The Claim We’ve Probably Seen Online
We see it online now and then. The picture with two columns, side by side. On the left, an Egyptian god named Horus. On the right, Jesus of Nazareth. Between them, a tidy list of matching points: born of a virgin, born on 25 December, 12 followers, killed, raised again after 3 days.
The message is short and confident. Christianity invented nothing. Jesus is simply an old pagan story wearing new clothes.
First, a word we will use a lot. “Pagan” here simply means the many gods worshipped in the ancient world outside Israel—Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Persian. It’s a description, not an insult.
The claim is popular. It takes all of 10 seconds to read and can feel devastating. But speed is not the same as strength. When you slow down and ask where each item on that list actually comes from, something surprising happens. The list starts to fall apart in your hands.
In this post, we shall do two things. We shall check the famous parallels against the actual ancient sources. And then ask the harder question that’s almost never asked: even if two things look alike, what would we need to prove that one caused the other?
Where This Idea Actually Came From
Most people assume the copycat theory came out of a university, from scholars digging in Egyptian tombs. It didn’t. It has a traceable family tree, and the roots aren’t academic.
| STAGE | WHAT HAPPENED |
|---|---|
| 1700s | European deists—thinkers who believed in a distant God but rejected the Bible—began arguing all religions were basically the same invented thing. |
| 1800s | Gerald Massey, an English poet, and Kersey Graves, an American writer, published lists of “16 crucified saviours” and Egyptian parallels. Neither could read Egyptian. Neither was trained in ancient history. Almost every claim in today’s memes traces back to them. |
| 1890 onwards | James Frazer’s The Golden Bough popularised the idea of the “dying and rising god” as a universal type found everywhere. |
| Early 1900s | A group of German scholars known as the history-of-religions school (Wilhelm Bousset, Richard Reitzenstein) argued Paul had reshaped Jesus using Greek mystery religions. |
| Late 1900s | That school collapsed under closer examination of the evidence. Specialists abandoned it. |
| 2007 onwards | The film Zeitgeist and writers such as DM Murdock and Tom Harpur revived the Victorian material for the internet, where it spread faster than any correction could follow. |
So the copycat argument didn’t survive scholarly testing and then reach the public. It failed scholarly testing, was quietly dropped by specialists, and then reached the public anyway.
There’s a further irony worth knowing. Historian Jonathan Z Smith showed the “pagan borrowing” argument was first built by Protestants attacking Rome—the charge being that Roman Catholic ritual was recycled paganism. Only later did unbelieving writers pick up that same tool and turn it against Christianity itself. The weapon was forged in a Protestant workshop.
Checking the Parallels One by One
Here’s the simplest and most effective test. Go to the actual ancient texts and see what they say. Not what a website says they say.
Horus and Osiris (Egypt)
This is the parallel you meet most often, and it’s the weakest.
- The birth. Horus wasn’t born of a virgin. In the story told by Greek writer Plutarch, goddess Isis gathers the scattered pieces of her murdered husband Osiris and conceives a child from his body. Whatever else that is, it’s not a virgin giving birth.
- The “resurrection.” Osiris was never restored to ordinary life on earth. He was made a mummy and became ruler of the realm of the dead. That’s the opposite of what the Gospels describe: a man walking out of a tomb, eating fish, and inviting people to touch His hands.
- The rest of the list. No crucifixion. No 12 disciples. No 25 December. No baptism at age 30. These items appear in Massey and in modern memes—and not in the Egyptian sources.
Mithras (Persia and Rome)
Mithras is the second favourite. The problems here are even sharper.
- The birth. Roman Mithras was born from solid rock. Not from a woman at all.
- The dating. Roman Mithraism appears in the evidence from the late 1st century after Christ and grows through the 2nd and 3rd centuries. That’s after Christianity, not before it. A cause cannot come after its effect.
- The sources. Roman Mithraism left us no scriptures. What survives are carvings, temples and inscriptions. Much of what people confidently “quote” about Mithras is modern guesswork poured into silent stone.
