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 whole “dying and rising gods” category has quietly collapsed in scholarship. Jonathan Z. Smith, a leading historian of religion, concluded it is “largely a misnomer” built on late, ambiguous, or imagined sources — many supposed parallels are vague, post-date Christianity, or were invented by modern writers. The nearest cases (Osiris) describe a god ruling the underworld, not bodily returning into history. 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 (Macmillan, 1987)“The category of dying and rising deities is 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, 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 internet compilations, not ancient texts — which is why even skeptical, non-Christian scholars dismiss them (the agnostic Bart Ehrman devoted a whole book 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. The worldwide flood traditions (see The Deluge) point as plausibly to a remembered event as to borrowing — and the differences are the whole point: Genesis is austerely monotheistic and moral where the Babylonian epics are polytheistic and capricious, the gods squabbling and the flood nearly an accident. Even where Israel knew the surrounding stories, it told them as a deliberate counter-narrative, 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 knew the old myths as intimately as anyone alive, 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: “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,” in God in the Dock (1944)“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact… 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.