Chapter 6: Dispelling the Myths: The Uniqueness of the Jesus Story

That some modern authors continue to suggest that the Gospel is based on myth is irresponsible at best and intentionally deceptive at worst.¹

—J. ED KOMOSZEWSKI

I’M A LITTLE RELUCTANT TO ADMIT THAT WATCHING late-night comedian Bill Maher is an occasional pastime for me. For one thing, he’s my age and reminds me of some of my friends growing up who always had a quick, off-color comment on just about everything. Maher gets paid to say things we would have been thrown out of school for repeating. Times have definitely changed. Another reason for watching is that his show gives a quick glimpse into the objections and conundrums of the skeptical mind.

Unhindered by traditional network censorship (what little is left), he can broadcast his often crude, bombastic ideology while his adoring audience shouts approval. This is very important because in America many decide who’s right and who’s wrong by who gets the loudest applause. Maher admits that his apparent cleverness is not as off-the-cuff and intuitive as it appears. In one of his books, he acknowledges the incredible team of writers and assistants that help him hone his sharp wit and acerbic speech and fine-tune his attacks against his favorite target: religion.

As smart as his crack team of comedic writers is, they haven’t done their homework in terms of biblical history. The main reason is that historical facts can get in the way of a good story, especially when your expressed goal in life is to help end religion.

This is on full display in Maher’s 2007 movie Religulous (not misspelled), where he showcases his tactic of interviewing religious people, most who certainly don’t represent the mainstream of Christian thought. Missing for the most part are academic philosophers and historians. That wouldn’t fit his intended narrative that religion is for the unthinking person.

In spite of the incessant, inane anti-God rhetoric, I actually like him. In a strange way his railings against hypocrisy, at times, have bits of truth in them even though most of his rants border on the kind of intolerance of which he accuses religion. One of the central claims of his movie is that the story of Jesus was borrowed from ancient pagan mythology. Maher interviews an assortment of people and asks whether they know a long list of pagan gods and personalities that had stories prior to, as well as similar to, the Jesus story.

Afterward comes a montage of images from various Jesus films. The captions read as follows:

• Written in 1280 BC, the Egyptian book of the dead describes a god, Horus

• Horus is the son of the god Osiris

• Born of a virgin mother

• Was baptized in a river by Anup the Baptizer

• Who was later beheaded

• Like Jesus, Horus was tempted while alone in the desert

• Healed the sick

• Healed the blind

• Cast out demons

• And walked on water

• He raised Asar from the dead

• Asar translates to Lazarus

• Oh yeah, he also had twelve disciples

• Yes, Horus was crucified first

• After three days two women announced

• Horus the savior of humanity had been resurrected

At first glance this list of similarities between Horus, an ancient Egyptian god, and Jesus seems incredible. Maher presents all this information as fact and with the air of how it is common knowledge to all intelligent people. I have been to Egypt and worked with Christian leaders, and their response to such claims has been complete disbelief. “If you made this kind of claim in Egypt, people would think you’re crazy,” said Egyptian pastor Shaddy Soliman.

First, there is no validity to these claims. None have any real historical basis. They are the academic equivalent to a drive-by shooting—something said to quickly kill someone’s faith. I have had conversations on university campuses with students who have bought into this idea that the Jesus story was fabricated or simply plagiarized from other earlier religions. Unfortunately, there is rarely enough time to sit with them and look at the evidence in any objective sense. They assume it must be true because somebody said it was true.

Before we go any further and talk about the roots of this whole notion of the “Jesus myth” and the supposed parallels, let us take a look at Maher’s assertions of similarities between Jesus and Horus. Here are a few highlights from some of these preposterous claims.²

Description of Horus

First, Horus was a mythical god with the head of a falcon and the body of a man. His mother was Isis and his father Osiris.

The book of the dead

This was a guide to the underworld and a collection of spells to help you after death.

