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The Unoriginal Miracle-Claims of the New Testament
The authors of Acts and the four gospels included miracle-stories in their respective texts which closely resemble miracle-stories from preexisting religious, historical, and even fictional texts. In fact, most of the well-known miracle-stories of the gospels, including the virgin-birth, the healings, the resurrection and the ascension, have a number of counterparts in both earlier and contemporaneous pagan writings from Egyptian, Greek and Roman sources. Taken cumulatively, such parallels strongly suggest that the inerrantist position on the origin of the texts of the New Testament is false. The text of the New Testament, like the Quran and the book of Mormon, shows every evidence of cultural and literary influence.
The Virgin Birth of Jesus
We start, appropriately enough, with the
miraculous birth of Jesus. By the time the Gospels came to be
written, the idea of a virgin-birth was already both widespread
and ancient. As Clarence Darrow once quipped, everyone who was
anyone in the ancient world had been --or so it was claimed--
born of a virgin. Plutarch, in his "Covivial Disputations,"
observed in the first century that "the fact of the
intercourse of a male God with mortal women is conceded by all"
(qtd. in Helms, 48). As a cursory list of virgin-born saviours
and sages who populated the ancient world, we may mention
Alexander the Great, Asclepius, Heracles, Miletus, Minos, and
Plato.
That the idea of a virgin-birth was entirely common is attested
to by a number of very early writings. Even Justin Martyr (~140CE),
writing what is perhaps the very earliest Christian 'apologetic'
treatise, found himself admitting that "all writers call God
the Father of men and gods. And if we assert that the Word of God
was born of God in a peculiar manner, different from ordinary
generation, let this, as said above, be no extraordinary thing to
you, who say that Mercury is the angelic word of God" (Apology,
I, 22). Justin exhorts his Pagan readers, saying "if we
even affirm that He was born of a virgin, accept this in common
with what you accept of Perseus [that he was virgin-born]"
(ibid). Elsewhere, in his 'Dialogue with Trypho," Justin
states that there are actually a number of Christians who
themselves deny the virgin-birth of Jesus, even though Justin
himself accepts it.
The early Pagan critics of Christianity were much more explicit when they discussed the virgin-birth of Jesus. Celsus, writing around 178CE, was perhaps the most caustic of these critics. Speaking of the virgin-birth, he says, "[c]learly the christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, or of the Auge and the Antiope in fabricating the story of Jesus' virgin birth." (Hoffman, 57). Celsus points out that belief in the virgin of Jesus is not more justiifed than belief in the virgin birth of any other person, saying that, "[a]fter all, the old myths of the greeks that attribute a divine birth to Perseus, Amphion, Aeacus and Minos are equally good evidence of their wondrous works. . . and are certainly no less lacking in plausibility than the stories [of the Gospels]" (59). In a sense he is pointing out the same dillema with which we began this essay, namely how one can rationally believe, without self-contradiction or inconsistent standards of evidence, that the miracles attributed to Jesus are true while at the same time disbelieving those attributed to other people by other witnesses. The answer, I submit, is that you can't.
The Bacchae and Acts
In other places, not only are the miraculous elements of the New Testament simply unoriginal, but actually appear to have been directly plagiarized from earlier Pagan writings. Several such instances, which are apparently derived from the Bacchae of Euripides (500BCE), appear within the 'Acts of the Apostles.' Before looking at the specific parallels between the two writings, perhaps a word should be said about the Bacchae. Firstly, it concerns the exploits of the God-man Dionysus, who is said to have been the child of the God Zeus and the mortal Semele. Secondly, and more specifically, it concerns the persecution of Dionysus' followers by King Pentheus of Thebes, as well as Dionysis' miraculous intervention on the behalf of his followers. The writing evidently enjoyed a very wide circulation within the ancient world.
Now, let us look at the parallels. In one instance, Pentheus, the persecutor of Dionysis' cult, is confronted by Dionysis himself, who says "you disregard my words of warning... and kick against the goads [pros kentra laktizoimi]" (line 794). This rare phrase also appears in Acts, where Paul is the persecutor, and Jesus the interlocutor: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you, this kicking against the goads [pros kentra laktizein]" (26:15). In another Bacchic instance, some of the followers of Dionysis have been imprisoned. Suddenly, as if by God's hand, "the chains on their legs snap apart ...untouched by any human hand, the doors swing wide, opening of their own accord" (lines 447-8). Similarly, in Acts, when Paul and Silas are imprisoned in Phillipi, "all the doors burst open and all the prisoners found their fetters unfastened" (16:26). The miracle is repeated elsewhere, with Paul and Peter in prison ". . . the chains fell away from his wrists. [When they approach the prison gate, it] opened for them of its own accord" (12:8,10). For a further discussion of Luke's "borrowing" from Euripides, see Helms (1997) and Heinneman (1985).
