Come back in time with me, all the way back to the magical year of 2007.  I had a beautiful, thick head of hair… My wife was pregnant with our first child. I was living in Eger, Hungary, where we had planted a church which I was pastoring, and I had just gotten broadband internet hooked up in our flat. There was this new thing around at that time called YouTube, we weren’t sure if it was going to catch on or not… I mean, who wants to watch videos on their computer???

There on YouTube, I came across this video called Zeitgeist, which is basically a big conspiracy theory that says that everything you’ve ever been told about everything is a lie, conjured up by people who want to control you. Overall, I didn’t take the movie seriously, but… the beginning of the movie made some pretty serious claims about Jesus and the Bible that gave me pause when I first heard them…

The Claims

For example, the video claimed that 3000 years before Jesus, the Egyptians had a god named Horus who was:

• Born on December 25
• Born of a virgin
• His birth was marked by a star in the East
• He was adored by 3 kings
• He was a teacher at age 12
• He was baptized and began his ministry at age 30
• He had 12 disciples

Sound like anyone else you’ve heard of before? They went on…

The basic premise of their claims is that all the stuff the Bible says about Jesus was just ripped off and plagiarized from other ancient religions. For a moment, these claims surprised me and shook me, because I had never heard this before, and I realized that if these claims were true, then Christianity is just a myth and is not true…

The Reality: the “Christ Myth Hypothesis” is a misinformation campaign

I figured it was pretty important to find out whether the things this video claimed were true, so I immediately went and did some research.

Here’s what I found: these claims are nothing new, they have been around for hundreds of years AND they have been disproven and are not taken seriously by anyone who knows anything about history because their claims are false.

Several books and films have been produced by “evangelical atheists” such as Richard Dawkins, Bill Maher, and Tim Harper which promote these claims as the basis for why people should abandon belief in the Bible.

Not only are the claims of the “Christ Myth Hypothesis” not true, but they are intentionally misleading, which is even worse. This is no mere misunderstanding, this is a misinformation campaign aimed at swaying people’s opinions using underhanded and dishonest means.

The Reality: Historical Facts Disprove the Christ Myth Hypothesis

One of the big claims of those who promote the Christ myth is that Jesus never actually existed.

How Do We Know that Jesus Really Existed?

Edwin Yamauchi, Professor of History at the University of Miami says this: “Any argument that challenges the claim of a historical Jesus is so ridiculous in the scholarly community, it is relegated only to the world of footnotes.”

Why? There are at least 10 sources, other than the Bible, that talk about Jesus as a historical person. Here are 2 examples:

• Tacitus (Roman official):   “Nero fastened the guilt . . . (for a great fire that happened in Rome) on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace.  Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilatus.” (Tacitus, Annals, 15.44)
• Josephus: “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he . . . wrought surprising feats. . . . He was the Christ. When Pilate condemned him to be crucified, those who had come to love him did not give up their affection for him.    On the third day he appeared . . . restored to life . . . and the tribe of Christians . . . has not disappeared.” (Josephus, Antiquities, 18.63–64)

Bart Ehrman is not a Christian, and yet he explains, “There is more evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than there is for nearly any other person from antiquity,” and “Mythicists as a group, and as individuals, are not taken seriously by scholars,” because “the idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion. It has no ancient precedents. It was made up in the eighteenth century. One might as well call it a modern myth, the myth of the mythical Jesus.”

Another reason we can be sure that Jesus really existed is because of the rise of the early Christian church.

The rise of early Christianity doesn’t make any sense if Jesus never actually existed. It was a movement of people who claimed to have known, lived with, and witnessed the life, death and resurrection of this man, and as a result they willingly suffered persecution and death, including the torture and murder of their wives and children. Not even the leaders reaped any personal benefit from these claims at all. The history of early Christianity makes no sense apart from the fact that these people actually saw their leader crucified and then rise again.

