The Mythic Core of the Christian Narrative

Orphism, Jainism, Shamanism, and the Christ myth theory

Image by Monceau, from Flickr

Christian apologists often defend Jesus’s historicity by strawmanning the Christ myth theory and focusing on differences in mere detail between the gospel narratives and the world’s other dying-and-rising-god myths. What, then, are these apologists trying to hide?

What’s the content of this ideal type that Christianity shares, for example, with Orphism, the ancient Mystery Religions, and the Osirian solar cycle? And what’s the most likely source of that mythic content?

The “V” trajectory

Here are three historians’ characterizations of this ideal type.

First, in Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk notes the structure of the Christian creeds that goes back to Paul’s formulations in 1 Cor. 15:3–5 and Phil. 2:5–11. Funk says this version of the Christian proclamation, known as the “kerygma,” ‘is limited to two events, or rather to a single event conceived as an uninterrupted downward and upward trajectory. Jesus as the Christ descends into the tomb and then ascends from the grave to heaven, where he sits at the right hand of the Father. The short form of the kerygma consists of this steep “V” movement.’

The more detailed creed in Philippians extends the “V” trajectory by adding to the initial descent. Jesus doesn’t just descend from earth to the tomb or the underworld but “descends from heaven to carry out his redemptive mission.”

Here’s the passage from Philippians so you can see for yourself:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Jesus descended from his heavenly form into “the likeness of men.” Then he humbled himself and fell even further by obeying God even unto death on a cross. Therefore, God exalts Jesus, beginning his Son’s upward trajectory back to his pristine status in heaven.

Notice how the later, Apostle’s and Constantinople’s formulations of the Christian creed flesh out different parts of this “V” plotline. The Apostle’s Creed says,

I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. He suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to hell. The third day he rose again from the dead. He ascended to heaven and is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty. From there he will come to judge the living and the dead. [my emphasis]

This formulation leaves out Jesus’ initial lofty status, supplied by John 1, which identifies Jesus as the light and the Word that were with God in the beginning before Creation. But this creed adds the deepest part of the descent, which is Jesus’s descent to hell, known as the harrowing of hell.

The creed that was hammered out at the First Council of Constantinople in 381 says that Christians believe

in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; by whom all things were made; who for us men, and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost and of the Virgin Mary, and was made man; he was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father. [my emphases]

That formulation includes the entire Christian “V” structure except the descent into hell.

Now, although death or the descent to the underworld marks the nadir of the “V” trajectory in Jesus’s and the other dying-and-rising-god narratives, this plot structure extends beyond that most extreme example of the protagonist’s apparent defeat. The “V” theme is apparent in the myths of merely suffering rather than dying deities, demigods, or heroes who are vindicated in the end. This would include, for example, Mithras’ slaying of the bull and the ten labours of Hercules.

As Richard Carrier says in On the Historicity of Jesus,

All mystery religions centered on a central savior deity (literally called the soter, “the savior,” which is essentially the meaning of the word “Jesus”…), always a son of god (or occasionally a daughter of god), who underwent some sort of suffering (enduring some sort of trial or ordeal) by which they procured salvation for all who participate in their cult (their deed or torment having given them dominion over death). These deaths or trials were literally called a “passion” (patheon, literally “sufferings”), exactly as in Christianity. Sometimes this passion was an actual death and resurrection (Osiris); sometimes it was some kind of terrible labor defeating the forces of death (Mithras), or variations thereof.

Orphism, Jainism, and purification by the torments of reincarnation

A second historian’s statement of this mythic core is that of Algis Uzdavinys in Orpheus and the Roots of Platonism, where he says that according to Orphism,

The soul as a sort of fallen daimon, or as a Dionysian divine cosmic spark, is buried in a tomb-like material body, thus entering the cosmic cycle of elemental transformation. Hence, the soul is the pre-existing and immortal knowing subject. It passes through a number of incarnations in a cyclical pattern, and these bodily incarnations may be regarded as a sort of punishment, ordeal, or simply viewed as a result of forgetfulness, ignorance and play.

Thus, he says, ‘the ultimate aim of the soul is freedom from the wheel of terrestrial punishment following the soteriological formula bios-thanatos-bios (life-death-life), which shows the way of entering the eternal and noetic “day” of Ra or Helios.’

That, then, is a more succinct formulation of the same “V” trajectory. The point of Orphism, as in Gnosticism and Jainism, is to learn how to save ourselves from our “fallen,” embodied condition by recognizing our inner spark of divinity. As Plato puts it, we who are “dead” and entombed in the cave of ignorance need to remember our oneness with the eternal Good.

