Christ Myth – God or Delusion?

Attis and the Resurrection Parallel

Series: The Problem of God – Chapter 4 Response

Post #5

🔍 Clark’s Claim

Mark Clark argues that skeptics overreach when drawing parallels between Jesus and Attis. He claims that:

Attis was not born of a virgin.
Attis was not crucified to redeem the earth.
Attis’s death involved genital mutilation under a tree, not crucifixion.
There was no resurrection, only the magical growth of hair and a moving pinky.
The entire comparison is a stretch used to “fit a preconceived narrative.”

Clark ends with the line: “Call me crazy, but I think it’s safe to say that this is not a parallel with the resurrection of Jesus.”

🧠 A Critical Analysis Using The God Question’s Core Philosophy

1. The Strawman of Literal Equivalence

Clark once again leans heavily on hyper-literal readings of pagan myths to dismiss any parallels. But scholars drawing comparisons aren’t typically claiming identical narratives — they’re tracing thematic and mythological patterns:

Attis is a dying and “resurrecting” god, tied to seasonal cycles, particularly vegetation gods who “die” in winter and “rise” in spring.
These motifs are symbolic. No one claims Attis literally rose from a grave in 30 CE Judea. That’s not the point.
The real question: Why do so many ancient myths include death and return motifs? And why does Christianity mirror those?

Clark refuses to engage with these thematic layers. Instead, he debunks a cartoon version of the myth — a clear misrepresentation of the scholarly argument.

2. Ignoring the Evolution of Religious Stories

Religions borrow. Stories evolve. Attis, like many figures in ancient religions, existed long before Jesus, and his worship included:

A March festival with ritual mourning and celebration of return.
Sacred pine trees.
Bloodletting rites and themes of regeneration.

By the 1st century BCE, Roman cults to Attis included language of rebirth and immortality. That Christianity appeared in the same cultural soup, with similar motifs, is not mere coincidence. It’s cultural osmosis.

To ignore that is to ignore the entire field of comparative mythology.

3. A Question of Selective Skepticism

Clark is skeptical of Attis’s connections to Jesus, yet entirely uncritical of Christianity’s own borrowing. Consider:

Jesus dies on a “tree” (cross), just like Attis under the pine.
Jesus’s resurrection is not historically verifiable — like Attis’s.
Both myths feature blood, sacrifice, symbolic rebirth, and religious ritual.

If we’re to demand literal virginity, exact crucifixion, or precise bodily resurrection as standards for a “valid” parallel, then all mythological comparison collapses — including parallels Christians make with Old Testament “types” and prophecies.

Why accept typology in one direction and reject it in another?

💬 Final Thoughts

Attis is not identical to Jesus — no myth is. But that’s not the point.

The point is that Jesus doesn’t stand alone in history as a dying and rising god. Attis is one of many figures who predate Christianity and feature death-rebirth motifs deeply symbolic in human storytelling.

To argue that Christianity arose in a vacuum — completely uninfluenced by the surrounding mythological environment — is intellectually dishonest.

The story of Jesus, as told by the gospels, fits into a pattern of ancient religious archetypes, not because it’s false because of that, but because it reflects the same human longings, anxieties, and symbolic systems as the rest.

That’s not myth-busting. That’s myth-understanding.

Dionysus: Dismembered Gods and Recycled Myths

This post is part of The God Question, an ongoing response series to Mark Clark’s apologetic book The Problem of God. Each post critically examines a section of the book using reason, evidence, and The God Question’s Core Philosophy: Begin with curiosity, not belief. Today we’re responding to Clark’s section on Dionysus in Chapter 4, “The Problem of the Christ Myth.”

🍷 Who Was Dionysus?

Dionysus was the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, ritual madness, and rebirth. His cult was popular across the ancient world and deeply symbolic—touching on life, death, and transformation.

If you’re looking for echoes of Christian motifs in earlier mythology, Dionysus is an unmistakable candidate. But Clark wants to dismiss all parallels as superficial, weak, or downright false.

Let’s examine the three he targets.

1️⃣ Born of a Virgin? Depends on Your Definition

Clark mocks the claim that Dionysus was born of a virgin. He recounts the myth of Semele, a mortal woman impregnated by Zeus (via lightning), and says, “This is not a virgin birth.”

But that depends on whether you’re looking for biology or mythology.

In many traditions, Dionysus is twice-born—first through Semele, then through his father Zeus, who either swallows his heart or carries him to term. These are not natural births. They are mythic signals that Dionysus is divine, destined, and otherworldly.

