Are the Gospels Just Copied from Pagan Myths?

It resurfaces every Easter on social media, usually with a graphic: Jesus was copied from Horus, or Mithras, or Osiris, or Dionysus — a virgin birth, a December 25th birthday, twelve disciples, three days in a tomb, all supposedly lifted from older pagan myths. It sounds devastating if you've never checked it. It falls apart almost immediately once you do — and interestingly, the scholars who study these ancient religions for a living are the ones who abandoned this idea first, not Christian apologists.

Where the claim actually comes from

The idea traces back to James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890), which grouped a wide range of ancient deities into a single category: "dying-and-rising gods." It was a popular and influential book — and it's also, by the verdict of the field it helped create, wrong. Jonathan Z. Smith, a historian of religion who literally wrote the entry on this topic for the standard reference work in the field, put it bluntly:

Jonathan Z. Smith, "Dying and Rising Gods," Encyclopedia of Religion

The category of "dying and rising gods" "must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts."

This isn't a Christian scholar defending the faith. This is the mainstream academic consensus in comparative religion — the category itself doesn't hold up as an accurate description of the ancient sources. Even Tryggve Mettinger, whose The Riddle of Resurrection is the most serious modern attempt to rehabilitate part of the idea, still concludes that whatever parallels exist are tied to seasonal vegetation cycles and are different in kind from the Christian claim — no vicarious death for sin, no bodily resurrection presented as a specific, datable historical event.

Checking the specific gods, one at a time

Mithras. Roman Mithraism has no myth of Mithras dying and rising at all — its central image is Mithras slaying a bull, not dying himself. And the timeline runs the wrong way for a borrowing theory: the Roman Mithras cult is first attested at the very end of the first century AD and doesn't flourish until the second century — after the New Testament had already been written. If any copying happened here, it couldn't have gone from Mithras to Christianity. The popular claims about Mithras being "born of a virgin on December 25th" or having a "baptism" ritual aren't found in the actual ancient sources — they're modern additions that got repeated online until they sounded like established fact.

Osiris. In Plutarch's account (written around 100 AD), Osiris is murdered and dismembered by his brother Set; his wife Isis gathers the pieces; Osiris is restored — but only to become king and judge of the dead in the underworld. He never returns to ordinary bodily life among the living. That's a categorically different claim from "a man was executed publicly and then walked around, ate, and spoke with people afterward." It's a myth about kingship over the realm of the dead, not a resurrection out of it.

Dionysus, Adonis, and Attis. These belong to the seasonal cycle of vegetation dying in winter and returning in spring — an annual, repeating pattern, not a one-time historical event. And the timing is the real problem for the copycat theory: the claim of an Attis "resurrection" festival is attested only in sources from the third through sixth centuries AD — centuries after Christianity was already established and spreading across the empire. Wherever these cults resemble Christianity at all, the resemblance is late enough that if there's any influence, it more plausibly ran from the church outward, not the other way around.

Why the theory fails at the root, not just in the details

Even setting the specific gods aside, the whole borrowing theory has a matching problem: the first Christians are the wrong people, in the wrong culture, telling the wrong kind of story.

Wrong culture. The earliest Christians were Torah-observant Jews. Paul, the earliest New Testament writer, was a Pharisee — someone trained to regard pagan myth and cult with contempt, not to raid it for material.
Wrong kind of claim. The resurrection wasn't presented as a story from mythic, timeless antiquity — it was announced as a recent, public, datable event, in a real city, within a few years, naming specific living witnesses who could be questioned (1 Corinthians 15:3–8). Pagan myths of this kind aren't set in anyone's living memory; this one explicitly was.
Wrong kind of hope. Jewish resurrection expectation meant a transformed physical body and the start of a new creation — not union with a cyclical nature-deity. As N. T. Wright documents at length in The Resurrection of the Son of God, nothing in the pagan world was expecting or asking for that; the mystery cults offered mystical union with a god, not one specific man raised, permanently, never to die again.
Wrong amount of time. Myths need generations to accrete legendary detail. The 1 Corinthians 15 creed is dated by scholars across the spectrum to within a few years of the crucifixion — there simply wasn't time for a borrowed myth to grow into a claim this specific, this fast, in a community this hostile to the source material.

A fair concession

To be fair in the other direction: some things Christians associate with the holidays genuinely did pick up later cultural overlap — December 25th as Christmas isn't claimed anywhere in Scripture as Jesus' actual birthdate, and its history is its own separate question from whether the resurrection narrative itself was borrowed. That's worth being honest about. But it's a different claim entirely from "the empty tomb and the resurrection appearances were copied from a dying-and-rising god myth" — and that specific claim is the one that doesn't survive contact with the actual ancient sources.

The full response — including the sources for every quotation above — is at Did Christianity Copy Pagan "Dying-and-Rising Gods"? If you're working through the resurrection case itself, we cover it directly in a separate post. And if you've got a specific parallel someone's thrown at you that isn't covered here, ask the research assistant — it draws from the same sourced library, with citations you can check yourself.