- The old theory. Belgian scholar Franz Cumont argued Roman Mithraism carried Persian doctrine forward intact. At an international congress in Manchester in 1971, specialists including John Hinnells and Richard Gordon dismantled that theory. It hasn’t recovered. Yet Cumont’s discarded framework is still the unspoken basis of most internet claims.
Attis, Adonis and Dionysus
These are the remaining names in the “dying and rising gods” file. The pattern repeats itself.
| FIGURE | WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS |
|---|---|
| Attis | No text before Christ says Attis rose from the dead. The claim first appears 300 years after the apostles preached. One main witness, Firmicus Maternus, is himself a Christian writer describing the cult of his own day. So the “parallel” is not an ancient source the Gospels could have copied. |
| Adonis | Early sources mourn Adonis. They don’t raise him. Any talk of resurrection reaches us only through writers of the Christian period, such as Origen and Jerome, who were describing pagan practice after the gospel was widely known. Once again the supposed source is younger than the thing it’s said to have produced—and if anyone was in a position to borrow, it wasn’t the Christians. |
| Tammuz | Ezekiel 8:14 shows women weeping for Tammuz, which the Bible treats as idolatry. Weeping is the point. There is no raising in the early evidence. |
| Dionysus | The story is dismemberment and rebirth in a new form—a different story altogether. There’s nothing resembling a crucified man raised bodily in public history. |
Notice the Pattern
In case after case, the “pre-Christian parallel” turns out to be either:
- Not a parallel when we read the source, or
- Recorded only after Christianity was already spreading.
Remove those two categories and the famous list is almost empty.
Correlation Isn’t Causation: The Test Every Claim Must Pass
Now for the deeper issue. Suppose, for argument’s sake, that some resemblance really did survive the checks above. Would that prove copying?
No. And this is where the whole argument quietly collapses.
Two words matter here, so let’s define them simply.
- Correlation means two things look alike, or appear together. Ice cream sales and drowning deaths both rise in summer.
- Causation means one thing actually produced the other. Ice cream doesn’t cause drowning. The two only happen to rise in hot weather.
Placing two lists side by side establishes correlation at best. It needn’t establish causation. Yet the copycat argument treats resemblance as if it were proof of descent. That’s not history. It’s pattern-matching.
So what would someone actually need to show? If a person claims the Christian account of Jesus was borrowed from an older religion, the burden of proof rests on them. And it’s a heavy one. Here’s what must be supplied.
| THE TEST | WHAT MUST BE DEMONSTRATED |
|---|---|
| 1. Priority in time | The supposed source must be clearly documented before the supposed borrowing. Most alleged parallels survive only in documents written after the New Testament. This alone sinks the majority of claims. |
| 2. A route of transmission | Show how Jewish men in Galilee and Jerusalem in the AD 30s came into contact with these cults, and why they would want to imitate them. Jewish faith of that period was fiercely opposed to mixing with foreign worship. The people most likely to borrow were the people least willing to. |
| 3. Direction of dependence | Even if contact existed, which way did the influence run? Later pagan cults living alongside a growing church had every opportunity to borrow from it. |
| 4. Genuine rather than surface likeness | Scholar Samuel Sandmel coined the word “parallelomania” for the habit of collecting shallow resemblances and calling them evidence. Every religion has meals, washings, birth and death. Shared human furniture is not shared parentage. |
| 5. Freedom from imported vocabulary | Describing Osiris as “resurrected” or a Mithraic meal as a “last supper” pours Christian words into non-Christian material—and then discovers Christianity inside it. That is a circle, not a proof. |
| 6. Control of abstraction | Parallels survive only when stated vaguely. Bring in the specifics—a named man, executed under a named Roman governor, at a named city, on a datable Friday, buried in a named man’s tomb—and the look-alikes vanish. |
| 7. Explanatory reach | A theory must explain what has no parallel at all: a crucified Messiah as public disgrace, women as the first witnesses, an absolute refusal to worship any other god, and believers dying rather than adding Caesar to the list. |
| 8. Testability | As usually stated, the theory cannot lose. Similarities prove borrowing; differences prove clever adaptation. A claim that no possible evidence could disprove is not a historical claim at all. |
Textual scholar Bruce Metzger made the point decades ago: proving that two things resemble each other says nothing about which came first, and nothing about whether either depends on the other. Resemblance raises a question. It doesn’t answer one.
