The just man will be scourged, racked, bound, will have his eyes put out, and will at last be crucified.
Plato, The Republic, Book II, c. 375 BC
Author’s Note: First and foremost, I don’t know why I was moved to write this. I am not sure if anyone will read it but, in some cases, that is not the KPI for effort. It is a work that I hadn’t seen anywhere before, so I took a stab at it. It is not behind a paywall, there is not a conscious email capture. It’s merely a perspective that I wanted known or a sermon that I wish had been preached.
I am not an academic or theologian, just someone in business. But I felt called to write this because I am inspired by them. With the help of Anthropic, I distilled months of research, book notes, and a few hundred books read over four years into something usable. And then I sat down to trudge through writing this. Because I saw a familiar archetype, over and over and over again. And it presented questions and, ultimately, the answer.
I often admire where disciplines overlap. I am most interested by the shaded sections of the Venn. So, why not?
One ancient text and two modern media depictions provoked this research. The first was a paragraph of Greek philosophy, a part of that paragraph is quoted above: Glaucon’s just man, scourged and impaled on page four, centuries before Christ experienced something similar in Golgotha. The second and third are frames of popular film: Steve Rogers, bearded and long-haired in the exact likeness that two thousand years of Western art assigned to Christ, and then, one movie later, lifting the hammer of a Norse god that only the worthy may hold. Third was the Matrix character Neo realizing his power over the universe, as Trinity looks on to Morpheus and his famous line: “He is the One.”
An ancient deduction and modern spectacle, separated by twenty-four hundred years, pointing at the same figure. This paper is an attempt to explain why it all rhymes.
I. The Deduction
Around 375 BC, four centuries before Rome raised a cross outside Jerusalem, Plato wrote down a prediction. He did not call it one. It appears in the second book of The Republic, in the mouth of his older brother Glaucon, as a thought experiment about the price of goodness. (1)
The setup is ruthless. Imagine, Glaucon says, a perfectly unjust man who is a master of his craft: rich, eloquent, admired, the greatest villain wearing the highest reputation. Now place beside him a perfectly just man, and strip him of everything except the justice itself. No name. No reward. No appearance of virtue. Being, not seeming. Then ask what the world will do to him.
Glaucon answers his own question. The just man will be scourged. He will be racked and bound. His eyes will be put out. And at the last he will be lifted onto a stake and killed. The Greek verb Benjamin Jowett translated as “crucified” means, literally, impaled. (2) All of this, Glaucon says, because the man preferred being good to seeming good.
Read that sequence again. Scourged. Bound. Publicly executed on wood. Written four hundred years early, by a pagan, with no scripture in front of him and no church behind him. This was not prophecy and Plato never claimed it was. It was deduction. Plato understood two things with total clarity: what the world is, and what uncompromised goodness is. He put them on a collision course and reported the wreckage.
He had evidence. Twenty-four years before the Republic was composed, Athens executed Socrates, the most just man the city had produced, on charges of corrupting the young. (3) Glaucon’s hypothetical was already autobiography for everyone in the room. The early church noticed the passage almost immediately; Clement of Alexandria cited it as evidence that the Greeks had glimpsed the Passion by reason alone. (4) Seventeen centuries later, C. S. Lewis made the same observation: when Plato imagined perfect righteousness entering the world, he saw at once that the world would kill it. (5)
Hold onto this chapter, because it does the heaviest lifting in this paper. The standard objection to everything that follows is causation. Of course the Christ story saturates Western culture, the skeptic says; Christendom ran the West for fifteen hundred years, and the saturation is downstream of the market share. It is a fair objection and it deserves a fair answer. The answer is Glaucon. The archetype of the innocent just man, misjudged as the worst of men and executed by the society he came to serve, exists on paper before the event, before the church, before a single Christian was alive to influence anyone. Reason arrived at the crucified just man on its own. The question this paper asks is why humanity has never once been able to put him down.
II. The Myths That Do Not Fit
There is a popular version of comparative religion, born in 1890 with James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, that claims the opposite of this paper. (6) In Frazer’s telling, the ancient world was crowded with dying and rising gods, and the Christian story is simply the last vegetation myth standing. Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, Mithras: the list still circulates online as if it were a settled demolition. An honest paper has to walk directly into this argument, because a dishonest one gets dismissed in a single search. So here is the audit.