There were many different books of the dead. These so-called parallels were pieced together from a wide range of books. The early Christians would not have had access to any of these writings, so it would have been impossible for them to somehow copy the story or any part of it in the first place.

Born of a virgin

Osiris was killed and dismembered, and his body parts cast into a river. Isis retrieved his genitals and then inseminated herself in order to get pregnant and have the son, Horus.

This was not a virgin birth and does not come close to matching the biblical account of Jesus’ conception in Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Baptized by Anup the Baptizer

This was completely made up by Gerald Massey, an amateur Egyptologist from the nineteenth century. The story was concocted from images of the Pharaohs of Egypt receiving a water cleansing at their coronation. There is no narrative of Horus being baptized.

Healed the sick, healed the blind, cast out demons

Again there were spells in the book of the dead that could supposedly cure people. There is no account of Horus traveling around and personally healing the sick.

Had twelve disciples

This claim also comes from Gerald Massey. It also has no basis in history. Different writings about Horus mention different numbers of people following him, but the number never adds up to twelve. Massey does reference a mural, but the painting does not have Horus as part of it.

Was crucified

Some ancient depictions have Horus with his arms spread apart. But depictions of people with arms spread was not unusual. It certainly does not indicate a Roman crucifixion, particularly since the Egyptians did not use that form of punishment.

Was resurrected

One story does describe Horus dying and then being brought back to life. However, being resuscitated is completely different from the Jewish view of resurrection. In the latter, individuals experience their bodies being completely transformed so they no longer age.

Besides Maher there are other popular websites, movies, and writers that try to pass off this narrative as true. For instance, the movie Zeitgeist makes similar accusations that Christianity borrowed from such pagan sources as the ancient worship of the sun, Osiris and Horus, and the Zodiac. These comparisons came from the writings of Dorothy Murdock, who consulted for the script writers. Murdock is a popular writer without any relevant academic training, and her claims have been completely rejected by the scholarly community.

The connections she concocted between Jesus and pagan sources ranged from the very superficial to the completely absurd. For instance, she attempted to relate the number twelve for the number of apostles to the twelve signs of the zodiac. She seemed to have missed the fact that the number of apostles represented the new embodiment of the twelve tribes of Israel. Her other arguments typically stemmed from misreadings of the original source material, use of documents that were written centuries after Jesus lived, or wild speculation.³

The problem is that when the average person sees or hears something claiming authoritatively that Christianity “borrowed” from other religions before it, there is very little instruction given to check the credibility of the sources. A quick Google search reveals scores of websites promoting this idea of the Jesus myth. The problem is that googling something is not the same as researching a topic. The qualified scholars who have thoroughly addressed these claims and found them spurious don’t always have their writings located by a search engine.

While the overwhelming number of scholars and academics, whether conservative or liberal, atheist or believer, would accept the historicity of Jesus, there remains a small minority who maintain that Jesus probably didn’t exist, and that the Christian story was not original. These kinds of rumors and conspiracy theories are hard to stop once they are articulated and published online and then take on a life of their own. If people have bought into this nonsense, then they respond to anyone trying to convince them that they are mistaken like religious fundamentalists who refuse to listen to anything that challenges their beliefs.

Of all people it is agnostic Bart Erhman who gives the strongest of warnings about this tendency to believe almost anything that someone posts online, “Still, as is clear from the avalanche of sometimes outraged postings on all the relevant Internet sites, there is simply no way to convince conspiracy theorists that the evidence for their position is too thin to be convincing and that the evidence for a traditional view is thoroughly persuasive.”⁴

The goal of this chapter, therefore, is to examine the accusation that the Jesus story was borrowed from pagan mythology and show that, in fact, the very opposite is true. If nothing else, you need to know that if anyone borrowed the story, it was the pagan writers who tried to retell their myths to make them sound like the gospel. J. Ed Komoszewski confirms this in Reinventing Jesus:

