“Your religion is a remix.” The copycat objection sounds devastating until somebody checks the footnotes.
It usually arrives as a list, and the list is why it works.
Horus. Mithras. Osiris. Dionysus. Attis. Born of a virgin. December 25th. Twelve followers. Killed and raised on the third day. Delivered fast, in that order, it lands like a verdict — and the Christian across the table usually goes quiet, because he has never heard of Attis and he is not about to pretend otherwise.
Here is what you should know. That list is not a finding. It is a chain letter. It travels from website to documentary to coffee-shop argument without anyone stopping at a primary source, and it has three separate problems: most of the parallels are not there, the ones that are there run the wrong direction, and even if every single one of them were real, the argument would still not touch the question that matters.
First, look up the actual stories
Osiris is the strongest card in the deck, and it is weaker than advertised. He is murdered and dismembered by Set, his body reassembled by Isis, and he is revived — to rule the underworld. He does not walk back out into Egypt. He becomes lord of the dead and stays there. That is not resurrection; in a sense it is the opposite of resurrection. The Christian claim is that a man came back into this world, in this body, and ate a meal with his friends in a room with a door.
Horus is the one that collapses fastest. The virgin birth, the twelve disciples, the crucifixion, the three days — none of that is in the Egyptian material. It traces to nineteenth- and twentieth-century popularizers, chiefly Gerald Massey and Kersey Graves, and from them into the film Zeitgeist, which is where most people actually got it. Isis was not a virgin; she conceived Horus from the body of her dead husband. There is no crucifixion anywhere in the Egyptian account, because crucifixion was a Roman innovation applied centuries later.
Mithras was born from a rock. Not a virgin — a rock. The documented features of the Roman cult are the bull-slaying image, the seven grades of initiation, and the ritual meal. There is no dying-and-rising Mithras in any of it. And the Roman mysteries flourish from the late first century into the third — which is to say, alongside and after the New Testament documents, not before them.
Attis, whose revival is the one real dying-and-rising parallel usually cited, is attested in that form in fourth-century sources. Three hundred years late.
The objection survives on the assumption that nobody will go look. Go look.
Which way is the borrowing supposed to run?
Grant for a moment that there are genuine late similarities. The chronology still does not help the skeptic, because the dated evidence puts the mystery cults developing those features during and after the spread of the church, not before it. An argument that needs the influence to run one direction cannot survive a calendar that runs the other.
But the deeper problem is that the copycat theory is looking in the wrong part of the world entirely. The resurrection hope the apostles preached is not Egyptian or Persian. It is Hebrew, and it is old.
For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: And though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.
Job 19:25–26 (KJV)
“In my flesh.” Not as a shade. Not as a symbol of the barley crop. In the body.
For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption.
Psalm 16:10 (KJV)
When Peter stood up in Jerusalem seven weeks after the crucifixion, that is the text he reached for (Acts 2:27, 31). He did not reach for a Persian mystery. He reached for David. And consider who these men were: first-century Jews, the most stubbornly anti-syncretistic people in the ancient Mediterranean, a nation whose entire historical memory was of refusing to blend their God with anyone else’s. The theory asks you to believe that these men quietly assembled a savior out of Egyptian and Anatolian spare parts — and then went to their deaths insisting it had happened in public.
Now look at the shape of the argument
Suppose I conceded all of it. Suppose every parallel on the list checked out. The argument would still be invalid, because resemblance is not derivation and derivation is not refutation.
Dozens of cultures have a flood story. That fact tells you precisely nothing about whether any particular flood occurred. You do not establish that a thing did not happen by pointing out that people have told stories shaped like it. You establish that a thing did not happen by examining the evidence that it did.
And there is an asymmetry here that the list is designed to hide. The myths are not claims about history. Nobody in Alexandria was arguing that Osiris was raised last spring outside the city wall, under a named governor, with named witnesses, most of whom you could still go and interview. The gospel is nailed to a calendar and an address.
For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve: After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.
1 Corinthians 15:3–6 (KJV)
“Of whom the greater part remain unto this present.” Read that again. That is not the grammar of myth. Myths do not supply a witness list and note how many are still alive. That is a man inviting cross-examination, in writing, roughly twenty years after the event, to a city full of people who could check.
And the apostles knew the category they were being accused of. They named it and refused it:
For we have not followed cunning devised fables, when we made known unto you the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.
2 Peter 1:16 (KJV)
The word under “fables” is the Greek word for myths. Peter is saying: we are not doing what the mystery religions do. We were there.
The generous answer — and the better one
Now let me say something a defensive Christian never gets to say, because he is too busy denying every similarity exists at all.
Some of the ache in those old stories is real. If the Creator built a world in which the seed goes into the ground and dies and comes up as a harvest, in which winter is answered by spring, it would be strange if human beings had never dreamed in that shape. The dying-and-rising god is a rumor running through the human race. The Christian claim is not that the rumor never existed. The Christian claim is that the rumor got an address, a date, a Roman governor, and a grave with a seal on it.
And Jesus Himself does not dodge the pattern. He claims it — in the week He intends to die.
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.
John 12:24 (KJV)
The myths were the shadow on the wall. He is the thing casting it.
So decide what you are actually doing
If you are a skeptic and the copycat list is your position, be honest with yourself about what it is doing for you. It is an exit ramp. It lets you file the resurrection under “ancient people believed weird things” without ever having to account for the empty tomb, the appearances, the sudden conversion of James, the conversion of the man who had been arresting Christians, or the simple fact that in the one city where producing a body would have ended the movement before lunch, nobody produced one.
Take the harder road. Read the four accounts. Read 1 Corinthians 15. Then explain the evidence rather than the genre.
And if you are a believer who got rattled by the list: your faith does not rest on the state of Mithraic scholarship. It rests on a man who stood in a locked room and told frightened men to put their hands on Him.
Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself: handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have.
Luke 24:39 (KJV)
No myth ever said that. Myths do not ask to be touched.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist