Bookwrights: Pagan Resurrection Myths

Pagan Resurrection Myths
and the Resurrection of Jesus
by Leon McKenzie
ISBN 0-880404-13-3
176 pp. 6 x 9 Hardcover
$21.95

Pagan Resurrection Myths
and the Resurrection of Jesus
by Leon McKenzie

Pagan Resurrection and the Resurrection of Jesus, based on the postmodern critique of the dark side of the Enlightenment, argues effectively that the human imagination-and particularly the religious imagination-has been diminished by some of the fallacies of the previous 300 years of intellectual history and unjustified hostility toward religion.

This is particularly true in regard to the Christian belief in the resurrection of Jesus. For many followers of Enlightenment values, the resurrection of Jesus is foolishness and "nothing more" than another myth. This fallacy is shattered by the book's thesis.

McKenzie argues against the trivialization of Christian belief on the part of many extreme liberal Christians. It is notable because it is argumentative without belligerence, and is sympathetic to different views without falling prey to the easy relativism so common among religious people today.

The resurrection archetype of Jesus was "forth-told" not only by the prophets. It is not the pagan myths that explain the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection of Jesus validates the core of pagan myths, the resurrection archetype, and universal human experience of the resurrection theme. This interpretation, it is suggested, will help in the rehabilitation of the Christian imagination.

About the author
Leon McKenzie is Professor Emeritus at Indiana University. He completed four years of graduate theological studies at Kenrick Seminary, St. Louis. In New York he attended Union Theological Seminary and received a Master's Degree in Religious Education from Fordham University. He holds a doctoral degree in Adult Education from Indiana University, where he studied as a Lilly Fellow and a Bergevin Fellow. He is the author of ten books and has published more than 100 journal articles.

Quotes about the Book

"Pagan Resurrection Myths and the Resurrection of Jesus is a unique and challenging work of substantive scholarship."

-The Midwest Book Review

"This is a helpful book, written in an easy-to-read style, and apologetic in that is seeks to defend the orthodox view of Jesus' resurrection. It is very critical of resurrection critics seeking to show that their whole approach to the question is biased."

-Richard Ruble in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith

"A credible and provocative defense of the resurrection of Jesus Christ that deserves to be taken seriously by the academic community. The author brilliantly shows how the pagan myths of dying and rising gods lend support to the New Testament claim that Jesus rose bodily from the dead."

- Donald G. Bloesch
Emeritus Professor of Theology
University of Dubuque, Theological Seminary

"The central event on which Christianity stands or falls is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. An event of such magnitude reveals as much about us who seek to understand it as it does about Jesus. …McKenzie comes down solidly on the side of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, not as a variant of pagan resurrection myths, but as a fulfillment of them. This is a first-rate study of the resurrection, from start to finish."

-James R. Edwards, Ph. D.
Professor of Religion
Jamestown College

"Leon McKenzie has put his finger on something so evident to us now, but hidden a scant twenty years earlier: the massive presumptions which a purportedly "scientific" approach entails to matters humane and religious. He targets the presumptions operative in much recent and not-so-recent scripture scholarship regarding Jesus' resurrection, showing how their 'conclusions' followed not from the arguments put forward but from the presumptions assumed."

- David Burrell, C. S. C.
Hesburgh Professor of Philosophy and Theology
Notre Dame University

"Professor McKenzie furnishes his audience-college students, graduate students, seminarians, and others who are serious readers-with an excellent antidote to the rationalist-naturalist premises of so much biblical criticism. In particular, he effectively criticizes the assumptions that lie behind the thesis that the resurrection of Jesus is derived from pagan myths about the death and resurrection of nature-gods. Against this he offers a challenging counter-thesis: that the myths, emerging from an archetype formed by humanity's collective experience, foreshadow God's definitive revelation of Himself to mankind in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead." - Francis Canavan, S. J.
Professor Emeritus of Political Science
Fordham University