Osiris died, and he stayed dead -- that's why he doesn't qualify as a "dying and rising God"!

Oh yeah. You know Pikachu is ticked off this time...

Pikachu has a big, big problem: The most important names in modern religious scholarship have indeed thrown over the idea of dying and rising Gods -- in fact, almost all of them, and in particular, J. Z. Smith. He's not a Christian, so Pikachu can't play the old "bias" game; so what's left for him to do? Just the other usual tactic of the pagan copycat crowd: Accuse the man of incompetence. We'll now look at how Pikachu tries to erase the stain Smith's expertise puts on his thesis, and we'll see how much more he squirms in the process.

Dying and rising God "scholarship" as Pikachu correctly notes did get going back in 1890 when Sir James Frazer wrote The Golden Bough Studies in Magic and Religion , which argued that in the ancient near east Gods like Osiris, Tammuz and the early middle eastern version of Adonis, had all "died and been resurrected" (Pikachu's words, misuing "resurrection" again).

It didn't take long for scholars to find serious flaws with Frazer's work. As a classical scholar noted for us here:

Frazer's theory is loaded with problems. Whole papers, even books, criticising his theory have been written, and nowadays it is extremely difficult to find any recognised, reputable anthropologists who will accept it even in a modified form. Here are some of the major difficulties with it: 1. Frazer's sources were frequently inaccurate or irrelevant, or else he interpreted them in tendentious ways. 2. Frazer himself subscribed to discredited nineteenth-century ideas such as the evolutionist model of human societal development (which has nothing to do with the theory of biological evolution and is today firmly rejected by experts) and the notion that present-day primitive tribesmen can be studied as a means of finding out what things were like at the dawn of civilisation. 3. Evidence which has emerged since Frazer wrote has not merely failed to back up his hypotheses: it has fatally undermined them. For interesting critiques of Frazer's work, see e.g. Sir Edmund Leach's articles in Daedalus 90 (1961) and Current Anthropology 7 (1966); also (in much greater detail) J.Z.Smith, 'The Glory, Jest and Riddle', Diss. Yale 1969 (by one of the greatest living historians of religion).

So it's a little bit slippery for Pikachu to say nothing but, ever since people have been arguing if Jimmy had things straight. The argument is, in fact, long over; Jimmy did not have things straight, and this is a broad, accepted consensus, Period.

So quite rightly, we often use this quote: >>

"The category of dying and rising Gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.
[Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods," in Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987, Volume 3, page 521]

Dr. Smith's Dying and Rising Gods
No doubt Pikachu has had this quote shoved (rightly) in his face so many times he's gotten a little perturbed. Not that he can do anything about it but wet his diapers. His response to Smith (whom he says is "a professor somewhere" who "writes about ancient religion and the modern scholarship of Pagan-Christian origins" -- he's a professor at the prestigious U. of Chicago, thank you, and has credentials that make Pikachu look like a cockroach) and while mocking, isn't even quality riposte. But anyway, since Pikachu needs to do something about this guy, and matching his level of education obviously isn't an option, he does the next best thing: he fudges, cries, whines, spits, and juxtaposes Smith's picture with one of Jimmy Swaggart. Yep, that'll do.

Fudging? Pikachu says you never hear apologists mention Dr. Smith's arguments. Um, yeah, and what? Is Pikachu trying to say that Smith doesn't have any arguments? That he just decided to wake up one day and say, "You know, there really isn't a category of dying and rising gods out there?" You're laughing, right? You shouldn't be. Pikachu goes on to say that the quote of Smith is from an opinion piece! Yes, it's just Smith's opinion (!) -- never mind that he is credentialed, respected by his peers, two hundred times more educated in this area than Pikachu will ever be in his wildest dreams -- it's all just his opinion which isn't backed up by any serious research; Smith just woke up one morning and felt like it! How pathetic can you get! Last, Pikachu says that the article itself actually makes it clear that other scholars don't all agree with Dr. Smith. Now how clear is that. Well, obviously some scholar at some point (like Frazer!) held a contrary position; otherwise there's no point in Smith writing a response! Keep in mind that all of this politically correct mulluguthering is Pikachu's best "argument" -- he can't actually deal in facts or educate himself to the level Smith has.

From Pikachu, here's what Smith's encyclopedia article say's [sic] about the Egyptian God Osiris >>

#1 Pikachu points to the date -- as if this makes some case for Osiris "dying and rising" >>
#2 He points out that it didn't change -- like this makes a case for it either >>

#3 Osiris did die, Pikachu notes, but remember that the bodies of Egyptian gods (as Smith knows) didn't ever actually "die" >>

He was "rejuvenated," -- remember that this means he was pieced back together; it is not "rising" in any sense of the word, because he isn't actually "dead" >>

He went to the underworld -- the Egyptian "Heaven" (though nothing like the Judeo-Christian one). >>

Armed with this ream of equivocation, Pikachu repeats, " Died...
rejuvinated...
went to Heaven. You got that? We sure do. Pikachu is so ignorant that he thinks he can collapse it all down to general terms, stand back, slap his forehead, and whoop, "Byyyy gumm, it's a parallel!!"

But, Disciplined scholars like Smith, who know about the nature of the Egyptian gods; who know that they were actually deathless -- know that there isn't a parallel. Period. If Pikachu wants to know [e]xactly what would count he needs to go out and do some homework -- not just sit around crying in his wet diaper. Smith knew the truth, and that is why he said:

In no sense can Osiris be said to have "risen" in the sense required by the dying and rising pattern; most certainly it was never conceived as an annual event. The repeated formula "Rise up, you have not died," whether applied to Osiris or a citizen of Egypt, signaled a new, permanent life in the realm of the dead.

