Isn't Jesus just a copy of pagan myths like Horus, Mithras or Dionysus?
Long before Jesus, pagan religions told of gods who were born of virgins on December 25, had twelve disciples, performed miracles, died and rose again. Horus, Mithras, Dionysus and Osiris share so many features with Jesus that the Gospel story looks like a recycled myth.
— Popularized online by the film Zeitgeist (2007), drawing on nineteenth-century writers such as Gerald Massey and Kersey Graves
When you check the ancient sources themselves, most of the claimed parallels disappear. Horus was not born of a virgin on December 25 and had no twelve disciples; Mithras was born from a rock and is never said to die or rise; Dionysus' stories are about a god, not a recent man executed under a Roman governor. Specialists in ancient religion have largely abandoned the idea of a common 'dying and rising god' pattern. The Gospels describe a Jewish man in datable history, and their roots are in the Hebrew Scriptures, not pagan myth.
What Scripture says
16For we did not follow cleverly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.
The apostles explicitly deny following 'cleverly devised myths'; they claim to be eyewitnesses.
1Many have undertaken to compose an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, 2just as they were handed down to us by the initial eyewitnesses and servants of the word. 3Therefore, having carefully investigated everything from the beginning, it seemed good also to me to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, 4so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.
Luke writes as an investigator of events handed down by eyewitnesses, not as a teller of sacred myth.
1In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, 2during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
The Gospel story is anchored to named rulers and a specific year, unlike timeless pagan myths.
3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that He was buried, that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,
Paul says Christ died and rose 'in accordance with the Scriptures', pointing to Jewish, not pagan, roots.
4Surely He took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows; yet we considered Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. 5But He was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. 6We all like sheep have gone astray, each one has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid upon Him the iniquity of us all. 7He was oppressed and afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so He did not open His mouth. 8By oppression and judgment He was taken away, and who can recount His descendants? For He was cut off from the land of the living; He was stricken for the transgression of My people. 9He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with a rich man in His death, although He had done no violence, nor was any deceit in His mouth. 10Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush Him and to cause Him to suffer; and when His soul is made a guilt offering, He will see His offspring, He will prolong His days, and the good pleasure of the LORD will prosper in His hand. 11After the anguish of His soul, He will see the light of life and be satisfied. By His knowledge My righteous Servant will justify many, and He will bear their iniquities. 12Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He will divide the spoils with the strong, because He has poured out His life unto death, and He was numbered with the transgressors. Yet He bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors.
The background for a suffering, vindicated servant is found in Israel's prophets.
22Then Paul stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I see that in every way you are very religious. 23For as I walked around and examined your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Therefore what you worship as something unknown, I now proclaim to you. 24The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples made by human hands. 25Nor is He served by human hands, as if He needed anything, because He Himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26From one man He made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and He determined their appointed times and the boundaries of their lands. 27God intended that they would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us. 28‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.’ 29Therefore, being offspring of God, we should not think that the Divine Being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by man’s skill and imagination. 30Although God overlooked the ignorance of earlier times, He now commands all people everywhere to repent. 31For He has set a day when He will judge the world with justice by the Man He has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising Him from the dead.”
Paul engages pagan religion respectfully but proclaims a man whom God raised from the dead, which his Greek audience found strange, not familiar.
The case
Check the sources, not the lists
The copycat argument usually comes as a list: virgin birth, December 25, twelve disciples, crucifixion, resurrection after three days. These lists mostly trace back to nineteenth-century popular writers like Gerald Massey and Kersey Graves, not to ancient texts or to modern specialists. The fair way to test them is to ask of each claim: Which ancient text says this, and when was it written?
Horus
Horus was the Egyptian falcon-headed god, son of Isis and Osiris. In the main versions of the myth, Isis conceives him by the dead Osiris, whom she has magically restored. That is not a virgin birth. There is no ancient Egyptian evidence that Horus was born on December 25, had twelve disciples, was crucified, or rose after three days. Several of these "parallels" appear to be modern inventions or loose renamings.
Mithras
The Roman cult of Mithras was a mystery religion for initiates, mostly soldiers and officials. Its evidence comes overwhelmingly from the late first century AD onward, especially the second and third centuries, which is after the New Testament was written. In its art Mithras is born from a rock and slays a bull. Scholars of Mithraism such as Manfred Clauss know of no story in which Mithras dies, let alone rises. If there was borrowing between Christianity and Mithraism, the timeline makes it at least as likely to have run the other way.
Dionysus
Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, has several birth stories. In one he is born from Zeus' thigh; in an Orphic version, a divine child is torn apart by Titans and remade. These are stories about gods in a mythic past. None describes a recent historical man who taught, was executed under a named Roman governor, and was seen alive by named witnesses.
What the specialists say
Around 1900, James Frazer's The Golden Bough (first edition 1890) proposed a widespread pattern of "dying and rising gods" tied to the seasons. Later scholars examined the evidence closely. Jonathan Z. Smith, a leading historian of religion and not a Christian apologist, concluded in the Encyclopedia of Religion (1987) that the category did not hold up: most of these gods either die without rising or "disappear and return" with the seasons. Tryggve Mettinger later argued that a few figures do fit the pattern, but he too found no evidence that the Christian proclamation was built from these myths.
