Chapter Five
Resurrection

Among the most conspicuous features of the fiction of the Roman empire, not only the prose romances but the mythological confections as well, is resurrection after death in the original body. Much of the time the resurrection is explained by theatrical and often bloody deaths that turn out not to have been deaths at all. The Scheintod , as the Germans call it, the "apparent death," allows for all the excitement and tragedy of extinction and resurrection without unduly straining the credulity of the reader. The German scholar Erwin Rohde, whose interpretations of the Greek novel must even now command respect, identified the earliest appearance of apparent death and resurrection in the novel The Wonders beyond Thule by Antonius Diogenes. Rohde was perhaps the first to see that, after the work of Diogenes, Scheintod and resurrection became among the most beloved of themes in the Greek romances.^[1] Since the fiction of Antonius Diogenes seems clearly to belong to that initial burst of creativity that we can trace from the reign of the emperor Nero

down to the end of the first century of our era, the appearance of this motif concurrently with the development of the genre itself is not likely to be without significance.

Although we know the complicated plot of The Wonders beyond Thule only from the exceedingly dense summary of it by the patriarch Photius, some memorable episodes can be disengaged. At a relatively early stage in the narrative an aristocratic woman of Phoenician Tyre, Dercyllis by name, turns up among the remote people known as Cimmerians. There a former slave of Dercyllis, a woman called Myrto, who had died long before, is introduced to instruct her former mistress on the nature of the Underworld. Myrto is not exactly brought back to life, since her activity with Dercyllis seems to have been confined to Hades. But subsequently Dercyllis takes a trip with some persons she had met in Hades, and they, the living and the dead, visit the nation of the Getae on the northern extremities of the Mediterranean world. Among the Getae Astraeus, who had come from Hades, meets his old friend Zamolxis, who is honored there as a god of his people.^[2] Readers of Antonius Diogenes' work will have known from Herodotus that Zamolxis had died some five or six centuries earlier, only to be resurrected and become, as a result of this miracle, regarded as a divinity.^[3] Once resurrected, he seems no longer to have been subjected to the ravages of time and could sustain his ancient friendship with so modern a traveler as Astraeus, who had, of course, himself made his way from the dead. A little later Dercyllis is subjected to an embarrassing

affliction, causing her to be dead during the daytime but restored to life in the night.^[4] At least one lover killed himself during the day over what he supposed was her corpse.

The appearance of the resurrected Zamolxis in the story by Antonius Diogenes underscores the Herodotean precedent for tall or miraculous tales, just as Dercyllis's visit to Hades and the return of Astraeus from the Underworld patently call to mind those visits to Hades that take their origins from the famous narrative in Homer's Odyssey . In fact, a return from the land of the dead was an important feature of several classical legends: Orpheus brought back Eurydice, and Heracles brought back Theseus. Equally, Euripides' play Alcestis has impressed upon every cultivated reader of Greek literature from antiquity to the present the tragic potential of one person's selflessness in being willing to die for another. In our own time the subject was no less movingly put on stage by Poulenc in his opera The Dialogues of the Carmelites , in which an older nun dies the death of a younger one. But all these negotiations for passage in and out of the world of the dead are obviously of a very different character from bodily resurrection after the corpse has grown cold. Not even the legendary philosopher Pythagoras, who was often associated with stories of returning from the dead, is remotely comparable to the Zamolxis of Herodotus and of Antonius Diogenes. Pythagoras believed in, and was said to have exemplified, a doctrine of reincarnation, which must certainly not be confused with resurrection.

Nor is resurrection the same as necromancy, by which the dead are magically summoned for a brief appearance in order to provide a prophecy of some kind. Necromancy as a form of

ancient magic was hardly confined to the Greeks, as any reader of the Bible will know from the story of the witch of Endor.^[5] Readers of the Greek novel will long remember the hair-raising episode in Heliodorus's Aethiopica in which an old woman causes the corpse of her son to stand bolt upright and to speak.^[6] The consultation of deceased spirits has a long and lurid history in classical antiquity, but once again it is palpably not the same thing as resurrection in the flesh. For that there are virtually no examples before the second half of the first century of the present era.

