Frequently Asked Questions · Question 2 of 10

Is Jesus Just a Copy of Horus, Mithras and Krishna?

The internet says Jesus is an old myth with a new name. Here is what the old myths really say.

THE CLAIM

Long before Jesus, gods like Horus, Mithras and Krishna were said to be born of a virgin, many on December 25, with 12 disciples. They did miracles, died and rose again. So the Jesus story was copied.

WHERE YOU HEARD IT

The online movie Zeitgeist in 2007, Bill Maher's movie Religulous in 2008, and now endless TikToks and memes.

WHERE IT STARTED

Writers in the late 1700s and 1800s, before anyone could read most of the ancient sources they were talking about.

THE VERDICT

False. When you read the real myths, the matches mostly disappear. The ones that are left are small or come from after Jesus.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH. Even scholars who are not Christians reject the copycat claim.

The Story You Have Probably Heard

It usually starts with Horus. A narrator in a deep voice says that Horus, the god of ancient Egypt, was born of a virgin on December 25. A star in the east announced his birth, and three kings came to see him. He was a teacher at 12, baptized at 30, and had 12 disciples. He walked on water, was crucified, buried for three days, and rose again.

Then the list goes on. Attis, Krishna, Dionysus, Mithras. The same story, again and again, thousands of years before Jesus. So the Bible must have copied it, right?

It sounds convincing for about two minutes. Then you go and read what the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks and Indians actually wrote about their own gods.

Where This Idea Came From

THE 1700s AND 1800s. In 1795 a French writer named Charles Dupuis claimed that all religions, including Christianity, were really stories about the sun and the stars. In the 1800s and early 1900s Godfrey Higgins, Kersey Graves and Gerald Massey added more. Graves wrote a book in 1875 called The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors. Massey wrote most of the Horus claims you see online today.

THE PROBLEM. None of these men could really read Egyptian. Egyptian hieroglyphs had only been cracked in 1822, and good translations were still rare. They often gave no sources at all. Later scholars checked and could not find their claims in the ancient texts.

THE GOLDEN BOUGH. In 1890 a Scottish scholar named James Frazer grouped many gods together as dying and rising gods, gods of the harvest who die every winter and come back every spring. That idea was popular for a long time.

THE INTERNET. In 1999 a writer using the name Acharya S put the old claims into a book called The Christ Conspiracy. In 2007 the online movie Zeitgeist turned them into a slick video watched by millions. From there they went everywhere.

Horus: The Real Story

Horus was one of the most important gods of ancient Egypt. He was shown as a falcon, or as a man with a falcon's head. Every pharaoh was said to be the living Horus on earth.

HIS BIRTH. His father was the god Osiris and his mother was the goddess Isis. Osiris was murdered by his jealous brother Set, who cut his body into pieces. Isis found the pieces and put him back together, and brought him back to life just long enough to conceive a son. That is not a virgin birth. Isis was Osiris's wife.

HIS CHILDHOOD. Isis hid baby Horus in the papyrus swamps of the Nile Delta to keep him safe from Set.

HIS LIFE. When he grew up, Horus fought Set for the throne of Egypt. In one battle Set tore out Horus's eye, and in most versions the god Thoth healed it. That is the famous Eye of Horus. In the end the gods made Horus king.

BORN ON DECEMBER 25?

No ancient Egyptian text says so. Egyptians celebrated his birth on their own calendar. A Greek writer named Plutarch, about AD 100, says the child Horus was born near the shortest day of winter, early and weak. That is close to December, but it is not December 25, and it is not a virgin birth.

A VIRGIN MOTHER?

No. Isis was married to Osiris. Online you may see her called Isis Meri, but Meri just means beloved, and it was not her name.

A STAR AND THREE KINGS?

Not in any Egyptian source.

BAPTIZED BY ANUP THE BAPTIZER?

There is no such person. Anubis, sometimes called Anup, was a jackal headed god of the dead.

12 DISCIPLES?

No. Horus had four sons who guarded the dead, but no 12 disciples.

CRUCIFIED AND RISEN?

