The New Testament authors were all influenced by pagan religions. Jesus is an unhistorical myth. If you don't believe me, Google Jesus Mithras Osiris Horus.

The list is genuinely impressive until you check it against the primary sources, at which point most of it evaporates. That is not a dodge. It is what happens when any claim is tested item by item instead of in a block.

1. Test the list against the texts. Most of the alleged parallels circulate as bullet points, not citations. When someone produces the Egyptian or Persian passage, the parallel usually turns out to be late, reconstructed by a modern writer, or read through categories the original text did not use. Ask for the line and the document. The conversation improves immediately.

2. Mithras is not a copy of Jesus. In the Roman mystery cult, Mithras is born from a rock, not of a virgin. There is no tradition of him dying and rising for the salvation of his followers in the way the Gospels describe. And most of the surviving Mithraic evidence postdates the New Testament, which makes the direction of borrowing hard to run the way the argument needs.

3. Horus is not a copy either. Egyptian texts present Horus as the son of Osiris and Isis, conceived after Osiris's death, which is not a virgin birth in the Christian sense. He is not crucified. There is no three-day resurrection. The Horus parallels that circulate online are frequently modern constructions stitched together from texts centuries apart.

4. Osiris belongs to a different category. Osiris is a god who dies and is revived in the mythic realm, tied to the Nile and the agricultural cycle. Jesus is presented as a historical man who taught in Galilee, was executed under a named Roman official, and appeared to named witnesses. Myth and history are being conflated here, not compared.

5. December 25 is not in the Bible. The date was adopted centuries later, most likely to reframe an existing festival, and no New Testament text ties Jesus's birth to it. If the Gospel writers had copied paganism, they forgot to include its most famous features: no birthday, no solstice, no mystery initiation, no secret knowledge for the elite.

6. The New Testament is thoroughly Jewish. Its authors were Jews who regarded the myths of Mithras and Osiris as false religion, and who quoted Deuteronomy in the middle of a temptation narrative. The central claim, that a crucified man is Israel's Messiah and risen Lord, was a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Greeks (1 Corinthians 1:22-23). It was offensive to both audiences. That is not how borrowed marketing works. Paul thanks God that the Thessalonians turned to God from idols (1 Thessalonians 1:9), which is not the vocabulary of men shopping for myths.

7. A crucified Messiah was a scandal. Deuteronomy says a hanged man is cursed by God (Deuteronomy 21:23). Anyone inventing a Messiah for a Jewish audience would have picked a conqueror, not a man executed by Rome. The shame at the center of the story is exactly what a myth-maker would have removed, and its presence is evidence that the story was not designed.

8. Parallels need direction and contact. Similarity is not dependence. To show borrowing you must establish that the earlier source existed in that form and that the later writer knew it. Scholars call the hunt for vague resemblance parallelomania for a reason. Resemblance between religions is common because human beings share questions, not because every story is a copy of every other.

9. Even skeptical historians reject this. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic critic of Christianity, wrote Did Jesus Exist? specifically to refute the myth thesis, arguing that the evidence for a historical Jesus is overwhelming. On this narrow point, careful Christians and their sharpest critics agree, even while disagreeing profoundly about who Jesus was.

10. The objection assumes its conclusion. Notice the shape of the argument: paganism had savior figures, therefore Jesus is one. That only works if you already assume the Gospels are fiction, because the Gospels present a Jewish teacher in a Jewish setting quoting Jewish Scripture. The parallels are doing the work that the evidence should be doing.

The copycat thesis is a list that does not survive checking. Mithras is born from a rock, Horus is not crucified, Osiris is a seasonal myth, and December 25 appears nowhere in the text. What the Gospels actually contain is a crucified Jewish Messiah, which is the one thing no first-century myth-maker would have invented.

Sources: Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?; Ronald Nash, The Gospel and the Greeks; Craig A. Evans; Wesley Huff.

Related challenges:
• How can you take the gospels as inspired when they don't even make that claim for themselves?
• Miracle stories were crafted AFTER Jesus died, and then included just to make Jesus look like a Jewish wonder working messianic figure. It’s called messianic fiction.
• There’s no evidence outside of the Bible that indicates the miracle stories about Jesus are authentic!