A third example is found in Thomas McEvilley’s The Shape of Ancient Thought. There he says that the doctrine of reincarnation which is found in both the Orphic strains of Platonism and Jainism is part of a “tripartite doctrine,” which is “reincarnation, purification, and release.” The purification typically takes the form of some suffering, often for a past misdeed committed when the soul was with the gods, or for negative karma built up over many reincarnations.

McEvilley quotes from the Papyrus of Ani, from 1250 BCE, which tells of the scribe Ani’s magical deification in the afterlife, thanks in part to his earthly purification. “Typically,” says McEvilley, “the soul, its memory expanded somehow, realizes that it has lived for countless ages rather than for a single, finite lifetime.”

Thus, Ani says, “I am Shu [the god] of unformed matter…before Isis was, and when Horus was not yet, I had waxed strong and flourished. I had grown old, and I had become greater than they who were among the shining ones who had come into being with him.”

Due to that recognition, Ani says he

arose in the form of a sacred hawk, and Horus made me worthy in the form of his own soul, to take possession of all that belongeth unto Osiris in the underworld. The double Lion-god, the warder of the things that belong to the house of the nemmes crown which is in his hiding place, saith unto me, “Get thee back to the heights of heaven, seeing that through Horus thou has become glorified in thy form.’

Elsewhere in the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Osiris says,

My soul is eternity. I am the creator of darkness, and I appoint unto it a resting place in the uttermost parts of heaven. I am the prince of eternity, I am the exalted one…I am lord of millions of years…I have come down unto the earth of Seb. I have done away with my faults.

There, then, is Osiris’ “V” trajectory: his soul is the eternal creator of darkness, but he comes down to earth to do away with his faults. Connected with the sun god that descends and rises, Osiris resurrects from the dead since he’s destined to return to his full glory.

As McEvilley points out, this is even more explicit in one of Empedocles’s fragments from the fifth century BCE, which hints at an origin in Jainism:

When one of the long-living gods wrongfully stains his limbs with bloodshed, or when one, moved by Hate, has sworn a false oath, they must then wander for three-times ten thousand seasons far from the blessed company of gods, and throughout this period they must be born into all kinds of shapes which are doomed to die, exchanging one hard way of life for another…

Indeed, McEvilley argues that Orphism, as it appears in Platonism, derives from Jainism in India. Jains likewise frame the “V” trajectory as a theodicy, as an expiation for an initial crime, which calls for punishment or purification before the soul can ascend to its former glory.

For Jains, desires attract a corrupt form of matter to the soul (which is composed of a subtler form of matter). Separated from corrupt matter, the soul is perfect and pure, as McEvilley summarizes the Jain proclamation. But once embodied, “the soul, bewitched by the instrumentality of the body at satisfying its own desires, forgets itself and plunges deeper and deeper into matter, setting in motion a causal chain that will bind it to the wheel for many incarnations.”

After all, says Plato in Phaedo, even when the body dies, the soul can’t get away; the soul tries to flee, but it’s “saturated with matter when it sets out, and so soon falls back into another body, where it takes root and grows.” For McEvilley, that reference to being saturated with matter even after death is a telltale sign of this Orphic myth’s Indian origin.

Entheogens and shamanic death and rebirth

Before we return to Christianity, we should note that this “V” trajectory can be traced further, back to shamanism and the perceived, likely prehistoric revelations from entheogens.

In Supernatural: Meetings with the Ancient Teachers of Mankind, Graham Hancock presents evidence from the anthropologist David Lewis-Williams that the “wounded men” from prehistoric cave art were likely meant to depict the pains undergone by shamans in hallucinogenic trances. The paintings sometimes show a man impaled by numerous thorns or arrows.

Likewise, the shaman who proves his or her mettle by surviving the harrowing adventure of undergoing peak states of consciousness after ingesting a psychoactive substance often experiences prickling sensations throughout his or her body. This is the wounded shaman archetype, which gives rise to the principle that a healer has to know pain to heal the suffering of others.

At any rate, because of the terrifying or surreal nature of these psychedelic experiences, the shaman interpreted them as a spiritual death and rebirth. By surviving the ordeal, the shaman returns to life invigorated and enlightened, having brought back insights from the spiritual plane.

Jesus’s descent and ascent

Let’s return to Jesus’s “V” trajectory. According to the New Testament, Jesus is identified with the co-creative Word of God, and he descends to earth to suffer punishment not for his sins, but for those of everyone else. The theodicy is thus displaced to preserve God’s perfection in a monotheistic context.

Jesus proves his divinity with his teachings and miracles, but eventually he’s captured by the forces of ignorance and darkness, namely the Jewish elites who conspire with the Roman Empire to have him tried and executed.

Like a shaman, Jesus ends up being pierced on a cross. That detail of being pierced derives from the reality of ancient Rome’s punishment for sedition, and the suffering servant passage in Isaiah 53:5, “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities.” That passage refers, in turn, to Israel’s suffering under several oppressive imperial regimes long before the Roman one. Still, the ascension of this suffering servant in Isaiah is itself a “V” trajectory which resonates with the many similar myths and metaphors from around the world.

There’s no reincarnation in Christianity because Jesus’s sacrificial death is meant to stand in for all other expurgations. This again is just the requirement of intolerance or exclusivity laid down by monotheism. Polytheistic religions allow for the validity of other religions because time for them is cyclical, and there are innumerable life cycles and thus legitimate paths of purification and atonement. The gods aren’t “jealous” like Yahweh, perhaps because they can socialize with equals and aren’t maddened by isolation.

Nevertheless, Jesus escapes his more concentrated imprisonment in matter by resurrecting from the dead and soon after ascending to heaven in his perfected, ghostly body. That rebirth is a truncated form of reincarnation, which suggests Egyptian, Indian, or Hellenistic influences.

Explaining the mytheme

How, then, is this ideal type or “mytheme” to be explained?

In addition to the historical influences, sketched above, there’s the symbolism of natural cycles, as in vegetation and the crops, the seasons, the motions of the constellations, and the cycle of night and day (the sun’s apparent descent and rebirth, as highlighted by ancient Egyptian religion).

There’s also the Jungian possibility that there are universal themes and concepts that resonate with our species because of the structure of our unconscious mind. That, too, might help explain the prevalence of myths such as the “V” trajectory in various cultures, united as we are by the same cognitive and neurological structures and basic life patterns.

But the Christian apologist insists that despite this common “V” plotline in Christianity, Egyptian religion, Orphism, the Mystery Religions, Jainism, and Shamanism, for example, the Christian proclamation is literally, historically true. All the other stories are just myths whereas God really descended to earth in the person of Jesus, whereupon he was tormented and executed, and then he did indeed rise from the grave and ascend to heaven. And he really will return to judge humanity and bring an end to our hubristic reign over the planet.

God descended literally to earth only once in human history, according to Christians. And according to Justin Martyr, who set the bar for apologists in grappling with Christianity’s evident unoriginality, all the other, older stories of what we’d call the “V” trajectory were cases of “diabolical mimicry.” The Devil sought to thwart God’s plan, knowing in advance that Jesus would come to save us by dying on the cross on our behalf. So the Devil implanted that forewarning in other writers’ minds, leading to comparable tales that are liable to cast doubt on the historicity of the Christian narrative.

In short, the apologist can resort to demonizing the apparent evidence that the gospel is just another myth in the same vein. This isn’t likely intended to convince any non-Christian, but the gambit protects the Christian’s faith since only the Christian (or some other exoteric theist) is primed to accept such a convoluted conspiracy theory.

A resentful rifling through the world’s mythemes

Here, though, is a more reasonable explanation. Even if Jesus didn’t historically exist, Jews in first-century Judea were growing increasingly rebellious against Roman occupation. Just a couple of decades after Paul’s activity in spreading his message of a dying-and-rising Hellenized Jewish savior god, from 66–73 CE, the Jews revolted, and Rome destroyed the Second Temple and Jerusalem.

There was no need for a single Jewish leader to have mastered all Cynical and mystical wisdom and performed “miraculous” healings, for all Jews to understand themselves as being collectively “Christ-like” in the sense that their history seemed to be summed up by Isaiah’s Suffering Servant passage. Jews saw themselves as righteous and longstanding servants of the Supreme Being. They followed God’s laws, kept the covenant, and expected to be divinely protected.

After that first Jewish-Roman war, however, all hope seemed lost. The profane, polytheistic Roman Empire had humiliated monotheists. This was an acute form of the problem of evil, which called for a surrender to atheistic despair or some artful theodicy. Christians were Jewish sympathizers who supplied the latter. To explain the calamity of Rome’s humiliation of Judaism and the physical destruction of the Jews’ sacred lands, Christians searched not just the Jewish scriptures but, thanks to the ongoing Hellenistic influences, much of the world’s store of myths.