And thus it is that "living forever in Heaven" here is "different from being risen," because what happened to Osiris was just part of the nature of his body as an Egyptian god. Pikachu, obviously frustrated by now, whines of how Smith "prattles on" about the nature of Egyptian afterlife (now you can be sure THAT hides a load of details Pikachu can't deal with!) and that it was not a "life of earth," and so again is obviously not a return to life at all. Pikachu calls this "digging the hole deeper." We say it is Pikachu playing hillbilly with scholarship beyoind his reach.

The myth and ritual of Osiris emphasizes the message that there is life for the dead, although it is of a different character than that of the living. What is to be feared is "dying a second time in the realm of the dead" (Book of Going Forth by Day 175-176).

Osiris is a powerful god of the potent dead. In no sense can the dramatic myth of his death and reanimation be harmonized to the pattern of dying and rising gods.
[Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods," in Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987, Volume 3, page 524-5]

That's it. That's all Pikachu says in response to Smith. He can't handle the evidence, because he doesn't have the needed background knowledge; and all he can do otherwise is rear back in his rocking chair, gum a corncob pipe in his mouth, and yell, "Gawwwwwwllly!" Have you even seen anything more pathetic? As a matter of fact, I have.

One of the books Pikachu recommends is Tryggve N.D. Mettinger's The Riddle of Resurrection: Dying and Rising Gods in the Ancient Near East. Please note that the use of "resurrection" in the title reflects a popular usage -- not the specific technical experience described in Judaism. Pikachu's all a-ga-ga over this book, but a review here by Bryn Mawr Classical Review is quite interesting. It says: The preeminent "dying" god was once thought to be Osiris, and Mettinger devotes Chapter 6 to exploring the Egyptian god's substantial differences from the gods under examination. Osiris is fundamentally a "dead" god: his rituals and his mythical powers extend from his permanent (and "lively") dominion in the world of the dead. From this position he raises the corn, as symbolized in the "corn mummies" that temples would assemble to dramatize the god's powers; but the corn's rising never signifies Osiris's resurrection. Perhaps, given the quite early appearance of Egyptian cults in cities along the Syrian coast, Mettinger notes, cults of Osiris might have influenced the west Syrian cults of dying and rising gods: the original Adonis gardens as descendants of the corn mummies? Osiris's underworld dominion inspiring similar powers among the Syrian dying gods? But Osiris himself stands apart from the "dying/rising" myth. It's in a book Pikachu recommends; he even quotes a small portion that calls Osiris a "dead" god -- but does he have any response to it? Not a word. To him, it's just "obvious" and needs no explanation. And that's the way it is when you haven't got an ounce of knowledge of scholarly discipline.

A real look at the scholarship of dying and rising gods? Be more critical than Pikachu, at least
Pikachu doesn't want you ""suckered into thinking scholars everywhere actually do agree there were no dying and rising Gods." That's a rather loaded description; Smith did not exactly say that there were "no dying and rising gods"; what he did say (as the review linked above notes) was that the category was tendentious and flawed, and that critical principles needed to be applied before such a designation was used on a deity. Mettinger, as the review notes, wrote with Smith's critical principles in mind.

Pikachu whines that scholars, being critical as they are, aren't using the definition of "dying and rising god" that he would. Now isn't that too bad. What Pikachu fails to grasp is that Frazer himself was the one who created the category, and it was he who would only allow a god to be so categorized if i.e., the god had annual rituals associated with their reversal of death. That's why Mettinger excludes Melqart. In his mental simplicity, Pikachu thinks that the category "dying and rising god" meant just what he reads it to say and nothing more.

It is a wise choice. If the category were not so properly managed, everything from Frankenstein to a revived CPR victim could be shoved into a category of "dying and rising god" by some ridiculous machination (especially if the CPR victim was a Mormon). And when Pikachu calls Melqart's reversal a "resurrection" he is playing the same game. No Jewish resurrection here -- Melqart (which Pikachu misspells "Melquart") is said to "awake" or "arise", which just isn't specific enough. (By the way, the review says that Melqart DID have rituals attached, so it's a good question as to whether Pikachu even read Mettinger correctly, especially since he didn't spell "Melqart" right!)

The upshot that is people can accurately say Scholars are a lot more critical about throwing around "dying and rising gods" than a neophyte like Pikachu. The "rigid academic definition" is designed to leave out precisely the sort of ignorant, uncritical evaluation Pikachu presents to us. As the review notes, in a way that pummels the rest of Pikachu's ravings on this point about Adonis, et al.: But it is precisely in this rigorous attention to differences and to the various meanings of gods' deaths and reappearances that Mettinger's work fractures the very usefulness of the category "dying and rising god." By the end of the monograph, the category emerges as a rather simplistic generalization for a very wide array of gods and a very murky range of rituals. What does it mean, for example, for these gods to "die"? They might descend for a time to the underworld, disappear from agricultural or seasonal experience, or frame ritual traditions of mourning -- in no case identical to "death" as experienced on a regular human (or even royal) scale. Likewise, a god's "resurrection" means vegetative, agricultural, or seasonal emergence, a divine image's "appearance" by procession at a particular temple, or the frame for ritual traditions of celebration -- not the kind of revivification imagined in the biblical tradition (e.g., Ezekiel 37, Daniel 12, 2 Baruch 50-51). J. Z. Smith once recommended that the comparison of religions involves ultimately the "rectification" of the categories by which one compares phenomena -- those essential lenses or contexts into which we experimentally set our data. In this case, Mettinger's methodological precision and attention to textual detail reveal the "dying/rising god" classification to be, in fact, a non-classification -- a Christian theological holdover, like "sacrament" or "faith," from a time when all comparison was meant to legitimize or delegitimize dogma.

Phooey, indeed!