The most beautiful thing the Resurrection chapter had to kill — and the killing is the credibility.
The old and charming idea, from J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, that every culture under heaven kept a dying-and-rising god — one universal resurrection sung in a thousand tongues. It would have made the chapter ring like a struck bell. It is, for the most part, false, and the careful reader who dismantled it (J.Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine) noticed two plain things:
- the gods who genuinely died mostly stayed dead and ruled the dead (Osiris); the ones who returned had mostly never truly died;
- smelling one single figure “behind them all” was a later faith reading itself backward into older, unsuspecting books.
Mettinger (2001) rehabilitated only a few NW-Semitic cases (Baal, Melqart), excludes Osiris, and warrants no Christian derivation. So the honest residue is small and heterogeneous — and that is the discipline working: the chapter leans on its structure, not on a crowd. It is the same shape as the apophatic over-claim cut down to an honest few. An over-claimed convergence is not evidence; it is a temptation, and the loss column is where you prove the blade is real.
Sources. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough (the dying-and-rising-god category); J. Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine (1990) + his Encyclopedia of Religion entry (the demolition); T. N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection (2001, the small rehabilitated residue — Baal, Melqart; excludes Osiris). Search: Frazer Golden Bough dying and rising god; Jonathan Z Smith Drudgery Divine; Mettinger Riddle of Resurrection.
Appears in: Resurrection · The Discipline