The Similarities Between Ancient Gods and Modern Religion Are Not a Coincidence

 This is not an attack on any religion. It is history. And it is history that most people who practice modern religions have never been taught.

The story of a god who dies and comes back from the dead did not originate with Christianity. It is one of the oldest religious ideas in human history. And the versions that existed before Christianity share enough details with the Christian story that scholars have been studying the connections for over a century.

Osiris

Osiris was the Egyptian god of the dead, the afterlife, and resurrection. His story is one of the oldest in recorded religion going back to ancient Egyptian texts from over four thousand years ago.

Osiris was killed by his brother Set who dismembered his body and scattered the pieces. His wife Isis gathered the pieces and resurrected him. After his resurrection Osiris became the ruler of the afterlife and the judge of the dead. Those who lived righteously could enter his kingdom after death.

The parallels to later religious traditions are striking. A god who dies. A resurrection. A kingdom of the dead ruled by the resurrected god. A moral framework where righteous living determines what happens after death.

Osiris was worshipped in Egypt for thousands of years. His cult spread throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. By the time Christianity emerged, the story of a dying and resurrected god connected to the afterlife and moral judgment was deeply embedded in the religious culture of the region.

Mithras

Mithras was a god worshipped across the Roman Empire at roughly the same time Christianity was spreading. The cult of Mithras was particularly popular among Roman soldiers.

Mithraism involved a sacred meal shared by followers. Initiates went through stages of spiritual development. The religion involved moral codes and ideas about the afterlife. The central figure of Mithras was often depicted as born from a rock and associated with light and the sun.

The cult of Mithras and early Christianity competed for followers across the Roman Empire during the same centuries. They were targeting similar populations with similar kinds of spiritual offerings. The degree to which one influenced the other is debated by historians, but the similarities were noted by early Christian writers themselves, some of whom attributed them to the devil deliberately counterfeiting Christian truth in advance.

What Historians Say

Historians who study comparative religion do not argue that Christianity invented nothing new. The message of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels has its own character and its own specific historical context. The ethical teachings, the emphasis on love and forgiveness, the specific historical figure at the center of the story. These elements have their own integrity.

What historians do argue is that the religious ideas of any time and place are shaped by the religious ideas that came before them. Christianity did not emerge in a vacuum. It emerged in a world saturated with ideas about dying and rising gods, divine births, sacred meals, afterlife judgment, and the cosmic struggle between good and evil. Some of those ideas got absorbed into the new religion, whether consciously or simply because they were part of the cultural water everyone in that world was swimming in.

Understanding that does not have to undermine anyone's faith. But it does undermine the idea that any religion's ideas appeared from nowhere with no connection to what came before.

All human ideas have history. Religious ideas are no exception.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.