The Heart of It
The copycat argument asks us to accept a conclusion about history without doing any history. It offers a list where it owes us a chain of evidence.
Even the Sceptics Don’t Buy It
Here’s something the memes never mention. The people best placed to use this argument against Christianity have publicly refused to.
- Bart Ehrman is an agnostic New Testament scholar and one of the most effective critics of traditional Christianity writing today. In his book Did Jesus Exist? (2012) he dismisses the Horus and Mithras parallels as baseless, and is openly frustrated that they circulate at all.
- Maurice Casey was a British scholar who didn’t hold Christian faith. His book Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? (2014) treats the copycat material as an embarrassment to serious enquiry.
- Tryggve Mettinger argued, against the majority view, that some dying-and-rising gods did exist before Christianity. Then he concluded this doesn’t explain Jesus, because the pagan stories run on the yearly cycle of the seasons while the resurrection of Jesus is presented as a once-for-all public event in datable history. He’s worth citing, because his minority view actually sharpens the difference.
When even hostile specialists say the argument doesn’t work, the question is no longer whether the evidence supports it. The question is why it remains so appealing.
What We Gladly Admit
An honest case must give away everything that is true. Three admissions.
- The New Testament uses Greek words that pagans also used. Words like logos (word, reason) and mysterion (a hidden thing now revealed) were common in the Greek-speaking world. But borrowing a word isn’t borrowing an idea. English speakers use the word “god” without meaning what Homer meant. John fills logos with the content of Genesis 1 and the Old Testament wisdom writings, not with Greek philosophy.
- Later Christian culture absorbed local customs. Church buildings, calendars, art and music all show cultural adaptation across the centuries. That’s what happens when a message crosses borders. It says nothing about the origin of the message itself. Distinguishing the apostolic gospel from the cultural furniture around it is exactly the instinct the Reformation trained into us.
- The date of 25 December is not in the Bible. Its origin is genuinely debated. One serious proposal is that it was calculated from an assumed date for the crucifixion rather than copied from a sun festival. Either way, Scripture fixes no date for the nativity, so nothing in the Christian faith depends on it.
Notice what none of these touch. Not the incarnation. Not the atonement. Not the empty tomb. The concessions are real, and they are peripheral.
The Real Background Is Jerusalem, Not Egypt
Here is the strongest positive point in the whole discussion, and it is often missed. Every supposed pagan source has an older, closer and better-documented Jewish source—and the New Testament writers tell us plainly that this is where they are drawing from.
| FEATURE OF THE GOSPEL | ITS ACTUAL OLD TESTAMENT ROOT |
|---|---|
| A promised deliverer who crushes the serpent | Genesis 3:15 |
| A lamb slain so that death passes over a people | Exodus 12 |
| A substitute bearing guilt away | Leviticus 16, the Day of Atonement |
| A righteous sufferer not abandoned to the grave | Psalm 16; Psalm 22 |
| A servant wounded for the sins of others | Isaiah 53 |
| Three days and then deliverance | Jonah 1:17, cited by Jesus in Matthew 12:40 |
Jesus Himself said exactly this on the Emmaus road: And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27). He didn’t point to Egypt. He pointed to Moses.
The historical evidence points the same way.
- The earliest summary of the gospel is astonishingly early. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 Paul quotes a formula he says he received and passed on. Scholars across the spectrum—including sceptic German scholar Gerd Ludemann—date this material to within a few years of the crucifixion. There’s no room in that gap for a slow drift of foreign myth into the story.
- The high view of Jesus appears immediately, not gradually. Historian Martin Hengel observed more development in understanding who Christ is took place in the first 20 years than in the following several centuries. Larry Hurtado showed worship of Jesus arose inside strict Jewish monotheism, as a sudden change within it, not as a slow leak from outside it.
