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Popular trends arise in culturally contingent ways, and those trends often dominate the public mind for a season. Thus, the idea that Christianity borrowed from prior pagan mythology gained notoriety with the rise of New Atheism. The Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007) is a poster child for this popular trend in thinking.

The Zeitgeist movie forces the narrative, ignoring glaring dissimilarities, and manufacturing similarities that don’t really exist. It ignores (or isn’t familiar with) the relevant academic scholarship, but it has been watched well over one million times. We might say that the Zeitgeist movie has become legendary in a truly mythic sense itself.

I will go out on a limb, nevertheless, to say that Christians have shown far too much angst over this trend of claiming that Christianity is similar to prior pagan mythology. There are critical differences, and they are significant, but there are some similarities also. Do the similarities pose a problem for Christianity?

The short answer is, no. In fact, if truth is truth and reality is reality, ancient, pagan attempts at explaining that reality are likely to hit on some metaphysical truth. If they didn’t, I might begin wonder about the nature of reality and our ability to recognize and understand it.

Mythic literature as a genre is an attempt to provide some explanation and understanding of basic realities and the ebb and flow of life. I am reminded of these things as I sit outside on an unseasonably warm day in November with a view of trees bared of their multicolored leaves that have been collected by my earnest neighbors in piles lining the suburban streets for pickup.

Fall is ebbing into the dark night of winter. The subtle coolness in the breeze portends (what seems to me now) a distant spring. I am braced for what comes next as I enjoy what is likely to be the lest vestige of warmer days for longer than I care to think about.

My hope for the spring, however far off it seems in my present mood, is rooted in my experience of the certainty of the seasons. I know my hope is not fanciful, even as I brace (all too knowingly) for the cold, bleak trudge ahead.

It seems completely natural that ancient mythology captures this duality in stories that have religious significance. These experiences are common to man. We remind ourselves of the hope of spring as we gaze in wonderment at fall trees in the throes of seasonal death and the chill onset of winter. It reminds us of our own life and death sagas, even now in all our modern comforts.

Our modern comforts allow us to be a bit more disconnected and circumspect, perhaps, than our ancient forbearers. Those comforts and great advances in scientific knowledge allow us to be intellectual about these things. Ancient pagans lived literally at the mercy of the seasons, and all the things they didn’t know played like gods on the stage of their fraught imagination.

Modern people chalk seasonal changes up to natural cycles that just happen. We believe humans chased all the gods off long ago. The ownership we have asserted in our knowledge of the way the world works gives us an illusion of control that I surmise is not all that much different than the ancients, who sought some ownership and control of this world through the mediators of gods they thought they could appease.

Pagans found solace in the seasons as we do. Myth is rooted in collective experience, and it is driven by an impulse to understand and import control into our experience. We also have a natural inclination to seek meaning. We might call this impulse a “religious” one.

Though we have the chased the gods off, we still have a religious impulse. Though we no longer believe in many gods, and we no longer venerate ancient myths with more than a curious read, the idea of one, Creator God God persists, and it is not explained away by modern science and knowledge. The Bible, though it has ancient origins, stands up to our modern scrutiny in ways that pagan myth does not.

Mythic literature makes no pretense at being history. A hallmark of mythology is the setting of the stories in a vague and distant past with figures that have no connection to actual history.

Some of the biblical writings bear resemblance to ancient mythology, but the Bible is much more than ancient mythology. Whereas, ancient mythology makes no pretense at being history, many of the biblical writings are self-conscious of history, providing intimate detailed descriptions of people, places, and events.

The record of people, places, and events has a provenance that has been verified in archaeological finds and nonbiblical writings that have their own historical value. In this and other ways, the Biblical writings are solidly embedded in history in ways that no pagan mythology is embedded in history.

The Bible is a collection of writings in many genres that span millennia. One of those genres we might call mytho-history. Mytho-history is defined as “narratives that are figurative and have both literary and historical value.”

These genres are not labeled in the text, so we need to be mindful of the context and character of the text as we read it. I like to think that we need to let the text inform us about itself. Too often, we impose our preconceived notions on the biblical text and come away with nothing but affirmation for what we already thought about it.

I was impressed when I first read the Bible in a college world religion class. Having read the key scriptural of all the major world religions, I noticed that the biblical text is not like the scriptural texts of the other religions. The Bible has some ineffable, mysterious, “living” and transcendent aspect to it that made me feel both uncomfortable and drawn to it at the same time. Yet, it is rooted in history in ways that no other sacred text in other world religions is rooted in history (except the Jewish texts that are are also incorporated into the Christian Bible).

