The Horus-Mithras-Dionysus Myth: Demolishing the Pagan Parallels.
If we ranked mythicist arguments by their real scholarly value, the idea that Jesus is just a recycled pagan dying-and-rising god would be near the bottom. It ranks lower than Carrier’s Bayesian method, Doherty’s celestial-Jesus theory, and even the debates about Josephus.
Most serious mythicists avoid this argument. Richard Carrier has even criticized the pagan-parallels claims linked to D.M. Murdock and the Zeitgeist film, calling much of it parallelomania.
However, if we ranked mythicist arguments by their impact on popular discussion, the pagan-parallels claim would be at the top. For many people, this is the first version of Mythicism they come across.
It is this version of Mythicism that circulates on Facebook every December in the form of memes claiming that Jesus and Horus share numerous supposed biographical features. And it was this version that the 2007 film, Zeitgeist, delivered to tens of millions of viewers in the early YouTube era, and that continues to circulate today through additional videos, podcast episodes, and the durable afterlife of Murdock’s books in the print-on-demand market.
For every person who has read Carrier or Doherty, thousands more have watched Zeitgeist or seen a Horus-Jesus comparison chart online.
So, the pagan-parallels argument is both the easiest mythicist claim to disprove and the most important one to address properly. A good refutation needs to show, using real primary sources, that these supposed parallels are made up, twisted, or impossible for the time period.
Most importantly, it should reveal the main problem behind these arguments: parallelomania. This habit lets people keep inventing new examples even after old ones are disproven. Without addressing this, debunking each claim is like fighting a Hydra; solve one, and more appear.
The Horus Claim and the Evidence from Egyptian Sources
The single most influential pagan-parallel claim, both in Zeitgeist and the broader Murdock corpus, concerns the Egyptian god Horus. According to the standard meme, Horus was born of a virgin on December 25th, his birth was announced by a star in the east, he was visited by three kings, baptized at the age of thirty by a figure who would then be beheaded, had twelve disciples, performed miracles like walking on water and raising the dead, was known as the Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd, was crucified, was dead for three days, and then was resurrected.
These supposed parallels are shown as so detailed and numerous that it seems obvious Jesus’s story was copied from Horus. The problem is that almost none of these claims appear in any ancient Egyptian texts.
The real Horus in Egyptian mythology, described in texts over three thousand years, is a falcon-headed sky god.
He is the son of Osiris and Isis, and is linked to kingship, the sun, and protecting the pharaoh. His mythology does not match the popular memes.
Isis was not a virgin when she gave birth to Horus. Instead, she conceived Horus after she reassembled the dismembered corpse of Osiris, who had been murdered, and then lay with it. Now this story is many things. I’d call it theologically fascinating. But it’s not a virgin birth, nor do ancient Egyptian sources present it as one.
Horus has no recorded birth date corresponding to December 25, in part because his birth wasn’t really celebrated anyway. The date of his birth isn’t mentioned in the ancient record. Quite possibly the earliest mention of Horus being born on this date is Kersey Graves 1875 book, The World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors. A work that doesn’t cite any evidence for the claim.
The other birth narrative aspects, the three kings and the star directing them where to go, seem to be imported wholesale from the Matthew infancy narrative, and then projected back onto Horus. Again, no ancient Egyptian source mentions these ideas, nor do we ever find evidence from those who make this claim.
One of the more strange parallels, not because of the parallel itself, but because of how it developed, is the idea of Horus being baptized in a manner similar to Jesus. While Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, Horus is said to have been baptized by Anup the Baptizer.
The problem is that this is not an Egyptian deity, or even a figure. He doesn’t exist until Gerald Massey, the late nineteenth-century English writer and Spiritualist, invented him. Massey would form part of the backbone of the arguments Murdock and others in this line make. For them, Massey was this great Egyptologist.
In reality, Massey was a poet with no real background in history, and he relied on secret texts that no one else knows about. This highlights a big problem with this type of Mythicism: the so-called experts are not actually experts, but people making up claims.