Osiris is genuinely ancient. He appears in the Pyramid Texts around 2400 BC, murdered and dismembered by his brother, reassembled by Isis. (7) But Osiris does not rise. He is repaired, and then he descends to rule the dead. He never returns to the living world. Tammuz, the Mesopotamian shepherd god, is older than Abraham and was mourned annually; the prophet Ezekiel saw women weeping for him at the gates of the Jerusalem temple itself. (8) But his pattern is seasonal, half the year below and half above, a calendar wearing a face. Adonis and Attis present a stranger problem: in the earliest sources they die and stay dead. The resurrection episodes attached to their names appear only in texts written after Christianity existed, which raises the genuine scholarly possibility that the borrowing ran in the other direction. Dionysus is attested a millennium and a half before Christ, his name pressed into Mycenaean clay, (9) and the Orphic story of his dismemberment and rebirth is the closest pre-Christian parallel that survives scrutiny. Yet even there the register is cosmic and cyclical, a god torn and reconstituted in myth time, not a moral execution in history. And Mithras, the favorite of the internet’s amateur mythographers, fails the comparison completely: the Roman mystery cult postdates the founding of Christianity, and in the entire surviving record Mithras never dies at all. (10)
Modern scholarship has litigated all of this. Jonathan Z. Smith’s work in the 1980s took the dying-and-rising category apart pin by pin, showing that Frazer had flattened wildly different figures into a shape none of them individually held. (11) His Drudgery Divine went further, tracing how much of the parallel-hunting had been motivated reasoning from the start. (12) Tryggve Mettinger mounted the strongest counter-case, defending a genuinely pre-Christian death-and-return pattern for Tammuz, Baal, and Melqart. (13) The honest state of play sits between them, and it is this: dying divine figures absolutely precede Jesus. The finished pattern does not. Nowhere in the pre-Christian record does the complete structure appear intact: an innocent man, executed once in datable history by the community he came to save, willingly, as a substitution, and bodily raised. The ancient world had the mourning. It did not have the morning.
So this paper concedes the parallels gladly, because it never needed them. What the old myths supply is not the pattern but the appetite. Humanity dreamed seasonal gods for four thousand years because it was starving for a specific story it could not yet tell. The myths are the longing. Glaucon is the logic. And both of them, dreaming and reasoning by entirely separate roads, converge on the same figure standing at the same place: the just man, dying at the world’s hands. What happened outside Jerusalem is the only event in history positioned at the intersection.
III. The Story That Will Not Stop
After the event, something changes in the world’s storytelling, and the change is measurable. The dying god stops being seasonal and becomes structural. He leaves the calendar and enters the plot.
Run the inventory. Melville’s Billy Budd, the innocent sailor hanged at dawn while blessing his judge. (14) Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, conceived, in the author’s own words, as “a perfectly beautiful man” and then fed to society to see what society would do. (15) Dickens’s Sydney Carton mounting the scaffold in another man’s place. Steinbeck’s Jim Casy, initials intact, dying with forgiveness on his lips. Hemingway’s Santiago, palms torn, carrying his mast up the hill. Kesey’s McMurphy, strapped to a table shaped like a cross, destroyed so that the men on the ward could walk free. (16)
Lewis’s Aslan on the stone table. King’s John Coffey on the green mile. Rowling’s Harry walking willingly into the forest. Then the screen: Cool Hand Luke posing cruciform over fifty eaten eggs. E.T. dying and rising and ascending while a boy’s heart breaks. Neo, told to his face in the first act, “You’re my savior, man, my own personal Jesus Christ,” dead in a hallway and breathing again by the end. (17)
Steve Rogers laying a plane into the arctic ice so that others might live, and coming back. (18) And with Rogers, the pattern completes itself in a way worth pausing on.
