Adonis

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A popular Internet quote: "The Greek deity Adonis was born of the virgin Myrrha, many centuries before the birth of Jesus. He was born 'at Bethlehem, in the same sacred cave that Christians later claimed as the birthplace of Jesus.'"

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According to the Greek mythographer Apollodorus (Lib. 3.14.3), Adonis' genealogy was known in three conflicting accounts:

1) Hesiod claimed that Adonis was the son of Phoenix and Alphesiboea.

2) Some people held that Adonis was the son of Cinyras, founder and king of Paphos in Cyprus, and his wife Metharme, daughter of Pygmalion, king of Cyprus.

3) Panyasis claimed that Adonis was the son of Thias, king of Assyria and his daughter Smyrna.

The last of these genealogies seems to have been the most popular of the three. It is also the most relevant to our study since the other two presume a purely natural and ordinary birth.

As the story goes, Aphrodite was outraged with Smyrna, either: 1) "because she did not honor the goddess" (Apollodorus) or 2) because her mother boasted that her daughter was more beautiful than the goddess herself (Hyginus). Aphrodite therefore gave Smyrna an incestuous passion for her father Panyasis:

… with the complicity of her nurse she shared her father's bed without his knowledge for twelve nights (agnoounti tō patri nuktas dōdeka suneunastē). But when he was aware of it, he drew his sword and pursued her, and being overtaken she prayed to the gods that she might be invisible; so the gods in compassion turned her into the tree which they call Smyrna (myrrh). Ten months afterwards the tree burst and Adonis, as he is called, was born … (Apollodorus, Lib. 3.14.4).

Ovid too represents Smyrna as engaging in incest with her father and thereby conceiving Adonis:

Plena patris thalamis excedit et inpia diro semina fert utero conceptaque crimina portat.
Forth from the chamber she went out, full of her father, with crime conceived within her womb. (Met. 10.469-70)

The other mythographers followed this same story (Plutarch, Parallela 22; Antoninus Liberalis, Transform. 34; Fulgentius, Mythologies 3.8; Lactantius Placidus, Narrat. Fab. 10.9; Scholiast on Theocritus 1.107).

This myth was etiological: it was meant to explain why myrrh trees oozed with drops of sap. These drops were the sad teardrops of Smyrna, from whom the myrrh tree had taken its name. The Greek word smyrna comes from a Semitic word, akin to the Arabic word murr. The Latin cognate is myrrha, from which the English word "myrrh" is derived. There is no etymological relationship between any of these words and the name of Jesus’ mother, however. Jesus is said in the New Testament to have been born of ‘Mary’ (Mat 1:16; Mk 6:3; Lk 1:30-31; Acts 1:14). In Greek, this name is Maria or Mariam, a very popular Jewish name in first century, it being the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Miriam. Its popularity was of course not attributable to the myth of Adonis’ birth but to the fact that Moses’ sister was named Miriam. Miriam had led the women in the prophetic song of triumph after Pharaoh’s army had been drowned and the Israelites had crossed through the Red Sea (Deut 15:20-21). While the etymology for Miriam is uncertain, it possibly came from the Egyptian mr ("love") and Yah (short for Yahweh). If so, the name would have meant, ‘loved of Yahweh’. Another possibility is that the name was derived from the root mr, which means "bitterness" (cf. Ruth 1:20).

Nothing is said or implied in the Adonis myth about his having been born of a virgin. Smyrna was impregnated by her father. This is expressly stated not only by Apollodorus, but by the other mythographers as well.

Nor do we find anywhere that Adonis was born "at Bethlehem, in the same sacred cave that Christians later claimed as the birthplace of Jesus", as we read in the above quote. The quotation marks within this quote were apparently lifted from a secondary source, but the source is making a bogus claim. According to the extant primary sources (e.g. Apollodorus, Hyginus, Theocritus, etc.) we can only assume that Adonis was born either in Paphos (a city of Cyprus) or somewhere in Assyria.

The New Testament accounts of Jesus’ virgin birth bear no resemblance to this myth and should be deemed independent of it.

