The Pagan Copycat Thesis

"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." — Jonathan Z. Smith, The Encyclopedia of Religion, 1987¹

Summary

The copycat thesis says the story of Jesus was assembled from older pagan myths:  a god born of a virgin on 25 December, who taught twelve disciples, died, and rose on the third day.  It comes in three forms, and they fare very differently.

1. The nineteenth-century lists. Kersey Graves's The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875) and Gerald Massey's books on Egypt gave each pagan god the details of the Gospels. The film Zeitgeist (2007), D. M. Murdock ("Acharya S") and Tom Harpur carried these lists to millions. Almost none of the details survive a reading of the ancient texts, and the sharpest critic of Graves is the mythicist Richard Carrier, who calls him "utterly useless to historians as a source."² Verdict: invented.
2. Claim by claim. Horus was conceived by Isis from the dead Osiris, was never crucified, and had no twelve disciples. Mithras was born from a rock as a grown youth, and no ancient source gives him a death or a resurrection; his Roman mystery cult first appears in the decades when the Gospels were written, so neither side can be shown to have copied the other. Osiris was restored as king of the dead, not returned to life. The "resurrection" of Attis appears only in Christian-era writers. Krishna died from a hunter's arrow in the foot, his mother had borne seven children before him, and the Bhagavata Purana, which tells his childhood in full, was written centuries after the Gospels. Verdicts: mostly invented, some real but later than Christianity.
3. The academic version. James Frazer's The Golden Bough built a class of "dying and rising gods" who stood for the yearly death and return of crops. Jonathan Z. Smith's 1987 article in The Encyclopedia of Religion took the class apart god by god. Tryggve Mettinger's The Riddle of Resurrection (2001) is the strongest reply: he argues that Dumuzi, Baal and Melqart did die and return, before Christ. On Dumuzi and on Melqart of Tyre, Mettinger has the better of the argument, and Smith himself left Baal undecided. Mettinger does not argue that Christianity copied them, and his reviewer David Frankfurter concluded that his careful work leaves "dying and rising god" a "non-classification."³
4. The parallels that are real. The Sumerian goddess Inanna is killed, hangs as a corpse, and is revived after "three days and three nights," in a text written down about seventeen centuries before Jesus.⁴ In Euripides's Bacchae of 405 BC, Dionysus makes wine spring from the ground, a wine wonder four centuries older than Cana. Greek and Roman writers told of great men fathered by gods. Celsus in the second century, and Christians such as Justin Martyr, already noticed these likenesses.
5. The closer parallels are Jewish. Honi the Circle-Drawer brought rain by prayer in the first century BC, and Josephus calls him "a righteous man he was, and beloved of God."⁵ Hanina ben Dosa is said to have healed a sick boy at a distance, as Jesus heals an official's son in John 4. Apollonius of Tyana, the pagan holy man most often set beside Jesus, raised a dead girl in a story told about 220 AD, and his biographer was unsure she had died. These figures show that Jesus belongs to a recognised type, the holy man whose prayers are answered. They do not show that his story was copied, and the Talmud's Hanina stories were written down centuries after the Gospels.
6. The same standard both ways. Some Christian writers have overstated the case: saying there are no pre-Christian dying and rising gods at all, or that the Mithraists borrowed from Christianity, which has no better evidence than the reverse. The honest position is narrower. Real parallels exist in themes: divine birth, miracle, death, return from the underworld. None of them supplies what the earliest Christian creed claims: a named man, recently executed by a known Roman governor, buried, and raised bodily on the third day as the first of a general resurrection, proclaimed in Jerusalem within a few years. Justin Martyr, who listed the pagan parallels himself, found none for crucifixion.⁶

Verdict:  the popular copycat thesis is false in nearly every specific claim.  The scholarly version survives only as a set of general themes that Christianity shares with its neighbours, and that sharing is what any religion in that world would show.  The parallels explain how first-century people could understand a claim of resurrection.  They do not explain why Jews in Jerusalem made it about a crucified man.  The question of whether he did rise is a separate one, argued elsewhere on this site.

Part 1: What the thesis claims, in its own words

The copycat thesis is older than its critics often admit, and its defenders range from cranks to serious scholars.  Each form is stated here from its own pages before it is tested.

