welcome to moral hala tix i'm your host valerie to rico and this is our monthly series christianity in the public square is easter a pagan holiday some folks are saying that the crucifixion and resurrection stories are just another retelling death and resurrection of the sun the cycle of the seasons other people insist that they are literal histories accurate in every detail our guest tonight dr tony nugent says that the reality is more complex and more interesting than either of these dr nugent has taught for fifteen years in the school of theology and religious studies at seattle university he is a symbologist an expert in ancient symbols and a presbyterian minister welcome thank you thank you for joining us tonight so you say if i understand you correctly that the death and resurrection of jesus are not literal histories coming from my background growing up as an evangelical that is an extraordinary assertion to hear from a christian minister and a christian scholar but what let's roll with it for for a bit more if they're not literal histories what are they well they are what i would call his sized myths you'll have to elaborate well it's a myth that is set in a particular historical setting and in this case first century palestine but in my view of things the historical part of it is extremely small and difficult to to the story has been so embellish with myth you know that that historical connel is not very recoverable you're saying we don't know nobody knows what actually happened refers to the cosmos it refers to ancient times and it gathers into itself many different ingredients as the as the christ myth is this just a retelling  cycle of the seasons the winter sun disappearing and returning to life after three days i think it's very much of an oversimplification to say that it's just just a seasonal me if it's just a nother example of dying and rising god myth those or that it's just about the seasons it's it's about all that stuff but it's a lot more than that as well the the new testament is very much of a continuation of the stories there are told in the hebrew scriptures in the gospel stories there's four gospels and the story is the stories of jesus and all through those gospels the authors are talking about how different things that jesus does are fulfillments of prophecies or prototypes which are in the hebrew scriptures the stories are that way because jesus is the fulfillment of the prophecies and prototypes of the he rescript troops but i think it works the other way actual  that the authors are not basing their stories on things that actually happened there they're basing their stories on the hebrew scriptures and it's like their in hebrew scriptures for their time it's like midrash it's you know it's the old testament scriptures and other mythic themes from antiquity are dictating the story rather than the events  in in the first century with a guy named jesus dictating the stories so i'm thinking of hollywood in the way they take an old movie and they remake it with modern characters my my kids were recently watching a remake of some disney history how can you say that if there are many there as a as a christian it sounds like complete heresy to me well that's because of the supposed from the comment you made at the beginning of the kind of christianity you grew up in mean right the bible is literally true it's the perfect word of god it is absolute and complete but like i mean to say you know i hear people say the bible has imperfections the bible our spiritual ancestors were doing the best they could to try and figure out god's will and to articulate it through their human context and through our feeble human brains but to say this stuff was a myth those that seems pretty afield well when i went to seminary we were trained in how to do careful and critical reading of the biblical texts and when you do that you discover all kinds of things like wide well you discover that the there's contradictions between the different accounts that there are things which cannot possibly be histor true that there are symbols and themes that connect up with the ancient near east and all kinds of interesting ways and it's very difficult after you've done that kind of a reading of the text and discovered this symbolic and mythic universe that these stories are part of it's very hard to hang on to a literal reading any longer you know fat fascinating so what you're saying these stories did not you know spring full formed from the forehead of zeus or whatever that crick myth is that they themselves evolved essentially they incubated it took time for them to develop they took on different forms he can and i think we can do that because of the discoveries that have been made in the last hundred fifty years by archaeologists who have dug up these tablets from this sands of iraq and we have  many many kinnear form tax with stories and some of them connect very closely with with biblical stories and i'm fascinated so i want to hear what have formed tablets the story from ancient mesopotamia which is forty two hundred years old that i think has the closest connection to the story of the death and resurrection of christ is a story wait what you're saying so you're saying the original jesus was female no i'm saying there's a mythic template that goes back forty two hundred years and the christ story is participates in  descent of ishtar in the babylonian version of it it's a story about the goddess in nona and about her descent to the underworld so at least that's the first half of the story which old ok so a not a goes down to the answer world k so she decides for whatever reason it's not real clear she decides she's going down to the underworld she's a goddess of the heavens she's the queen of heaven and she's a personification of the planet venus actually all right so she decides that she's going to go down to the underworld and down there is she's going to confront her sister arish who's the queen of the underworld so before she goes she tells her