The author of the article Auferstehung in the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum states categorically that the whole concept of resurrection, although attested among other peoples, was altogether alien to Graeco-Roman thought.^[7] He cites many examples from classical literature in support of this fundamentally accurate generalization. Aeschylus, in the Eumenides , summed it all up when he gave to Apollo the lines, "Once a man has died and the dust sucked up his blood, there is no resurrection ."^[8] Gods might die and be reborn, but not mortals of flesh and blood. The mortal dead might be conjured up in feverish dreams or imagined as ghostly apparitions, but they did not come back as before. When Cicero told the story of the Indian Brahman Calanus, who, before going to his funeral pyre, told Alexander the Great that he would be seeing him soon, neither Cicero nor, apparently, anyone else

believed this to be a promise of immediate resurrection.^[9] The meaning of Calanus's enigmatic utterance only became clear, as Cicero says, when Alexander died in Babylon. The two met each other in death.

A similar inability to credit the fact of resurrection characterized those philosophers at Athens—Epicureans and Stoics—whom the apostle Paul is reported to have met there. According to the narrative in Acts, which must certainly reflect attitudes of the time, "Some philosophers said, 'What would this intellectual lightweight want to say?' And others said, 'He seems to be proclaiming foreign gods'—because he was preaching Jesus and resurrection ."^[10] The philosophers appear to have imagined that Paul was importing two divinities, one Jesus Christ and the other a goddess . So difficult was it for them to comprehend the message that Paul was really bringing to them. But obviously the news of resurrection had begun to spread.

Paul went to Athens just a few years before the accession of Nero. From that time onward the Greeks and the Romans acquired a lively interest in or, as pagan writers sometimes said, ("return to life"). Rohde was absolutely correct when he observed that the subject of resurrection, with its attendant rationalizing explanation of apparent death, makes its earliest appearance in ancient fiction in Antonius Diogenes. And Diogenes drew on the one clear and distinctive example from classical literature, the deity of the Getae called Zamolxis. Just how much of Zamolxis's past Antonius Diogenes recounted to his readers we can never know, but he either repeated what Herodotus said or expected his readers to know it.

Zamolxis's teachings, according to the Father of History, included the doctrine that none of his disciples or their posterity would ever perish, but that they would all go to a place where they would live forever in the bosom of their master.^[11] In order to demonstrate the truth of his doctrine Zamolxis constructed a secret underground residence to which he retired when it seemed an appropriate moment for him to die—or rather appear to die. He lived in his underground chamber for some three years, after which he reappeared and was believed to have been resurrected. Herodotus takes a characteristically agnostic position about the story, but it is clear that the three-year residence underground is intended as a rationalist explanation for an otherwise miraculous event.^[12] The death of Zamolxis, believed by his followers to be real, is, it is suggested, perhaps nothing but a Scheintod . On the other hand, there can be no question of a Scheintod for Diogenes if the resurrected Zamolxis is still around to converse with his friend Astraeus many centuries later.

After Antonius Diogenes the resurrection stories become ever more elaborate and lurid. Every reader of the romance of Chariton will remember the important episode in the third book in which the heroine's beloved Chaereas turns up at the tomb where she was believed to lie in death after an act of violence committed by Chaereas himself in a jealous rage. When Chaereas goes to the tomb, to offer wreaths and libations and (in accordance with his secret intention) to commit suicide on the spot, he finds the stones moved and the entrance laid open.^[13] His beloved Callirhoe is no longer in the tomb. As the reader knows perfectly well, Callirhoe is still alive. For Chaereas the disappearance of the dead woman

cannot possibly be explained as the work of tomb robbers, even though one of his fellow citizens reasonably proposes this explanation. He jumps to the conclusion that she has been carried off by a god, as Dionysus took Ariadne or Zeus Semele. He abandons his idea of committing suicide. In an apostrophe to the absent Callirhoe, he cries out, "You force me to live, because I shall look for you on land and sea, and in the very sky if I can reach there. This I beg of you, my dear—do not flee from me."^[14] In other words, he believes that she has been brought back to life by a divine power that had taken her away. When he had gone to the tomb, he had had no doubt that she was dead.

