Is Christianity Copied from Pagan Myths?

Isn't Jesus just another dying-and-rising god — Osiris, Dionysus, Baal?

The resurrection is a recycled pagan template. The ancient world was full of gods who died and rose again; Jesus is simply the Jewish edition.

The “dying and rising gods” category has taken heavy fire in modern scholarship. Jonathan Z. Smith, a leading historian of religion, concluded that it is “largely a misnomer,” resting on “imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.” Even the nearest case, Osiris, is no parallel: in Smith’s words he “did not return to his former mode of existence” but became lord of the dead in the underworld. Jesus' resurrection is rooted in Jewish hope and proclaimed as a datable, public event with named witnesses — not a recurring seasonal myth.

historian of religion · Jonathan Z. Smith, “Dying and Rising Gods,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (Macmillan, 1987; reprinted in the 2nd ed., 2005)“The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts.”

What about Horus and Mithras — virgin birth, December 25, crucified, raised in three days?

The Zeitgeist lists are devastating: Horus and Mithras already had Jesus' whole biography centuries before he was born.

Those lists don't survive contact with the sources. Horus was not born of a virgin (in Plutarch’s telling, Isis conceives him by Osiris), not crucified, not raised on the third day; Mithras was born from a rock, and there is no Mithraic resurrection. The detailed “parallels” come from modern popular books and films, not ancient texts — which is why even skeptical, non-Christian scholars dismiss them (the agnostic Bart Ehrman devoted a whole book, Did Jesus Exist?, to refuting the mythicist case). And “December 25” isn't a biblical claim at all — the Gospels never date the nativity. The actual sources are Jewish: a virgin conceiving is Isaiah's prophecy, not a pagan motif.

Even Genesis was copied from Babylon — Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish.

The creation and flood stories were simply lifted from older Mesopotamian myths.

Shared memory isn't literary theft. Flood traditions are kept on every inhabited continent (see The Deluge), which fits a remembered event at least as well as borrowing — and the differences are the whole point: Genesis is austerely monotheistic and moral, where the Mesopotamian epics are polytheistic and capricious; in Atrahasis the gods send the flood after humanity’s noise robs the god Enlil of sleep. Where Genesis does engage the older stories, scholars such as William Moran and Tikva Frymer-Kensky read it as a deliberate answer to them, not a copy.

If it echoes the old myths, doesn't that prove it's just another myth?

The very resemblance to pagan myth is the giveaway — it's mythology dressed as history.

C. S. Lewis, who had long been moved by the old myths of a dying and reviving god, drew the opposite conclusion. The longing those myths expressed — a god who dies and rises, life out of death — he saw not borrowed but fulfilled in Christ. As he wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves in 1931, “Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…” The echoes don't debunk the gospel; they're the rumor the whole world had been telling, finally come true in history under Pontius Pilate.

writer · C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” World Dominion (September–October 1944); reprinted in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970)“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”

writer · C. S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greeves, October 18, 1931 (The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, vol. 1)“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…”

Even if the parallels were real, wouldn't that sink Christianity?

Borrowed motifs would mean the whole thing is fabricated.

Two confusions hide here. Similarity isn't derivation — cultures independently imagine floods, heroes, and sacrifice — and even derivation wouldn't be falsity, since a true claim can be told in familiar language. More basically, the Christian claim doesn't rest on being unprecedented; it rests on evidence: Jesus' death under Pilate, the empty tomb, the transformed eyewitnesses, a creed traceable to within a few years of the events (see The Historical Jesus). Pointing to a myth that rhymes doesn't touch the historical case.