The nineteenth-century lists

Kersey Graves, a freethinker from Indiana, published The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors in 1875.  Its title page promises "revelations in religious history, which disclose the oriental origin of all the doctrines, principles, precepts, and miracles of the Christian New Testament."⁷  Its first chapter on the saviors is the "Crucifixion of Chrishna of India, 1200 B. C.," and Graves writes that "The evidence of his having been crucified is as conclusive as any other sacrificial or sin-atoning God."⁷  The evidence he then gives is a set of drawings in Edward Moore's Hindu Pantheon, as described by Godfrey Higgins:  figures with marks on the feet that Graves takes for "the nail-holes made by the act of crucifixion."⁷  Graves never cites a Sanskrit text for the crucifixion.

Gerald Massey, an English poet who, in Harpur's words, "taught himself to decipher the hieroglyphics," wrote six large volumes arguing that the Gospels retell the Egyptian myth of Horus.⁸  His influence runs through the modern popularisers.  The Canadian journalist and former Anglican priest Tom Harpur, in The Pagan Christ (2004), names Higgins, Massey and Alvin Boyd Kuhn as the scholars who "have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned works that the Jewish and Christian religions do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots."⁸

Frazer's dying and rising god

The academic form of the claim comes from James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890, abridged 1922).  Frazer grouped Adonis, Attis and Osiris as gods whose yearly death and return acted out the death and return of vegetation.  He was careful to say that the Church borrowed a festival rather than a story:  "When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis."⁹  Later writers dropped Frazer's "may surmise" and his distinction between a festival and a creed.

Zeitgeist and Acharya S

The film Zeitgeist (2007), by Peter Joseph, put the lists online for millions of viewers.  Its companion source guide prints the film's narration line by line, each line followed by a defence written by D. M. Murdock, who wrote as "Acharya S."  The narration reads:  "Horus was born on December 25th" "of the virgin Isis-Meri";  "Horus had 12 disciples"; and "After being 'betrayed' by Typhon, Horus was 'crucified,' buried for three days, and thus, resurrected."  Of Mithras:  "born of a virgin on December 25th, he had 12 disciples and performed miracles, and upon his death was buried for three days and thus resurrected."¹⁰

Murdock's defences concede much of the ground.  On the virgin birth:  "The virginity of Horus's mother, Isis, has been disputed, because in one myth she is portrayed as impregnating herself with Osiris's severed phallus."  On the order of events:  "Mythical motifs found disparately in the ancient Egyptian texts are combined in this paragraph."¹⁰  And her support for the Mithras paragraph is not an ancient text but a summary by the English writer Edward Carpenter, whose Pagan and Christian Creeds appeared in 1920:  "He had twelve companions or disciples (the twelve months).  He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose again."¹⁰  Part 2 tests each of these against the ancient sources.

The scholars who defend real parallels

Two serious defenders deserve to be heard, and neither holds the Zeitgeist lists.

• Tryggve Mettinger, a Swedish Old Testament scholar at Lund, argued in The Riddle of Resurrection (2001) against what he called the consensus that the dying gods "died but did not return or rise to live again." His own summary: "The author concludes that Dumuzi, Baal, and Melqart were dying and rising gods already in pre-Christian times and that Adonis and Eshmun may well have been so too. Osiris dies and rises but remains all the time in the Netherworld."¹¹
• Richard Carrier, a historian with a Columbia doctorate in ancient history and the leading academic mythicist, rejects Graves but defends a narrower list. In his 2003 essay on Graves he writes: "I have confirmed only two real 'resurrected' deities with some uncanny similarity to Jesus which are actually reported before Christian times, Zalmoxis and Inanna."² In a 2025 lecture he widens the list again to Osiris, Inanna and Tammuz, Melqart, Baal, Zalmoxis and Romulus, and calls the dying-and-rising god prehistoric: "In every culture with one, they appear as soon as writing appears there."¹²

Carrier is also the copycat thesis's harshest critic from inside mythicism.  Of the astrological reading that runs through Zeitgeist and Murdock, he wrote in 2022:  "astrotheological explanations of the origins of Christianity, or the content of the Gospels, are bullshit."¹³  The larger question of whether Jesus existed at all is argued in Did Jesus Exist? Jesus Mythicism Audited, and the theory that Roman courtiers wrote the Gospels in Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah.  This article asks only whether the Gospel story was copied.

Part 2: The famous claims, tested against the ancient sources

Each claim below is checked against the oldest texts that tell the god's story.  Three verdicts are possible:  real parallel (an ancient source earlier than the Gospels says it), real but later (an ancient source says it, but only after Christianity was preaching), and invented (no ancient source says it).

