I’m always disturbed by how ignornant most people are in regard to the historical Jesus.  My wife was talking to one of her co-workers about the Gospel, and he brought up the age-old argument against Jesus’ life and resurrection; the idea that the story of Jesus was just a re-hashing of the age-old “Dying/Resurrecting God Myth.”  When one examines the myths of ancient literature, one does seem to notice some recurring themes like Mother/Son close relationship, the death and resurrection of a diety, and many other details that seem to weaken the idea that Jesus actually existed as the Gospels portray Him.  According to critics who cite this theory, the followers of Jesus constructed His story based upon the myths that they saw around them.  Therefore Christianity is a fabrication.

 This approach is really problematice, though, because there is only one myth that even remotely resembles the Jesus narrative that dates to before the life of the historical Jesus: the myth of Horus.  All the other myths that seem to resemble the Jesus narrative are much younger than the Jesus narrative, by 400 to 500 years.  We don’t have any record that dates them further back than that.   When one examines Christianity in comparison to Horus, the differences are incredibly stark.  Horus’ mother was not a virgin; she resurrected her husband Osiris to conceive the son.  Horus death and resurrection is intimately connected with the seasons, and his death and does not even remotely resemble the horrible death on the cross and resurrection three days later.

The closest ancient myth that resembles the Jesus story is the story of Mithras, but as I’ve said before, the Mithras cult existed in about the 4th and 5th centuries, so any similarities of the Mithraic myth to the Jesus story are largely due to the fact that the cult of Mithras was competing for Roman attention with the Gospel of Jesus.  The Mithraic cult did borrow some details from the life of Jesus, but the myth of Mithras is still starkly different to the Jesus narrative.  Mithras was born from a rock, for example, not of a virgin.  The death and resurrection of Mithras is a vague issue, and it is cerainly not the central tenet of the Mithraic faith. 

Most of modern scholarship has rejected the uniformity of the “Dying God myths” because the myths are all starkly different from one another.  It marginalizes them all to say that they all rely on the same archetypes, and as a result each myth should be explored on a one-on-one basis.  Likewise, the story of Jesus is unique in its own right, not simply a compilation of the coolest ideas from all world myths.

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