No. Horus is never crucified. In one Egyptian story baby Horus dies from a scorpion sting in the swamps, and Thoth brings him back. That is a baby healed in a marsh, not a man raised from a tomb after three days.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH that almost every claim in the Horus list is made up.

Mithras: The Real Story

There are really two Mithras, and the internet mixes them up.

MITHRA OF PERSIA. In old Persian and Indian religion, Mitra or Mithra was a god of promises and agreements, linked to the light of the sun. He is praised in the Avesta, the holy book of the Zoroastrians. There is no story of a virgin birth, 12 disciples, death or resurrection.

MITHRAS OF ROME. The Mithras most people mean was the god of a secret Roman club for men, popular with soldiers. Members met in small, dark rooms built to look like caves, and moved up through seven ranks. The oldest real evidence for this religion comes from the late first century AD, after the time of Jesus and after Christianity had already spread to Rome. So if anyone copied, it was not the Christians. Plutarch says some pirates kept secret rites for Mithra in 67 BC, but he wrote that 150 years later, and nothing links those pirates to the Roman club.

HIS BIRTH. Roman Mithras was born out of a rock as a young man, holding a dagger and a torch. A few carvings show shepherds watching. A rock is not a virgin, and he was never a baby in a manger.

HIS STORY. His big deed was killing a bull. That scene was carved in almost every Mithras temple. Then he shared a meal with the sun god and rode off with him in his chariot. He never dies, so he never rises.

BORN ON DECEMBER 25?

No ancient source says so. A Roman calendar from AD 354 lists December 25 as the birthday of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus. Some think Emperor Aurelian started that festival in AD 274, when he built a temple to the sun, but no ancient writer says so. Some modern writers guess the Mithras club kept it too, but there is no proof.

12 DISCIPLES?

No. Some carvings show the 12 signs of the zodiac around him. Signs of the zodiac are not disciples.

A SACRED MEAL?

Members did share a meal, and the Christian writer Tertullian, about AD 200, said it looked like a copy of the Lord's Supper. He thought the copying went the other way.

SUNDAY?

Christians met on the first day of the week because Jesus rose that day, Acts 20:7 and Revelation 1:10. That was settled before Roman Mithras was popular.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH. The Roman Mithras religion grew up after Christianity, not before.

Krishna: The Real Story

Krishna is one of the most loved gods in Hinduism. Many Hindus believe he is the eighth avatar, or earthly form, of the god Vishnu. Others worship him as the highest God himself. His teaching in the Bhagavad Gita is one of the most famous religious texts in the world.

HIS BIRTH. Krishna's mother was Devaki and his father was Vasudeva. He was their eighth son. That means his mother was not a virgin. She had already had seven children.

THE WICKED KING. A voice warned Devaki's brother, the wicked King Kamsa, that her eighth son would kill him. So Kamsa locked the couple in prison and killed their babies. When Krishna was born, his father carried him across the Yamuna River to safety, and cowherders raised him. This does sound a little like King Herod in Matthew 2. But while Krishna killing Kamsa is an old story, the part about killing the babies first shows up in Hindu books written after the time of Jesus.

HIS LIFE. As a boy Krishna played tricks, stole butter, played the flute and killed demons. As a man he was a prince and a warrior, and he drove the chariot of the hero Arjuna in a great war.

HIS DEATH. A hunter named Jara mistook Krishna's foot for a deer and shot him with an arrow. Krishna died and returned to his home in the heavens. He was not crucified, and he did not rise from the dead.

BORN OF A VIRGIN?

No. He was his mother's eighth son.

BORN ON DECEMBER 25?

No. His birthday, Janmashtami, is in August or September.

A STAR IN THE EAST?

No. One Hindu book says the stars were lucky the night he was born, but no star leads anyone to him.

KRISHNA AND CHRIST SOUND ALIKE?

Only in English. Krishna is Sanskrit for dark or black. Christ is Greek for anointed one. They are not related.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH that the big claims are false. MEDIUM for the baby killing king, which is real but written down late.