Getting back to Anup, he is at times identified in the Mythicism literature with the Egyptian god Anubis. But Anubis, the jackal-headed deity, is associated with embalming and the protection of the dead. We have no record in Egyptian texts of him baptizing anyone. And just to round it out, the idea that this Anup figure was beheaded, well, he didn’t exist in the ancient record, so he couldn’t have been beheaded.
What we see here is another major problem with this strain of Mythicism. It takes stories about Jesus, different aspects of his story, and the traditions around him, and it attempts to retroactively apply those same stories to prior ideas. In effect, they are copying the story of Jesus, pasting it onto an assortment of deities or gods, and then claiming that those paste jobs were in fact the true stories.
Which is why it may be no surprise to hear that the 12 disciples of Horus also do not exist in Egyptian mythology. The closest we come is an idea found in various funerary texts, including the Pyramid Texts, the Coffin Texts, and the Book of the Dead, which discuss the four sons of Horus. Eventually, they would serve as guardians of the four canopic jars used in mummification, and they are said to be the offspring of Horus and Isis.
A few things are clear: there are only four sons, not twelve, and they were not disciples but actual sons of Horus.
As we continue down this list, we really get the same. Horus walking on water or raising the dead, not in any Egyptian source. The titles, Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd, which are pastoral Jewish imagery, have no real parallel in the falconry and kingship imagery of Horus. And the crucifixion of Horus is a complete fabrication. Crucifixion was a form of execution that didn’t even exist within pharaonic Egypt, and would have been an alien concept.
What we come out with is not a summary of Egyptian religions. Instead, it’s a summary of the Gospel narratives, with the name Horus pasted over the name Jesus, then repackaged as an independent attestation of pre-Christian parallels.
This is a bold move.
The Mithras Claim and the Chronology Problem
Moving on, we get to the second great pillar of the pagan-parallels argument. Here we deal with the Roman mystery cult of Mithras, which is alleged to have supplied the template for many Christian beliefs and rituals.
The usual claim is that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25, had 12 disciples, performed miracles, was crucified, rose on the third day, and started a sacred meal of bread and wine that inspired the Christian Eucharist.
While we will see how this Mithraic case fails for many of the same reasons as the Horus case did, there is another, even more significant problem. The chronology here runs in the wrong direction.
The Roman cult of Mithras, or the Mithraic mysteries as many know it, appears in the historical record beginning in the late first century AD. The earliest archeological evidence for Mithraic sanctuaries dates from this period. The literary references begin somewhat later, and it wasn’t until the second and third centuries AD that the cult reached its full development.
By the time Mithraism became important in the Roman Empire, Christianity had already been around for generations. The Pauline letters had circulated for a century, and the Gospels were already written.
If there was any borrowing between Christianity and Mithraism, and the evidence for this is minimal at best, the historical arrow points the wrong way for the mythicist case. We have a better argument for Mithraism borrowing from Christianity. But really, the most we can say with confidence here is that two religious movements existed within the same Roman imperial environment during the second through fourth centuries and may have influenced each other’s iconography or vocabulary in very modest ways.
Simply put, the idea that the Mithraic cult was the model for early Christian beliefs is impossible based on the timeline. Christianity was already established when the Mithraic mysteries developed.
Besides the timeline, the specific parallels also fall apart. Mithras was not born of a virgin in any source. Instead, he appeared fully grown from a rock, holding a torch and a knife.
Mithras also didn’t have 12 disciples. Instead, when we look at the standard iconography, it shows Mithras with two attendant figures who carry torches, one pointed up, and one pointed down, which are meant to represent dawn and dusk, or some other related cosmological pair.
There also isn’t a crucifixion or a resurrection in Mithraism. Largely because there is no death. The story just doesn’t really add up here.
Now, to be fair, we do have one similarity. There was a cultic meal associated with the Mithraic ritual. But the specifics here are rather obscure. The surviving evidence we have about Mithraism is generally thin. And the alleged parallels with the Christian Eucharist tend to dissolve once one moves from popular paraphrases to primary sources.
