Was Jesus copied from pagan myths like Horus and Mithras?
✓Fact-checked & reviewed for Nicene orthodoxyHow we review →No — the alleged parallels dissolve when you read the actual sources, and the strongest voices saying so are not apologists but secular historians of religion. Christianity did arise in a world of mystery cults — Osiris, Adonis, and others — so the question is worth answering carefully rather than waving away.
The strongest critics here are not apologists but historians of religion. Jonathan Z. Smith, the skeptical University of Chicago scholar, concluded that the whole dying-and-rising category is largely a misnomer built on late and ambiguous texts. Where genuine cases exist, they are gods bound to the seasonal cycle, dying and reviving with the crops each year, in a timeless mythic elsewhere. The Christian claim is a different kind of thing: a named man, under a named governor, Pontius Pilate, in a known city, claimed to have risen once, bodily, never to die again. Figures like Mithras and the Egyptian Horus don't match the story at all once you read the sources rather than the memes.
And the positive case doesn't rest on the Gospels being ancient and unique alone. It rests on how early the belief is. Paul quotes a creed in 1 Corinthians 15 that scholars date to within a few years of the crucifixion, far too early for legend to have slowly grown. The right verdict is not that the resurrection is proven, but that it was something new, which its environment cannot explain away.