Comparative Religion – God or Delusion?

Krishna and the Virgin Birth Parallel

🚩 Mark Clark’s Claim

In The Problem of God, Mark Clark dismisses the oft-cited parallel between Jesus and the Hindu deity Krishna, particularly the claim that Krishna was born of a virgin. He argues:

Krishna had seven siblings, which in his view, undermines any claim of virginity.
The miraculous conception story involves a white elephant impregnating his mother, which he says is “spectacular” but “not a virgin conception at all.”
He concludes that the parallels to Christianity are weak or fabricated, and suggests that some pagan stories actually borrowed from Christianity, not the other way around.

🔍 What Does the Evidence Really Say?

Clark’s rebuttal simplifies or misrepresents Hindu mythology and ignores the nature of myth-making, particularly in oral traditions that evolve over centuries and contain symbolic rather than literal meanings.

Let’s address each of his key points:

1. Krishna’s Birth Story

Krishna’s mother Devaki was the sister of Kamsa, a tyrannical king. Upon hearing a prophecy that her eighth son would kill him, Kamsa imprisoned Devaki and her husband Vasudeva, killing each child as they were born. When Krishna, the eighth child, was born, he was miraculously smuggled out and raised by foster parents.

Was it a virgin birth?
No, not in the literal biological sense. But neither was Jesus’ birth in any historically verifiable sense. The claim that Jesus was born of a virgin appears only in two Gospels (Matthew and Luke), and even those accounts are riddled with literary tropes, anachronisms, and theological motives. The concept of a divine or miraculous conception is common across mythologies and serves as a symbol of divine selection or intervention, not necessarily a gynecological claim.

Further, while Clark points to seven siblings as a refutation, this is biologically irrelevant to the idea of divine intervention in one particular birth. Miraculous conceptions in myth often occur after prior normal births—this does not disqualify the miraculous nature of the latter.

2. The White Elephant Myth

Clark claims that a white elephant impregnated Krishna’s mother. This is actually a confusion with the birth of Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha), not Krishna. In Buddhist tradition, Queen Maya dreams of a white elephant entering her side, a vision interpreted as foretelling the Buddha’s divine birth.

There is no known Hindu text that describes Krishna’s conception via a white elephant. By confusing these mythologies, Clark undermines his own credibility. Such a conflation would be like attributing Moses parting the Red Sea to Muhammad—a basic factual error.

3. Parallels and Plagiarism

Clark insists that “several of these stories come later than Christianity and borrow from it.” This is a common apologetic tactic, but it is chronologically and academically dubious.

The Mahabharata, where Krishna’s story appears, is dated centuries before the Common Era.
Krishna worship was well established in India long before Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have lived.
The oral traditions and folklore surrounding Krishna go back possibly as early as the 9th century BCE.

Apologists often invoke the idea of pagan stories borrowing from Christianity, but this is historically and geographically implausible when it comes to Indian texts, which predate and developed independently of any Christian influence.

🧠 The God Question’s Core Philosophy

Let’s apply our framework:

🔍 Lens	Insight
Curiosity over certainty	Rather than defending Christian uniqueness at all costs, we must ask: why do so many cultures tell stories of divine births, miracles, and resurrected saviors? What human need or cultural pattern do these myths reflect?
Evidence over belief	Clark demands historical scrutiny for Krishna but suspends that scrutiny when it comes to Jesus. A consistent approach reveals that all divine birth narratives lack empirical evidence and share common mythological features.
Seeing faith as human	The Krishna story—like that of Jesus—reflects human hopes, archetypes, and storytelling patterns. The real question is not whether one is “true” and the rest are “false,” but what these stories tell us about us.

🔚 Conclusion: Dismissing Parallels Doesn’t Prove Christianity

Mark Clark’s treatment of Krishna is riddled with factual errors, cultural misunderstandings, and apologetic bias. The virgin birth parallel may be symbolic, but so is the Christian version when viewed through a historical-critical lens.

Rather than undermining the case against Christianity’s uniqueness, Clark inadvertently reveals how common the themes of divine conception, miraculous life, and divine mission are across world religions—including those predating Christianity.

The more honest approach is not to defend one myth as uniquely historical while labeling all others as “fabricated,” but to recognize that myth-making is universal, and Christianity is one expression of this larger human pattern.

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.

Did Christianity Copy Pagan Resurrection Myths?

📅 Today is Day 18 of The 20-Day Easter Special

Each day leading up to Easter, we’re critically examining a core resurrection claim—one at a time—through the lens of reason, evidence, and The God Question’s Core Philosophy.