All in all, the Mithras case is, in some way, a more interesting example of parallelomania than the Horus case, because Mithras is at least a real religious figure from a relevant historical period. But the specifics aren’t any more historical, and the chronology here is fatal to the argument.
Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, and the Dying-and-Rising God Category
Beyond Horus and Mithras, the pagan-parallels literature draws on a longer list of alleged Christ-prototypes: the Greek god Dionysus, the Phrygian god Attis, the Syrian god Adonis, the Mesopotamian god Tammuz, the Egyptian god Osiris, and a scattering of others.
The general claim is that all of these figures share a common mythological pattern, that they die and are resurrected, and that this pattern was incredibly widespread in the ancient Mediterranean world. So widespread was this pattern that the Jesus narrative would have been understood as just one more instance of it, rather than as the report of an actual historical individual.
Much of this supposed theory can be traced back to the work of Sir James Frazer and his 1890 book, The Golden Bough, which was later expanded in multiple editions. Frazer’s central thesis was that many great ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern religious traditions revolved around the vegetation deity whose death and resurrection symbolized the annual cycle of agricultural fertility.
With that framework in mind, Frazer then argued that Christianity should be understood as the most successful surviving instance of this archaic pattern. The Golden Bough was, at the time, a work that had considerable cultural influence. But by today’s standards, it’s largely obsolete.
The dismantling of the “dying and rising gods” category was a long process that spanned much of the 20th century. A decisive moment in this, though, came in 1987, with the publication of Jonathan Z. Smith’s article on the dying-rising-gods in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Smith demonstrated that the entire category was largely a modern myth, and when projected back onto ancient materials, it just didn’t fit.
When the actual primary texts were examined, what one found instead was not a pattern of dying-rising-gods, but a scattered and varied collection of myths that covered numerous ideas, such as descent, disappearance, mourning, and various forms of return. None of which corresponds all that closely to the Christian resurrection narrative. They just weren’t a match in any meaningful sense.
The Mesopotamian god Tammuz, for example, was associated with an annual mourning ritual that included a descent into the underworld. But none of our surviving texts presented him as being resurrected. He is retrieved from the underworld for about half the year. But then he’s replaced by his sister, Geshtianna, and it becomes a cycle. Each one spends half the year in the underworld, only to then switch places with their sibling.
At least according to one version of Tammuz’s tale. Others have him dying, and that’s about it. Others show that he never dies. The traditions here are inconsistent, but none actually show a resurrection. Only in a vague sense could they be seen as similar to that of the story of Jesus.
There is the Egyptian god Osiris, who is sometimes seen in this connection. Unlike Tammuz, whose accounts vary, Osiris does in fact die. He’s murdered by his brother Seth, dismembered, his body parts scattered, and later on, is mostly reassembled by his wife Isis.
Osiris, though, doesn’t come back to life. He’s dead permanently and becomes the god of the dead, where he rules in the underworld. Osiris never returns to the land of the living.
We have the Phrygian god Attis, who castrates himself under a pine tree, where he ends up bleeding out and dying. He is mourned by his consort Cybele, and this is where it gets a bit complicated.
In our earliest sources, Attis is dead. Period. But that’s not the end of his tradition. Greek sources would add a slight twist here, with Attis in a state between life and death. He’s preserved, but there is no resurrection.
The Romans would then reinterpret this further, reviving Attis as part of their cultic ritual. Attis still doesn’t get up and walk around, so we don’t see a resurrection. But the symbology is a bit more developed. However, this tradition is rather late and may, in fact, reflect some Christian influence, rather than the other way around.
Finally, we have Dionysus, who kind of represents the whole issue here. As with many of these other figures, there is a wide array of traditions associated with them. For Dionysus, we do have one strand where he died. This is in the Orphic myth of Zagreus, which was not part of mainstream Greek religion and was more specific to mystery cults. It’s also relatively late.