Horus

The Egyptian story is told most fully by the Greek writer Plutarch, about AD 100, and in pieces by Egyptian texts going back to the Pyramid Texts of the third millennium BC.  Osiris is murdered by his brother Typhon, the Greek name for Seth;  his wife Isis recovers the body;  and Horus grows up to avenge him.  Plutarch even says Osiris "consorted with Isis after his death, and she became the mother of Harpocrates," the Greek name for Horus as a child.¹⁴  Murdock's own guide admits the conception was not virginal:  Isis was impregnated by her dead husband's "severed phallus."¹⁰

No Egyptian text gives Horus twelve disciples, a baptism at thirty, or a crucifixion.  The guide's defence of the crucifixion is that "Mythical motifs found disparately in the ancient Egyptian texts are combined in this paragraph";¹⁰ the word "crucified" is in quotation marks in the film's own script.  Crucifixion was a Persian, Carthaginian and Roman punishment, and no Egyptian myth of Horus has it.  Nor is Horus's birth dated to 25 December.  That date was a Roman festival of the Sun, "by no means limited to the mysteries of Mithras," in the words of Manfred Clauss's standard study of the Mithras cult,¹⁵ and Carrier traces its use for Jesus to "the 4th century, 300 years after Christianity began."²

Verdict:  virgin birth, December 25, twelve disciples, crucifixion and third-day resurrection of Horus are invented.

Mithras

Roger Beck, the leading specialist on the Roman Mithras cult, describes the god's birth as the cult's monuments show it:  "He is shown rising upright from a rock, not as a baby but in the prime of youth, with extended arms holding torch and sword.  He has, it seems, no father."¹⁶  Clauss:  "Mithras was known as the rock-born god."¹⁵  The god's great act is killing a bull, whose death feeds a banquet with the Sun.  No ancient text or monument gives Mithras a death or a resurrection, and the word "resurrection" does not appear in the searchable text of Clauss's monograph.¹⁵  The twelve disciples and the rising from a tomb come from Edward Carpenter in 1920, quoted in the Zeitgeist guide,¹⁰ not from any ancient author.

Dates matter here, and they cut both ways.  An Iranian god Mithra is very old, but the Roman mystery cult is a different thing.  Plutarch, writing late in the first century AD, says the pirates Pompey defeated in the 60s BC "celebrated certain secret rites," "of which those of Mithras have survived up to now."¹⁶  The first Latin poet to describe the bull-killing Mithras is Statius, about AD 90:  "Persei sub rupibus antri indignata sequi torquentem cornua Mithram," Mithras twisting the horns of the unwilling bull beneath the rocks of a Persian cave.¹⁷  Beck reports that Clauss "locates the cult's origins and point of departure firmly in late first-century CE Rome."¹⁶  That is the same generation in which the Gospels were written, and a generation after Paul's letters.  Neither cult can be shown to have borrowed from the other.  The one real likeness, a rite with bread and a cup of water, is first reported by Justin Martyr about AD 155, a century after Paul described the Lord's Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23-26).⁶

Verdict:  virgin birth, twelve disciples, death and resurrection of Mithras are invented.  The rock birth is real and unlike the Gospels.  The cult meal is real but later than Paul.

Osiris

Osiris is the strongest Egyptian case, and the Pyramid Texts do speak of his revival.  Carrier's 2025 lecture quotes them:  "I [Horus] have come to thee . . . that I may revivify thee, that I may assemble for thee thy bones," and "raise thyself up, king."¹²  But the revived Osiris does not come back to this world.  He rules the dead.  Jonathan Z. Smith:  "he did not return to his former mode of existence but rather journeyed to the underworld, where he became the powerful lord of the dead.  In no sense can Osiris be said to have 'risen' in the sense required by the dying and rising pattern."¹  Mettinger, who defends the category, agrees on this case:  "Osiris dies and rises but remains all the time in the Netherworld."¹¹  Plutarch's Osiris returns to the living only as a visitor:  "Osiris came to Horus from the other world and exercised and trained him for the battle."¹⁴

Verdict:  death and restoration of Osiris is a real parallel, older than Christianity by two thousand years.  It is a restoration to rule over the dead, not a return to bodily life on earth.

Attis

Attis is the shepherd loved by the mother goddess Cybele.  In the old Phrygian and Lydian myths he dies, castrated or killed by a boar, and does not return.  Pausanias, writing about AD 170, gives the gentlest ending found in a pagan source:  the goddess Agdistis "persuaded Zeus to grant that the body of Attis should neither rot at all nor decay."¹⁸  That is a preserved corpse, not a risen one.  Smith:  "two late, post-Christian theological reflections on the myth hint at rebirth," one of which mentions "a pretended resurrection."¹  The March "Day of Joy" that writers since Frazer have read as an Easter for Attis "is a late addition to what was once a three-day ritual," and the famous line "Be of good cheer, you of the mysteries, your god is saved!" from Firmicus Maternus, a Christian writing about AD 346, names no god at all.¹

Verdict:  a resurrection of Attis is real but later, appearing only in Christian-era writers;  the earlier myths have him stay dead.  Crucifixion and a December 25 birth are invented.