In the somewhat later work of Xenophon of Ephesus there is a similar case of disappearance from the tomb. Perilaus has discovered Anthia insensible and, he presumes, dead after taking a strong but not, as it turns out, lethal dose of poison. Laid out in her tomb, Anthia eventually comes to life and regrets that she has been cheated of the death by which she had hoped to join her beloved Habrocomes, whom she, for her part, believed to be dead.^[15] But just as in Chariton some pirates learn that the newly buried Anthia has been accompanied by a considerable supply of gold and silver, and so they enter the tomb and carry her off with the treasure. Thus Perilaus, an eminent personality of the region, who had been in love with Anthia, becomes inconsolable upon discovering that the body has vanished from the tomb.^[16] Unlike Chaereas in Chariton, the canny Cilician immediately interprets the empty tomb as a sign of body snatching, although it later becomes clear that the supposedly dead Anthia is indeed alive. In both stories the opened and empty tomb is an essential stage in ensuring the survival of the heroine. A credulous lover, in one

case, infers a divine resurrection, and a more worldly lover, in the other, opts for theft of the corpse.

For what seems at first an unequivocal resurrection we must look to the novel of Achilles Tatius, in which the heroine, Leucippe, dies—or seems to die—no fewer than three times. The multiple deaths of Leucippe and the dramatic resurrections that follow them certainly count among the most memorable episodes in the entire novel. If the patriarch Photius is really the author of an epigram in the Palatine Anthology about this novel, it is dear that he was as much impressed as anyone:^[17]

The acid taste of love combined with chastity
Is pictured in the tale of Cleitophon.
Chaster still the all-astounding heroine:
Leucippe beaten, shaved, and much abused.
But, most astounding!—she endured three executions.

All three executions constitute high drama. They are elaborately stage-managed productions. In the first episode the notorious bandits of the Egyptian Delta, known here and elsewhere as the Boukoloi ("cowherds," "rangers"), carry out a sacrifice of Leucippe in the sight of the narrator.^[18] They pour a libation over her head and lead her around an altar while a flute makes music and a priest intones something sacral in Egyptian.^[19] She is then laid out on her back and tied to stakes in the ground, presumably upside down, since her position is compared to that of Marsyas attached to a tree in the old story of the competition with Apollo. A member of the sacred band plunges a sword into Leucippe's

heart and saws all the way to her abdomen so that the entrails burst out. All her internal parts are then divided up solemnly and eaten by the bandits in a ceremony of rustic communion. Soon after witnessing this horrifying spectacle, the narrator receives from an approaching friend the astonishing news, "Leucippe will now come to life again."^[20] The narrator is understandably incredulous, whereupon the friend taps several times on the top of the coffin into which the remains have been placed. A voice is heard from beneath the lid; and, when the coffin is opened, Leucippe rises up to embrace her beloved even though her stomach is, embarrassingly, still gaping wide open.

Achilles Tatius favors the reader with a detailed account of the organization of this miraculous episode as if it were a scene in the theater. An animal hide stuffed with bloody entrails was attached to Leucippe's stomach, and so on. The sword that penetrated deep into her was a trick sword in which the blade returned into the hilt as it was pressed against the body. The whole affair was managed, we learn, by a professional stage actor with an expertise in simulation worthy of the Grand Guignol. Both death and resurrection were apparent, not real. But they were, it must be admitted, memorable theater.

