Talk:Dying-and-rising god/Archive 2

Archive 1

Archive 2

Christian Apologists at Work

Trying to intertwine these deities with James Frazer, as if they aren't real without him, is like trying to say evolution depends on Darwin. It is a weak rhetorical strategy because all either of these men did was identify (not invent) what was already there. The fact that Persephone and company were in fact believed to die AND rise exists independent of whether any particular scholar is in fashion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:8C3:4001:9220:1943:91CD:9DBB:3756 (talk) 16:29, 11 May 2022 (UTC) Whoever put this page together is overtly trying to obscure knowledge rather than enrich it.

No one is arguing that these deities' existence depends on Frazer. The debate among scholars is about whether it's useful to categorize deities in this way. The idea that all these deities fit a single pattern may distort our understanding of the individual deities in question. For example, Frazer assumed that the dying-and-rising deities originated as representations of agricultural fertility. Yet even in the case of Osiris, who does check most of the boxes for a dying-and-rising deity, that assumption fails. The earliest evidence about Osiris indicates that he was originally a funerary god, and his connection with agricultural fertility, though certainly an important aspect of his character, was a secondary development (as J. Gwyn Griffiths argued at length in The Origins of Osiris and His Cult decades ago).

Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the most prominent critics of the category, argues that the idea of a single category for all these deities is based on Christianity. According to Smith, the deities Frazer put in the category either die without returning to the world of the living (like Osiris) or disappear and return without actually dying (like, in Smith's interpretation of the fragmentary and ambiguous texts, Baal/Hadad). In the ancient world, the argument goes, the only deity said to have died, been resurrected, and reappeared in the world of the living was Jesus. And such criticisms don't need to come from a Christian apologetic perspective. As this article says, Marcel Detienne criticized the category for "making Christianity the standard by which all religion is judged, since death and resurrection are more central to Christianity than many other faiths". A. Parrot (talk) 17:54, 11 May 2022 (UTC)