The other day, I came across a succint passage on a page of superstitions, with a nice bit of information about Norse mythology:

Twelve gods were invited to a banquet at Valhalla, Odins home. Loki, god of evil, mischief and turmoil , had been excluded from the guest list but chose to come uninvited, bringing the total to 13 attendants. True to form, Loki raised hell by inciting Hod, the blind god of winter, to attack Balder the Good, who was viewed as a favorite of the gods. Hod took a spear of mistletoe offered by Loki and hurled it at Balder, killing him instantly. All of Valhalla grieved.

While I can’t find any other references to this event happening over the course of a dinner, the similarity between this and the Last Supper of Christ and his Apostles is rather striking. If you replace Balder with Jesus, and Loki with Judas, you have essentially the same story. Jesus is even slain upon a piece of wood (the cross).

Balder (or Baldur) is said to be a god of “light, joy, purity, beauty, innocence, and reconciliation.” Pretty much exactly like Jesus. The story goes that Balder’s mother, Frigg, had gotten all creatures, objects and forces of nature to take an oath that they would not harm Balder, but she didn’t ask the mistletoe, because she didn’t think it could possibly harm him. Because of this, the gods used to make sport of throwing weapons and things at Balder, and seeing them bounce off without harming him. Loki of course tricked her into revealing the weakness, fashioned a spear of mistletoe, and fooled the blind Hod into throwing and killing Balder. Mistletoe is, of course, a very important and sacred plant in many European pagan traditions, although the meaning seems to vary.

Anyway, to me, the similarity between Balder and the myth of Christ is very interesting and worth looking into further. A great many non-Christian traditions from all over the world - many of which were far older than Christianity - feature prominently stories of a pure and perfect sun god who is born of a virgin, dies, and rises again three days later. People generally seem to do one of two things with this information. If they are not Christian, they try to take this information and say that it proves that Christianity is not a unique invention, and therefore not important. Or, if they are Christian, they try to prove that the similarities are so slim as to be unimportant.

It’s really quite stupid from both sides, I think. Here’s an article by a Christian apologist (somehow who argues in defense of Christianity) who delivers an extremely short-sighted comparison trying to debunk the parallels in the Christ/Balder story. It’s ridiculous to me, because he focuses on small culturally specific details, rather than looking at the big picture. It’s like saying that since West Side Story features a Puerto Rican gang that it therefore has NOTHING in common with Romeo & Juliet. It’s a narrow way of thinking that overlooks the symbolic value of what’s going on in these types of parallel stories. Further, I don’t think the uniqueness of the Christian story is what makes it powerful and interesting. But then, I’m also not locked into some kind of binary true/false view of religion where if something isn’t factually true, then my whole belief system crumbles.

CS Lewis seems to have cooked up an interesting story to account for the reason that there seem to be so many “Pagan Christs.” A page on that topic summarizes Lewis’s view:

The One True God, the Creator of all peoples, revealed Himself to any sincere seeker with a heart open to Him, even if that person dwelt in a heathen land. Perhaps the Lord even revealed something of His plan of future redemption to these righteous Gentiles, so that they, like His Chosen People, could have faith in the coming Messiah. C. S. Lewis suggests that God may have sent them prophetic visions and “good dreams”, in which they foresaw Christ’s future birth from a Virgin, His Death and Resurrection. Maybe they then shared these wonderful revelations with others, who passed them on and on until these visions became part of the folklore of the people.

Of course, as stories get passed from generation to generation, they tend to change. So, over the centuries, God Incarnate mutated into a pagan “dying god”, like Balder, and His human Mother was convoluted into a “mother goddess” like Frigga. As each generation told and retold the story, the details of Christ’s death were gradually altered and became increasingly fantastic, until each pagan mythology finally possessed a different version of a “dying god” legend. When Christ finally came, it was as though the “dying god” myths of paganism suddenly became Reality. The long-awaited Event at the core of these myths finally occurred; God became Man to redeem us, fulfilling both the Messianic prophecies of Scripture and the “good dreams” of righteous Gentiles.

Of course, not all Christians are as sharp or as generous as CS Lewis was. There are a great many fundamentalists who today believe that the reason these parallel pagan stories exist is because the Devil planted them. Because he snuck around all over the world for millenia befor Christ came to spread lies and rumors to cloud the minds of people, so that when Jesus came, they would not recognize him. This, to me, is laughable. The only funnier thing than that is the belief among some of these same folks that Satan also planted dinosaur bones in the Earth in order to test the faith of righteous Creationists.

Here are some further resources for you to explore this area:

1. Pagan Origins of the Christ Myth
2. The Principal Germanic Gods
3. Balder on the Encyclopedia Mythica
4. Mythological stories about Balder
5. Confronting the Copycat Thesis