Only after the rise of Christianity did mystery religions begin to look suspiciously like the Christian faith. Once Christianity became known, many of the mystery cults consciously adopted Christian ideas so that their deities would be perceived to be on a par with Jesus. The shape of the mystery religions prior to the rise of Christianity is vague, ambiguous, and localized. Only by a huge stretch of the imagination, and by playing fast and loose with the historical data, can one see them as having genuine conceptual parallels to the Christian faith of the first century.⁵

That’s why we look to dispel the myth of the myth. My intent is to bring the light of history to this subject and give you the confidence to help others who are struggling over whether something they heard or read on the Internet about the alleged Jesus myth is actually true. In separating fact from fiction, we can help people find a credible faith in the midst of a sea of confusion and deception.

ROOTS OF THE JESUS MYTH HYPOTHESIS

First, let’s look at how this bizarre notion that the early Christians cobbled together the Jesus story from ancient mythology and astrology to construct a new religion. As we learned in chapter 1, doubts about the historical Jesus did not begin to appear until the eighteenth century. Before we go on, we should state the obvious: The fact that Jesus existed was virtually unchallenged for almost seventeen hundred years. As the supernatural aspects of the Gospels began to be reevaluated because of the Enlightenment influences, the only logical alternative to Jesus performing real miracles was that these stories were simply myths or legends. From that position it was easy to then speculate that these so-called miracle stories had been in circulation before the time of Jesus and had merely changed names and clothing to fit the Christian narrative.

Then, in the early nineteenth century, David Strauss, a German theologian, proposed that the miracles of Jesus were merely a mythical expression of the early Christians to try and connect Jesus to the prophecies of the Messiah. Following Strauss, another German, Bruno Bauer, went even further and proposed that the Christian story was similar to ancient stories about the dying and rising gods of the pagan world. “As far back as the 1840s, Bruno Bauer began to publish views that the story of Jesus was rooted in myth. Bauer’s greatest influence was on one of his students, Karl Marx, who promoted the view that Jesus never existed. This view eventually became part of communist dogma.”⁶

This general belief was fleshed out in more detail in the nineteenth century by authors Kersey Graves and Gerald Massey. Graves argued in his book The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors that numerous stories of crucified savior gods who rose from the dead existed throughout the world. Massey claimed in his book The Natural Genesis that the story of the Egyptian god Horus was similar to many details of Jesus in the Gospels. In the twentieth century, very similar claims were propagated by anthropologist Sir James George Frazer in his book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. These writings would influence later authors, such as Murdock, to propagate this same line of reasoning. However, the claims of these myth proponents have been thoroughly disproved by leading scholars, particularly the comparisons to the resurrection. Historian Jonathan Smith summarizes:

The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts. . . . All the deities that have been identified as belonging to the class of dying and rising deities can be subsumed under the two larger classes of disappearing deities or dying deities. In the first case the deities return but have not died; in the second case the gods die but do not return. There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.⁷

Despite these refutations, the campaign of misinformation found a following among skeptics willing to accept any explanation for the claims and miracles of Jesus other than the version recorded in the Gospels. Reading these myth proponents reminds one of those who make bold leaps of association that force supposed pieces of a puzzle together that really just don’t fit. Using their logic, one could make virtually any claim of association imaginable and be able to “prove” it. Such practices are not real history.

MOTIVES

As we mentioned briefly, part of the motivation for connecting Christianity to pagan myths comes from the denial of the supernatural resulting from the rise of skepticism during the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Scholars at that time denied the possibility of any supernatural intervention in the world. They also applied evolutionary theory to the study of religion. Specifically, they argued that the understanding of God evolved over time as society developed.⁸ As a side note, this process is often the explanation atheists give when they are faced with the evidence of Christianity’s positive influence on science and education. Their rebuttal is that though religion “got us started,” evolution has taken us beyond our need for any religious or spiritual view of the world. Enlightenment scholars assumed Christianity also evolved from earlier beliefs, so they naturally looked to pagan religions as a source of those developments.