Modern scholarly consensus affirms that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical figure, as was Pontius Pilate. Historians do not doubt that Jesus lived, nor that he died on a Roman cross. Peter, James, Paul, and John are attested in biblical and non-biblical writings. Old Testament figures like King David, King Hezekiah, and Nebuchadnezzar are amply represented in archaeological and written records with historical significance.

The Bible is consciously embedded in an historical milieu. Some of the biblical writings reads like historical narratives. These narratives include statements made by people claiming to be eyewitnesses to the events they described. At the center of these claimed experiences is the death and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Paul, who once zealously persecuted people who worshipped Jesus as God/man who rose from the dead, became the most eloquent spokesman for that claim. This is what he said:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Paul], and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

1 corinthians 15:3-8

Paul’s claims are rooted in his own contemporary experience with the resurrected Jesus and with hundreds of people who also claimed personal interaction with Jesus who appeared to them live after they saw him be crucified. These claims were not just mythic to Paul or the people who shared in that experience. That claim is the lynchpin of Christinaity:

if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith… if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile

1 Corinthians 15:14, 17

We might see some element of “dying and rising” gods in pagan mythology by stretching the imagination, but those mythic threads do not have historical provenance, and they make no real claim on our credulity. The death and resurrection of Jesus is different in that respect. It is an historical claim embedded in historic narrative by people who actually lived and claimed to have experienced its reality firsthand.

CS Lewis, who knew pagan mythic literature intimately, found in it the bread crumbs that led him to belief in the risen Christ. For Lewis, pagan mythology contained an echo of truth, however dim and obscured. Myth is narrative that seeks to make sense of transcendence that we can only sense and about which we find knowledge and words inadequate.

Underneath the cold hard experience of winter grows a sense of renewal that gurgles like the transcendence of spring runoff. That we can’t reduce what we perceive to formulas or hard and fast knowledge leads some of us to scoff at attempts to find meaning in it. Yet, we still seek that sense out of the ineffable today in the music, art, and wonder that wells up in the human heart from regions unknown and just barely out of reach.

The impulse that inspires our art is a religious one. It seeks to give expression to that unseeable reality we sense. It is an expression of meaning. It is prehistoric in its roots. A theist might say it derives from “before the foundations of the universe”.

CS Lewis describes it like the prisoner who has lived out his life in a cell with windows above his head. He can see the light streaming in. He hears the sounds from outside. He knows there is a reality beyond the four cell walls that is the sum of his experience even if he cannot see it.

Myth is an attempt to root human experience in the grand narrative of the universe and to find meaning in the cold, stark reality of such a universe that does not beckon to our every need. Pagan myth provides imagery to our vague angst filled hope that inevitably seems to succumb to a dangerous, alluring tune we do not control.

That same universe grounds us in a very small and lush garden oasis we call the Earth surrounded by light years of inhospitable space. The biblical narrative moves quickly past the chaos into the garden where we live, giving full vent to the lesser hostilities we experience in this earthen reality that confines us.

The biblical narrative brings our experience quickly into the historical discourse, aligning with treaties, and steles, and pottery, and ancient ruins of a past that is not beyond our collective memory. The convergence of the mytho-history of the biblical narrative with actual history lines up like a laser pointer in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth.

That Jesus lived and interacted with real people in real places in real time, is as certain as any historical narrative can be. That puts the claim that this same Jesus rose from the dead squarely in the realm of that history.

People have tried to paint that narrative in mythic black and white, but the attempt does not ring true to the reality. The attempts are pseudo-history: stretching vague similarities to fit like a small shirt on a 3x frame, and ignoring the fullness of the differences like a 2D rendering of a multi-dimensional landscape.

The historical claim is that Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead in real time, in a real place, and interacted in a resurrected human body with real people. CS Lewis says it is the true myth of which all other myth is a shadow. It breaks into our experience like a switch shifts everything from black and white into living color.

If there are dying and rising gods in pagan mythology, they (only faintly) portend the reality that occurred in the 1st Century (modern era) that is recounted in the biographies (that we call the Gospels) written about one, Jesus of Nazareth, in a place called Judea. The earliest claimants of this reality – people who knew the man we call Jesus, who lived with him, who heard him speak, who watched him die on a Roman cross – were so convinced of the reality of his resurrection that they were willing to die for it, and many of them did.

As other people have pointed out, many people are willing to die for the abstract truths they believe in. These people died for a concrete reality they claim to have experienced – Jesus who appeared alive to them in the flesh after he was dead. It doesn’t make sense that they would be willing to die for this claim if they had any question about the truth of that concrete claim.