A few books later Leucippe dies again in another grotesque and gruesome episode, in which her head is cut off.^[21] Yet only a little after that her beloved receives a letter from Leucippe in which she writes to him long-sufferingly that she has died twice. He asks a friend, "Has Leucippe come to life again?"^[22] The answer is patently yes. The third death and resurrection are perhaps a little less sensational but equally false. This time they

involve a report of death conveyed by a jealous lover to Leucippe's true love, the narrator, Cleitophon.^[23]

In the Latin novel of Apuleius, the Metamorphoses , what appears in the Greek romances about death and resurrection is elevated to a major theme. This work, about the transformation of a man into an ass and his eventual repatriation to the human state and conversion to the worship of Isis, is clearly based on a lost Greek novel.^[24] Death and resurrection, both literal and symbolic, may well have been very important in the original Greek work, but there is no doubt that for Apuleius it was an essential representation of the transition to spiritual fulfillment. Communication with the dead, necromancy, and visits to the Underworld are all conspicuous in Apuleius's novel (with echoes of the Odyssey ),^[25] and these, of course, represent the more traditional forms of returning from the grave.

In the exquisite myth of Cupid and Psyche, descent into the Underworld and return from it are literal facts of the narrative, whereas in the history of the man-turned-ass known as Lucius they are figurative. Once Lucius achieves his fulfillment under the auspices of Isis, in the eleventh book of the novel, he declares, "I have approached the confines of death and, having once trodden upon the threshold of Proserpina, I have made my return, traveling through all the elements of the world."^[26] During the regrettable period in which he had the form and behavior of an ass,

Lucius recognized that his family and slaves all thought that he was dead, so that, when they finally saw him alive again, they truly believed that he had been resurrected. This is, for Apuleius, a kind of symbolic rebirth, which he describes in Book 10 by a remarkable phrase. There a dead child rises from its coffin into his father's waiting arms by a process Apuleius calls postliminium mortis .^[27] Postliminium is a technical term from Roman law: it concerns the rights of a Roman citizen who is captured by the enemy and, by virtue of his being a captive, has the legal position of a slave. Yet the right of postliminium , the ius postliminii , allowed the captive, after his return from captivity, to recover all his former rights as if he had never been captured at all.^[28] Apuleius's transference of this term to the restoration of the dead to life equates death with the servility of a captive and life with the restoration of full citizen rights. This appears to be the only example of such a Roman interpretation of death and resurrection, but it is a powerful one and entirely worthy of the great African writer and rhetorician who conceived it.

The religious or quasi-religious implications of death and resurrection in other fiction of the Roman imperial age emerge dearly enough from the biography of the sage and wonder worker Apollonius composed by the sophist Philostratus in the early third century at the request of the empress Julia Domna. Among Apollonius's many miracles is a case of resurrection, which, as Philostratus tells it, is not to be understood as an apparent death or Scheintod . Nor is it to be understood as simply symbolic. After all, Philostratus makes the pretense, throughout his biography of Apollonius, that this is a well-documented account according to

the record of a certain Damis, one of Apollonius's own companions. That claim is in all probability part of the larger fiction of the work, but it is certainly worth noting that, within the framework of the claim, there is no mechanical explanation of the supernatural occurrence. A girl at Rome, from a distinguished family of consular rank, had died just at the time of her wedding. During the elaborate funeral ceremony, with all the lamentations over an unconsummated marriage (as Philostratus wryly observes), the sage Apollonius appeared and said peremptorily, "Put the coffin down. I will stop you crying for the girl." He then asked the name of the girl, touched her, spoke quietly to her, and she woke up as if from a sleep and returned to her father's house.^[29] Philostratus recalls at this point the story of Alcestis brought back to life by Heracles, although it is by no means comparable. Of Apollonius, Philostratus remarks that he may perhaps have seen a spark of life in the deceased, which the doctors had not noticed, or he may indeed have revived and restored her life when it had been snuffed out. "The true explanation of this has proved unfathomable," writes Philostratus, "to me no less than to the bystanders." We are left in doubt as to whether this is a case of resuscitation or resurrection, but the miraculous element prevails.