Without attempting to dissect the psychological motivation of those espousing these notions, it is safe to say that their conclusions were not the product of objective historical research. The appearance of these writings in nineteenth-century Germany claiming that the Jesus story was not original should give us pause to consider the motivation of such speculation. The fact that Jesus was Jewish and all the disciples were Jewish produced a desire to change the narrative. The attempts to dismiss the Jewishness of Jesus was clearly a key factor. The fact that Jesus was a first-century Jew is still problematic for the multitudes that harbor bias and anti-Semitic bigotry. “One of the most astonishing features of the quest of the historical Jesus has been the seeming determination of generation after generation of questers to discount or to strip away anything characteristically Jewish from the Jesus tradition. We can explain the underlying logic, even if we can never sympathize with it—the logic of traditional Christian anti-Semitism,”⁹ comments James Dunn in A New Perspective on Jesus.

However, the primary reason many make such a fantastic claim about Jesus being a mythical being is to dismiss the claims that He makes as Lord of the universe and the ultimate moral authority to whom we are accountable. Think about any sporting match you might attend; at almost every event you find people disdaining the referees. I cannot imagine a more thankless job. Fans on both sides will at some point in the contest hurl insults of the vilest nature at the person in charge of enforcing the rules for daring to penalize their team.

The same can be said of the police. The very sight of a police car can throw you into a panic. Of course, they are a welcome sight when you need them, but they represent the reality of the law of the land. People don’t mind acknowledging the Creator, just as long as God keeps His distance from us, until we really need Him. The thought of a personal God who knows our thoughts and actions and will call us to account is unnerving. Even though Jesus came and sacrificed His life on our behalf to demonstrate His love, the fact that there is a judgment to come is not a pleasant thought. Denying these realities might prove comforting to skeptics. But as Richard Dawkins likes to say, “Just because a thought is unpleasant doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

CHRISTIANITY ROOTED IN JUDAISM

If there’s anything in this book that should be crystal clear to you, it’s that Jesus was Jewish. Before we look at the various pagan deities that have been proposed as alleged forerunners to Jesus, it is necessary to understand that in Israel, Christianity rose out of the very soil of Judaism, not because of pagan mythology. James Dunn concurs with this thought:

Nevertheless, looking at Jesus within the context of the Judaism of his time remains a more plausible line of search than starting with the intent of wrenching him out from that context. By noting what the characteristics are of Jewish practice and belief, we can infer, unless we have indications to the contrary, that Jesus shared these characteristics. A basic list would include the fact that he was circumcised, that he was brought up to say the Shema, to respect the Torah, to attend the synagogue, to observe the Sabbath. In addition, Sanders has offered a list of what he describes as “almost indisputable facts” about Jesus: that his mission mainly operated round the towns and villages of Galilee.¹⁰

William Lane Craig affirms the same in Reasonable Faith, as we see in the following statement:

Here we see one of the major shifts in New Testament studies over the last century, what I earlier flagged as the Jewish reclamation of Jesus. Scholars came to realize that pagan mythology is simply the wrong interpretive context for understanding Jesus of Nazareth. Evans has called this shift the “Eclipse of Mythology” in Life of Jesus research. Jesus and his disciples were first-century Palestinian Jews, and it is against that background that they must be understood. The spuriousness of the alleged parallels is just one indication that pagan mythology is the wrong interpretive context for understanding the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection.¹¹

If history means anything, it is clear that it was not the Christians stealing the pagans’ stories but the other way around. As Dr. Craig Keener states:

Even apart from this observation, bodily resurrection was a Palestinian Jewish idea. It is difficult to conceive of a rapidly hellenizing Gentile church preaching a dying-and-rising mystery deity triggering Palestinian Jewish Jesus people to adopt a pagan idea and then modify it in a Palestinian Jewish direction (including the specifically Jewish language of “resurrection”). It is far more likely that later Gentiles attracted to a growing Jewish cult would have adopted and transformed a Palestinian Jewish understanding of the resurrection.¹²

