This post is part of The God Question, an ongoing response series to Mark Clark’s apologetic book The Problem of God. Each post critically examines a section of the book using reason, evidence, and The God Question’s Core Philosophy: Begin with curiosity, not belief. Today we’re responding to Clark’s section on Dionysus in Chapter 4, “The Problem of the Christ Myth.”
🍷 Who Was Dionysus?
Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, ritual madness, and rebirth. His cult was popular across the ancient world and deeply symbolic—touching on life, death, and transformation.
If you’re looking for echoes of Christian motifs in earlier mythology, Dionysus is an unmistakable candidate. But Clark wants to dismiss all parallels as superficial, weak, or downright false.
Let’s examine the three he targets.
1️⃣ Born of a Virgin? Depends on Your Definition
Clark mocks the claim that Dionysus was born of a virgin. He recounts the myth of Semele, a mortal woman impregnated by Zeus (via lightning), and says, “This is not a virgin birth.”
But that depends on whether you’re looking for biology or mythology.
In many traditions, Dionysus is twice-born—first through Semele, then through his father Zeus, who either swallows his heart or carries him to term. These are not natural births. They are mythic signals that Dionysus is divine, destined, and otherworldly.
Like Jesus, he is set apart from the beginning. That’s the common thread—not whether their mothers had intact hymens.
2️⃣ Born on December 25? So What?
Clark again debunks the claim that Dionysus—or Jesus—was born on December 25. But this is largely a red herring.
Nobody seriously argues Jesus was born in late December. The point is that Christianity adopted a pagan holiday, slapped a new name on it, and made it Christian.
It’s not about who was born when. It’s about how Christianity assimilated earlier religious ideas, imagery, and calendar slots to appeal to Roman audiences already steeped in myth.
3️⃣ Death, Dismemberment, and Resurrection
Here’s the most compelling thread.
Dionysus, in one version of the myth, is torn to pieces by Titans, who eat everything but his heart. Zeus saves the heart and resurrects him—a death-and-rebirth cycle.
Clark scoffs: “A man rising after crucifixion and a god restored from a heart aren’t the same thing.”
Of course they’re not.
But they’re not supposed to be.
These are variations on a universal theme—death and rebirth. It’s what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, the dying-and-rising god archetype that spans cultures and centuries.
Christianity didn’t invent this theme.
It just anchored it in time, gave it a name, and called it exclusive.
🧭 Final Thought: Dismissal Isn’t Disproof
Clark’s method here is to dismiss anything that isn’t a carbon copy of the Gospels. But myth doesn’t work that way.
Myth evolves. It flows. It adapts.
Dionysus doesn’t need to be Jesus to make the point. He just needs to show that the idea of divine death and resurrection was already well in circulation long before Christianity made it “history.”
God or Delusion? 