A century after Philostratus the pagan Hierocles, in his tendentious work against Christianity modeled on the great diatribe of Celsus, found in the miracles of Apollonius, not surprisingly, a powerful pagan parallel for the miracles of Jesus Christ.^[30] Certainly the parallel with the miracle of Jesus at the city called Nain, as recounted in Luke, cannot be missed.^[31] When Jesus came to the gate of the city, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother, who was a widow. And

the people of the city were thronging around her. He told the mother not to weep, "and he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still. And he said, 'Young man, I say unto thee, Arise.' And he that was dead sat up and began to speak. And he delivered him to his mother." Both Philostratus and Luke presented these stories as part of a narrative in the form of history, , to use the emperor Julian's phrase.^[32] But whether either recorded an episode that actually happened remains unclear. What is clear is the close similarity of the stories, for which no parallels can be found before the mid-first century A.D .

Taking resurrection seriously in a polytheist world was not confined to inspirational or quasi-religious narratives such as the Life of Apollonius . Philostratus himself has given us a memorable example of mythological revisionism in his dialogue the Heroikos , in which the various rectifications of Homer are introduced by none other than a resurrected hero, Protesilaus.^[33] This famous man had been a Greek from Thessaly in the expedition against Troy, who fulfilled a prophecy by stepping first on the soil of Asia Minor and dying immediately thereafter.^[34] His memory was cherished through the ages, not least by Alexander the Great, who sacrificed to him on his own journey to the East, a sacrifice that was commemorated in turn in the second century of the Christian era in Arrian's narrative of Alexander's campaign.^[35] Protesilaus seems to have been a popular figure in the literature of later Greece and of Rome. A story had grown up that he had left behind a bride whom he had recently married, and he was therefore allowed to join her from the Underworld for a

few hours in return for his patriotic death.^[36] But this inversion of the Alcestis and Orpheus stories nonetheless remained firmly within the old tradition of returning from the Underworld.

What appears in the period from Nero onwards, however, is a Protesilaus who is actually alive again and talks amiably to people in the Troad. The vineyard worker who explains all this to his amazed visitor from Phoenicia says calmly that Protesilaus lives and converses with him about the history of the Trojan War on regular occasions. As we have come to expect, Homer and the post-Homeric cyclic poems are shown to be wrong in many particulars. Philostratus's presentation of the resurrected Protesilaus was scarcely original with him. Already in Chariton the unhappy Dionysius of Miletus cries out, "What Protesilaus is this, who has come back to life to plague me?"^[37] And in the writings of the second-century orator Aelius Aristides, whose career fails between Chariton and Philostratus, we read that it is known that Protesilaus now associates, after so many centuries, with the living .^[38] Protesilaus is not only himself the vehicle for revising the Homeric stories. He has been revised so as no longer to be part of any old-fashioned legend like that of Alcestis or Orpheus. He is resurrected bodily, mingles with the people of the Roman empire, and instructs them as a teacher his disciples.

This new image of Protesilaus with a second life (rather than simply accorded a brief tryst with his wife) first shows up in our extant literature from antiquity in Petronius's novel, the Satyricon . Encolpius, whose inability to perform sexually is an im-

portant part of the last set of the surviving fragments of the novel, considered that he was effectively dead in that part of his body where once he had been an Achilles: "funerata est illa pars corporis, qua quondam Achilles eram."^[39] When finally he is restored and able to display his old prowess before an amazed Eumolpus, he declares that you would think him more lucky (gratiosiorem ) than Protesilaus or any of the other ancients ("quam Protesilaum aut quemquam alium antiquorum").^[40] This is, of course, a generalized reference to those who returned from the dead, but the choice of Protesilaus for particular mention is surprising and striking. He is the polytheists' new representative of bodily resurrection. And for Encolpius, in particular, resurrection becomes a metaphor for erection.

The widespread use of the resurrection motif in many forms of Roman imperial fictional writing—erotic romance, hagiography, mythological revisionism, and satire—suggests an unusually great interest in this subject, far beyond any interest documented for earlier periods. It even shows up in the theater, in the most surprising circumstances. As Jack Winkler perceptively pointed out more than a decade ago,^[41] the sober and genial Plutarch recorded with great respect his admiration for a performer who could simulate death perfectly and thereby astound the audience by his visible return to life. What is so remarkable about the performer that Plutarch saw is that he was a dog.