SOURCES, SCHOLARS, AND SUBSTANCE

In a political season many candidates throw their hats into the ring, so to speak, and run for office. As time goes on, the field begins to narrow, and you find a few emerge as the real contenders to be elected. Similarly, skeptics often attempt to quickly present a long list of so-called Jesus parallels, but a few are commonly cited as leading contenders. The following section describes some of the most popularly cited myth sources and shows the flimsiness of the supporting arguments. There are three key principles to keep in mind as these parallels are examined: sources, scholars, and substance.

Sources

What is glaringly missing time and time again are any original sources for these imaginative claims. Skeptics typically make assertions out of thin air, or they quote earlier writers who made the same claim but also failed to cite any original sources. Bart Ehrman agrees:

The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen. They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked. It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence. They have not even cited the available evidence. And for good reason. No such evidence exists.¹³

It is incredible that virtually none of the scrutiny and verification is applied to the myth theories by the skeptics that they demand the Gospels be subjected to. The result is a massive distinction between the material that is genuine and the other material that is clearly fiction.

Scholars

Second, arguments come from popular writers without any relevant academic credentials. Or they represent opinions that have been rejected by virtually all respected scholars. In particular, myth proponents often argue that virtually all of the New Testament writings are completely unhistorical. They believe they were fabricated to serve the agendas of the later writers. For instance, Richard Carrier, one of the few myth proponents with relevant credentials, stated, “The authors of the Gospels clearly had no interest in any actual historical data.”¹⁴

This is a scandalous statement in light of history. No competent historian believes, as detailed in chapter 2, that the New Testament is completely devoid of any historical content. In contrast, the writings (as described in chapter 3) are some of the best from that era, supported by historical and archaeological evidence. In addition, many New Testament details originally believed by skeptics to be unhistorical were eventually proven to be accurate, such as the existence of the city of Nazareth and the Pool of Siloam. In order for myth proponents to argue their views, they have to ignore the most recent archaeological discoveries and reject virtually all standards of sound historical study.

Substance

Finally, the myth proponents suffer from what Dan Wallace described as “parallelomania.” Namely, they tend to argue that certain similarities between pagan sources and Christianity prove that Christians copied the pagan stories. However, the parallels invariably lack any real substance. They are either too superficial, or they come from documents that postdate Christianity by centuries.

Even if the parallels were earlier and far more similar, they still would not prove copying. Many remarkable coincidental similarities exist between different religions and between different historical events. One of the most striking examples is the similarity between the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and that of John F. Kennedy. Numerous details perfectly coincide:

• Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

• Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. John F. Kennedy was elected president in 1960.

• Lincoln and Kennedy each have seven letters.

• Lincoln had a secretary name Kennedy; Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln.

• Both were married in their thirties to twenty-four-year-old, socially prominent girls who could speak fluent French.

• Both presidents dealt with civil rights movements for African Americans.

• Both presidents were assassinated in the back of the head, while sitting next to their wives, on a Friday before a major holiday.

• Both their assassins were known by three names consisting of fifteen letters (John Wilkes Booth, Lee Harvey Oswald).

• Oswald shot Kennedy from a warehouse and was captured in a theater; Booth shot Lincoln in a theater and was captured in a warehouse.

• Both assassins were shot and killed with a Colt revolver days after they assassinated the president, before they could be brought to trial.