Dionysus

Dionysus is the son of Zeus by a Theban princess, Semele, who died when Zeus appeared to her in fire.  In Euripides's Bacchae (405 BC) the god says so himself:  "Who bore me, Cadmus' daughter Semele."¹⁹  That is a divine father and a human mother, but not a virgin birth;  Zeus's union with her is sexual.

The wine is a different matter, and here the copycat writers have a point.  In the Bacchae a follower of Dionysus "set Her thyrsus in the bosomed earth, and there Was red wine that the God sent up to her, A darkling fountain."¹⁹  At Elis, Pausanias reports, priests sealed three empty pots in a building overnight at the festival of the Thyia, and in the morning citizens "find the pots filled with wine."¹⁸  These are real pagan wine wonders, and the Euripides passage is four centuries older than the wine at Cana (John 2:1-11).  Justin Martyr also knew a myth in which Bacchus was "torn limb from limb" and then rose to heaven.⁶

Verdict:  virgin birth and December 25 are invented.  The miraculous supply of wine is a real parallel, and older than John.  Dismemberment and return to the gods is real in the myth, and is a god's restoration, not a man's bodily resurrection.

Inanna

Inanna is the copycat thesis's best case, and it should be stated at full strength.  In the Sumerian poem Inanna's Descent to the Nether World, known from copies made in the early second millennium BC, the goddess enters the underworld to visit her sister.  The seven judges look at her with "the look of death";  "The afflicted woman was turned into a corpse.  And the corpse was hung on a hook."  "After three days and three nights had passed," her minister goes for help.  Two creatures made by the god Enki ask for the body, sprinkle it with "the life-giving plant and … the life-giving water.  And thus Inana arose."⁴

The differences are just as plain in the text.  Inanna is a goddess who was never human.  She is revived by magic food and water, not vindicated by a god who judges her innocent.  And the underworld will not let her go free:  "If Inana is to ascend from the underworld, let her provide a substitute for herself."  She hands over her own husband, Dumuzi, and in the end he and his sister take turns in the underworld, "half the year" each.⁴  Jesus's resurrection is presented as the opposite:  he dies for others, and no one takes his place in the grave.

Verdict:  a goddess killed, dead three days, and revived is a real parallel, about seventeen centuries older than Christianity.  It is the closest pre-Christian story in shape.  There is no evidence that it was known in first-century Judea.

Zalmoxis

Herodotus, writing about 430 BC, heard from Greeks near the Black Sea that the Thracian teacher Salmoxis built "a chamber under the ground," vanished into it, and lived there "for three years:  and they grieved for his loss and mourned for him as dead.  Then in the fourth year he appeared."²⁰  Carrier counts this as one of his two real pre-Christian parallels.²  It is a real story, but Herodotus tells it as a trick to make the Thracians believe his teaching on immortality, and Salmoxis never died.

Verdict:  a real parallel to a reappearance, older than Christianity, and told by its only ancient source as a staged disappearance.

Krishna

Krishna's story is told in the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata, in its appendix the Harivamsa, and most fully in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana.  Edwin Bryant's Krishna:  A Sourcebook (Oxford, 2007) puts the earliest archaeological evidence of Krishna as a god at the Heliodorus column at Besnagar, "dated to around 100 B.C.E.," which shows that devotion to him is older than Christianity.²¹  But the Bhagavata Purana, the text that tells his childhood in detail, is dated by a contributor to the same volume to the "ninth century C.E."²¹

What those texts say does not match the lists.  Krishna is the eighth son of his mother Devaki:  the tyrant Kamsa, warned that "Devaki's eighth son would be his nemesis," kills the children born before him.²¹  He is not born of a virgin.  He dies when "A fierce hunter of the name of Jara," taking him for a deer, "pierced him at the heel with a shaft," while he lies on the ground "in high Yoga."²²  There is no cross and no return to bodily life.  Carrier, again, is blunt:  "almost all his sources on Krishna long postdate Christian-Nestorian influence on India.  No pre-Christian texts on Krishna contain the details crucial to his case."²  His 2025 lecture adds that the dying-and-rising god does not appear "even in India until the Middle Ages."¹²

One likeness is real:  a wicked king who kills infants to destroy a promised child, as Herod does in Matthew 2.  But it is told in texts whose final form is later than Matthew, and it is no closer than the story of Pharaoh and the infant Moses, which is older than both.  The Hindu background to these texts is in Hinduism, and the separate claim that Jesus learned from Indian teachers in Did Jesus Go to India?.