Like Jesus, he is set apart from the beginning. That’s the common thread—not whether their mothers had intact hymens.

2️⃣ Born on December 25? So What?

Clark again debunks the claim that Dionysus—or Jesus—was born on December 25. But this is largely a red herring.

Nobody seriously argues Jesus was born in late December. The point is that Christianity adopted a pagan holiday, slapped a new name on it, and made it Christian.

It’s not about who was born when. It’s about how Christianity assimilated earlier religious ideas, imagery, and calendar slots to appeal to Roman audiences already steeped in myth.

3️⃣ Death, Dismemberment, and Resurrection

Here’s the most compelling thread.

Dionysus, in one version of the myth, is torn to pieces by Titans, who eat everything but his heart. Zeus saves the heart and resurrects him—a death-and-rebirth cycle.

Clark scoffs: “A man rising after crucifixion and a god restored from a heart aren’t the same thing.”

Of course they’re not.

But they’re not supposed to be.

These are variations on a universal theme—death and rebirth. It’s what Joseph Campbell called the monomyth, the Hero’s Journey, the dying-and-rising god archetype that spans cultures and centuries.

Christianity didn’t invent this theme.

It just anchored it in time, gave it a name, and called it exclusive.

🧭 Final Thought: Dismissal Isn’t Disproof

Clark’s method here is to dismiss anything that isn’t a carbon copy of the Gospels. But myth doesn’t work that way.

Myth evolves. It flows. It adapts.

Dionysus doesn’t need to be Jesus to make the point. He just needs to show that the idea of divine death and resurrection was already well in circulation long before Christianity made it “history.”

Taking on the Christ Myth: Does Horus Really Parallel Jesus?

Why This Series Exists

This post is part of The God Question’s response series to The Problem of God by Mark Clark, a book that aims to defend Christianity from common objections. We believe these objections deserve more serious engagement than Clark provides. Using reason, evidence, and clear thinking, we’re exploring each chapter’s claims—pointing out what holds up, what doesn’t, and what’s missing. We begin not with belief, but with curiosity. That’s the difference.

Horus and Jesus: Does the Parallel Hold Up?

In this section of Chapter 4, Mark Clark attempts to debunk the “Christ Myth” theory by challenging the alleged parallels between Jesus and Horus, the Egyptian deity. According to Clark, the proponents of the myth theory—like Acharya S (D.M. Murdock), Peter Joseph (of Zeitgeist), and Tom Harpur—fail to engage primary sources and rely instead on one another’s claims without verification. His tone is confident, and he appeals to academic discipline to suggest the entire Horus-Jesus parallel falls apart under scrutiny.

But how accurate is Clark’s own critique?

A Fair Point… But Also a Straw Man?

Clark’s strongest point is methodological: many popularizers of the Christ Myth theory don’t cite original Egyptian texts or hieroglyphs when making claims like “Horus had twelve disciples.” Instead, they cite 19th- and 20th-century authors such as Gerald Massey, who often wrote without scholarly accountability.

Clark pounces on this, arguing that no Egyptologist affirms such parallels and that the twelve-disciples claim isn’t found in the Book of the Dead or any known Egyptian text. He notes Massey couldn’t even remember where he had read it.

Fair enough. Credibility matters. But here’s the problem: Clark then suggests that because one exaggerated claim is weak, the entire discussion is nonsense. That’s the real fallacy here.

The Danger of Dismissing Everything

Even if it turns out that Horus didn’t have twelve disciples, or wasn’t born of a virgin on December 25, that doesn’t mean all parallels between mythological figures and Jesus dissolve. It means we need to separate exaggeration from evidence.

Clark frames the issue as if any failed parallel—no matter how minor—proves that Jesus is unique and historical. But that’s not how comparative mythology works. Many ancient religious stories share thematic structures: divine births, suffering saviors, resurrections, cosmic battles, miraculous healings, and chosen disciples. These motifs span cultures because they speak to universal human longings. We shouldn’t dismiss them outright—we should ask what they reveal.

Let’s Talk About the Virgin Birth

Clark challenges the claim that Horus was “born of a virgin” by offering a gruesome counter-narrative: that Horus was conceived after Isis hovered over the severed phallus of her dismembered husband Osiris. He concludes that this is not a virgin birth.