The Resurrection of Jesus
While most of the miracles attributed to Jesus in the New Testament can plausibly be considered as inessential to the theological meaning of Christianity, the resurrection can not. Paul, the earliest Christian writer as far as we know, had already stated to his fellows that "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 COR 15:14). The belief in a God-king who was killed and resurrected was at least 3000 years old by the first century CE. Far from being a unique claim, the resurrection of Osiris played a prominent role in Egyptian writing and religion for more than three millenia. In brief, the story is this: Osiris was killed by Set, a sort of Egyptian Satan, who dismembered his body and hid the pieces. Isis, the female consort to Osiris, found these pieces, except for the phallus, and reunited them; then, fanning a "breath of life" into his nostrils [just as Yahweh breathed the breath of life into Adam], Osiris was resurrected. Wallis Budge, one of the world's foremost Egyptologists, observed that not only were "[s]ections of it are found inscribed upon tombs, sarcophagi, coffins, stelae and papyri of the XI dynasty to about AD 200," but also that "everywhere, and in texts of all periods, the life, sufferings, death, and resurrection of Osiris are accepted as facts universally admitted" (1967, p. ix).
We find similar claims in the Roman world. For example, even though Romulus was not said to have been killed and resurrected, he was said to have appeared to his followers, after his bodily ascension into heaven, in ways which are reminiscient of the New Testament accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances. In Livy's account, for example, we are told that a man named Proculus had the following to report about the ascended Romulus:
"'Romulus,' he declared, 'the father of our City, descended from heaven at dawn this morning and appeared to me. In awe and reverence I stood before him, praying for permission to look upon his face without sin. 'Go,' he said, 'and tell the Romans that by heaven's will my Rome shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman arms.' Having spoken these words, he was taken up again into the sky" (51).
The Ascension of Jesus
According to the author of Luke-Acts, Jesus ended his stay on earth by ascending physically into the sky. In the gospel, this is said to have occured on the same day as the resurrection. According to Acts, however, Jesus ascended physically into heaven fifty days after the resurrection. No other book of the New Testament refers to either the ascension or to Jesus' fifty-day sojourn after the resurrection. At any rate, according to Acts, written approximately 90CE, Jesus gives a final address to the disciples before ascending:
"And, being assembled together with them, commanded them that they should not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father. . . When they therefore were come together, they asked of him, saying, Lord, wilt thou at this time restore again the kingdom to Israel? And he said unto them, It is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power. . . And when he had spoken these things, while they beheld, he was taken up; and a cloud received him out of their sight" (1:4-9).
Compare this familiar account with an earlier Pagan account, dated around 10CE, related by the Roman historian Livy. The subject of the ascension in this case is Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome. Like Jesus, we may here note, Romulus was called the "son of a god," was said to have been born of a Virgin, Rhea Sivius, and was also said to have been fathered by a god, Mars.
"One day while [Romulus] was reviewing his troops on the Campus Martius near the marsh of Capra, a storm burst, with violent thunder. A cloud enveloped him, so thick that it hid him from the eyes of everyone present; and from that moment he was never seen again upon earth. The troops. . . saw that the throne was empty, and, ready though they were to believe the senators, who had been standing at the king's side and now declared that he had been carried up on high by a whirlwind, they none the less felt like children bereft of a father and for a long time stood in sorrowful silence. Then a few voices began to proclaim Romulus's divinity; the cry was taken up, and at last every man present hailed him as a god and son of a god, and prayed to him to be for ever gracious and to protect his children" ("The Early History of Rome" by Livy (Penguin Classics Edition, pp 50-51).
The parallels here are unmistakable. In both stories we have a "king" addressing his subjects, a cloud enveloping the "king", and the bodily ascension upwards into the heavens. Jesus and Romulus are simply two examples among many. As with the virgin-birth, such stories seem to have been part of the common mythological coinage, as it were, of the ancient world. Gerhard Lohfink observes:
"Similar stories were also told in antiquity about other famous men, for example, Heracles, Empedocles, Alexander the Great [son of Olympias and Jupiter Ammon], and Appollonius of Tyana. Characteristically the scene is set with spectators and witnesses, before whose eyes the person in question disappears. Often he is born aloft by a cloud or shrouded in darkness that takes him from the eyes of the people. Not infrequently the whole business takes place on a hill."
Conclusion
What can we conclude from all of these Pagan parallels to the New Testament? We can conclude that, for anyone willing to peruse the writings of ancient history, the miracles attributed to Jesus are not unique. At the least, this overview should encourage a reasonable scepticism regarding miracle claims as a whole. Stories of the miraculous were indeed a primary staple of ancient literature. Over the course of time, such stories came to be associated with nearly every God, sage, emperor, king, and teacher. We read of them in the writings of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, in the plays and biographies of the Greeks, and, most relevantly, within the Roman and Jewish histories of Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, and others. It is within precisely this historical and literary context which the New Testament was written. As Richard Carrier has pointed out in his "Kooks and Quacks of the Roman Empire" (1997):
"From all of this one thing should be apparent: the age of Jesus was not an age of critical reflection and remarkable religious acumen. It was an era filled with con artists, gullible believers, martyrs without a cause, and reputed miracles of every variety. In light of this picture, the tales of the gospels do not seem remarkable at all. Even if they were false in every detail, there is no evidence that they would have been disbelieved or rejected as absurd by a people largely lacking in education or critical thinking skills."
WORKS CITED
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Budge, Wallis. (1967). The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani. New York, Dover Publishing.
Heinneman, Uta-Rank. (1994). Putting Away Childish Things.
Helms, Randel. (1988). Gospel Fictions. New York, Prometheus Books.
Hoffman, Joseph P. (1987). Celsus on the True Doctrine. Oxford University Press.
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