Dumuzi descends to the underworld, Baal is struck down by Mot, Osiris is dismembered, and Persephone is kidnapped by Hades—each myth cycles through death and return tied to the rhythms of nature. The Easter tradition shares this symbolic landscape, yet it also departs from it in key ways. In this lecture, Leandro Palacios of Toronto Centre Place examines how the Passion and Resurrection accounts of Jesus draw on ancient motifs of dying and rising gods, while reinterpreting them within a new theological and historical framework. We will also consider why modern scholars have questioned the old category of “dying and rising gods” and how the Easter proclamation offered something distinct that resonated with early Christian communities.