By Avengers: Infinity War, the character appears bearded and long-haired, youthful and pleasant, wearing without comment the face that Western art spent two millennia assigning to Christ. One film later he lifts Mjolnir, the hammer of a Norse god, an object that yields only to the worthy. Read that against Section II. Inside the most profitable franchise in the history of storytelling, the Christ-figure is certified worthy of the old pantheon’s power, and wields it better than the god who owns it! The pagan dying gods could not carry the finished pattern; here the finished pattern carries their hammer. Four billion dollars in receipts staged the argument of this paper as spectacle, and almost nobody in the audience needed it explained.
Here is the detail that turns a list into an argument: most of these authors were not evangelizing.
Melville was wrestling God, not selling Him. Kesey was a countercultural psychonaut. The Wachowskis were not writing a tract. Spielberg, a Jewish director, spent years politely denying that E.T. was a Christ allegory while the film’s own marketing quoted the Sistine ceiling. (19)
This is the phenomenon that demands explanation. Homage is voluntary. What the record shows is involuntary reproduction: storytellers who do not believe the story, or actively resist it, producing its structure anyway, the way water finds the shape of the vessel. The arc is not decoration in Western narrative. It is load-bearing.
Kurt Vonnegut, an avowed humanist, spent part of his career graphing the shapes of stories, plotting fortune against time. He noticed that one shape towered over the others in the affection of Western audiences, and he named it without embarrassment: the man in the New Testament. (20) Joseph Campbell’s monomyth catalogued death and return across every culture, (21) and Christopher Booker found rebirth among his seven basic plots, (22) but the specifically moral core belongs to one biography: innocence condemned by the crowd it came to save, a death accepted rather than suffered, a substitution. Strip that core out of modern storytelling and half the canon collapses.
Now the comparison that this paper’s thesis originally reached for, stated honestly. It is not true that no other figure has inspired so much matter. The Buddha may be the most sculpted human being in history; there are likely more statues of him on earth than of anyone who ever lived.
Islamic civilization raised some of the most staggering devotional architecture ever built, under a tradition that forbids depicting the Prophet at all. If my argument were tonnage, it would lose. But the argument was never tonnage. The Buddha inspired devotional matter: images made by believers, for veneration. Muhammad inspired sacred matter under a discipline of holy restraint.
What neither inspired, what no other figure in human history has inspired, is compulsive narrative reproduction by unbelievers.
Nobody accidentally writes the Buddha into a summer blockbuster. No secular novelist keeps involuntarily producing the arc of the Prophet’s life. Only one man’s biography became the operating system of stories told by people who reject him. That is not market share. That is something stranger, and strangeness is the correct response to it.
IV. The Commerce Turn
And this is where the paper enters 2PM’s territory, because the modern content economy is the most ruthlessly optimized market humanity has ever built, and optimization is a truth serum. Studios test everything. They focus-group endings, reshoot third acts, A/B test trailers, and greenlight by algorithm. Sentiment is scored in real time. Whatever survives that filter survives for one reason: it converts. The market does not care what is sacred. It cares what sells. Which makes the market an unusually credible witness.
So examine what sits at the top of the all-time global box office. (23) Avengers: Endgame: a willing sacrificial death that redeems the universe, and a mass resurrection in which half of all living things return from dust. Titanic: a substitutionary death in freezing water so that the beloved may live. Star Wars: an old teacher who allows himself to be struck down and returns transfigured in light. Harry Potter: a boy who walks willingly to his death and wakes in a white station called King’s Cross. The Lion King: a father who dies for his son and returns in the clouds to commission him. The Passion arc is not merely present in the highest-grossing narratives ever produced. It is the house style. Tested against global demand, across every culture a studio can distribute to, the risen innocent is the highest-converting story structure in the history of commerce.
The economist Robert Shiller won a Nobel Prize in part for insisting that narratives are not decoration on economies but drivers of them; stories go viral and move markets the way pathogens move through populations. (24)
Six years ago I argued something adjacent in the linear commerce thesis: that media and commerce converge until the publication and the store become a single operation, that audience precedes product, that the story is the storefront. (25) I did not fully appreciate at the time that I was describing a two-thousand-year-old case study. The Christ story is the ultimate linear commerce company. It began as pure narrative with no product attached, monetized nothing at the founding, gave the content away to fishermen and tax collectors, and built the largest distribution network in human history on story alone. Today that narrative underwrites trillion-dollar content industries that never really acknowledges the source. Every Marvel premiere is a rent payment on an arc the audience learned somewhere, even the audience that has never opened the original text.