Verdict:  crucifixion, virgin birth and resurrection of Krishna are invented.  The tyrant who kills infants is a real parallel of uncertain date, with an older Hebrew precedent.

Summary of verdicts

Part 3: The scholars' verdict on "dying and rising gods"

Smith's critique

Jonathan Z. Smith's 1987 article is the standard statement of the case against Frazer's category.  His method was simple:  read each god in the language of its own cult, and see whether the native texts say what Frazer's Greek and Latin sources said.  His summary of the result:  "The majority of evidence for Near Eastern dying and rising deities occurs in Greek and Latin texts of late antiquity, usually post-Christian in date."¹  For Adonis, "Only late texts, largely influenced by or written by Christians, claim that there is a subsequent day of celebration for Adonis having been raised from the dead."¹  For Attis, nothing before the Christian era.  For Osiris, a lord of the dead.  For Dumuzi, a god carried off to replace Inanna, whose half-year return "is not what is usually meant in the literature when speaking of a deity's 'rising.'"¹  His conclusion:  "the category of dying and rising deities is exceedingly dubious.  It has been based largely on Christian interest and tenuous evidence."¹

Two cautions about how this is quoted.  The famous first sentence says the category "must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer";  apologists often drop "now," which hides that Smith was reporting a change in scholarship, not a timeless truth.¹  And Smith did not close every case.  Of the Ugaritic god Baal, whose texts break off at the crucial points, he wrote:  "The question whether Aliyan Baal is a dying and rising deity must remain sub judice."¹

Mettinger's reply, and where it has force

Mettinger's Riddle of Resurrection answers Smith by going back to the native sources, and it wins three points.

1. Dumuzi does come back. The full text of Inanna's Descent, recovered after Frazer's day, ends with Dumuzi and his sister taking turns in the underworld, "half the year" each.⁴ Smith calls this alternation, not rising. That is a definition, not a finding: a god who dies and returns to the living every year has died and returned.
2. Melqart had an "awakening." Josephus, copying the Hellenistic historian Menander of Ephesus, says the Tyrian king Hiram "was the first to hold the awakening of Heracles in the month Peritius," using the Greek word egersis, the noun Matthew 27:53 uses for Jesus's own resurrection.²³ Heracles is the Greek name for Melqart, the god of Tyre. Carrier, summarising Mettinger, adds that Phoenician inscriptions from before Alexander speak of officials who were "raisers of Melqart."¹² This is pre-Christian, and it is a festival of a god's return. Whiston's popular English translation of Josephus hides it: it renders the phrase "he first set up the temple of Hercules."⁵
3. Baal remains possible. Smith himself left the question open.

Frankfurter, reviewing the book, granted that much:  Mettinger "has shown, without the pro- or anti-Christian biases of his forebears, the historical existence of some ancient gods apparently believed to die and to be resurrected."³  Christian writers who say flatly that no pre-Christian god died and rose are therefore overstating the case.

What Mettinger's case does not show

Frankfurter's next point is the one that matters for the copycat thesis.  Mettinger's care over the differences between these gods "fractures the very usefulness of the category."³  The gods' "deaths" are descents to the underworld or seasonal absences;  their "resurrections" are "vegetative, agricultural, or seasonal emergence, a divine image's 'appearance' by procession at a particular temple," "not the kind of revivification imagined in the biblical tradition (e.g., Ezekiel 37, Daniel 12, 2 Baruch 50-51)."³  Mettinger's own book, Frankfurter notes, "almost entirely brackets the question of 'influences' on Christian thought."³  And Robert Price, a mythicist who admired the book, notes that Mettinger "does not espouse the Christ-Myth theory," and finds his conclusion about Jesus "altogether too sketchy."¹¹

N. T. Wright puts the difference in one question:  "Did any worshipper in these cults, from Egypt to Norway, at any time in antiquity, think that actual human beings, having died, actually came back to life?  Of course not."²⁴  The gods of Mettinger's list die and return every year, as the crops do.  The earliest Christian claim is about a man who died once, in a known year, under a named governor, and was raised once, as the "first fruits" of a resurrection of all the dead at the end of the age (1 Corinthians 15:20-23).  That idea comes from Daniel 12:2 and Jewish apocalyptic, which is exactly where Frankfurter points.