• Both presidents were succeeded by vice presidents named Johnson; both Johnsons were from the South, born in 1808 and 1908 respectively.¹⁵

Despite this remarkable list, no one believes that one assassination was a mythical retelling of the other. For no evidence exists that copying took place, and the accounts of both assassinations rest on solid historical foundations. Similarly, not a shred of evidence exists that the early Christians were influenced by any of the stories about pagan mythical or historical figures. And the time frame between the events and the writing of the Gospels and letters was far too short for myths to have developed since eyewitnesses were still alive. “There was not enough time for legends to accrue significantly. Ever since D. F. Strauss broached his theory that the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ life and resurrection are the products of legendary and mythical development, the unanswered difficulty for this viewpoint has been that the temporal and geographical distance between the events and the accounts is insufficient to allow for such extensive development.”¹⁶

Finally, the core Jesus story and even many minor details are supported by the strongest historical evidence. Therefore, no justification exists for skeptics to continue to present the myth argument, except to justify their own desire to discredit Christianity.

OTHER PARALLELS TO CHRIST?

These described problems can be clearly seen by examining the claims related to the most popular Jesus-parallel candidates.

Krishna

One of the first candidates mentioned by Bill Maher in his documentary was the deity Krishna, who is one of the most popular Hindu gods. In Hinduism, Krisha is believed to be the incarnation of the god Vishnu. He is commonly depicted in Eastern art as a blue child. As mentioned, Maher listed several specific parallels between Krisha’s story and Jesus, including the virgin birth, working as a carpenter (the actual claim is that Krishna’s father worked as a carpenter), and being baptized in a river.

These same assertions have been made by the usual suspects of myth proponents. They also claim that Krishna was crucified, rose from the dead, and shared with Jesus numerous other commonalities. This small circle of writers and fringe scholars promote books without references to any primary sources, which is understandable since none of their claims have any basis in reality. For instance, the birth narrative in the Hindu text states that Krishna’s mother already had seven children before delivering him, so she certainly was not a virgin. The birth stories also do not explicitly mention that the mother was divinely impregnated.¹⁷ Likewise, the claim about Krishna’s being born of a carpenter was simply made up. His father was a nobleman.¹⁸ Nor do any records exist of his being baptized in a river. Likewise, no texts claim that Krishna was crucified or resurrected. He was, instead, killed mistakenly by a hunter named Jara, and then his soul left his body.¹⁹ The only identified parallels of any substance come from texts that were written hundreds of years after the Gospels, when Hindus began copying Christianity.²⁰

To summarize, the claims about the parallels between Jesus and Krishna match those with Horus, in that they fall into the categories mentioned previously:

• Similarities so superficial that they represent characteristics common to many religions, such as the presence of miracles. Therefore, they provide no evidence of copying.

• Parallels that are more substantial are based on gross misrepresentations of the original texts or simply made up.

• Parallels that are substantial and based on legitimate historical sources were written long after the first century. The only copying would have been pagans borrowing from the Christians.

Mithras

The second common copycat candidate is Mithras, who was worshiped in the Roman Empire by the followers of the mystery religion known as Mithraism. Little is known about this religion since no major writings have survived. Most of our knowledge comes from shrines.²¹ What has been suggested is that Mithras was seen as the god of light, who offered salvation to his followers. One of his most memorable acts was slaying a bull, which was the source of the religion’s ritual of pouring the blood of a bull over worshipers. Skeptics often connect this rite to the Christian belief in the blood of Jesus cleansing Christians of their sins. Myth proponents, such as Maher, have also argued that several other details about Jesus were copied from Mithras, including being born on December 25, performing miracles, resurrecting on the third day, and being known by several of the same titles of Jesus, such as the way, the truth, and the life.

As with Horus and Krishna, the truly striking similarities between Jesus and Mithras, such as the resurrection, were simply made up.²² And the actual similarities are superficial at best. For instance, the use of blood in worship is a feature of many religions in the ancient world. Even more problematic is the issue of dates. Mithraism did not take root in the Roman Empire until the late first century. And the earliest documents describing it were written more than a century after the completion of the Christian gospels. Therefore, any borrowing of ideas at that time would have been the followers of Mithras copying from the Christians. However, respected scholars of Mithras do not believe either religion influenced the other. “After almost 100 years of unremitting labor, the conclusion appears inescapable that neither Mithraism nor Christianity proved to be an obvious and direct influence upon the other in the development and demise or survival of either religion. Their beliefs and practices are well accounted for by their most obvious origins and there is no need to explain one in terms of the other.”²³