Attis: The Real Story

Attis came from Phrygia, in what is now Turkey. He was the young lover of the mother goddess Cybele.

HIS BIRTH. Here the internet is half right. In one Greek version, his mother Nana became pregnant when she put an almond, or in another version a pomegranate, in her lap. So yes, it is an odd kind of virgin birth. But it came from a fruit that grew from the blood of a wild, half monster god. That is not exactly Luke 1.

HIS DEATH. Attis was about to marry a princess. Cybele, also called Agdistis, was jealous and drove him mad, and he cut off his own private parts under a pine tree and died. His priests copied him by doing the same thing to themselves. This story does not get better from here.

DID HE RISE? In the stories we have, no, and they were written after Jesus. One says Zeus kept his body from rotting, so his hair kept growing and his little finger kept moving. Another says he turned into a pine tree. A Roman festival in March later celebrated joy for Attis, but clear evidence that people saw it as a rising from the dead comes from after Christianity spread.

BORN ON DECEMBER 25?

No. His festival was in March.

CRUCIFIED?

No. He died under a pine tree from a wound he gave himself.

RISEN AFTER THREE DAYS?

No early source says so.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH that the Zeitgeist version is wrong.

Dionysus: The Real Story

Dionysus, called Bacchus by the Romans, was the Greek god of wine, parties and wild worship.

HIS BIRTH. His father was Zeus and his mother was Semele, a human princess. Zeus slept with her, so she was no virgin. Zeus's jealous wife Hera tricked Semele into asking to see Zeus in all his glory, and she burned up on the spot. Zeus saved the unborn baby and sewed him into his own thigh until he was ready to be born. That is why Dionysus was called twice born.

A DIFFERENT DEATH. In a later version, a baby Dionysus called Zagreus was torn apart and eaten by giant gods called Titans. Zeus saved his heart and he was born again. Being eaten and born again as a new baby is not the same as walking out of a tomb in the same body.

WINE MIRACLES. This part is real. The Greek writer Pausanias, in the 100s AD, says that at a festival in Elis, priests sealed three empty pots in a building overnight, and in the morning they were full of wine. Jesus turned water into wine too, John 2. But a god of wine having a wine trick at his own party is not a big surprise, and the stories look nothing alike.

BORN OF A VIRGIN ON DECEMBER 25?

No to both.

KING OF KINGS, ONLY BEGOTTEN SON, ALPHA AND OMEGA?

No ancient source calls him these. Those are Bible titles for Jesus, 1 Timothy 6:15, John 3:16 and Revelation 22:13, pasted onto Dionysus.

CONFIDENCE

HIGH for most claims. The wine miracles are a real but shallow match.

The Rest of the List

OSIRIS. The Egyptian god of the dead. Murdered and cut up by Set, put back together by Isis. He did not return to life on earth. He went down to rule the underworld. Christians believe Jesus rose to new life in the same body, Luke 24:39.

TAMMUZ. A Babylonian shepherd god, Dumuzi in Sumerian, whose death was mourned every year. The Bible itself mentions it. God showed Ezekiel women weeping for Tammuz at the temple gate and called it an abomination, Ezekiel 8:13 to 15. The Bible knew these gods and rejected them. One Sumerian poem says Dumuzi and his sister took turns, each spending half the year in the underworld.

BUDDHA. Born in India about 400 to 500 years before Jesus. His mother Maya was married to King Suddhodana. A later legend says she dreamed of a white elephant before he was born. He taught that suffering ends when desire ends, and he died at about 80 after eating a meal. He never claimed to be God and never claimed to rise.

THE SIXTEEN SAVIORS. Kersey Graves's 1875 list of crucified saviors included gods from Mexico, India, Persia and more. Almost none of them were crucified in any ancient source. Even skeptical writers today call his book unreliable.

The Star Signs Theory

Zeitgeist also says Jesus is really the sun moving through the sky. Here is how that works, and why it does not.

GOD'S SUN. The movie says Jesus is God's Sun, the light of the world. But son and sun only sound alike in English. The New Testament was written in Greek, where son is huios and sun is helios. Jesus did not speak English.