So the scholarly verdict is narrower than either side usually admits.  Smith overstated:  some pre-Christian gods were believed to die and return.  The copycat thesis overstates far more:  none of them was a human being, none died once in history, and none of their returns was a bodily resurrection in this world.

Part 4: The closer parallels: Jewish holy men and Apollonius

If the Gospels borrowed a model for Jesus, the nearest models were not Egyptian gods but Jewish holy men whose prayers worked wonders.  The Oxford scholar Geza Vermes, a Jewish historian of early Judaism, made this the thesis of Jesus the Jew (1973).  After setting the Gospels beside the rabbinic stories, he concluded that "Jesus of Nazareth takes on the eminently credible personality of a Galilean Hasid."²⁵

Honi the Circle-Drawer

Honi is the only one of these men attested by a first-century source.  Josephus calls him Onias, "a righteous man he was, and beloved of God, who, in a certain drought, had prayed to God to put an end to the intense heat, and whose prayers God had heard, and had sent them rain."  Dragged into the civil war of 65 BC and told to curse one side, he prayed that God would hear neither, and the crowd "stoned him to death."⁵  The Mishnah, edited about AD 200, tells the story that gave him his name:  when his first prayer failed, "He drew a circle on the ground and stood inside it" and swore not to leave it until God sent rain.  The Pharisee leader Shimon ben Shetach said he would have excommunicated anyone else, but "You nag God and He does your bidding, like a son who nags his father."²⁶

Hanina ben Dosa

Hanina was a first-century Galilean rabbi.  The Mishnah says only that when he prayed for the sick he could tell who would live:  "If my prayer is fluent in my mouth, I know that he [the sick person] is favored."²⁷  The Babylonian Talmud, finished about AD 500, adds a story that is the closest parallel to a Gospel miracle in any ancient source.  Rabban Gamaliel's son fell ill;  Hanina prayed in an upper room and told the messengers "the fever has already left his son";  they wrote down the time, and Gamaliel confirmed:  "Precisely at that moment his fever broke and he asked us for water to drink."²⁶  In John 4:46-53, an official's son in Capernaum is healed at a distance, and his servants report, "Yesterday at the seventh hour the fever left him," the very hour Jesus spoke.

The parallel is real.  The dating is the problem, and it runs against the copycat thesis.  John Meier, in the second volume of A Marginal Jew (1994), checked every rabbinic text Vermes used.  He found that "none of the three texts in the Mishna explicitly and unambiguously presents Hanina as a miracle-worker," that miracle stories about him "increase rapidly in the Babylonian Talmud," and that "many of the traditions about Hanina ben Dosa do not find any literary attestation earlier than the two Talmuds."²⁷  His conclusion:  "the earliest traditions about Honi and Hanina ben Dosa do not support such a contention."²⁷  A Talmudic story written down four centuries after John cannot be the source of John.  If anything was borrowed, it could as easily have gone the other way, though nothing shows that either.

Apollonius of Tyana

Apollonius, a wandering Pythagorean teacher of the first century AD, is the pagan most often set beside Jesus.  His life was written by Philostratus, a sophist in the circle of the empress Julia Domna, who says she gave him the memoirs of a disciple named Damis and asked him to rewrite them.²⁸  Meier dates the finished Life to "some time around A.D. 217-20," and notes that before it there is "almost total silence about Apollonius."²⁷

The Life's most famous miracle is a raising.  In Rome a girl "had died just in the hour of her marriage";  Apollonius touched her and "at once woke up the maiden from her seeming death."  Philostratus then hedges:  "whether he detected some spark of life in her, which those who were nursing her had not noticed,—for it is said that although it was raining at the time, a vapour went up from her face—or whether life was really extinct, and he restored it by the warmth of his touch, is a mysterious problem which neither I myself nor those who were present could decide."²⁸  The story resembles the raising of Jairus's daughter (Mark 5:21-43), but it was written down about 150 years after Mark.  About AD 300 the governor Hierocles used Apollonius to argue that Jesus was no greater, and Eusebius wrote a reply.²⁷  Apollonius was set up as a rival to Jesus after the Gospels, not as a model for them.

What these parallels show

They show three things, and the first is a point for the skeptic.