Perseus

Perseus was a well known Greek "hero" (hērōs) figure. That is, he was the son of a mortal woman and a god—Zeus. The story of his birth is told by several mythologists, one of whom is Pherecydes:

… Acrisios married Eurydice daughter of Lacedaimon. they had a daughter, Danae. When Acrisios consulted the oracle about having male children, the god in Pytho responded that he would have no male child, but his daughter would have a son by whom he would be killed. Upon his return to Argos, he had constructed in the courtyard of his home an underground chamber so that no son might be born of her. But Zeus fell in love with the girl and flowed through the thatched roof in a form like gold; she caught him in her lap. Zeus revealed himself and had sex with the girl; they had a son, Perseus. (Pherecydes, frag. 10 trans. Fowler)

One might speculate that the "golden shower" of Zeus in this myth had its origins in the mystery cults and that its ritual re-enactment involved urinating on a woman. Urine is excreted from the same male member as semen so perhaps in the ancient mind urine was thought to have some potential for fertilization. In any case, Danae did somehow become impregnated by Zeus. The question arises, though, as to whether his shower was itself the cause or whether the god had only transformed himself into a shower in order to gain entrance into Danae's sealed chamber. Pherecydes adopts the latter view, saying that once Zeus flowed through the thatched roof and onto Danae's lap he "revealed himself and had sex with the girl." Vase paintings, on the other hand, suggest that Danae's impregnation was by the golden shower itself:

Museum Collection: State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia Catalogue Number: St Petersburg ST 1723Beazley Archive Number: 203792Ware: Attic Red FigureShape: Krater, calyxPainter: Attributed to the Triptolemos PainterDate: ca 490 BCPeriod: Late Archaic / Early Classical

Museum Collection: Musée du Louvre, Paris, FranceCatalogue No.: Louvre Ca925 Beazley Archive No.: N/AWare: (Lucanian?) Red FigureShape: Krater Painter: -- Date: ca 450 - 425 BC Period: Classical

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Ovid (Met. 4.611) also seems to have held that the shower itself was what caused the conception. He writes that "Perseus was the son of Jupiter, whom Danae had conceived of a golden shower" (Iovis … quem pluvio Danae conceperat auro).

Apollodorus' version of the story, on the other hand, is ambiguous about whether Zeus had intercourse with Danae in the form of the shower or in some human form:

… Zeus, having transformed himself into gold, and having flowed down through the ceiling into Danae's lap, had intercourse with her (sunēlthen). (Lib. 2.4 [34])

Synēlthen, with the prefix syn-, refers in this context to an act of intercourse, not simply an act of entering into Danae. Hyginus too is somewhat ambiguous:

Iouis autem in imbrem aureum conuersus cum Danae concubuit, ex quo compressu natus est Perseus.
Jupiter ( = Zeus), [after] having turned himself into golden rain, laid down together with Danae. From this embrace Perseus was born. (Fab. 63)

However the pregnancy was thought to have happened, the point of the story is that Zeus was Perseus' father and that it was through some private intercourse with this god that Danae conceived Perseus. Notice in all of the stories that Zeus' intercourse with Danae is either explicitly mentioned or implied. There is no actual ‘virgin birth’ in the story. To be sure, Acrisios had tried to preserve his daughter’s virginity. But Zeus found a way to de-flower her despite all her father's efforts. As the story line continues, Acrisios places his daughter and the newborn Perseus in a sealed chest and abandons them to the sea. The chest is then discovered by satyrs, allowing Perseus to grow to manhood. As a young man he searches out and reunites, after so many years, with Arcisios whom he has forgiven. Tragically, however, he kills his father by accident and becomes king in his place, just as the prophecy had foretold.

As a whole, this dramatic tale of divine seduction, abandonment, patricide and cruel fate bears no compelling similarities to the story of Christ's birth in the New Testament. There is no reason to think the story of Perseus' birth influenced or laid the theological groundwork for the story of Jesus' virgin birth.

Primary sources: Pherecydes, frag. 10; Apollodorus, Library 2.4 [34-35]; Pausanius, Guide to Greece 2.16.2, 25.6, 3.13.6; Hyginus, Fables 63.
Minor primary sources: Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.607ff.