themselves abandoned him initially, began to interpret his very demise as the consummation of his work. With respect to the Jewish milieu, one could see a certain correspondence here in the Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran; or, regarding the Old Testament, in the prophet Jeremiah whose words and experiences were passed on by his student Baruch (Jer 36); or, regarding the Greek world, in Socrates who died a condemned man but lived on for centuries through Plato; or, regarding the Hellenistic world, in Julius Caesar who after his violent end became the guardian spirit of the empire, or in the Neo-Pythagorean peripatetic philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, a contemporary of Jesus, whom Philostratus in A.D. 217 portrayed in an aretology with the aid of surviving traditions.
In none of these analogies--Is 53 excepted--has sustained effectiveness been achieved by a resurrection. The Teacher of Righteousness at Qumran was probably eliminated like Jesus by the ruling priesthood, but his followers held firmly to his interpretation of scripture and continued to reflect meditately upon it in the manner he taught. For them he was the prophetic figure standing at the brink of world calamity, but no one spoke of his continued existence in person. This closest analogy makes clear that the Easter kerygma (message) was entirely unprecedented in the Jewish milieu of Jesus. The kerygma would appear to come closer to the message through which Caesar's demise was glorified mythologically rather than philosophically by the heir to the throne, Octavius Augustus. Caesar's death became his apotheosis. Rising out of the ashes of cremation, his genius ascended to the divine world. In the Roman forum a temple was erected to him as Divus Julius Caesar. As the "divine Julius Caesar" he became, along with his successors, the guardian spirit of the Roman empire, the ideological Cosmokrator. The descriptive account of the apotheosis of Apollonius of Tyana calls to mind even more the accounts of Easter. He was snatched away from his judges through translation. He then appeard to his followers as one raised from the dead. He was revered by them as a "divine man," and so the traditions about this life and miraculous deeds were passed on from generation to generation.
But none of the comparable figures of the ancient world sustained their effectiveness through the message of their resurrection. The Easter Kerygma is not the appropriation and adaptation of an idea generally familiar to the ancient world. That the continuation of Jesus' ministry should take its decisive expression in this form is utterly unprecedented. This observation prohibits us historically from discarding the New Testament representations as though they were examples of an obsolete supernaturalism. On the contrary, we must analyze them in terms of their own context. The really decisive question is whether the earthly ministry is in fact the essential--and not something like the psychological--basis of the Easter kerygma. Does the ministry of Jesus, in terms of its essential structure, lead up to the passion and resurrection so that the cross does not end up representing the collapse of a utopian dream, nor the resurrection a miraculous corroboration, but so that both become discernible as the fitting conclusion to his whole ministry? If it is possible to answer this question positively, it would also appear to be a contradiction historically to postulate a ministry of Jesus devoid of his death, and an Easter faith devoid of a transsubjective foundation as the starting point for the continuation of Jesus' ministry and, consequently, for New Testament theology. |