He’s right: the Horus myth is not a one-to-one match for the nativity in Matthew and Luke. But his rebuttal misses the forest for the trees. Virgin or magical conception stories are not unique to Christianity. They appear in various forms across mythological systems—including Greek (Perseus), Roman (Romulus), and even Buddhist traditions. The existence of these birth legends raises a real question: Why do so many religious founders need miraculous births to validate them?

What About December 25?

Clark argues that Horus did not share a birthday with Jesus—and that, in fact, Jesus wasn’t born on December 25 anyway. The Christian date, he says, was chosen later by Pope Julius I to challenge Saturnalia, not based on history.

This argument defeats itself. If Jesus wasn’t born on December 25, then there’s no reason to deny the Horus-December 25 claim as a meaningful parallel. It’s irrelevant. More importantly, the broader point still stands: both Horus and Jesus had festivals celebrating their births during the winter solstice period—a key symbolic time in ancient religions. That’s what matters here: the motif, not the calendar accuracy.

Miracles, Disciples, and Crucifixion

Clark attacks the idea that Horus had disciples—pointing to depictions of Horus with animal companions (a turtle, a lion, a bear, a tiger) and claiming they were not disciples in any religious sense. He suggests this stretches all credibility.

And perhaps it does. But here again, the rebuttal feels too smug and too convenient. Christianity does not get to claim historical superiority merely by mocking the mythologies that came before. If anything, the similarities—however stylized or exaggerated—should prompt deeper reflection: Why does the Jesus story echo so many earlier themes?

Even if the parallels aren’t exact, the recurrence of crucifixion, death, and resurrection in pre-Christian stories should make us wonder: Is Christianity building on a mythological foundation it never acknowledged?

What Clark Gets Right—And What He Avoids

To be fair, Clark is right to call out sloppy sourcing. Some Christ Myth proponents have overstated their case. But Clark’s selective rebuttals also avoid stronger scholarly arguments—such as those presented by Richard Carrier, Robert Price, and others—who offer more rigorous critiques of the historical Jesus.

Instead of wrestling with their evidence, Clark chooses easy targets and brushes the rest aside.

The Real Issue

Ultimately, this section is less about Horus and more about how people engage inconvenient questions. Clark defends Christianity by insisting the Jesus story is utterly unique. But the evidence suggests otherwise: Christianity borrowed, absorbed, and reshaped common religious themes that came long before the first century.

That doesn’t automatically prove Jesus never existed. But it does undercut claims of originality—and invites us to take the Christ Myth idea seriously, not sweep it away with a chuckle.

Is Jesus a Copycat of Ancient Myths? Debunking the Christ Myth

Welcome back to The God Question, where we explore today’s biggest spiritual doubts with thoughtful reflection and intellectual honesty.

In today’s post, we enter Chapter 4 of The Problem of God by Mark Clark, tackling one of the more provocative claims in modern skepticism: the Christ Myth — the idea that Jesus never existed and was merely invented by the early church, copied from older mythological gods.

You’ve probably encountered this claim in viral videos or documentaries like Zeitgeist, Religulous, or The God Who Wasn’t There. They say Jesus is just a rebranding of gods like Horus or Mithras — born of a virgin, performed miracles, died, and rose again after three days. Sounds suspiciously familiar, right?

But here’s the thing: this argument, while loud in pop culture, doesn’t hold up in serious historical circles. Clark reminds us that even scholars who don’t believe in Jesus’ divinity — like Bart Ehrman — affirm his historical existence. The question scholars debate isn’t if Jesus lived, but who he really was and what he really did. Even H.G. Wells, no Christian apologist, called Jesus “the very center of history.”

So why does the Christ Myth remain so popular?

Because it’s simple. It’s edgy. And it lets people reject Christianity without having to dig into inconvenient questions. But as with any conspiracy theory, we need to slow down and examine the facts.

The truth is, most of the supposed parallels between Jesus and pagan gods don’t hold up under scrutiny. Many are exaggerated, misrepresented, or cherry-picked. Others rely on post-Christian sources or questionable interpretations. What they share is often superficial — more coincidence than copycat.

So here’s today’s challenge: If you’ve dismissed Jesus because of the Christ Myth, take a second look. Not at the memes or TikToks or fringe films — but at the actual historical evidence. Because when you do, you’ll find something surprising: not a myth, but a man who changed the world.

And that’s where the real question begins — not “Did he exist?” but “What if everything he said was true?”

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📚 Next up on the blog: Did Jesus actually exist? We’ll explore the historical sources outside the Bible that say yes.