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.
God or Delusion? 