🧩 The Claim We’re Examining

Critics have long argued that Christianity borrowed its resurrection narrative from earlier pagan religions—claiming that gods like Osiris, Mithras, Adonis, Dionysus, and others were said to have died and returned to life.

If Jesus isn’t the first resurrected god… what does that mean for Christianity’s foundational claim?

To explore this, let’s apply The God Question’s Core Philosophy:

Does the claim rely on evidence or belief?

Are alternative explanations considered?

Is there independent corroboration?

Is the claim falsifiable?

Does the explanation raise more questions than it answers?

1. 🔍 Evidence or Belief?

Christian apologists often assert that the resurrection of Jesus is unique, unprecedented, and historically verified. But this stance requires ignoring or minimizing the abundant mythic material from earlier cultures:

Osiris (Egypt): Killed and dismembered, later reassembled and revived by Isis.
Dionysus (Greece): Torn apart and reborn.
Mithras (Persia/Rome): Celebrated with communal meals and promises of eternal life.
Tammuz (Mesopotamia): Descended into the underworld, mourned and revived cyclically.

These aren’t obscure parallels—they were widespread and well-known throughout the ancient Mediterranean world before and during the rise of early Christianity.

✳️ Christianity is not the first religion to claim that a divine figure died and returned.

Verdict: The apologist’s claim relies on belief, not critical engagement with the comparative historical record.

2. 🔁 Are Alternatives Considered?

Christianity’s defenders often frame pagan parallels as coincidental or “Satanic counterfeits.” But they rarely engage with the most reasonable alternative:

That resurrection myths were symbolic, archetypal, and fertility-linked motifs shared across ancient cultures—and that early Christian theology absorbed and adapted these themes.

This explanation is not only plausible, it’s predictable. Syncretism—blending religious ideas—is what religions do when they move across cultures and compete for followers.

Verdict: Mainstream apologetics do not seriously consider syncretism as an explanation. The God Question does.

3. 🔗 Is There Independent Corroboration?

There is no independent historical corroboration of Jesus’ resurrection outside Christian writings. The Gospels themselves disagree on the details of who visited the tomb, when, and what happened there.

Meanwhile, evidence of ancient resurrection cults is abundant and well-documented through texts, rituals, and archaeological artifacts. These include:

Initiation rites into mystery religions (like those of Mithras and Eleusis)
Artistic depictions of deities returning from the underworld
Written prayers and poems about divine resurrections

Verdict: Pagan parallels are corroborated by multiple sources. The Christian resurrection is not.

4. ❌ Is the Claim Falsifiable?

Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection is not falsifiable:

Empty tomb? Could be legend.
Witness reports? Decades-later hearsay.
Spiritual experiences? Common across religious traditions.

If you remove the supernatural assumption, the claim becomes indistinguishable from other mythical resurrection narratives—which Christians dismiss without evidence.

By contrast, the mythic parallel hypothesis is falsifiable: it can be supported or refuted by comparing texts, rituals, and historical timelines.

Verdict: The traditional resurrection claim fails falsifiability. The syncretism hypothesis survives it.

5. ❓ Does It Raise More Questions Than It Answers?

Trying to isolate Jesus’ resurrection from all other myths raises more problems than it solves:

Why would God stage His single, universal act of salvation in a cultural and religious context already full of dying-and-rising gods?
Why is the resurrection language in Paul’s letters (1 Corinthians 15, for example) so vague and symbolic—far more in line with mystery cults than forensic biography?
Why did belief in resurrection lead to ritual practices (e.g., baptism, communion, reenactments) just like in the surrounding pagan world?

Verdict: The syncretic explanation explains the pattern. The supernatural one just doubles down on mystery.

🧠 Final Thought: Not So Original After All

If Christianity had arisen in a cultural vacuum, the resurrection claim might feel more extraordinary. But it emerged in a world where gods died and rose all the time—symbolizing seasonal renewal, harvest cycles, and cosmic hope.

Christianity didn’t invent resurrection. It inherited it, reinterpreted it, and proclaimed it as fact.

But repeating a myth louder doesn’t make it true.

🧭 The God Question’s Invitation

We’re not here to mock tradition—but to ask the questions tradition was too afraid to answer.

Was the resurrection history? Or was it myth, retold with new urgency?

Let’s keep asking.

