'Jesus is a copy of Horus and Mithras' — examined

It usually arrives as a forwarded video or an image with bold text. Horus, the Egyptian god, was born of a virgin on 25 December. A star in the east announced him. He had twelve disciples, performed miracles, was crucified, buried for three days and rose again. Mithras, Dionysus and Krishna, the post continues, all did the same — thousands of years before Jesus. Christianity, it concludes, is a recycled myth.

It sounds devastating. It is also, almost entirely, untrue — and you do not need a degree in ancient religion to see why. You need to ask one question, and know a few dates.

Where the claims come from

The modern form of the argument was spread by an online film, Zeitgeist: The Movie, released in 2007 and watched by many millions of people. Its section on Jesus drew heavily on popular writers rather than on ancient texts.

Behind them stand older books. In 1875 an American writer named Kersey Graves published The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors, claiming that Krishna, Horus, Mithras and many others had been crucified before Jesus. Graves was not a historian, and his book cites almost no primary sources for its central claims. It is so unreliable that even some writers who doubt Jesus existed have warned readers not to depend on it. The Victorian writer Gerald Massey supplied many of the Egyptian "parallels" in the same period.

So the first thing to know is that these claims did not come from scholars of Egypt, Persia or India reading the ancient sources. They came from enthusiasts writing much later, and they have been copied from book to website to video ever since — usually without anyone checking.

What the myths actually say

The fairest way to test the claims is to look at what the ancient sources say about each figure.

Horus

Horus was an Egyptian sky god, usually shown with a falcon's head. The best-known story of his birth comes from the myth of Osiris. Osiris, his father, is murdered by his brother Seth and his body is cut into pieces and scattered. Osiris's wife Isis searches out the pieces and reassembles the body, and Horus is conceived by Isis from the dead Osiris. In some versions he is conceived before Osiris's death.

Whatever this is, it is not a virgin birth. Isis is Osiris's wife, and the conception is sexual, if strange.

Horus then grows up to fight Seth for the throne of Egypt, losing an eye in the struggle. He becomes the patron of the living king.

He is not born on 25 December — no Egyptian source says so, and the Gospels themselves never give Jesus' birth date. He has no twelve disciples. He is not crucified. He does not die and rise on the third day. The baptiser figure sometimes called "Anup" comes from Massey, not from Egypt; Anubis, the jackal-headed god, was associated with embalming, not baptism.

Mithras

The name Mithra goes back to an ancient Persian and Indian god of covenants and light. But the Mithras of the Roman Empire — the one the internet compares to Jesus — belonged to a secret religion for men, especially soldiers, which met in small cave-like temples.

Here is the key fact: the Roman mysteries of Mithras are first clearly attested in the late first century AD, roughly AD 80 to 100, and flourished in the second and third centuries. The ancient historian Plutarch mentions pirates practising rites of Mithras in the first century BC, and mythicists often cite this. But scholars of Mithraism generally see the Roman cult as a new creation of the late first century, not a continuation of anything older in that form. Most of the New Testament had already been written by then.

What do the Mithraic sources show? Mithras is born not from a woman but from a rock, already a youth, wearing a cap and holding a dagger and a torch. The central image of every Mithras temple shows him killing a bull. Members ate a ritual meal and passed through seven grades of initiation.

There is no virgin, because there is no mother at all. There is no crucifixion, and no ancient source describes Mithras dying or rising. The idea that his birthday was 25 December rests on a festival of the Unconquered Sun recorded in a Roman calendar of AD 354 — no ancient source assigns that date to Mithras specifically.

Dionysus

Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, is the son of Zeus and a mortal princess, Semele. In the myth, Semele asks to see Zeus in his true form and is burned to death by his glory; Zeus rescues the unborn child and sews him into his own thigh until he is ready to be born.

That is not a virgin birth either. There are genuine wine miracles in the Dionysus traditions — empty jars miraculously filled with wine at his festivals — and it is fair to admit that. One late version of the myth has the infant Dionysus torn apart by the Titans and made alive again. But a god's restoration in the mythical past, set in no historical time, is a very different kind of story from the claim that a crucified Jewish teacher was seen alive by named witnesses in Jerusalem a few days after Pilate executed him.

Krishna

Krishna is a beloved figure in Hinduism, honoured as an incarnation of the god Vishnu. He is born to Devaki and her husband Vasudeva — their eighth child, so certainly not born of a virgin. A wicked king, Kamsa, tries to kill him, and the baby is smuggled to safety. That is a genuine point of resemblance with Herod's slaughter of the infants, and it is fair to say so.

But Krishna is not crucified. In the traditional account he dies when a hunter's arrow strikes his foot. And there is a dating problem here too: the fullest accounts of Krishna's childhood are in texts such as the Bhagavata Purana, which most scholars date many centuries after the New Testament. Nobody in serious scholarship argues that the Gospel writers borrowed from Krishna stories.

