Dying God - Jesus

Jesus

Some scholars, beginning with Franz Cumont, classify Jesus as a syncretized example of this archetype. In the Victorian era, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn used parallels between Christ, Osiris, and other solar dying-and-rising gods to construct elaborate systems of mysticism and theosophy. Following his conversion to Christianity, C. S. Lewis believed that the resurrection of Jesus belonged in this category of myths, with the additional property of having actually happened: "If God chooses to be mythopoeic—and is not the sky itself a myth—shall we refuse to be mythopathic?"

New Testament scholar Robert M. Price writes that the Jesus narrative has strong parallels with other Middle Eastern narratives about life-death-rebirth deities, parallels that he writes Christian apologists have tried to minimize.