- The pagan world found resurrection unthinkable, not familiar. NT Wright has documented at length that the settled conviction of the ancient world was that dead bodies don’t come back. That’s why the Christian claim caused offence rather than recognition. Nobody borrows an idea their neighbours regard as absurd.
This point deserves weight. A century ago, when the history-of-religions school was at its height, American scholar J Gresham Machen answered it directly in The Origin of Paul’s Religion (1921). His argument still stands: Paul’s gospel cannot be explained as a Greek makeover, because Paul preaches a crucified Jew as the fulfilment of Hebrew Scripture to an audience who found that message either blasphemous or ridiculous. As Paul said himself, the message was a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). Nobody manufactures a myth designed to offend everyone he’s trying to persuade.
Why Do Any Resemblances Exist at All?
A fair question remains. If there’s no copying, why do the religions of the world contain sacrifices, priests, washings, and hopes of life beyond death? Why does the human race keep telling stories that rhyme?
The Bible gives an answer, and it’s more interesting than the copycat theory.
Paul writes that people exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator (Romans 1:25). The picture is not of humanity slowly inventing religion from nothing. It is of humanity holding down a knowledge it already has, and then reshaping it.
John Calvin put this in two memorable ways. He spoke of a sense of divinity placed in every human mind, and a seed of religion sown in all people. And he wrote that the human mind is a perpetual factory of idols—it never stops manufacturing substitutes.
Herman Bavinck developed the same insight in the following centuries: the religions of the world aren’t simply darkness with no light in them, nor are they roads to God. They’re the wreckage of a revelation that was received and then twisted.
The Point Turned Around
If the Bible is true, resemblances between pagan religion and Christian truth are exactly what we should expect. Not because the gospel copied the nations, but because the nations are working with fragments of a truth they already knew and refused to keep. The copycat theory treats the fragments as the original. Scripture treats them as the wreckage.
Cornelius Van Til pressed this further. He argued unbelieving thought lives on borrowed capital: it uses truths it cannot account for on its own terms. Something similar is happening here. The person who says “Jesus is just another dying god” is using a category—sacrifice for sin, life through death—that his own worldview cannot explain, and then using it as a weapon.
GK Beale has shown across the Old Testament that we become like what we worship. Idolatry isn’t merely a wrong opinion. It reshapes the worshipper. Which is why the differences between the gospel and the myths aren’t incidental details. They’re the whole point. The myths take you round a circle of seasons. The gospel takes you to a tomb with a date on it.
The Question Behind the Question
Very few people arrive at the copycat theory by reading Plutarch. They meet it as a reason not to have to deal with Jesus. That’s not a criticism of anyone’s intelligence. It’s a description of what all of us do when a claim asks something of us. The gospel doesn’t merely offer information. It issues a summons. And a tidy argument that removes the summons will always feel more attractive than one that leaves it standing.
So the historical answer, strong as it is, isn’t the last word. Facts can be checked and still resisted. The Westminster Confession of Faith says that while many arguments show the Scriptures to be the word of God, full persuasion comes from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts. Evidence clears away obstacles. It doesn’t create faith.
Which means the reply to this objection has two halves.
- First: The charge is false, and the evidence isn’t close.
- Second, and more importantly: The Jesus who stands behind the evidence isn’t a story to be traced. He’s a person to be met.
Peter, who watched it happen, wrote: For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty (2 Peter 1:16).
He knew what a myth was. He was insisting this is not one.
Tough Questions, Honest Answers
What about Krishna and Buddha? Were they not also born of virgins and crucified?
No, and these claims are even weaker than the Egyptian ones. Krishna was the 8th child of Devaki, so any talk of a virgin birth collapses at once, and he dies in the Mahabharata when a hunter’s arrow strikes his foot—not by crucifixion. The Buddha was born to a married queen, Maya, and died in old age of illness, surrounded by his followers. These “parallels” trace back to Kersey Graves in 1875, who supplied no sources and could read neither Sanskrit nor Pali. Anyone repeating them today is repeating a 19th-century error rather than reporting an ancient text. The lesson is the same one running through this whole subject: always ask which primary source the claim comes from.
