The Death and Resurrection of Jesus, Myths & Sacred Narratives
Standing
Concerns Scholarly Note
Currently States The comparative category of the dying and rising god, which reads the death and resurrection of Jesus alongside similar patterns in other traditions' myths, descends from James Frazer's The Golden Bough and belongs to the same tradition of comparative mythology represented by Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1949), which treats cyclical death and renewal as a recurring cross-cultural pattern. That comparative category has been directly contested since the 1980s, when Jonathan Z. Smith's critique argued the supposed pattern was constructed by scholars rather than found consistently in the primary sources, and the dispute remains unresolved for every entry of that comparative type the atlas records, not only this one.
Mircea Eliade's The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History (Princeton University Press, 1949), read alongside Jonathan Z. Smith's later critique, examined whether the comparative category of the dying and rising god, applied to the death and resurrection of Jesus since James Frazer, is a pattern genuinely found across traditions' myths or one constructed by the comparative method itself. Weighing Eliade's cross-cultural reading of cyclical death and renewal against Smith's argument, from the 1980s onward, that the primary sources do not support it consistently, the atlas records the category as contested for every entry of that type rather than reliable for this one.
Source The Myth of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History, Mircea Eliade; Willard R. Trask (trans.)