The "dying and rising gods" idea

There is a more serious, academic version of the argument, and it deserves a fair hearing.

In 1890 the Scottish anthropologist James Frazer published The Golden Bough, which grouped together several ancient gods — Osiris in Egypt, Adonis and Attis in the Greek world, Tammuz in Mesopotamia — as "dying and rising gods" linked to the death of vegetation in winter and its return in spring. For decades this was a standard idea, and it made Jesus look like one more example.

In the second half of the twentieth century the category came under heavy criticism. The most influential critic was Jonathan Z. Smith, a highly respected secular historian of religion at the University of Chicago — not a Christian apologist. Writing in 1987, he argued that the category was largely a scholarly invention: that the evidence for most of these gods was late, fragmentary or reconstructed, and that on close reading the gods in question either die and do not return, or disappear and return without having truly died. Osiris, for instance, does not come back to life on earth; he becomes king of the dead in the underworld.

To be fair, not everyone agreed. In 2001 the Swedish Old Testament scholar Tryggve Mettinger published a careful study arguing that some ancient Near Eastern gods — such as Dumuzi (Tammuz), Baal and Melqart — really were understood to die and return in some sense. So the category is not dead.

But Mettinger's conclusion about Jesus is the important part. He concluded that these gods were tied to the yearly cycle of the seasons, that the death and resurrection of Jesus is quite different — a one-off event, set in history, with no seasonal meaning — and that there is no real evidence the Gospel accounts were constructed from those myths. In other words, even the scholar who most strongly defends the category does not think it explains Christianity.

A difference in kind, not just in detail

Step back and the biggest difference is not in any one detail. It is in the kind of story being told.

The myths begin "in the time of the gods". Horus fights Seth in no particular year. Mithras is born from a rock in no particular place. Nobody in the ancient world thought you could go and interview a witness.

The Gospels go out of their way to do the opposite. Luke dates the start of John the Baptist's ministry to "the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being tetrarch of Galilee" (Luke 3:1) — a list of rulers any reader could check. Paul tells the Corinthians that most of the five hundred witnesses to the risen Jesus "are still alive" (1 Corinthians 15:6). Peter writes, as if he had heard the accusation already: "we did not follow cleverly devised myths... but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16).

There is also the matter of who the first Christians were. They were Jews — devout monotheists who would rather die than bow to the emperor's statue, and who regarded pagan gods as idols. They were the least likely people in the ancient world to borrow a pagan myth and build their lives on it. Their categories came from the Hebrew Scriptures: a Messiah, a suffering servant (Isaiah 53), a coming resurrection of the dead (Daniel 12:2). What startled them was that God had done for one man, in the middle of history, what they expected him to do for everyone at the end.

Why the similarities exist at all

C. S. Lewis, who knew ancient mythology better than almost anyone who has made the copycat argument, was not threatened by the resemblances. He had loved those myths before he became a Christian, and he came to think of them as something like dreams — humanity's half-remembered longing for a God who dies and brings life.

In his essay "Myth Became Fact", Lewis argued that in Jesus the old dream came true: the story that had been told of gods in no time and no place actually happened, in a particular province, under a particular governor, to a particular man. The Bible says something similar when it says God "has put eternity into man's heart" (Ecclesiastes 3:11), and when Paul tells the Athenians that the God they worshipped as "unknown" has now made himself known by raising a man from the dead (Acts 17:23, 31).

You do not need to accept Lewis's view to see the point. Similarities can be explained in more than one way. Copying is only one possibility — and the dates and the sources make it the weakest one.

How to respond kindly

Most people who share these claims are not scholars trying to trap you. They saw a confident video and it seemed convincing. Treat them as you would want to be treated.

1. Thank them and ask a question. "That's interesting — where does the Horus story come from? Which ancient text?" You are not trying to win; you are inviting them to look with you.
2. Concede what is true. Yes, there are stories of gods who die and return. Yes, Christmas falls near a pagan festival. Yes, Christian art borrowed from older art. Honesty about small things earns you a hearing on big ones.
3. Give one clear fact, not twenty. Usually the Mithras date, or the fact that Isis was married to Osiris, is enough to show the video was careless.
4. Point back to Jesus. The real question is not about Horus at all. It is whether a man named Jesus was crucified under Pilate and seen alive afterwards. Our articles on the historical Jesus and the resurrection lay out that evidence.
5. Stay warm. "Always be prepared to make a defence... yet do it with gentleness and respect" (1 Peter 3:15). The aim is a friend who keeps talking to you, not an argument you won.

The copycat claim feels powerful because it seems to make Jesus ordinary. Examined carefully, it does the opposite. Set beside the myths, the Gospels stand out for exactly the thing the myths never claim: that this happened, here, to him, and that you can go and ask the people who saw it.