 In the mid-twentieth century, some scholars began to criticize the designation of "dying-and-rising god", in some cases arguing that deities like Adonis, previously referred to as "dying and rising", would be better termed separately as "dying gods" and "disappearing gods", asserting that gods who "died" did not return, and those who returned never "really" died.Biblical scholars Eddy and Boyd (2007) applied this rationale to Adonis based on the fact that his portion of the year spent in the Underworld with Persephone is not really a death and resurrection, but merely an instance of a living person staying in the Underworld.They further argued that Adonis is not explicitly described as rising from the dead in any extant Classical Greek writings, though the fact that such a belief existed is attested by authors in Late Antiquity.