Comparative Religion Gateway

Isn't the resurrection story borrowed from pagan dying-and-rising god myths?

Representative formulation: Popular in internet atheism; traced to Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890); popularized recently by Zeitgeist: The Movie (2007)

The Objection

The argument has a long pedigree. Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890, expanded through 1915) proposed a sweeping comparative framework: across pre-Christian cultures, a recurring pattern emerges of a god who dies (often associated with vegetation cycles) and returns to life, guaranteeing fertility, cosmic renewal, and — by extension — hope for human immortality. Frazer catalogued candidates from across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean world: Osiris (Egypt), Adonis (Syria/Greece), Attis (Phrygia), Dionysus (Greece), and others.

The 2007 film Zeitgeist: The Movie brought a version of this argument to a mass audience, claiming that Jesus was a direct borrowing from the Egyptian Horus narrative and listing point-by-point parallels: virgin birth, twelve disciples, baptism, crucifixion, resurrection after three days, and so on. The implied conclusion is that Christianity is mythology recycled under a Jewish veneer — that there is nothing historically distinctive about its central claim.

Even setting aside Zeitgeist’s specific claims (which most serious scholars, including atheist ones, regard as poorly sourced), the broader comparative-religion version of the argument retains academic respectability in softer form. If dying-and-rising deity motifs were widespread in the religious environment of the early Roman Empire, might not early Christians have borrowed the framework and applied it to their founder?

Why This Matters

The resurrection is not peripheral to Christian faith — it is, as Paul states explicitly in 1 Corinthians 15:14, the hinge on which everything turns: “if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain.” If the resurrection narrative is a mythological borrowing rather than a historical claim, then what Christians have been asserting for two thousand years — that a specific man was physically raised from the dead in Jerusalem around 30 AD — is not a fact about the past but a story about seasonal renewal dressed up in historical clothing.

The Evidence

The Specific Claims of Zeitgeist Are Not Supported

The point-by-point parallels between Jesus and Horus, Mithras, and others cited in Zeitgeist have been examined by scholars and found to be largely fabricated or grossly distorted. A few representative examples:

Horus: The film claims Horus was born of a virgin on December 25th, had twelve disciples, was crucified, and rose after three days. None of these claims is accurate. In the Egyptian sources, Horus is conceived when Isis assembles the dismembered body of Osiris (not a virginal conception). There is no ancient tradition of December 25th for Horus. Horus does not have twelve disciples. He is not crucified — he defeats his uncle Set in battle. The parallels are inventions or wild distortions of actual Egyptian texts.

Mithras: The film claims Mithras was born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, was crucified, and rose after three days. The Mithraic mysteries were a secretive Roman-era cult about which we have limited documentation — but what we do have does not support these claims. Mithras is depicted as born from a rock (not a woman), surrounds himself with two companions (Cautes and Cautopates, not twelve disciples), and the central mythological act is the tauroctony — the slaying of a bull. There is no ancient textual or iconographic evidence of a Mithraic death and resurrection. Classicist and historian of religions Luther Martin has written extensively on Mithraism (Hellenistic Religions, 1987) without finding resurrection parallels.

The classicist Ronald Nash examined these alleged parallels in The Gospel and the Greeks (1992) and concluded that the specific parallels claimed by popular-level mythicists are either absent from primary sources or based on distortions of those sources.

The Dying-and-Rising God Category Itself Is Contested

The deeper problem is with the categorical claim — the idea that a coherent “dying-and-rising god” mythology was a widespread ancient template. The scholar who most systematically dismantled this category was Jonathan Z. Smith, a prominent historian of religion at the University of Chicago (and not a Christian apologist). In his essay “Dying and Rising Gods” (in The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987, edited by Mircea Eliade) and in more extended treatments in Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (1990), Smith argued:

Many of the proposed parallels (Adonis, Attis) do not clearly involve resurrection — they involve death and mourning, sometimes with later return to life in versions that postdate the Christian era.
The “dying-and-rising” category was constructed by scholars like Frazer from disparate myths that share only a surface-level common denominator; the actual theological meaning, social function, and narrative details differ enormously between cases.
The direction of influence — when demonstrable — often runs from Christianity to the later forms of pagan religion, not the other way around.

Smith’s position was not that the parallels are zero, but that the comparison is being made carelessly and in a way that would not survive scrutiny in any other domain of comparative history.

