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.

The Ancient Religions of the World Were All Telling the Same Story With Different Names

 Look at the major religions and mythologies of the ancient world and you will notice something strange.

They keep telling the same stories.

Almost every ancient culture has a story about a great flood that nearly destroyed humanity and a handful of survivors who preserved the human race. The Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh has it. Ancient Hindu texts have it. The Hebrew Bible has it. Greek mythology has it. Indigenous traditions across the Americas and Australia and Africa have versions of it.

Almost every ancient culture has a story about a god who dies and comes back. The Egyptian god Osiris dies and is resurrected. The Babylonian god Tammuz dies and is mourned and reborn. The Greek god Dionysus has a death and rebirth story. The Norse god Baldur dies and is prophesied to return.

Almost every ancient culture has a story about a miraculous divine birth. A god or a hero born of a human mother and a divine father. Hercules in Greece. Gilgamesh in Mesopotamia. Horus in Egypt.

These are not coincidences. The question is what they mean.

What the Similarities Tell Us

There are a few explanations that scholars have put forward.

One is that some of these stories reflect real historical events. A massive flood did occur at the end of the last Ice Age when sea levels rose dramatically and coastlines were inundated across the world. Communities that survived that catastrophe may have passed down stories about it that evolved differently in different cultures but preserved the core memory of a great flood.

One is that these stories reflect universal human experiences and psychological patterns. The dying and rising god may reflect the cycle of seasons. The harvest dies in winter and is reborn in spring. Every agricultural civilization experienced that cycle and many of them developed religious stories around it.

One is that ancient cultures had more contact with each other than we often assume. Trade routes crossed the ancient world connecting Mesopotamia to Egypt to Greece to India. Stories traveled with goods and people. Ideas spread. Religious concepts mixed and evolved as they moved from culture to culture.

One is that human minds, when confronted with the same fundamental questions about life and death and meaning, tend to produce similar answers. The deep structure of religious storytelling may reflect something about how human consciousness works rather than about historical connections between specific cultures.

What This Means for How We Think About Religion

If you were raised in one religion and you learn that its central stories appear in older religions from different parts of the world, that can feel threatening. Or it can feel like evidence of something important.

The flood story is in the Bible. It is also in the Epic of Gilgamesh which predates the biblical version by centuries. The story of a divine birth is in the New Testament. Similar stories appear in Greek and Egyptian and Babylonian traditions that are much older.

None of that tells you what is true. It does tell you that human beings have been asking the same questions and finding similar answers for a very long time. And that the questions themselves, about where we came from, why we suffer, what happens after death, whether the world is meaningful, are universal.

The names of the gods change. The questions they are answering do not.

That is not an argument against any particular religion. It is an argument for taking the universal human search for meaning seriously regardless of which tradition it comes from.

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