I have spent years writing about the deterministic economy: the observation that when demand is fixed, supply converges, and markets stop inventing and start discovering. Here is the strongest data point I have ever encountered for it.
Across twenty-four centuries, across every medium humanity has invented, across print and stage and screen and console, across believing cultures and hostile ones, demand for this one story has behaved like a constant. Markets are discovery mechanisms. What the market keeps discovering, every time it optimizes for what the human heart will pay for, is the just man who dies and rises. The church should sit with the strangeness of its own position: the most sophisticated storytellers on earth, commanding the largest budgets in the history of art, keep converging on your story, and most of them do not know why.
V. Myth Became Fact
In 1944, my hero C. S. Lewis compressed everything this paper has assembled into three words: myth became fact. (26)
The heart of Christianity, he wrote, is a myth which is also a fact. The old dying god, dreamed on the Nile and mourned in Babylon, comes down from the heaven of legend and into history: an actual person, an actual date, an actual hill. And, crucially for Lewis, the story does not stop being myth when it becomes fact. It keeps all of its old resonance and gains a birth certificate. His friend Tolkien, who helped argue him into faith on a night walk in 1931, said it in his own key: the Gospels contain a story with the exact arc of the greatest fairy tales, the catastrophe that turns to joy, yet written in the texture of history, and the joy of it has “the very taste of primary truth.” (27)
Now the claim of this paper, stated with the precision the subject deserves, because overclaiming here would dishonor it.
Cultural saturation is not a proof of the resurrection. Arguments from popularity prove popularity; a billion retellings of a false story would still be retellings of a false story. If this paper claimed that box office receipts demonstrate an empty tomb, every skeptic reading it would be right to close the document, and should. The claim is narrower, and stranger, and much harder to dismiss. It is that three facts sit in the record, each independently verifiable, all pointing at one figure.
First: reason deduced him in advance. Four centuries before the event, with no conscious Christian influence in existence, Plato reasoned from first principles that a perfectly just man entering this world would be scourged, bound, and executed on wood.
Second: the myths did not contain him. The pre-Christian world is full of dying gods, and an honest audit shows that none of them carries the finished pattern; they carry the ache for it, the appetite without the meal. Third: after the event, the pattern became unstoppable. It is the most reproduced, most purchased, most involuntarily retold story on earth, produced compulsively by cultures and creators who do not believe it, converting at the top of the most optimized market in history. Before the event, the story exists as longing and as logic. After the event, it exists as everything.
The strongest secular reply deserves the floor before the close, because it is far better than the mythicist one and a serious reader will bring it. Call it the memetic explanation: the Passion arc persists not because it is true but because it is the perfect exploit of universal human psychology.
Attachment, loss, hope, the ache to be substituted for: the story presses every ancient button at once, and so it replicates. On this reading the market is not discovering a truth about the world; it is discovering a vulnerability in the heart, and Glaucon simply found the vulnerability early. Concede this mechanism entirely.
The concession costs nothing, because the question underneath it is the one Lewis spent his post-war, post-atheistic life asking: why is the heart shaped with precisely this hole in it? A hunger does not prove any particular meal. But hunger is strange evidence for a world without food. (28) If the deepest and most durable appetite in human storytelling is for an innocent who dies in our place and does not stay dead, then the memetic explanation has not explained the appetite. It has renamed it.
The thesis, then. The Christ story behaves in culture the way energy behaves in physics: it is conserved. Strike it from one medium and it reappears in another. Suppress it in one century and it returns in the next, wearing a cape or a trench coat or a crown of fur. That behavior is what you would expect if the story were not one copy among many but the original, the thing itself, the true north that every narrative compass has been trembling toward since Glaucon put down his stylus. Consonance is not proof. But it is evidence, and it points in one direction, and a rational person is permitted to follow it. Lewis followed it. So did the pagans who wept for Tammuz without knowing what they were rehearsing.