Does Apollonius of Tyana not show that miracle-working holy men were a common type?
Apollonius was a 1st-century wandering teacher whose life was written up by Philostratus around AD 220-230—roughly 2 centuries later, and well after the Gospels were circulating. The commissioning empress, Julia Domna, presided over a court sympathetic to reviving traditional religion, so the biography has an obvious agenda. Even taken at face value, Apollonius isn’t crucified, not raised, and isn’t worshipped as God by monotheistic Jews. If anything, the direction of influence is more plausibly the reverse. Christians should not be nervous that other figures were said to do wonders; the question is never whether a claim is made but what evidence supports it and what the figure claimed about himself.
Did Paul invent Christianity by mixing Jesus with Greek mystery religion?
This was the central thesis of the history-of-religions school, and it hasn’t survived. Paul was a trained Pharisee who describes himself as advancing in Judaism beyond many of his peers (Galatians 1:14), and his letters argue almost entirely from Hebrew Scripture. He also submits his gospel to the Jerusalem apostles and reports their agreement (Galatians 2:1-10)—an odd move for a man smuggling in foreign ideas. Most decisively, the creed he cites in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is material he received from others, not invented. J. Gresham Machen answered this charge in detail a century ago and no one has overturned his case. Paul is a witness to the gospel, not its author.
Are baptism and the Lord’s Supper borrowed from pagan washings and sacred meals?
Both ordinances have obvious Jewish roots that require no pagan source at all. Baptism grows out of Old Testament washings and the ceremonial immersions already practised in Judaism, and it is explicitly tied to the Passover-shaped rescue at the Red Sea (1 Corinthians 10:1-2). The Lord’s Supper was instituted at a Passover meal, and Jesus interprets the bread and cup by covenant language drawn straight from Exodus 24 and Jeremiah 31. Ritual washing and shared meals appear in nearly every culture because human beings eat and wash; that is common humanity, not common ancestry. What matters is the meaning attached to the sign, and here the meaning is entirely Hebrew.
Even if the doctrine isn’t pagan, are Christmas trees and Easter eggs not pagan?
Some later customs do have mixed or unclear origins, and the popular claim that “Easter” derives from a goddess named Ishtar is itself a modern invention with no basis in the languages involved. But the honest answer is that this is a different question altogether. Whether a 19th-century German tree custom is wise has nothing to do with whether Jesus rose from the dead. Our tradition has always insisted worship be governed by Scripture rather than by accumulated custom, so we’re free to examine and discard any practice that cannot justify itself. Discarding a custom costs us nothing; the gospel was never resting on it.
Does CS Lewis’s idea of Christianity as “true myth” not concede the borrowing?
Lewis was arguing the opposite of what the copycat theory claims. His point was that the longings expressed in myth—sacrifice, rescue, life coming out of death—find their answer in an event that actually happened at a particular time and place. In his terms, the myth became fact. That is not borrowing; it is fulfilment, and it sits comfortably with the Bible’s own account of a knowledge of God suppressed and distorted among the nations. We would add one caution: Lewis’s framing can blur the line between general revelation and saving revelation, and no amount of half-remembered longing saves anyone. Only the preached word of the crucified Christ does that.
Is there any evidence outside the Bible that Jesus existed at all?
Yes, and it’s more than most ancient figures receive. Roman historian Tacitus records Christus was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius (Annals 15.44), writing as a hostile witness with no reason to help the church. Josephus, a Jewish historian, mentions Jesus twice, and the second passage—referring to James as the brother of Jesus called Christ—is accepted as authentic by virtually all scholars. Pliny the Younger describes Christians in Bithynia singing to Christ as to a god around AD 112. Taken together with the New Testament documents themselves, which are historical sources whether or not one believes them, the existence of Jesus is not seriously disputed by working historians of any faith or none.
