page_title: The Christ Myth
section_title: Features of dying-and-rising God
hierarchical_section_title: The Christ Myth / Christ Myth II – the witnesses to the historicity of Jesus (1912) / The witness of the Gospels / Features of dying-and-rising God
caption_attribution_description: Jesus Passions
context_page_description: The Christ Myth, first published in 1909, was a book by Arthur Drews on the Christ myth theory. Drews, along with Bruno Bauer and Albert Kalthoff, is one of the three German pioneers of the denial of the existence of a historical Jesus.
context_section_description: In Chapter 13, Drews emphasizes the mystery cult character of early Christian ecstatic reverence:
  Isaiah's suffering servant of God, offering himself for the sins of men, the just of Wisdom in combination with the mythic ideas of a suffering, dying, and rising god-saviour of the nearer Asiatic religions — it was about these alone, as about a solid nucleus, that the contents of the new religion crystallised. The ideal Christ, not the historical Jesus of modern liberal theology, was the founder of the Christian movement... It is more probable that Jesus and Isaiah are one and the same person than that the Jesus of liberal theology brought Christianity into existence.
  ...that Christ became "the son of God" and descended upon the earth; that God divested himself of his divinity, took on human form, led a life of poverty with the poor, suffered, was crucified and buried, and rose again, and thus secured for men the power to rise again and to obtain forgiveness of sins and a blessed life with the heavenly father—that is the mystery of the figure of Christ; that is what the figure conveyed to the hearts of the faithful, and stirred them to an ecstatic reverence for this deepest revelation of God. [emphasis added]
caption: Icon of Jesus being led to Golgotha, 16th century, Theophanes the Cretan (Stavronikita Monastery, Mount Athos).
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