1. Jesus fits a known type. First-century Jews knew holy men whose prayers brought rain and healing, and some Gentiles knew wonder-working sages. The Gospels' miracle stories are not unique in kind, and an honest account says so. Meier's own survey of method notes that "many of the pagan and Jewish parallels (e.g., Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana or the rabbinic material) come from centuries after the Four Gospels."²⁷
2. The type is Jewish, not mythic. Honi, Hanina and Jesus pray to the God of Israel and are compared with Elijah. None of this needs Horus or Mithras.
3. The type does not explain the resurrection claim. Honi was stoned and stayed dead. No one claimed Hanina or Apollonius rose bodily from a grave. A pagan critic of the second century saw the difference clearly. Celsus, speaking through a Jewish character he invented, listed men who were said to have come back from the underworld, Zalmoxis, Pythagoras, Rhampsinitus, Orpheus, Protesilaus, Heracles and Theseus, and then asked: "But the question is, whether any one who was really dead ever rose with a veritable body."²⁹

Part 5: The same standard, both ways

The series rule for these articles is that a test applied to another religion's stories must be applied to the Christian ones, and that Christian arguments get no easier pass than skeptical ones.

Where Christian writers have overstated

1. "There were no dying and rising gods." This is too strong. Inanna dies and is revived; Dumuzi returns for half of every year; Tyre held an "awakening" of Melqart centuries before Christ; the Pyramid Texts tell Osiris to "raise thyself up." Smith himself left Baal undecided. What is true is narrower: no pre-Christian story has a human being who died once in history and was raised bodily to life in this world.
2. "All the pagan evidence is post-Christian." Much of it is, especially for Adonis and Attis, but not all. The Inanna poem, the Pyramid Texts, Euripides's wine miracle and Herodotus's Salmoxis are all centuries older than Jesus. Divine-birth stories are older too. Suetonius repeats, from an earlier Egyptian writer, Asclepias of Mendes, that Augustus's mother fell asleep in Apollo's temple, a serpent came to her, and "In the tenth month after that Augustus was born and was therefore regarded as the son of Apollo."³⁰ That is a son of a god born to a human mother, told of an emperor who died in AD 14, during Jesus's boyhood. It is not a virgin birth: Atia "purified herself, as if after the embraces of her husband."³⁰ But it shows that "son of God" birth stories were part of the Roman world, and an honest apologist says so.
3. "The Mithraists copied the Christians." Some apologists turn the copycat thesis around. The evidence for that is no better than for the original: the Roman Mithras cult and the church appear in the record in the same decades, and nothing in either shows knowledge of the other's stories. Justin's charge that demons imitated the Eucharist in the Mithraic rite⁶ is a theological explanation, not a historical finding.
4. Truncated quotations. Smith's sentence is often printed without "now." A line attributed to Mettinger, that "The consensus among modern scholars — nearly universal — is that there were no dying and rising gods that preceded Christianity," appears in no text of his that could be found; his own abstract describes that consensus only in order to reject it.¹¹ It is set aside in this article's quarantine file and should not be quoted.

Where the copycat writers fail their own test

The copycat thesis asks the Gospels to show that their stories are not borrowed.  Applied to its own sources, the same demand sinks it.  Graves gives no ancient text for Krishna's crucifixion, only drawings described by Higgins.⁷  The Zeitgeist guide's support for Mithras's twelve disciples is a 1920 English book.¹⁰  The guide concedes that its Horus story combines "motifs found disparately" across the Egyptian texts.¹⁰  A Christian who built a doctrine that way would be laughed at, rightly.

The Gospels' own numbers

The test that matters is date and distance.  Paul's letters were written about 20 to 30 years after the crucifixion, and the creed he quotes in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5, "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day," is dated by the atheist New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann to the first two years after the crucifixion.³¹  Mark was written about 40 years after the events.  That earliest layer is Jewish through and through:  it appeals to "the scriptures," not to Osiris, and it was preached first in Jerusalem, among Jews who regarded the pagan cults as idolatry.  For a myth to be copied into that setting within a few years, it would have to be one that Jerusalem Jews knew and respected.  No one has shown that any of the gods above meets that test.  The fuller case for the early date is made in Did Jesus Exist? Jesus Mythicism Audited.

By contrast, every close parallel in this article fails the same test in one direction or the other.  The ones that are old enough (Inanna, Osiris, Dionysus's wine, Salmoxis) are not close in content.  The ones that are close in content (Hanina's healing at a distance, Apollonius's raised girl, the Attis "resurrection") are written down after the Gospels.

