From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels resemblance to

certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith. When
pagan apologists for the official pantheism of the Roman empire denied that
the death-and-resurrection myth of Jesus differed in any significant way
from the myths of Dionysus, Osiris, Adonis, Attis, etc., they failed to stem
the rising Christian tide. In the last two hundred years, however, as
anthropologists have discovered all over the world foundational myths that
similarly resemble Jesus Passion and Resurrection, the notion of
Christianity as a myth seems at last to have taken holdeven among
Christian believers.
Beginning with some violent cosmic or social crisis, and culminating in the
suffering of a mysterious victim (often at the hands of a furious mob), all
these myths conclude with the triumphal return of the sufferer, thereby
revealed as a divinity. The kind of anthropological research undertaken
before World War IIin which theorists struggled to account for
resemblances among mythsis regarded as a hopeless metaphysical
failure by most anthropologists nowadays. Its failure seems, however, not to
have weakened anthropologys skeptical scientific spirit, but only to have
weakened further, in some mysterious way, the plausibility of the dogmatic
claims of religion that the earlier theorists had hoped to supersede: if
science itself cannot formulate universal truths of human nature, then
religionas manifestly inferior to sciencemust be even more devalued
than we had supposed.
This is the contemporary intellectual situation Christian thinkers face as
they read the Scriptures. The Cross is incomparable insofar as its victim is
the Son of God, but in every other respect it is a human event. An analysis of
that eventexploring the anthropological aspects of the Passion that we
cannot neglect if we take the dogma of the Incarnation seriouslynot only
reveals the falsity of contemporary anthropologys skepticism about human
nature. It also utterly discredits the notion that Christianity is in any sense
mythological. The worlds myths do not reveal a way to interpret the
Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret
myth.
Jesus does, of course, compare his own story to certain others when he
says that his death will be like the death of the prophets: The blood of all
the prophets shed since the foundation of the world may be required of this
generation, from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah (Luke 11:50-
51). What, we must ask, does the word like really mean here? In the death
most strikingly similar to the Passionthat of the Suffering Servant in
Isaiah, chapters 5253a crowd unites against a single victim, just as
similar crowds unite against Jeremiah, Job, the narrators of the penitential
psalms, etc. In Genesis, Joseph is cast out by the envious crowd of his
brothers. All these episodes of violence have the same all-against-one
structure.
Since John the Baptist is a prophet, we may expect his violent death in the
New Testament to be similar, and indeed John dies because Herods guests
turn into a murderous crowd. Herod himself is as inclined to spare Johns
life as Pilate is to spare Jesusbut leaders who do not stand up to violent
crowds are bound to join them, and join them both Herod and Pilate do.
Ancient people typically regarded ritual dancing as the most mimetic of all
arts, solidifying the participants of a sacrifice against the soon to be
immolated victim. The hostile polarization against John results from
Salomes dancinga result foreseen and cleverly engineered by Herodias for
exactly that purpose.
There is no equivalent of Salomes dancing in Jesus Passion, but a mimetic
or imitative dimension is obviously present. The crowd that gathers against
Jesus is the same that had enthusiastically welcomed him into Jerusalem a
few days earlier. The sudden reversal is typical of unstable crowds
everywhere: rather than a deep-seated hatred for the victim, it suggests a
wave of contagious violence.