assistant that she's going down there and that she's going to get in big trouble that she's going to be killed and she instructs her assistant about what to do when that happens so she goes down to hell to to the underworld to the land of no return and she is immediately arrested by the soldiers ok so it's going to little familiar making an arrest she's arrested she's put on trial she's convicted ok she's sentenced to death then she's hung on a stake in effect she's crucified ok after being tortured and stripped of her clothes for example i mean there are all these things that happen this is definitely sounding more familiar ok and then get this after three days she's rescued and how is she rescued her assistant so she comes back to life after three days is that what you're saying she's brought back to life by another god her assistant has gone and talked to god whose name is so let's let me interrupt here so mythic template i'm hearing i'm hearing dissent from heaven i'm hearing  they were always kind of crosses like a picture of them christians sometimes refer to jesus being tied hung from a tree and then three days that's fascinating three days where does the number three come from well the number three in terms of  this three days he comes to mentally i would say from the heavens from from astronomy so let me explain that for a minute ok there are two heavenly bodies which can reappear in the sky after being under the horizon for three days and those two have only bodies are the moon and the planet venus ok so nest being ishtar being in and so if you don't mind a little bit of astronomy here ok i'm fascinated ok so the moon the moon every month as a part of its cycle disappears at the eastern horizon and in the morning the old crescent of the moon is seen and then the moon is no longer seen and two or three days later it reappears on the opposite side of the sky  in the western sky in the evening so you're saying this three day part of the story actually is kind of you know when people talk about those people who say it's all it's all astrological it's all about the disappearance they say the sign you're saying the moon or the planet venus yeah but i'm also not saying it's just astrological i say but it's partly astrological but we have to be very you know rigorous in how we interpret these things and we can't just make these big generalisations so but i think that the lunar cycle is involved in the three day period but there's another heavenly body i mentioned venus which also can reappear after three days and it does it sort of in the opposite way it last appears in the evening aha so so you're saying your peers in the morning so what you're saying is that the death of crucifixion the crucifixion i'm sorry and resurrection of jesus are based on this story the the end on a story is this the mythic template then that you were talking about i think yes that this is the primary mythic template that the gospel story of the death and resurrection and ascension to heaven of jesus follows and if we take the gospel of john's account of this where jesus also descends from heaven before he ascends back up that's an even closer parallel to the to the anon a  story again like yours you're still get to hold your credentials as a professor in a in a catholic university and you're still going to call yourself a presbyterian minister but are there other christians who would say this that this is the basis for the gospel story oh of course there are lots of views within christianity you know we're taught in our seminary to do critical readings of these texts and it was a very different kind of christianity than that i grew up in from the type that you grew up in and there are there have been from the beginning of the christian religion and many different forms of christianity not all of which subscribe or do subscribe today to a literal stic fundamentalist reading of the bible i am a while back when to hear an eastern sermon at a local mega church called mars hill and the minister there said if the resurrection didn't literally happen there's no reason for us to be here in fact what he said is if the resurrection didn't literally happen there is no reason for us to be here there are parties to be had there are women to be had there are guns to shoot there are people to shoot now he said you know his audience laughed and of course what i was thinking is if if if the only thing that stands between you and  violence is a belief in the literal resurrection of jesus christ i'm very glad you believe that but of course what he was also saying is there is no basis for christianity without a literal resurrection well i don't think th e important question is whether these stories that are told are literally true or not i think the most important questions what do the stories mean what do they signify what kind of values do they communicate spiritually and ethically what do they mean for us today if anything i think these are the questions and to get hung up on the questions of the historical basis or lack of basis for the stories is i think is kind of a red herring in and diversion from what's important in stories if the real important questions are what the stories mean and what what they meant to the writers and what they mean to us today what did they mean to the writers and what do they mean to us today and we have to look for the whole long ancient mythic background to these stories and i started to tell you how that sounds like a college course and i started to tell you the story of the descent of anon and i got halfway through it and you know but there's more to the story too that relates to this all right what his form in the he break and biblical tradition as your way ok so we can come back to that later well so another lineage yeah so but here's the thing when  is heading back up to the upper world she's rescued by some creatures who are sent down by the sort of like angels and we also have that in in the  story but so she's heading back up to the upper world