Yes, I saw that line in the Britannica entry too. It looks like the authors were hung up on the Christian meaning of “resurrection,” which as we’ll see in a moment, is quite dubious. Britannica also says that Osiris “was both a god of fertility and the embodiment of the dead and resurrected king,” and that Isis gave “new life to Osiris, who thenceforth remained in the underworld as ruler and judge.” So again, the hang-up seems to be about a difference between bringing the dead back to life, and some allegedly narrower meaning of “resurrection.” And that’s even though Britannica grants that Osiris was identified with “the dead and resurrected king.”
The other online encyclopedias all say Osiris was resurrected. New World Encyclopedia speaks of Osiris, “the god's resurrection and return to prominence in the afterlife.” And it says that Isis “used a spell she had learned from her father and brought him back to life so he could impregnate her. At the conclusion of their semi-necrophilial intercourse, he died again,” and that she “reconnected the pieces and bandaged them together for a proper burial. Thereafter, Osiris was restored to life (of sorts) as the god of the underworld.” Regarding Osiris-Dionysus in the Greek context, it says “attempts had been made to unify Greek mystical philosophy, such as Platonism (and, more explicitly, Neo-Platonism) with the cult of Osiris, whose mythical resurrection was highly appealing to Greek auditors.”
World History says “Isis was able to revive Osiris and, once he was alive, she assumed the form of a kite and flew around him, drew the seed from his body into her own, and became pregnant with a son, Horus. Even though Osiris now lived, he was incomplete and could no longer rule the land of the living. He withdrew into the afterlife where he became Lord and Judge of the Dead.”
Encyclopedia.com says Isis “found all the pieces (except the penis, which she replicated), reconstituted the body, performed the rituals to give Osiris eternal life, and founded his cult. The principal version of the story cited by Plutarch does not reveal how Isis gave birth to her son Horus, but according to the eighteenth-dynasty Hymn to Osiris and the iconography of several Egyptian monuments, she conceived Horus by the revivified corpse of her husband.”
Wikipedia says Osiris is “the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation,” and that “Isis retrieves and joins the fragmented pieces of Osiris, then briefly revives him by use of magic. This spell gives her time to become pregnant by Osiris.” And it says that “Osiris (strongly connected to the vegetable regeneration) who died only to be resurrected, represented continuity and stability…Because of his death and resurrection, Osiris was associated with the flooding and retreating of the Nile and thus with the yearly growth and death of crops along the Nile valley.” Moreover, “These ceremonies were fertility rites which symbolised the resurrection of Osiris…The first phase of the festival was a public drama depicting the murder and dismemberment of Osiris, the search for his body by Isis, his triumphal return as the resurrected god, and the battle in which Horus defeated Set.”
Hence, I spoke of the apparent “consensus” of scholars on the subject. Your dismissal of Assmann’s and Carrier’s interpretations is weird, considering you’re not an expert in the field. But when you say your background is in physics, this begins to make more sense. That’s why you’re drawn to a rationalistic interpretation of Mark, to a naturalization of the Christian myth. And the latent scientism you find in scientific and engineering circles (i.e. the prejudice against the humanities as supposedly inferior disciplines) would account for the one-sidedness of your opinions about Osiris and the gospels.
The problem is that the evidence of Jesus’s historicity is so weak that all we can do is appeal to the best explanation, lacking any smoking gun. There are lots of possibilities, and our preference for one or the other is going to be underdetermined by the available evidence.
But if we turn to your explanation, you’re saying the influence of dying and rising gods and of the Mystery Religions would have been redundant because the Christian claim that Jesus was resurrected came from Paul’s theology and from Mark’s allusion to the theft of Jesus’s body, which allusion Matthew made more explicit.
Yet Paul’s theology looks like it was influenced by the Mystery cults. He speaks, for instance, of ranks of initiation. And the Mystery cults (such as Isis’) worshiped dying and rising gods and held out the promise of personal immortality. Early Christianity was in fact a Jewish instantiation of a Greco-Roman Mystery cult, just as the latter was a Hellenistic syncretism. You say Paul was influenced by Philo, but Philo is the paradigmatic case of a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher. So how does appealing to Paul block the influence of dying and rising gods on early Christianity?
As for Mark, the consensus of scholars, as I understand it, is that Mark drew on numerous sources, including Paul, the Hebrew scriptures, and classic Greco-Roman writings such as Homer’s epics, transvaluating them all to produce not a historical record but a giant theological parable with exoteric and esoteric meanings. You’re not supposed to take his gospel literally unless you’re an outsider or only barely initiated into his inner Christian circle.
Mark follows Paul’s penchant for secrecy, as in 1 Cor. 2:7, 14: “But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, the hidden wisdom which God ordained before the ages for our glory, which none of the rulers of this age knew…the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.”
Mark 4:9-12 combines this with Isaiah when Mark has Jesus say, regarding his parables, ‘“Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear.” When he was alone, the Twelve and the others around him asked him about the parables. He told them, “The secret of the kingdom of God has been given to you. But to those on the outside everything is said in parables so that, “they may be ever seeing but never perceiving, and ever hearing but never understanding; otherwise they might turn and be forgiven!”’
So, is it likely that the inner meaning of Mark’s narrative is merely that Jesus’s body was stolen? How would that be at all spiritually illuminating or uplifting? No, the more likely intended meaning is that Jesus found the source of eternal life, and that Mark’s readers could do the same if they stuck together and contemplated the secret Christian teachings (like in Gnosticism).
If you’re saying instead that Jesus’s body was actually stolen, and that the spiritual interpretations were just overcompensations to address that awkward historical fact, this too is unlikely for several reasons. How would his body have been stolen when he didn’t likely have a private tomb? How would Jesus’s followers have learned what exactly happened to his body when they likely would have all fled for their lives? If they knew Jesus died on the cross and wasn’t somehow brought back to life, why would they have worshipped Jesus? How would the Christian cult have begun on such a shabby foundation?
If you’re saying not just that Jesus’s body was stolen but that it was naturally revived, as in The Passover Plot, so that Jesus faked a resurrection, this is an intriguing possibility, but I don’t see any decisive evidence in its favour. Matthew raises the possibility because critics evidently interpreted the emerging Christian narrative in that way. There are lots of awkward passages in Mark which Matthew and Luke tried to fix up. The reason they were there in the first place wasn’t so much that Mark was dealing with awkward historical facts, as that he was speaking in allegorical form to convey deeper meanings.
As for your preoccupation with the word “resurrection,” as when you say that Osiris wasn’t technically resurrected and is therefore irrelevant to Christianity, have a look at the root meaning of the word. The word comes from the Latin “resurgere,” meaning to rise again or to lift up, and is thus related to “resurge,” which comes from “surrigere,” combining “sub” (secondary) and “regere” (to direct or to rule). The word “reg” there derives from “rex,” meaning king, as in “regicide,” the killing of a king.
In plain English, “resurrection” means the act of rising from the dead. Thus, there’s no need for a physical revivification; any revival from the dead would do, and the Osiris myth is clearly centered on a resurrection in that broad sense. Osiris rises from the dead, not necessarily or mainly in physical terms, but in spiritual ones: he lives on in the Underworld, and indeed he rules there as the king of spirits, and he’s associated with Ra which rises every morning; moreover, Osiris lives on through Horus who was conceived by Osiris’s magically risen corpse, and who rises in that he rules from the sky after he avenges Osiris and defeats Set.
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Osiris#The_Isis_.2F_Osiris_Cycle
https://www.worldhistory.org/osiris/
https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/ancient-religions/ancient-religion/osiris