Glaucon asked what would happen if a perfectly just man entered the world. The world answered once, on a hill outside Jerusalem, and it has been unable to stop repeating the answer ever since: in every medium it invents, at every price point, in every language, whether it believes the answer or not.
He is on the pages and the screens because he was first in the world. The echo does not create the voice but the echo confirms it.
Research and Writing by Web Smith (view the source list of works here)
Selected Bibliography
Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Continuum, 2004.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949.
Chadwick, John. The Mycenaean World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Clauss, Manfred. The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries. Translated by Richard Gordon. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.
Clement of Alexandria. Stromata. In Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885.
Faulkner, R. O. The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1890.
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952.
Lewis, C. S. “Myth Became Fact.” In God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970.
Lewis, C. S. Reflections on the Psalms. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958.
Mettinger, Tryggve N. D. The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001.
Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. 3rd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Introduction to Christianity. Translated by J. R. Foster. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.
Shiller, Robert J. Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Smith, Jonathan Z. Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.
Smith, Jonathan Z. “Dying and Rising Gods.” In The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade, vol. 4. New York: Macmillan, 1987.
Smith, Web. “On Linear Commerce.” 2PM, 2020. 2pml.com.
Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams, edited by C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage. New York: Delacorte, 1981.
Notes
- Plato, The Republic, bk. II, 361e–362a, trans. Benjamin Jowett, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888).↩︎
- The verb Jowett renders “crucified (literally impaled)” is anaschinduleuthesetai, to be fixed on a stake. Republic 362a.↩︎
- Socrates was executed by Athens in 399 BC, roughly a quarter century before the Republic was composed. See Plato, Apology.↩︎
- Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 5.14, where Plato is described as “all but predicting the economy of salvation”; in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 2, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (Buffalo: Christian Literature, 1885). The passage’s afterlife runs to the present: Joseph Ratzinger treats Plato’s crucified just man at length in Introduction to Christianity, trans. J. R. Foster (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970).↩︎
- C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1958), chap. 10, “Second Meanings.”↩︎
- James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890).↩︎
- R. O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).↩︎
- Ezekiel 8:14.↩︎
- Dionysus appears by name on Mycenaean Linear B tablets of the second millennium BC. John Chadwick, The Mycenaean World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).↩︎
- Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, trans. Richard Gordon (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).↩︎
- Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 521–27.↩︎
- Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).↩︎
- Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection: “Dying and Rising Gods” in the Ancient Near East (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 2001).↩︎
- Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, published posthumously (London: Constable, 1924).↩︎
- Fyodor Dostoevsky to Sofya Ivanova, January 1868, in Complete Letters, ed. and trans. David Lowe (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988–1991). Dostoevsky describes his aim in The Idiot as the depiction of “a perfectly beautiful man.”↩︎
- Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (New York: Viking, 1962).↩︎
- The Matrix, dir. Lana and Lilly Wachowski (Warner Bros., 1999); The Matrix Revolutions (Warner Bros., 2003).↩︎
- Captain America: The First Avenger, dir. Joe Johnston (Marvel Studios, 2011); Avengers: Infinity War (Marvel Studios, 2018); Avengers: Endgame, dir. Anthony and Joe Russo (Marvel Studios, 2019).↩︎
- Joseph McBride, Steven Spielberg: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Spielberg, raised Jewish, repeatedly disclaimed any intended Christ allegory in E.T.; the film’s iconic poster art nevertheless reproduced the finger-touch of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam.↩︎
- Kurt Vonnegut, Palm Sunday: An Autobiographical Collage (New York: Delacorte, 1981), chap. 18, on the “shapes of stories.”↩︎
- Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York: Pantheon, 1949).↩︎
- Christopher Booker, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories (London: Continuum, 2004).↩︎
- All-time worldwide box office rankings, Box Office Mojo, accessed July 2026.↩︎
- Robert J. Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).↩︎
- Web Smith, “On Linear Commerce,” 2PM (2020), 2pml.com. The thesis: media and commerce converge until the publication and the store are one operation. Audience precedes product; the story is the storefront.↩︎
- C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970), 63–67. First published in World Dominion, 1944.↩︎
- J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” in Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947).↩︎
- The argument from desire is Lewis’s: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952), bk. III, chap. 10.↩︎