The myths alleged to have grown about the career of Jesus as a wonder-worker are prefaced by parallel accounts of a temptation and a con- quest of the power of evil. The prince Siddhartha was temjited by the spirit of evil, who urged him to abandon his foolish and futile purpose of living a simple and abstemious life, and to return to the comfort, glory, and power of the royal palace ; but he resisted. The prophet Zarathustra had been urged by the evil spirit Ahriman to ' renounce the good law of the worshippers of Mazda,' and thereby to win dominion over the nations of the earth. But he had declined to do so. All the subsequent mii-acles recorded of Jesus are said to be abun- dantly paralleled in the legendary lore of the Orientals. The miraculous element did, in fact, persist through the Patristic age and down into the mediaeval period.
The last portion of the Gospel story is said to be specially overlaid with mj'ths of this genus. All that is apparently distinctive and remarkable here is represented as the reflexion and counterpart of the myths current among pagans. The idea of the death of Christ as the propitiation for sin is paral- leled by the numerous instances of Wcarious human sacrifices. The burial and resurrection are the Christian equivalents of the Egyptian myth of Osiris, who was slain by his brother Set, ' the demon of the withering heat of summer,' and who lives again in the person of his son Horns. Like- wise the fabled death, resurrection, and translation into heaven of Adonis, the rape of Persephone, and her rescue upon the compromise that she thereafter spend part of the year with her mother upon earth and part in Hades, are expressions of the same thought.
These cases are associated with mystic rites. In fact, it seems to be a peculiarity of mysteries that death and restoration to life again should be sj-m- bolically represented in them. In their best form these rites occur in the Dionyso- Orphic festivals. Here the death of the god was enacted in the sacrifice of a bull, whose flesh was then torn and devoured by the worshippers without being drainetl of its blood. Thus, it was supposed, the immortal life of the god passed into and conferred immor- tality upon the wor.shippers (Clem. Alex. Protrcpt. i. 12, 17; Frazer, Golden Bough'-, ii. 165).
If the death of Jesus is pictured as a voluntarj' descent into the realm of shades that He might there conquer death, the same thought is seen
to run through the Babylonian myth of Islitar (Schrader, Hollnnfahrt d. latnr), the ilanda»an myth of Hibil Ziwa (Brandt, Mnnduische Religion, p. 213 ff.), and the myths of Orpheus and Herakles, both of whom accomplished descents into Hades, and, according to the Greek classical mythology, achieved conquests there.
The Gospel account of the ascension is paralleled first of all in the OT by the ascensions of Enoch and Elijah, then in the Gra^co-Koman legendary lore by the ascensions of Romulu-s and Herakles. Legends of ascensions were, in fact, common even in the later periods. Some of the Roman emperors were said to have been raised at their death into equality with the gods (Rhode, Psyche, p. 663). The case of Peregrinus Proteus, recited bj' Lucian, is quite noteworthy. Peregi-inus took Herakles as his ensample. As Herakles had made his exit fiom the world by consigning himself to a funeral pyre, so Peregrinus built a pj're and cast himself into it ; but at the moment of his doing so a trustworthj' old man rejiorts that he saw an eagle issuing from the flames and flying up into the heavens. Further, the same old man testifies that he beheld Peregrinus clothed in a white garment, and with a garland of victory on his head. Apol- lonius of Tyana is also reported to have dis- appeai'ed quite mysteriously, either in the temple of Athene at Lindus or in that of Dictynna at Crete. Philostratus, his biographer, appeals to the fact that nowhere on earth could a grave of him be found, in proof of his ascension and deification.
To the question how these mj'ths filtered into the Gospel story there is no clear answer given. It is simply assumed that tliej" were in the air, and that a new religion must somehow adopt them, and embellish the life and personality of its founder with them. This is a serious difficulty with the new mythical theory. For it is precisely the manner of their infiltration into the Christian tradition that is the crucial point in it. The exist- ence of the myths themselves among the pagans has always been knoAvn, and is no new discovery. It is not by simply re-telling these stories that the theory can gain sujjport to itself, but by substanti- ating the claim that they actually passed from the v/orld of heathen thought into the Christian tradi- tion. This difficulty is enhanced and made practic- ally insuperable when it is further borne in mind that the Hebrew antecedents of the Gospel had resolutely and efl'ectively resisted the incorpora- tion of such myths for a thousand years. More- over, there is no room in the time interval between the life of Jesus and the writing down of the Gospel accounts of Him for such a process as is assumed, unless we except the birth-narratives of St. ^latthew and St. Luke upon purely textual grounds. Criticism has been busy with the origin of the Gospel story as found in the extant narratives, and the more light it throws on the subject the more clearly it appears that the main data come from eye- and ear-witnes.ses. The old Strauss theory, assuming that the myths were constructed by the disciples of Jesus under the power of an excited and vivid imagination, was at this point stronger than the new one.