Pope Benedict and the dying vegetation god
One surprising passage in the book Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI treats a pagan god in Old Testament times as a pre-figurement of Christ in dying and rising again.
The god in question is Hadad-rimmon, whom Benedict (now living in quiet retirement in the grounds of the Vatican) calls in his book “one of the dying and rising vegetation gods”.
Benedict, formerly Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has been painted by some as a dogmatist imposing a narrow creed. To them the comparison of Jesus and a mythical god would seem even more unlikely.
A few pages before his remarks about Hadadrimmon, Benedict tells a second-hand anecdote about CS Lewis, taken from a book by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn. The anecdote concerns Lewis having read “a 12-volume work about these myths”, which must be the armchair anthropologist James Frazer’s Golden Bough (written with the intention of discrediting Christianity).
The incident Schönborn refers to is recounted by Lewis in Surprised by Joy: “In 1926 the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew sat in my room on the other side of the fire and remarked that the evidence for the historicity of the Gospels was really surprisingly good. ‘Rum thing,’ he went on. ‘All that stuff of Frazer’s about the dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it really happened once’.”
Lewis, himself an atheist then, found this remark shattering. Five years later he wrote to a childhood friend: “The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
It’s one thing for an Oxford don to be stirred by pagan myth and find it fulfilled in Christianity, and another for a pope to speculate that an Old Testament prophet was doing something similar.
The reference to Hadadrimmon is in the Book of Zechariah: “They will look on him whom they have pierced . ... On that day the mourning in Jerusalem will be as great as the mourning for Hadad-rimmon in the plain of Megiddo.”
The sentence, “They will look on him whom they have pierced”, is quoted in the Gospel of St John as a prophecy of the death of Christ. As for Hadadrimmon, Benedict explains its presence in the prophetic book thus: “The death of the god, which is then followed by resurrection [like the death and resurrection of sown grain], was celebrated with wild ritual laments; these rituals impressed themselves upon those who witnessed them – as the Prophet and his audience evidently did – as the absolute archetype of grief.”
For Zechariah, Benedict writes, Hadad-rimmon is a non-existent divinity that Israel despises, “yet through the ritual lamentation over him, he mysteriously prefigures someone who really does exist”.
To be clear, Benedict insists that the mythical parallels of the life of Jesus do not make his story unhistorical: “Yes, it really did happen. Jesus is no myth. He is a man of flesh and blood and he stands as a fully real part of history.”
Other biblical scholars explain Zechariah’s words differently. In the fourth century, St Jerome takes Hadad-rimmon as a placename and the mourning to be for king Josiah.
Yet if Zechariah could unknowingly prophesy “him whom they have pierced”, he could have been inspired as easily to prophesy resurrection by referring to a mythic analogue of a future event.