Osiris

Osiris was said to preside over the soul in judgment. Osiris is also the husband of Isis, one of the most popular Egyptian deities. Skeptics often argue the Osiris myth is one of the main sources behind the Christian belief in the resurrection. They also attempt to connect Osiris’s and Jesus’ roles in judgment of the dead. Some argue Osiris was the source of several other significant details claimed about Jesus, such as His baptism, being born on December 25, His title of “Good Shepherd,” His instituting a eucharist-like sacred meal, and His death atoning for sin. However, these assertions have been rejected by all respected Osiris authorities. New Testament scholar J. Ed Komoszewski summarizes:

According to the most common version of the myth, Osiris was murdered by his brother who then sank the coffin containing Osiris’s body into the Nile river. Isis discovered the body and returned it to Egypt. But her brother-in-law once again gained access to the body, this time dismembering it into fourteen pieces which he scattered widely. Following a long search, Isis recovered each part of the body . . . Sometimes those telling the story are satisfied to say that Osiris came back to life, even though such language claims far more than the myth allows. Some writers go even further and refer to the alleged “resurrection” of Osiris.²⁴

Clearly, the alleged similarities between Jesus and Osiris presented by myth proponents are extreme exaggerations or complete figments of their imaginations. The resurrection of Jesus has little in common with Osiris’s reassembly by Isis. And as scholar Ronald Nash comments, “The fate of Osiris’s coffin in the Nile is as relevant to baptism as the sinking of Atlantis.²⁵

Even skeptics such as Bart Ehrman have felt compelled to challenge such irresponsible assertions. For instance, he critiques authors Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, who repeated many of these claims in their books.

What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds? Or that he was crucified? And that his death brought atonement for sin? Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead? In fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods). But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge. And they “prove” it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who said so. But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence. This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere. This is not serious historical scholarship.²⁶

Dishonorable Mention

Several other examples are cited less frequently as sources for Christian copying. One person of interest is Apollonius, who, unlike our previous examples, was a real historical figure. He was a Greek philosopher from the town of Tyana in the Roman province of Cappadocia. He lived around the time of Jesus, and he is claimed to have taught disciples, performed miracles, and appeared to witnesses after his death. These parallels are truly striking. However, they come from a biography written by a philosopher named Philostratus in the third century. So ample time was provided between his death and the writing of the biography for legendary accounts to have developed. In addition, by that time the Christian church had become well established throughout the Roman Empire, so Philostratus likely copied from the Gospels.

Another source occasionally cited is the god Dionysius. He is claimed to be born of a virgin on December 25,²⁷ changed water into wine, have a triumphant entry riding upon a donkey, have followers worship him by eating bread and drinking wine, be crucified, and rise from the dead. As with the other candidates, these purported similarities are distortions of the original texts or simply made up. For instance, he was the god of wine, but no record exists of wine being used in worship that even remotely resembles the Christian story.²⁸ Again, the parallels are primarily projections of the minds of those who have already denied Jesus with their hearts.

SUMMARY

The story of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus was not borrowed from pagan mythology. The very fact that something this absurd has to be addressed demonstrates how shallow the discussion has become in terms of the real facts surrounding the gospel and the implications for every person on the planet.

The roots of Christianity are in the Jewish faith. Jesus was Jewish and came in fulfillment of the Hebrew prophets who spoke about the Messiah. His miracles were not magic tricks or written in mythological language, but pointed people to the redemptive purposes of God and their opportunity to be a part.

Ironically, the copying was not early Christians borrowing from ancient Egyptian, Greek, or Persian stories, but the other way around. The enormous success and growth of early Christianity provoked proponents of mystery religions to retell their story with Christian imagery and themes.

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