The Osiris Case: A Critical Examination

Osiris is the strongest candidate, since his myth does involve death and subsequent divine existence. In the Egyptian sources (the Pyramid Texts, the Book of the Dead, the Osirian liturgies), Osiris is killed by his brother Set, his body is dismembered and scattered, Isis collects the pieces and reanimates the body sufficiently to conceive Horus, and Osiris becomes king of the dead in the underworld. He does not return to life in the ordinary world — he rules the realm of the deceased.

This is not a resurrection in any sense comparable to the New Testament claim. The NT claim is that Jesus returned to bodily life in this world, was encountered by named individuals, ate food, showed his wounds, and departed visibly. Osiris stays in the underworld. The two narratives are not analogous without stripping away the very details that give each narrative its specific meaning.

The 1 Corinthians 15 Creed: Jewish, Not Pagan

The earliest source for the resurrection claim is not the Gospels — it is 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, which most scholars date to within a very few years of the crucifixion, transmitted as received tradition. The formula is saturated with Second Temple Jewish theological concepts: the death for sins “according to the Scriptures” (citing the Hebrew prophetic tradition, plausibly including Isaiah 53), burial (emphasizing real physical death), resurrection “according to the Scriptures,” and appearance to named witnesses including Peter, the Twelve, five hundred at once, James, and Paul.

This is not the grammar of mystery religion mythology. It is the grammar of Jewish legal testimony: named witnesses, verifiable timing, specific events presented as historical fact. Richard Bauckham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (2006) argues extensively that the Gospel tradition preserves the formal markers of eyewitness testimony — named individuals who would have been identifiable and available for questioning in the early decades of the movement.

The Jewish context matters enormously here. Second Temple Judaism was aggressively monotheistic and deeply resistant to the kind of pagan syncretism the dying-and-rising-god theory requires. The early followers of Jesus were predominantly Jewish, operating in a milieu that was theologically opposed to borrowing from Osirian, Mithraic, or Phrygian mystery traditions. For the dying-and-rising-god theory to work, we would need to posit that a group of Palestinian Jews, within a decade or two of a crucifixion they personally experienced, spontaneously synthesized their theology from Egyptian and Roman mystery cults — and then convinced hundreds of others to die for this synthesis.

The Criterion of Embarrassment (Again)

The empty-tomb narrative in all four Gospels shares a remarkable and seldom-discussed feature: the first witnesses to the empty tomb are women. In first-century Jewish legal culture, women’s testimony was not accepted in court (documented in Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.15). If the resurrection narrative were being crafted to persuade, inventing women as the primary witnesses would be the wrong choice. The most historically plausible explanation is that women were the first witnesses and the tradition preserved this fact despite the apologetic liability. Richard Bauckham (Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, Chapter 3) identifies Mary Magdalene as a named primary source, her name appearing consistently across all four Gospel accounts in a tradition that shows the markers of individual eyewitness memory rather than communal mythologizing.

No dying-and-rising-god myth requires this kind of socially awkward specificity. Myths are not constrained by the inconvenient facts that historical memories preserve.

What This Does and Doesn’t Establish

Demonstrating that the specific parallels between Jesus and Osiris/Mithras/Horus are historically weak, exaggerated, or anachronistic does not, by itself, prove the resurrection occurred. It removes one popular explanation for how the resurrection narrative might have arisen non-historically, but it does not close every alternative.

The remaining question — whether the resurrection claim is historically credible on its own merits — requires evaluating the primary source evidence: the Paul creed, the Gospel accounts, the behavior of the early disciples, and the question of what alternative explanations (hallucination, theft, legend-development) can adequately account for the data. That is a longer argument than this objection requires.

What this response does establish: the claim that Christianity borrowed its resurrection narrative from mystery-religion parallels is poorly supported by the primary sources. Scholars who are not Christians — including Jonathan Z. Smith, A.J.M. Wedderburn (A History of the First Christians, 2004), and others — have reached similar conclusions from a purely historical-critical standpoint.

The softer form of the argument — that the cultural environment of the Roman Empire made a dying-and-rising figure conceivable — is more defensible but less explosive. Of course first-century people had cultural frameworks for interpreting unexpected experiences. The question is whether those frameworks generated the resurrection claim or were used to interpret a claim that arose from other causes.