📺 For Further Exploration

Video: How Christianity Copied Pagan Myths

📅 Note: After we wrap up our 20-Day Easter Special on April 20, we’ll return to our regular schedule of posting three times a week:

Tuesdays & Fridays – our structured explorations through all 11 blog categories
Sundays – our Sunday Special Feature, where we critically respond to real-world religious claims in real time

We hope you’ll stay with us as we continue asking bold questions and applying reason to faith.

Resurrection in Other Religions: A Common Myth?

📅 Today is Day 12 of The 20-Day Easter Special

Each day leading up to Easter, we’re critically examining a core resurrection claim—one at a time—through the lens of reason, evidence, and The God Question’s Core Philosophy.

Each Easter, Christians celebrate the resurrection of Jesus as a singular event—unprecedented in history and unique in meaning. The claim is clear: Jesus rose from the dead, proving he was divine and offering salvation to all who believe.

But is the idea of resurrection truly unique?

Today, we turn to comparative religion and mythology to ask: Is the Christian resurrection narrative one-of-a-kind, or does it echo a broader pattern in ancient religions and cultural myths?

🧭 Resurrection Before Christianity?

Long before the New Testament was written, civilizations across the Mediterranean and Near East told stories of gods and heroes who died and returned to life. These tales often symbolized agricultural cycles, cosmic battles, or moral victories. Some of the most frequently cited examples include:

Osiris (Egyptian Mythology): Murdered and dismembered by his brother Set, Osiris is reassembled and resurrected by his wife Isis, becoming lord of the underworld.
Dionysus (Greek Mythology): A god of wine and fertility, Dionysus was dismembered and reborn. His cult emphasized rebirth and transformation.
Tammuz (Sumerian Mythology): A shepherd-god whose death and return are tied to seasonal changes and fertility rituals.
Mithras (Roman Cult): Though not a direct resurrection story, Mithraic worship included themes of cosmic struggle, salvation, and life after death. The cult predates or parallels early Christianity.

While the details differ, the themes of death, descent, and return to life are ancient and widespread.

📖 So What Sets Jesus Apart?

Christian apologists argue that Jesus’ resurrection is unique because:

It’s claimed as a historical event, not myth or metaphor.
It is central to salvation, not symbolic of nature or harvest.
Jesus predicted his death and resurrection in advance.
The empty tomb and post-resurrection appearances are offered as evidence.

But do these distinctions hold up under scrutiny?

🔍 The God Question’s Core Philosophy Applied

1. Does the claim rely on evidence or belief?

The uniqueness of Jesus’ resurrection rests more on theological interpretation than verifiable evidence.
The parallels to earlier resurrection myths are often dismissed by believers without engaging the historical and literary data.

2. Are alternative explanations considered?

The presence of earlier dying-and-rising gods suggests a pattern in religious imagination and storytelling.
It’s reasonable to ask whether Jesus’ resurrection story evolved within a cultural context already familiar with similar myths.

3. Is there independent corroboration?

Christian resurrection claims rely almost exclusively on insider testimony (New Testament writers).
There is no neutral, non-Christian documentation confirming a bodily resurrection.

4. Is the claim falsifiable?

Like other mythic resurrection stories, Jesus’ resurrection is immune to verification or disproof.
It rests entirely on faith and interpretation, not public, testable evidence.

5. Does the explanation raise more questions than it answers?

If God wanted to prove the resurrection as uniquely true, why mirror patterns found in pagan mythology?
If myth is a natural human expression of hope and transformation, could the Christian resurrection be another example—rather than an exception?

✍️ Conclusion

The resurrection of Jesus may feel uniquely sacred to Christians, but it exists within a larger, older pattern of myth and meaning. Cultures have long told stories of death and rebirth—perhaps because such stories reflect our deepest fears and hopes.

What sets Jesus apart, then, is not the structure of the story—but the claim of literal truth attached to it. And that’s where scrutiny matters most.

In a world filled with similar tales, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If resurrection is a common mythic theme, we must ask: What makes the Christian version any more real?

📺 For Further Exploration

YouTube: How Dying and Rising Gods Were Syncretized With Judaism w/ Richard Carrier

Dying and Rising Gods were a popular trend in the first century and the years leading up to it. The Jews then syncretized their faith with the dying and rising God mytheme and created Jesus.

📅 Note: After we wrap up our 20-Day Easter Special on April 20, we’ll return to our regular schedule of posting three times a week:

Tuesdays & Fridays – our structured explorations through all 11 blog categories
Sundays – our Sunday Special Feature, where we critically respond to real-world religious claims in real time

We hope you’ll stay with us as we continue asking bold questions and applying reason to faith.