Origins · 08
Pagan Origins: How Much of Christian Practice Predates Christianity?
Christianity didn't develop in a vacuum. It formed inside the Roman Empire, in direct contact with Greco-Roman religion, Egyptian cults, Persian Mithraism, and Hellenistic philosophy — and it absorbed practices, dates, and imagery from that environment as it grew. The honest version of this argument is narrower than the popular one: there's a real, well-documented pattern of borrowed form, and a separate, much shakier claim that Jesus himself was invented from pagan myth. This page keeps those apart.
What's well-documented: borrowed form Secular / academic
Historians of late antiquity generally agree that as Christianity became the empire's dominant religion in the 4th century, it absorbed and repurposed existing Roman religious infrastructure — dates, sites, and visual language — rather than replacing it outright.
December 25 and Sol Invictus
No Gospel gives Jesus's birth date. The earliest Christian writers didn't celebrate it at all — Origen, in the 3rd century, mocked the very idea of birthday celebrations as a pagan practice unworthy of Christ. December 25 first appears as the fixed Christian date in Rome in 336 CE, in the same document — the Chronography of 354, compiled from an earlier 336 CE calendar — that separately records December 25 as the feast of Sol Invictus ("the Unconquered Sun"), the state solar cult Aurelian had elevated in 274 CE. It's worth being precise about what's solid here: Aurelian's 274 CE decree elevating Sol Invictus is well attested, but a source directly pinning that cult's major festival to December 25 before the mid-4th century isn't; the two December 25 observances are first confirmed side by side in the same mid-4th-century document, not proven to have shared that date for the prior sixty years. Scholars of the period (including Steven Hijmans, though his own position is more a nuanced "re-signification" argument than a simple copy-the-pagan-holiday claim) generally treat the proximity as more than coincidence: a solstice-adjacent date already meaningful across the empire got a Christian observance layered onto it. A rival scholarly view, the "calculation hypothesis," argues the date was reached independently by early theologians counting nine months from a symbolic March 25 date for the crucifixion/conception — a minority position, but one that doesn't depend on the contested Aurelian-to-336 continuity.
Easter, Eostre, and the spring fertility calendar
The English word "Easter" is generally traced (via the 8th-century monk Bede, our only real source) to Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon spring goddess — though because Bede is the sole surviving attestation, some historians treat this etymology as less certain than the Sol Invictus overlap. What's on firmer ground is the calendar mechanics: Easter's date is fixed to the spring equinox and lunar cycle, the same seasonal marker that pre-Christian European fertility festivals used, and imagery like eggs and rabbits recorded in later folk Easter customs plainly comes from the same fertility-symbol pool rather than from anything in the resurrection narratives.
Halos, temples, and processional imagery
The solar halo — a disc of light behind the head — appears in Roman imperial and Sol Invictus iconography before it becomes standard in Christian art of Christ and the saints. Church architecture and processional ritual likewise absorbed a great deal of existing Roman civic and temple form once Christianity became the state religion under Constantine and his successors, a continuity documented at length by historians like Ramsay MacMullen in his work on the Christianization of the Roman world.
Mithraism: real parallels, overstated claims Secular / academic
Mithraism — a mystery cult centered on the god Mithras, popular among Roman soldiers from roughly the 1st to 4th centuries CE — is the comparison most often reached for, and it's also the one modern scholarship has most aggressively walked back. Popular claims that Mithras was born of a virgin on December 25, died, and rose after three days circulate widely online, but specialists in Mithraic studies (following Roman religion scholar Franz Cumont's later critics, and more recent work summarized by Manfred Clauss and David Ulansey) find little to no evidence for most of these specific claims in the actual Mithraic archaeological and textual record. Mithras is depicted being born from solid rock, not a virgin womb; there is no ancient death-and-resurrection narrative for Mithras that survives. What is real: shared bull-sacrifice and communal-meal imagery, a shared solar-cult calendar, and general structural similarity as a Roman-era mystery religion with initiation grades — but the specific 1-to-1 biographical parallels popularized since the 19th century are considered an overreach by the scholars who actually study the Mithraic sources.
The "dying-and-rising god" pattern Secular / academic
Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, and Tammuz are regularly cited as pre-Christian "dying and rising god" figures. The category itself was popularized by James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) and remains a staple of comparative mythology in popular writing. But the specialist most associated with critiquing it, religious studies scholar Jonathan Z. Smith, argued in his essay "Dying and Rising Gods" (in the Encyclopedia of Religion) that the category collapses under close examination — many of the supposed parallels either don't actually involve a return to life in the earliest sources, or were reshaped by later scholars to look more Christian than the original myths describe. Smith's critique is now the dominant position in religious studies, and it's worth citing directly here because it cuts against overstating this argument: the pattern is real as a broad, loose family resemblance across Mediterranean religion, not as a precise template Christianity copied point for point.
