Introduction: Framing Miller with Massey and Bernal
Richard C. Miller’s Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity (2015) proposes a provocative reinterpretation of the central claim of the Christian faith: the resurrection of Jesus. Miller’s core thesis is that the earliest Christians would not have understood the Gospel accounts of the resurrection as historical reportage, but as a “translation fable,” a common Mediterranean literary trope used to signify the divine status or deification of heroes, kings, and philosophers. Drawing on the archetypal legends of figures like Heracles and Romulus, Miller argues that resurrection narratives were fictive devices intended to exalt Jesus to the level of the demigods and emperors of the Hellenistic-Roman world.
To evaluate Miller’s work rigorously, one must engage with the Egyptocentric diffusionism of Gerald Massey and the Afro-Asiatic model of Martin Bernal. Massey argues that the “original mythos and gnosis of Christianity” were primarily derived from Egypt. Bernal’s Black Athena framework identifies the “Afroasiatic roots” of classical civilisation, contesting the “Aryan model” that erases Egyptian and Levantine influence on Greece and Rome. These lenses allow for a critique of whether Miller’s “Greco-Roman” horizon adequately accounts for the African and Semitic genealogies that Massey and Bernal consider the primal sources of Mediterranean religious thought.
Miller’s Thesis and Argumentative Architecture
Miller’s argument progresses through a semiotic and philological examination of early Christian literature in its ancient context. He begins with a “grand concession” found in Justin Martyr’s 1 Apology, where Justin admits that the Christian stories of Jesus’ divine birth, death, and resurrection were “nothing new” compared to the mythic conventions of the Mediterranean demigod. Miller contends that the shift toward viewing these narratives as “historical fact” was a second-century development driven by the need for a “comprehensive cultural revolution” to assert Christian superiority over classical forms.
Miller’s typology of the “translation fable” identifies several recurring semiotic signals: a missing or vanished body, post-mortem appearances, metamorphosis, and heavenly ascension. In Chapter 2, he catalogues a gallery of these fables—including Aristeas, Alcmene, and Pythagoras—to demonstrate that such endings were a standard honorific protocol in Mediterranean hero fabulation. Miller argues that the Gospels conclusionally apply this protocol to Jesus, using the “fabulous coda” to dramatically reverse the ignominy of his execution.
In the final chapters, Miller conducts a narrative analysis of the four Gospels and Acts, asserting that they mimetically follow the translation of Romulus, the archetypal figure of Roman imperial apotheosis. He positions his work as a challenge to the “sui generis” status of the resurrection, arguing that the narratives fundamentally relied upon and adapted the broadly applied cultural-linguistic conventions of antique Mediterranean society.
Dialogues with Gerald Massey
Miller’s thesis regarding the non-literal, mythic nature of resurrection narratives resonates strongly with Massey’s contention that the “canonical gospels” were fundamentally allegorical. Both scholars identify the resurrection not as a unique historical event, but as a performance of pre-existing mythic patterns. However, while Miller centres his matrix on Greco-Roman figures like Heracles and Romulus, Massey argues that these figures are themselves derivatives of the Nile Valley’s “primal source”.
Massey’s specific parallels, such as the relationship between Horus and Jesus, offer a deeper genealogy than Miller’s “Mediterranean” framework. Massey identifies the “karast” (Egyptian for embalmment/mummy) as the prototype for the “Christ,” arguing that the resurrection of Osiris was the original model for the raising of Lazarus. Miller briefly acknowledges Egyptian figures like Isis as part of a “bricolage” of iconic themes, but he lacks Massey’s exhaustive detail on the “Osirian mysteries” as the direct anatomy of the Gospel episodes.
Miller’s claim that early Christians understood resurrection narratives as “fictive mythography” aligns with Massey’s distinction between the “gnostic” mythos and later “historicised” Christianity. Incorporating Massey’s evidence would strengthen Miller’s claims by showing that the “translation” signals he identifies—such as the “missing body”—were already ritualised in the Egyptian cult of the dead thousands of years prior to the Roman Principate. Yet, Miller’s focus on the Romulean model arguably marginalises the Egyptian priority that Massey insists is the “fountain-head” of the Christian legend.
Dialogues with Martin Bernal
Applying Bernal’s historiographical critique reveals that Miller’s primary interpretive horizon—the “Greco-Roman Mediterranean”—may tacitly presuppose aspects of the “Aryan model”. Bernal argues that 19th-century scholarship systematically erased the Egyptian and Semitic influences on Greece to project an image of a purely European, self-generated civilization. While Miller acknowledges the “oriental” valences of the Gospels and their relation to “Judaic Hellenism,” his reliance on Greek and Roman authors as his primary gallery may inadvertently re-centre a Eurocentric interpretive core.
Miller’s methodological rigor, focused on “semiotics and the sociology of inference,” mirrors Bernal’s use of “competitive plausibility” over absolute certainty. Bernal argues that the vast majority of Greek divine and mythological names are of African or Semitic origin—an “inmixing” that the ancients themselves acknowledged. Miller’s identification of “translation signals” is a similar attempt to restore ancient “legibility” to texts that modern scholarship has isolated. However, where Bernal uses philology to trace Egyptian etymologies for names like “Athena” and “Hermes,” Miller remains largely within the semantic field of the “Hellenistic Levant”.
Incorporating Bernal’s Afro-Asiatic mediation would require Miller to theorise his Greco-Roman comparanda as already resting on Egyptian/Levantine substrates. For instance, Miller discusses the “sons of Zeus” as a model for “divine sonship,” but Bernal and Massey argue that “Zeus” and the Greek gods were adaptations of Egyptian predecessors like “Ammon” or “Horus”. Thus, the “translation fables” Miller cites may themselves be Hellenised versions of Afro-Asiatic myths, a layer Miller largely leaves underexplored.
Critical Evaluation and Synthetic Judgment
Viewed through Massey and Bernal, Miller’s Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity is a significant achievement in decentring strict historicism and emphasizing mythic patterning. His strength lies in breaking the “taboo” surrounding the historicity of the resurrection and relocating the Gospel texts into a shared conventional system of Mediterranean antiquity.
However, from an Egyptocentric or Afro-Asiatic perspective, Miller’s framework possesses notable weaknesses:
• Genealogical Depth: By focusing on the Greco-Roman horizon, Miller neglects the “African and Afro-Asiatic religious genealogy” that Massey and Bernal identify as the foundation of Mediterranean thought.
• Direction of Influence: Miller’s “translation fable” trope appears to emerge from a generic Mediterranean soup, whereas Massey and Bernal argue for a specific, northward flow of cultural symbols from the Nile Valley and the Levant.
• Eurocentric Framing: Miller’s methodology, while subversive to Christian orthodoxy, may still reproduce the “Aryan model” by treating Greece and Rome as the primary originators of the tropes he analyzes, rather than as translators of an older African gnosis.
In conclusion, Miller’s framework ultimately reinforces the project of locating Christian origins within a broader Mediterranean mythic context, but it requires revision to account for the deep Egyptian and Levantine roots described by Bernal and Massey. His “synthesis” of resurrection as a fictive embellishment would be more robust if it acknowledged that the Greco-Roman “translation fable” rests on a much older Afro-Asiatic foundation, making the Gospel narratives a late iteration of an originally African-derived mythos
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