"He gave a fine performance of various actions and emotions required by the plot, and in particular, when they experimented on him with a supposedly deadly poison (which in the plot turned

out to be merely a sleeping potion), he took the bread soaked in poison and, after gulping it down, he began in a moment to shudder and misstep and let his head sag down. Finally he lay stretched out on the ground like a corpse and let them drag his body and carry him around as the plot of the drama required. And, when he noticed his cue in certain words and movements of the actors, he first began to stir gently, as if waking up from a deep slumber, and then, raising his head, he looked around. To the wonder of the audience he then got up and went to the right actor and fawned on him, wagging his tail and showing all the signs of canine affection. Everyone was thrilled, even the emperor, for the aged Vespasian was present in the audience."^[42] This is quite clearly a canine version of the scenes that are familiar to us from the Greek novels. The date of the incident is worth noting—the last years of the emperor Vespasian, in other words, about ten years after the death of Nero and in the lifetime of both Ptolemaeus Chennus and Antonius Diogenes.

With all this interest in resurrection, it is no wonder that a strict polytheist like the anti-Christian Celsus viewed the apparent success of Jesus Christ in raising the dead, to say nothing of the bodily resurrection of Jesus himself, in a larger context. Even Origen, in beginning his refutation of Celsus's work, acknowledges that the mystery of the resurrection, "because it has not been understood," is talked about and ridiculed by the unbelievers.^[43] In his True Doctrine Celsus had expressed profound skepticism about Jesus's raising of the dead as well as about Jesus's own resurrection. He obviously said or implied that the raising of Lazarus was a piece of fiction, inasmuch as Origen is obliged to reply to him in these terms. Here are Origen's words:

"That he really did raise the dead, and that this is not a fiction of the writers of the Gospels, is proved by the consideration that, if it was a fiction , many would have been recorded to have been raised up, including people who had already been a long time in their tombs. But, since it is not a fiction , those of whom this is recorded may easily be enumerated."^[44] He then mentions Lazarus and one or two other examples. This is perhaps not one of Origen's strongest arguments.

When he turns to Jesus's own resurrection, Celsus clearly reflects the fascination and the skepticism of his age. If his contemporary Marcus Aurelius could say, in his philosophic way, that a human being had within him the resources for living again, he probably referred to spiritual regeneration, but he used the very language of resurrection that is familiar from the novelists—.^[45] A more flamboyant philosopher and another contemporary of Celsus, Peregrinus Proteus, actually did manage to achieve bodily resurrection after his fiery demise on a funeral pyre at Olympia. Or so, at least, a serious and reliable old gentleman (Lucian calls him ) reported. Peregrinus after death appeared before him garbed in white and crowned with olive.^[46] There is an unmistakable echo here of the Gospel narratives, although the white clothes belong in that story to the angelic messenger or messengers who proclaim the risen Christ. In the earliest account, that of Mark, Mary Magdalene

and two other women encounter a young man in Jesus's tomb clothed in a long white garment.^[47]

The scene at the tomb after the crucifixion must, in fact, have made a powerful impression on far more than the followers of Peregrinus. There had never been anything like it before, and not even Peregrinus's ancient prototype, the Indian Brahman Calanus, had intimated, as it turned out, that he would join Alexander in the flesh. The meeting in Babylon betokened, as we have seen, Alexander's death, not a new life for Calanus.^[48] Yet from the mid-first century onward the empty tomb and all that it implies becomes a conspicuous theme in both Chariton and Xenophon of Ephesus. Chariton wrote of Chaereas, for example, "When he reached the tomb, he found that the stones had been moved and the entrance was open. He was astonished at the sight and overcome by fearful perplexity at what had happened."^[49] This is not much removed from the words of Mark: "They came to the tomb at sunrise, and they said to one another, 'Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance of the tomb?' Looking up, they saw that the stone was already rolled away..., and they were frightened."^[50]