In this strand, Dionysius/Zagreus is killed by the Titans, but Athena is able to rescue his heart. From there, Zeus recreates him. Really, he’s dismembered and then recreated. He doesn’t return from the underworld. He isn’t resurrected. And, this is a late story that is a bit fringe.
In the main story, Dionysus doesn’t die.
Now, we can see some vague similarities here if we choose our sources carefully and ignore other factors, such as their dates. But when we closely look at these texts, we see something quite different. The stories aren’t that similar. Which is why scholars have long rejected the dying-rising god idea as just a modern myth.
What all of this misdirected attention has done is that it has obscured the actual influence on the story of Jesus, which is thoroughly Jewish. There is no reason to look to other religions and disconnected cultures. We can simply look at Second Temple Judaism.
There we have resurrection imagery in places like Daniel and 2 Maccabees. We have a broader Jewish hope for some sort of justification in the end days. If we want to understand the resurrection claim, all we really have to do is look at the 1st-century Jewish apocalyptic tradition, the same tradition from which Christianity emerged.
The Methodological Problem: Parallelomania
Dismantling these supposed parallels is rather straightforward, as we can see. What now becomes more important is identifying the methodological vice that allows these supposed parallels to be continually created. It just so happens we have a name for this.
In 1962, the Jewish biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel delivered a famous presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature. There, he coined the term parallelomania in order to describe what he saw as a pervasive bad habit in comparative religious scholarship. It was this tendency to see casual influence in any superficial resemblance.
The reason parallelomania works, when it does, is that our minds are exceptionally good at pattern recognition but rather poor at determining the significance of the patterns they recognize. Given any two sufficiently rich narratives, as attentive readers, we would almost be guaranteed to find a dozen similarities, such as birth, struggles, and suffering, because these are basic elements.
The fact that two stories share these elements tells us nothing about whether one story is influenced by the other. It only tells us that both stories are stories. But if we are looking for patterns, it doesn’t take much to then leap to other conclusions.
When dealing with ancient mythology, this becomes exceptionally easy. Often, we have vast amounts of material to work with that often span in a variety of different directions, and if we squint enough, a lot of things will look familiar. Once we add up enough of these resemblances, then it can look rather impressive, regardless of the actual quality of the similarities.
In the case of Jesus, this is then coupled with some of the parallels being completely fabricated, which can make the case look even more impressive.
But when we brush away all of the noise, the few parallels that may exist are the ones we would expect for any two individuals. They are the kind that would either develop independently or are so generic that we simply expect them. There is no need to suggest any sort of borrowing.
Why the Pagan Parallels Will Not Die
If the pagan-parallels argument is so weak, why does it continue to persist? Why does the movie Zeitgeist continue to be watched, or Murdock’s books passed around?
Part of the answer is that the internet rewards content that confirms what people already want to believe. And the fact is, there is a certain segment of the online atheist community that finds the pagan-parallels argument satisfying, partially because it allows them to dismiss Christianity not only as false, but as a copy of other false ideas.
Another part of the answer is that it sounds scholarly. Citing supposed parallels with what seem to be specific details looks like the kind of thing only a serious researcher would do. And most people who haven’t read the relevant primary sources aren’t in a position to really determine whether these similarities are legitimate or just made up. Instead, what they get is something that appears to be scholarship but isn’t.
Finally, part of the answer is that the pagan-parallels argument can be difficult to refute on social media. It’s easy to throw up a meme on Facebook that asserts that Horus was born of a virgin on December 25th. Refuting that requires quite a bit more. You need to discuss the narrative of Isis and Osiris, the absence of any mention of a birth on December 25th, where the idea first arose, and possibly the broader issue of parallelomania.
Simply, ad arguments are cheap to make and expensive to refute. The whole thing is rather asymmetrical, and social media tends to reward the cheaper route.
The refutation needs to be made, though, and it certainly can be made.