Examining the Claims of the Christ Myth Hypothesis

Problem #1: Lack of Primary Sources

Problem #2: Gets basic facts about the Bible wrong

Let’s look at some of the specific claims, starting with the most popular: Horus.

Born on December 25
I hope I’m not ruining your Christmas, but Jesus wasn’t born on December 25th. Nowhere in the Bible does it say when Jesus was born, in fact it is most likely it was not in winter, but in fall because it says in the Gospels that the shepherds were sleeping outside with their sheep – which they don’t do in Israel in December because it’s too cold.

It was around 400 AD, when Pope Julius I changed when the day when Christians celebrated the birth of Jesus, to December 25th — in order to subvert a pagan holiday which was celebrated on the Winter Solstice.

Christians have never actually believed that Jesus was born on Dec. 25th — that’s just the day we chose to celebrated it. If you want to celebrate it in August, go for it!  So, December 25 is not an actual parallel.

Born of a Virgin

Here’s how Horus was conceived: His mom was a goddess named Isis — his dad was a god named Osiris. Osiris got into a fight with another god and lost (it’s such a bummer when your god loses…) The other god cut Osiris up and chopped him into pieces, and then Horus’ mom came along and found Osiris’ severed phallus — and yada, yada, yada — she got pregnant, and that’s how Horus was conceived.

I’m pretty sure that doesn’t count as a virgin birth, and it’s certainly not a parallel to Jesus.

Star in the East — Attended by 3 Kings

Again, I don’t want to ruin your Christmas — but the Bible doesn’t say that 3 kings followed a star and arrived at the birth of Jesus. The only people who came at the birth of Jesus were the shepherds from the nearby fields.

In the Gospel of Matthew — it says that a group of magi came from the East, when Jesus was about 2 years old, but nowhere does it says they were kings… “Magi” were magicians, sorcerers, practitioners of Zoroastrianism (Persian traditional religion).

Furthermore, nowhere does it say that there were 3 of them. It says that they brought 3 gifts, gold, frankincense and myrrh —but there were probably more than 3 of them. There could have been 15 or 20 or 100. So, again: this isn’t a parallel.

Teacher at 12 and Baptized at 30 

There aren’t any references to any of these things in ancient writings regarding Horus.  

12 Disciples

The Hieroglyphics show that Horus actually had 4 disciples — and they were: a turtle, a bear, a lion and a tiger. Also not a parallel

Some people say that Horus was crucified and then resurrected on the 3rd day. However, crucifixion didn’t exist in Egypt — it was invented by the Romans thousands of years later. Furthermore, in most stories of Horus, he didn’t die. In one story, he was killed and cut up into pieces, then thrown into a swamp, in which the pieces turned into a crocodile – and THAT is claimed to be a resurrection which was supposedly copied by the Gospels!

Mithra: Born of a Virgin

Mithra, legend says, was actually born fully-formed, out of a rock. That’s not exactly a virgin birth.

Other “Parallels”

Another resurrection parallel that is sometimes claimed is the Greek god Attis, but if you look at his story, here’s how it goes: Attis gets killed by his father, then his father asks Zeus to resurrect him from the dead, and Zeus said: “No. But, here’s what I’ll do: I’ll make Attis’ pinky finger move eternally, and his hair will grow forever.”

Again that’s not resurrection, and there’s no parallel at all with Jesus.

Conclusion & Further Resources

It’s probably not a great idea to get historical information from YouTube videos and blatant propaganda materials, and yet many people do.

What makes Christianity unique is that it is not based on abstract ideas, feelings, or concepts, but it is based on historical events which either happened or they didn’t. The good news is that because of this, the claims of Christianity can be studied and researched from a historical perspective. Actual scholarly research and material refutes the claims of the Christ Myth Hypothesis and corroborates the claims of the gospel.

For further reading/listening, I recommend:

• Website: Always Be Ready, “Zeitgeist: Analysis and Response”
• Book: Mark Clark, Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity
• Sermon: “The Trouble Is: The Christ Myth”