Description
One of the most common objections to Christianity I came across when I left New Age spirituality is that all cultures have their versions of dying and rising deities. Horus, Krishna, Dionysus, etc., all had the same story as Jesus and predated Him by hundreds of years. Virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection. This is an ancient archetype used to tell a heroic story, of which Jesus was made to fit by his early followers. Jesus’ story is nothing more than an amalgamation of pagan god stories.
The reality is, all scholars agree this is not true, including non-Christian ones like Bart Ehrman. He has said “The alleged parallels between Jesus and the ‘pagan’ savior-gods in most instances reside in modern imagination.” Jewish scholar Trygge Mettinger published the most comprehensive work ever written on this topic and concluded “There is no evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct drawing on myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world…The faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus retains its unique character in the history of religions.”
Primary sources reveal that the alleged parallels are either spurious or completely made up. There is no unambiguous instance in history of a dying and rising savior figure. The story of Jesus is unique. Full version on my YT channel titled “Zeitgeist Debunked: Jesus is not a copy of pagan gods”.