Resurrection

This article concerns itself with Jesus Christ, Christian, Islamic and other religious interpretations of resurrection in general. For the restoration of humanity on Judgment Day, see resurrection of the dead. Miraculous resurrection of one sort or another has been a recurrent theme or central doctrine of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and other Abrahamic religions. Religious accounts represent the resurrection of individuals, as well as a general resurrection of humanity on Judgment Day. Christianity also uses the term to refer to God's resurrection of Jesus. Accounts of resurrection also occur in other religious traditions. With the advent of written records, the earliest known recurrent theme of resurrection was in the ancient Egyptian religion and it was especially focused upon an individual in the cults of Neith, Isis, and Osiris.
In the literal sense of the word, resurrection refers to the event of a dead person completely returning to life. Thus it is not to be confused with things like Hellenistic immortality in which the soul continues to live after death, "free" of the body.
"Centuries before the time of Jesus Christ the nations annually celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris, Tammuz, Attis, Mithra, and other gods" . A cyclic dying-and-rising god motif was prevalent throughout ancient Mesopotamian and classical literature and practice (eg in Syrian and Greek worship of Adonis; Egyptian worship of Osiris; the Babylonian story of Tammuz; rural religious belief in the Corn King).Specifically, some of the language concerning resurrection in the Hebrew Bible appears to have origins in Canaanite belief as demonstrated by the Baal cycle found at Ugarit in Northern Syria. Ba'al-Hadad's battle against Mot seems to be the origin of the some of the resurrection imagery found in Hosea, Isaiah and Daniel. This influence survives into the New Testament and even Rabbinic literature, with agricultural imagery regarding resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:35-40 and in John 12:24 reflecting the agricultural images of the Ba'al myth.