Christians thus told a Jewish version of the savior god’s “V” narrative. They incorporated Jewish messianic expectations, suitably spiritualized to avoid the threat of empirical falsification. But they appealed also at least indirectly to all of the above, to elements of Orphism, Neoplatonism, the Mystery Religions, Jainism, shamanism, and the solar cycle.

These Christian stories may originally have been read as allegories, with both an exoteric, superficially historical message and an esoteric, Gnostic one for insiders and intellectual elites to decipher. Eventually, as a Christian orthodoxy formed in opposition to Gnostic churches, the official Christian creed was literalized.

That literalization and historicization served at least two functions. First, as Elaine Pagels says in The Gnostic Gospels, it reinforced the political power of the church that could trace its authority to the physical transmission of control from Jesus to the popes, or to the leaders of this “catholic,” historicizing church. This way, the more freewheeling, inclusive churches that credited dreams and private inspirations could be demonized and persecuted for heresy, for denying the priority of the one true church.

Second, there’s the monotheistic impulse that stems from Jewish resentment, from Jews’ feeling of being unfairly persecuted throughout their history. Christians would have treated their myth as historical because they couldn’t accept their religion’s equality with all the others while simultaneously needing some guarantee that the Jewish people’s suffering wasn’t in vain. The time for decadent cosmopolitan relativism was at an end; Jerusalem was destroyed, the evil empire was victorious, and monotheism was evidently a sham.

What could rescue Judeo-Christian confidence that nature wasn’t wholly absurd and demonic was a spiritual message that wasn’t on par with all the others. What they needed was a story that stood out, that alone testified to a higher plane that could redeem them. That way, Christians could distinguish the true from the false in religion, and all the foreign myths — however similar they might seem to the Christian gospel — could be dismissed not on dubious theological grounds but simply for being historically empty.

The ironic triumph of Christian literalism

In short, precisely because Christians held the material world in such contempt (following the “V” storyline), including the Egyptian, Indian, and Greco-Roman civilizations that fared better than dispersed and perennially humiliated Israel, Christians felt obliged to demonize pagan religions along with fallen nature.

Of course, these other religions were also often dualistic, and their saints repudiated material processes, too, renouncing them with ascetic rebellions against biological impulses. But the pagan contempt for nature resulted in indifference towards the prospect of proselytizing. For the Eastern religions, we each must save ourselves because we have the divine power to do so already within us. To attempt to save another is to pit God against God, which is absurd. God is playing through our ignorance, so we should let the drama play out.

By contrast, Christian contempt for nature led to the desperate search for a supreme solution and for reassurance from the Church’s domination of the pagan civilizations that had prevailed over the righteous, long-suffering Jews. Indeed, the Roman-empowered Church set about destroying the pagan world with a vengeance.

Moreover, Constantine’s conversion and Rome’s adoption of Christianity as its official religion in the fourth century signaled to the Church that perhaps this miracle was afoot. Evidently, the turnaround was fair play, and the heavens were speaking and acting in the earthly, historical realm through the triumphant Christian institution — and thus through its founding events in Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection.

In hindsight, mind you, this ironic Roman embrace of Christianity looks more like a demonic hiding of the revelation in plain sight, and like fallen nature’s embroilment of the Church in grotesque politics that buried the metaphorical and existential importance of the “V” trajectory. That was Christianity’s verdict, too, as this religion splintered in the East-West divide and the Protestant Reformation.

In any case, the Christian literalist is liable to miss the wood for the trees. If you don’t see the “V” trajectory for what it is, for a mytheme, a plotline, or an ideal type, you don’t know what you’re talking about when you profess to have faith in Jesus. Your religion becomes a travesty, ready to be bastardized by a parade of snake oil salesmen.

The point for Christians shouldn’t be that God is found in Creation only in his “begotten” form in the incarnation of his Son Jesus. If that were so, God’s relation to us would be like our relation to ants. Only if we, too, were potentially divine could we relate to the divine. That insight leads from the dubious Christian literalization to the Gnostic, Orphic, and Eastern formulations of the bios-thanatos-bios mission.

At any rate, the apologist is stuck having to maintain that the historicizing of the Christian myth, including perhaps the appeal to diabolical mimicry, makes for a better explanation of the shared “V” trajectory than the above, much simpler, naturalistic account.

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