Objections and responses

1. "Even if the details are wrong, the overall pattern is the same: a divine son who dies and returns. That is enough to show borrowing." A pattern that broad fits Inanna, a goddess revived by magic water; Osiris, who rules the dead; Attis, whose corpse does not decay; and Salmoxis, who hid in a cellar. A category that wide predicts nothing in particular, which is Frankfurter's point about the "non-classification."³ Borrowing has to be shown by specific shared details, early enough and near enough to have been borrowed. The specific details offered are the ones Part 2 found invented.
2. "Christians invented the late evidence: the Attis and Adonis resurrections look Christian because Christians wrote them down." That is possible, and Smith raised it himself: whether the late Adonis cult "developed a dying and rising mythology (possibility in imitation of the Christian myth) cannot be determined."¹ But it cuts against the copycat thesis. If the only witnesses to a resurrected Adonis are later than the Gospels, they cannot be the Gospels' source.
3. "Inanna was dead three days and rose. That is exactly the Easter pattern." It is the closest shape, and this article grants it. But the "third day" in the Christian creed is tied to "the scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:4), and Hosea 6:2, "on the third day he will raise us up," was in Jewish scripture centuries before Christianity. A Jewish source in Jerusalem is nearer to hand than a Sumerian poem nobody in Roman Judea is known to have read.
4. "Mettinger proved the category real, and Smith was refuted." Mettinger showed that some gods were believed to die and return, and this article says so. He did not argue that the Gospels copied them, and his reviewer judged that his own care made the category useless for comparison.³³
5. "Justin Martyr admitted the parallels. Christians knew their story was copied and invented demons to explain it." Justin admitted resemblances and said Christians claim "nothing different" from what pagans say of the sons of Jupiter.⁶ He was writing to pagans and arguing that their objections were inconsistent. In the same work he names the one thing no myth imitated: "the being crucified."⁶ The diabolical-mimicry argument is a bad historical argument, and it is no evidence of copying either.
6. "Jesus fits the Jewish holy-man type, so his miracles are legend like Honi's and Hanina's." Fitting a type is not the same as being copied. Honi is accepted as a real man on the strength of one paragraph of Josephus written 150 years after his death.⁵ By that standard, a man attested by letters written within 20 to 30 years cannot be dismissed for belonging to the same type. Whether his miracles happened is a separate question from whether his story was borrowed.
7. "This article gives a Christian verdict on pagan religion." The key witnesses against the copycat thesis here are not Christian: Smith, a secular historian of religion; Frankfurter, who praises Mettinger; Carrier, a mythicist; Meier, a Catholic priest who writes by strictly historical rules; and the pagan Celsus, who already knew the difference between a hero's return from the underworld and a dead body raised.²⁹

Issues and unanswered questions

1. Mettinger's book was not read directly. His case is stated here from his own abstract, from Frankfurter's and Price's reviews, and from Carrier's summary of his pages on Melqart. A sentence often quoted from his page 221, that there is no prima facie evidence that Jesus's death and resurrection is a mythological construct, could not be checked against the print and is not quoted.
2. Melqart's "awakening" is the strongest pre-Christian case and the least known. The Greek word egersis in Josephus and the Phoenician title "raiser of the god" that Mettinger reports deserve a fuller treatment from the Phoenician inscriptions themselves, which were not read for this article.
3. The Egyptian texts were read in translation only, and mostly through Plutarch and Carrier's quotations of the Pyramid Texts. Isis's title "the Great Virgin," which the Zeitgeist guide cites from Reginald Witt, was not checked against an Egyptian source.
4. The dates of the Krishna infancy stories are uncertain. The Harivamsa is older than the Bhagavata Purana, but how much older, and whether its slaughter-of-infants story is older than Matthew, was not settled here.
5. Massey was not read directly. His influence is stated from Harpur and from the Zeitgeist guide's citations of him.
6. Christian influence on paganism. Smith suggests some late Adonis and Attis material may imitate Christianity. That would be an interesting finding in its own right, and no source read here proves it.

Verdict

The popular copycat thesis fails on its own terms.  Horus's virgin birth, twelve disciples and crucifixion, Mithras's death and resurrection, and Krishna's cross appear in no ancient text.  They come from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English writers, and the films and books that repeat them are disowned by the leading academic mythicist.

The scholarly form is more serious and partly right.  Inanna was revived after three days;  Osiris was restored, to rule the dead;  Tyre celebrated Melqart's awakening;  Dionysus gave wine by miracle;  Greek and Roman writers told of sons of gods;  Jewish and pagan holy men worked wonders by prayer.  Christian writers who deny all of this have overstated their case.

But none of these parallels is both early enough and close enough to be a source.  The early ones are seasonal gods and goddesses who were never human.  The close ones are written down after the Gospels.  The first Christian claim, recorded within a few years in a creed Paul quotes, is that a crucified Jewish man was raised bodily on the third day "in accordance with the scriptures," as the first of the general resurrection Daniel had promised.  That claim has Jewish roots, and no pagan model has been found for it.  Whether it is true is argued elsewhere on this site.  That it was copied is not supported by the evidence.

Sources