The novelistic interest in empty tombs and the fictional possibilities of tomb robbing bears directly upon the interpretation of a notorious Greek inscription acquired a little over a century ago by a European collector in France from a Palestinian antiquities dealer. The stone, for which no precise provenance can be given, must nonetheless come from somewhere in or near Judaea. Its inscribed text is in Greek, but it is demonstrably a

translation from a lost Latin original. That original was an edict of an unnamed Roman emperor on penalties to be established for breaking open and violating tombs. The letter forms of the inscription suggest a date in the middle or late first century A.D .^[51]

Obviously the implications of such a text from Palestine at this time, so soon after the fateful disappearance of Jesus's body from his tomb, have been apparent from the beginning. Some have even, on that account, suggested a modern forgery. But as Louis Robert and others have insisted, the stone must be accepted as a genuine document.^[52] The evidence of Chariton and Xenophon can now serve to reinforce the epigraphical and linguistic arguments in placing this imperial edict in the Neronian or immediately post-Neronian context. The novelists' interest in this ghoulish topic may well duplicate the preoccupations of the emperor who issued the edict—whatever we may suppose those preoccupations to have been. Christianity could indeed have been involved. The designation of the edict as , without specification of the emperor's name, is probably a reflection of a damnatio that precluded an exact reference. If so, this will be a ruling of either Nero himself or of Domitian.

The accumulated evidence points to the power of the Gospel stories about Jesus's resurrection for anyone, like Celsus, who wished to deny their credibility. Celsus knew the old myths of returning from the Underworld, but he was perfectly capable of distinguishing these from the actual resurrection in the body. For that, he was inclined to believe there must have been some kind

of trickery or stage machinery, as so often in the novels. "How many others produce wonders like this," asked Celsus, "to convince simple hearers whom they exploit by deceit? They say that Zamolxis, the slave of Pythagoras, also did this among the Scythians, and Pythagoras himself in Italy.... They say that Orpheus did this among the Odrysians, and Protesilaus in Thessaly, and Heracles at Tinerum, and Theseus. But we must examine this question, whether anyone who really died ever rose again with the same body."^[53] That was clearly the crucial point for Celsus. In his opinion, those who saw the resurrected body, with its marks of the crucifixion, were only a hysterical female and one or two others equally deluded.

Origen is obliged to labor long and hard in refuting this point. For Celsus, as Origen admits, the old heroic stories about the men who descended to Hades and came back or brought women back with them are essentially fantastic tales. Accordingly, Jesus's resurrection from the dead cannot be compared with them.^[54] Yet that is precisely Celsus's point. Nor is Celsus likely to have been the first to elaborate it. In the hundred years before he composed his treatise, it is obvious, as our review of the literature amply demonstrates, that the theme of bodily resurrection was all too familiar to pagan readers and even audiences in the theater. For a sage like Apollonius or for a hero like Protesilaus, a resurrection of this kind could be presented in total seriousness and enjoyed, if not necessarily believed. The fiction has its own truth, which carried conviction within its context. But in most narratives it is obvious that episodes of resurrection in the flesh had to be explained as the inevitable result of a false or apparent death, a Scheintod . Thus the death could not be credited, nor the resur-

rection. It was undoubtedly some such perspective as this that Celsus brought to his reading of the Gospels.

The question we must now ask is whether from a historical point of view we would be justified in explaining the extraordinary growth in fictional writing, and its characteristic and concomitant fascination with resurrection, as some kind of reflection of the remarkable stories that were coming out of Palestine precisely in the middle of the first century A.D . Already in the days of the emperor Claudius the name of Jesus Christ was known at Rome.^[55] The Gospels, as we have them, had not yet been written, but much of the story that they were to contain was obviously already in circulation. By the time of Claudius's successor, the emperor Nero, that great philhellenic patron of the arts, the claims of the Christians were being widely disseminated at Rome as a result of the residence of Paul in the city and the infamous immolation of many Christians in the aftermath of the fire that consumed it in 64.^[56] By this time it is possible that the earliest of the extant Gospels was actually being written. If the nature of contemporary fiction helps us, as it does, to explain the interpretation that Celsus brought to the Gospels, it would be wise next to consider the possibility that the Gospel stories themselves provided the impetus for the emergence of that fiction in the first place.