T he Resurrection of Jesus stands as the linchpin of Christian theology. Without it, the religion’s salvific framework falls apart. As Paul famously writes in 1 Corinthians 15:14 ,  “If Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith is in vain.”  For believers, this is a miraculous and literal event; for many scholars, however, it is better understood as a mythological narrative — one that follows well-worn patterns from the ancient world. Resurrection and the Pattern of Dying-Rising Gods The Resurrection story did not emerge in a vacuum. As Jonathan Z. Smith , a historian of religion at the University of Chicago, points out in Drudgery Divine (1990), the ancient Mediterranean world was replete with stories of dying and rising gods. While Smith was critical of oversimplified comparisons, he acknowledged that early Christians developed their theology in dialogue with prevailing mythic motifs. “Early Christians didn’t invent the category,...

T he assumption that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure is nearly universal in Western thought. Yet a growing minority of scholars—most notably Dr. Richard Carrier, PhD—argue that this assumption deserves serious scrutiny. Carrier is a historian of antiquity trained at Columbia University and a prominent advocate of the “mythicist” position: the idea that Jesus Christ may have originated not as a real person, but as a mythical, celestial being later historicized by early Christians. In On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (2014), Carrier applies Bayesian probability theory to historical evidence and concludes that “the probability Jesus existed is low—maybe as low as 1 in 3” (Carrier, 2014, p. 600). He asserts that the earliest Christian documents, particularly the epistles of Paul, describe a supernatural savior who performs salvific acts in a heavenly realm, not on Earth. Paul, writing decades before the Gospels, shows no knowledge of a recen...