The "astrotheology" checklist: Horus, Attis, Krishna, and Mithra, checked against the primary texts Contested / fringe
A specific, very popular version of the pagan-parallels argument — spread mainly through the 2007 film Zeitgeist: The Movie — claims that Jesus's biography (virgin birth, birth on December 25, a star in the east with three kings, twelve disciples, water-to-wine and healing miracles, betrayal, crucifixion, three days dead, resurrection) is a checklist copied wholesale from four earlier figures: Horus, Attis, Krishna, and Mithra. Almost every specific claim in that film traces to one writer, D.M. Murdock ("Acharya S"), leaning heavily on Gerald Massey, a self-taught 19th-century writer with no Egyptological training. It's worth checking the list item by item against what the actual primary sources for each figure say, because the claims are specific and checkable — and mostly don't hold up.
Horus
The Egyptian sources (the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, temple hymns, and Plutarch's De Iside et Osiride) don't give Horus a December 25 birthday, a star, three kings, twelve disciples, or any water-to-wine or healing miracles — none of these appear in any primary Egyptian text. Isis's conception of Horus is genuinely unusual (per Plutarch and the Osiris hymns, she conceives after Osiris's death, using magic to revive his body long enough to conceive), but she is his widow, not a virgin, and no source calls it a virgin birth. The "crucified and resurrected" claim conflates two different figures: it's Osiris, not Horus, who dies and is reassembled by Isis — and Egyptologists are explicit that this makes him lord of the dead in the underworld, not a walking, resurrected body on earth. Horus himself never dies in the myth at all.
Attis
Attis is the one figure here with a genuine textual "miraculous conception": per Pausanias and Arnobius, the nymph Nana becomes pregnant after placing an almond, grown from a self-castrated hermaphroditic being, in her lap — a real parallel to non-ordinary conception, though nothing like the Gospel account mechanically. But no primary source gives Attis a December 25 birthday: the actual Roman Attis/Cybele festival cycle (the Day of Blood and the Hilaria) falls at the spring equinox, March 22–25, confirmed by the 4th-century Philocalian calendar. The earliest and most detailed source, Catullus's Poem 63 (1st century BCE), doesn't narrate Attis's death at all; later versions have him gored by a boar or dying by self-castration under a pine tree, not crucified in any judicial sense. Scholars of the cult (Jan Bremmer, Philippe Borgeaud) find no resurrection motif in the early sources — the only text that reads anything like a return-from-death is a 4th-century-CE Neoplatonic allegory (Sallustius), written centuries after Christianity was already established, which undercuts rather than supports a "Christianity copied this" claim.
Krishna
Krishna's mother Devaki was married to Vasudeva and had already borne seven children before Krishna, her eighth — the "virgin birth" claim is directly contradicted by the primary texts (Mahabharata, Harivamsa, Bhagavata Purana), which describe a married mother, not a virgin one. No source places Krishna's birth on December 25 (his actual festival, Janmashtami, falls in August–September) or describes a star or three kings at his birth — the infant is instead given a secret naming ceremony to hide him from a king who wants him dead. No source gives him twelve disciples, or attributes water-to-wine or healing-the-sick miracles to him specifically. His death, in the Mahabharata's Mausala Parva, comes from a hunter's arrow after he's mistaken for a deer, followed by a voluntary ascension — not a crucifixion, not a three-day entombment, and not what most readers would recognize as a resurrection.
Mithra
As the Mithraism section above already covers, Mithras was born from solid rock, not a womb — even the 2nd-century Christian writer Justin Martyr, who was actively looking for ways to accuse the cult of diabolically imitating Christianity, describes the rock-birth rather than claiming a virgin one, which is telling on its own. No ancient source gives Mithras a December 25 birthday; that date belongs to the separate cult of Sol Invictus, and modern Mithraic-studies specialists (Roger Beck, Manfred Clauss) are explicit that the evidence for Mithras sharing it is thin at best. Mithraic art consistently shows exactly two companion figures, the torchbearers Cautes and Cautopates — not twelve disciples — and no primary source describes Mithras dying and rising again.
Caesar's Messiah and the "invented Jesus" claim Contested / fringe
A separate and much more radical claim goes further than borrowed dates and iconography: that Jesus himself was a literary invention. Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah (2005) argues the Gospels were composed by the Roman Flavian imperial court as propaganda, deliberately parallel to Josephus's account of the Jewish-Roman War, to pacify Jewish messianic hopes. Kersey Graves's The World's Sixteen Crucified Saviors (1875) and the more recent work of "Acharya S" (D.M. Murdock, The Christ Conspiracy, 1999) make a related but distinct "Christ myth" argument — that Jesus is a composite of earlier pagan dying-god and solar myths with no historical basis at all.
Where this leaves the argument
The version of this critique that holds up under scrutiny isn't "Jesus was invented from Mithras and Osiris." It's narrower and, in a sense, more damaging to institutional Christianity's claims to unbroken tradition: the specific dates, symbols, and much of the ceremonial form of Christian practice were assembled over the 4th and 5th centuries from the surrounding Roman religious world, well after the events the New Testament describes, and often centuries after Jesus's own lifetime. That's a claim about the religion's institutional history, not about the existence or teachings of the man at its center — and it's the claim the source material for this page, along with mainstream classical and religious-studies scholarship, actually supports.