but they stop her and they tell her that she cannot leave the underworld unless a substitute is provided ok so finally comes upon her husband upon her husband has been so so so democracy then becomes a substitute for her in the underworld but you know yeah this is sounding a little fishy i mean you're saying first you're he is that the jesus figure with a subsidy is a substitute for somebody who deserves to be dead who can't leave you but then you've got in on a as the jesus figure do see is important mythic character from mesopotamia and there are a lot of similarities between him and jesus finishing the story she she goes and she finds her husband who doesn't seem to care at all that she's been in the underworld and she gets mad at him and she decides he'll be her substitute ok ok so he he starts running away from the soldiers of of the underworld who have come up there and he's assisted by the sun god i think you know ok this is too ok think oh ok i'm sorry finish the story but we're running out of time and what i'd love to hear is what is the story means to you ok so they finally find him and and find  him and take him down but a compromise is reached whereby he only has to spend half of the year in the underworld and then his devoted sister substitutes for him for the other half of the year and then the crisis on the earth so i'm sorry i have to interrupt i said i wanted to hear your interpretation but what i'm thinking about is all of those old testament stories in which there is  substitutionary atonement there is a blood sacrifice of an animal it sounds like kind of in the early parts of the torah that was emerging out of this tradition of blood sacrifice of human beings as substitutionary sacrifice and then jesus of course is called the lamb of god the kind of unblemished lamb who takes away the sins of the world so this notion of substitutionary atonement or kind of having a substitute who dies for you this is a familiar theme it sounds like yeah and a lot of those stories about that involved a movie who's called tom in the west semitic world if this story is not a historical reality if jesus didn't literally die and be resurrected if this is a story that has deep mythic significance spiritual significance symbolic significance what for you as a presbyterian minister what is that significance yeah well easters always been of interest to me and meaningful to me partly because i was born on easter but what it means to me is  that out of death can come life and out of situations which are dangerous and which are threatening us with with death spiritually and physically life can come so it is a story of redemption a story of him a story about hope and it doesn't need to be a story about  hope for what's going to happen to us when we die can be a story about hope for us here on this earth in this life so i think it's a very powerful metaphor a story of hope a story of rebirth a story of resurrection i listen to that and i think there can be no accident that we celebrate easter when we do at the height of spring people don't  think much about why do we call this holiday easter well we call this holiday easter because our anglo saxon ancestors called it that and they named it after the goddess of the springtime and of renewal whose name was a stir which is a form or reflex of the name ishtar you're telling it goes back you see to the very same story yeah incredible as anyone told the church this well it's been discussed in in journals and in classes on religion and  christianity but not to many people in the churches seem to know about this you know one of the things i find fascinating is that many christians in the tradition that i grew up in think of some of the secular symbols of easter as being just kind of random add ons the easter eggs as a symbol of fertility if you will the rabbit or hair is a symbol of fertility that these things are about birth and renewal and yet what you're saying is it's part of the very same storable paganism of this goes back to the beginnings i mean even the church of the holy sepak or right which is the holiest church in the christian world and which was built in the fourth century was built where there was a temple of s talk to which is also ishtar the west semitic version of her it was built on that site they tore down the temple of turkey and built the church of the holy s there is another linkage to this ancient myth thoughts i am absolutely fascinated what would you want to say to people or were the kind of people that i was as an evangelical christian as a fundamentalist who fear that unless the bible is literally true unless this story is literally true there is no basis for christianity there is no basis for morality or spirituality or for us kind of coming into community with each other i would say you know the christian faith does not need to be based on fear it can be based on hope and it can be intellectually open and honest and rigorous and it doesn't need to be a literalistic kind of religion it doesn't need to be a triumphalist kind of religion that says and i was his right only way this is the only truth you know christians can can open themselves up to seeing that a lot of the truths of their faith are mirrored in other faith traditions around the world in judaism in isla buddhism but once people start really reading the bible in a critical way instead of just taking a simple minded literalistic few then the doors open up i it sounds like now this is a whole a whole additional show the question of whether there is one path or many pa whether christianity can and should a certain kind of an exclusive well unique claim to insight into into god i think the exclusive istic form of christianity is really a very and in teaching i don't think it's in tune with the original spirit of jesus at all dr nugent thank you very much for joining us here tonight and i appreciate your presence as a as a christian minister as a scholar of christianity and other world religions you've given us lots to think about