The decisive differences
| Pagan myths | The Gospels | |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Mythic past, no date | Reign of Tiberius, under Pontius Pilate |
| Subject | Gods or nature cycles | A Jewish man from Nazareth |
| "Return" | Seasonal, underworld or spiritual | Bodily, once for all, never to die again |
| Sources | Often centuries later, scattered | Written within decades, naming witnesses |
| Roots | Polytheistic religion | Jewish Scripture and monotheism |
The earliest Christians were Jews who despised idolatry (1 Thessalonians 1:9). It is hard to imagine them borrowing from pagan cults they considered false worship. They explained Jesus from Moses, the Psalms and the Prophets, and their resurrection hope came from texts like Daniel 12:2, not from Egyptian or Persian religion.
Similarity is not copying
Some real resemblances exist: many cultures tell of sacrifice, renewal and gods who visit humans. But similarity does not prove dependence. If God made humans to long for redemption, we should expect echoes of that longing across cultures. The question is whether those longings were ever met in real history. Christianity's claim is that they were, in a particular place and time.
Why it matters
Myths speak of what happens "always" or "once upon a time". The gospel speaks of what happened once, outside Jerusalem, around AD 30. That makes it testable, and it makes it good news rather than a symbol. The hopes hinted at in human stories are answered by a real person who can be known.
Word study
greek · “myth, fable, tale” · 2 Peter 1:16
In the New Testament mythos always carries a negative sense: a made-up story set against the truth (1 Timothy 1:4; 2 Timothy 4:4). The apostles were aware of the category of myth and deliberately set the gospel apart from it as eyewitness testimony.
“But what about…?”
Didn't early Christians themselves admit the parallels?
Justin Martyr (c. AD 155) told his pagan readers that Christian claims about Jesus were not stranger than what they already believed about the sons of Jupiter (First Apology 21–22). He was arguing that Christians should not be persecuted for their beliefs, not conceding that the Gospels were borrowed. He also insisted that Christ's story was foretold by the Hebrew prophets long before.
What about Osiris? Didn't he die and come back?
Osiris was murdered and dismembered, and Isis gathered his body parts. But he did not return to life on earth; he became ruler of the dead in the underworld. That is a very different idea from Jesus' bodily resurrection to new, immortal life in the world.
But some scholars do still defend 'dying and rising gods'?
A few do, notably Tryggve Mettinger (2001), who argued that some ancient Near Eastern gods do fit the pattern. Yet even Mettinger concluded he found no clear evidence that the Christian proclamation of Jesus' death and resurrection was built from these myths.
Isn't December 25 borrowed from pagan festivals?
The Bible never gives the date of Jesus' birth, so the date of Christmas has nothing to do with whether the Gospel story is true. Historians debate why the church later chose December 25; that is a question about church calendars, not about the life of Jesus.
Where Christians differ
Go deeper
- book · 2003The Gospel and the Greeks: Did the New Testament Borrow from Pagan Thought?Ronald H. Nash
- book · 2001The Riddle of Resurrection: 'Dying and Rising Gods' in the Ancient Near EastTryggve N. D. Mettinger
- article · 1987Dying and Rising Gods (Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 4)Jonathan Z. Smith
- book · 2000The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His MysteriesManfred Clauss
- book · 2012Did Jesus Exist? The Historical Argument for Jesus of NazarethBart D. Ehrman
- ancientFirst ApologyJustin Martyr
Sources (5)
- Jonathan Z. Smith, 'Dying and Rising Gods', in Mircea Eliade (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), vol. 4, pp. 521–527
- Tryggve N. D. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection (Almqvist & Wiksell, 2001)
- Manfred Clauss, The Roman Cult of Mithras (Routledge, 2000; German original 1990)
- Justin Martyr, First Apology 21–22 and 54
- Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris (De Iside et Osiride): the Osiris myth
Related questions
Did Jesus even exist?
Almost every historian of the ancient world, Christian or not, agrees that Jesus of Nazareth existed and was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He is mentioned by Roman and Jewish writers within about a century of his death, and Paul's letters, written within twenty to thirty years, name people who knew Jesus personally, including his brother James. By ancient standards, that is excellent evidence. The real debate is not whether Jesus lived, but who he was.
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?
A small set of facts is granted by nearly all historians who study the period, including skeptics: Jesus died by crucifixion; his disciples sincerely believed he appeared to them alive; the church persecutor Paul and the skeptic James were converted by what they believed were appearances; and the tomb was very likely found empty. Natural theories each explain one or two of these facts but fail on the rest. The resurrection explains all of them, and it is exactly what Jesus predicted.
Weren't the resurrection stories written too late to be reliable?
The resurrection is not first found in the Gospels but in Paul's letters from the 50s AD, which quote a creed that most scholars date to within a few years of the crucifixion. That is far too early for legend to replace the core facts, especially while Peter, James and hundreds of other witnesses were alive. By ancient standards the Gospels themselves are also early: our main sources for Alexander the Great were written centuries after his death.
This entry is a draft and has not yet been theologically reviewed.