THE THREE KINGS. The movie says the three kings are the three stars of Orion's Belt, which point to the star Sirius. But the Bible never says there were three wise men, and it never calls them kings. It says magi came with three kinds of gifts, Matthew 2:11. The number three and the word kings come from later tradition.

DEAD FOR THREE DAYS. The movie says the sun stops moving south for three days in December, near the Southern Cross, then rises again on December 25. But the Southern Cross is far south in the sky, nowhere near the sun's path. And the Bible never gives December 25 as Jesus' birthday. See Was Jesus Born on December 25?, Luke, p.···.

TWELVE DISCIPLES. The movie says the 12 disciples are the 12 signs of the zodiac. Jesus chose 12 because Israel had 12 tribes, Matthew 19:28. That number came from Genesis, not from the stars.

What the Experts Say

NOT JUST CHRISTIANS. Bart Ehrman is one of the best known New Testament scholars in the world, and he is not a Christian. In his 2012 book Did Jesus Exist?, he says Jesus certainly existed, and he says many of the claims about pagan gods like Horus are not found in any ancient source. See Exhibit A, Jesus in History, Exhibit A: Did Jesus Really Live?.

DYING AND RISING GODS. Scholars later took Frazer's idea apart. In 1987 Jonathan Z. Smith of the University of Chicago wrote that dying and rising gods are a modern category that does not really fit the ancient evidence. In 2001 Swedish scholar Tryggve Mettinger argued that a few gods, like Tammuz, Baal and Melqart, really were said to die and come back. But he also said there is no proof the story of Jesus was built on them.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE. Those gods die and return every year with the harvest, like spring after winter. Jesus died once, Hebrews 9:26, and rose once, at a real time, in a real place, and never died again, Romans 6:9.

Why Jesus Is Different

A REAL TIME AND PLACE. Myths happen once upon a time in a land far away. The Gospels name real rulers. Luke 3:1 dates John the Baptist's work to the fifteenth year of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate governed Judea. Archaeologists have found a stone with Pilate's name on it, in 1961, and a bone box that may belong to the high priest Caiaphas, in 1990.

JEWISH FOLLOWERS. The first Christians were Jews who believed in one God and hated idols. They would sooner die than borrow from pagan gods, and some did. In Lystra, when people thought Paul and Barnabas were the gods Zeus and Hermes, the two of them tore their clothes in horror, Acts 14:11 to 15.

EARLY WITNESSES. Paul passed on a short creed that Jesus died, was buried, rose on the third day, and appeared to Peter, the twelve and more than 500 people at once, 1 Corinthians 15:3 to 8. Most scholars, even skeptics, date that creed to within a few years of the cross. That leaves very little time for a legend to grow.

NOT A MYTH. The letter of 2 Peter says, We did not follow cleverly devised myths, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty, 2 Peter 1:16. Paul told a king that these things were not done in a corner, Acts 26:26.

Did the Early Christians Notice?

Yes, and they did not hide it. About AD 155, Justin Martyr wrote to the Roman emperor that when Christians say Jesus was born of a virgin, died and rose, they are saying nothing stranger than what Romans believe about the sons of Zeus. He thought the devil had tried to fake the coming of Christ ahead of time to confuse people. You do not have to agree with his answer. But it shows Christians were not secretly copying. They talked about both the likenesses and the differences in public.

The Verdict

Jesus is not a copy of Horus, Mithras, Krishna, Attis or Dionysus. Most of the matches on the internet lists were made up in the 1800s, and the few real ones are small, vague or come from after Christianity.

C.S. Lewis, who loved the old myths, came to Christ in 1931 after a long night talk with his friends J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. Tolkien showed him that the hunger in all those old stories, for a god who dies and brings life, was pointing at something real. In 1944 Lewis wrote that in Jesus, myth became fact. The old stories were people's dreams. Jesus is the day those dreams came true, in a real place, at a real time, with real witnesses.

God has put eternity into man's heart, Ecclesiastes 3:11. That is why people everywhere have longed for a Savior. The good news is that He really came.

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