Jesus is just a rehash of pagan dying-and-rising gods like Osiris, Dionysus, and Mithras — Christianity copied earlier myths.

Why people find it persuasive

Ancient Mediterranean religion is full of gods who die and return: Osiris dismembered and restored, Dionysus torn apart and reborn, Attis dying and rising with the spring. Given this cultural backdrop, it seems far more plausible that early Christians borrowed a common mythic template than that a Galilean carpenter actually rose from the dead. Popular writers and internet memes have made this comparison a staple of casual skepticism.

Important distinctions

• • Whether real parallels exist versus parallels manufactured by scholars overstating similarities
• • Whether Osiris, Dionysus, and Mithras narratives actually involve resurrection to bodily life in history
• • Dating of the alleged parallel myths relative to the first century
• • Difference between vegetation/seasonal cycle myths and a claimed one-time historical event
• • Whether Paul and the Gospels show awareness of or dependence on mystery cults

Christian response

• • The 'copycat' thesis was popularized by early twentieth-century comparative mythologists like James Frazer in The Golden Bough, but it has been heavily criticized by subsequent historians of religion, including Jonathan Z. Smith, whose Drudgery Divine (1990) shows that many alleged parallels were constructed by scholars reading Christian categories back into pagan sources rather than found independently in them. The category 'dying and rising god' itself was largely a scholarly artifact of that era.
• • Osiris does not rise to a renewed earthly life; in Egyptian myth he becomes lord of the dead in the underworld, his body reassembled but he remains in the realm of the dead, not walking among the living. This is categorically different from the Gospels' claim of an empty tomb and physical appearances in ordinary history. Dionysus and Attis stories are tied to seasonal, agricultural cycles of death and rebirth in nature, not to one-time datable historical events attested by named witnesses.
• • The Mithras cult evidence mostly postdates Christianity or is contemporaneous with it, making the direction of influence, if any, uncertain or even reversed; scholar Richard Gordon and others note the paucity of first-century Mithraic evidence in the Roman world relevant to Palestine. N.T. Wright, in The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003), surveys ancient views of the afterlife and shows that no pagan concept anticipated bodily resurrection in the Jewish sense; resurrection language in the Gospels is distinctly Jewish, not Hellenistic borrowing.
• • Early Christian preaching is saturated with Jewish categories: Passover, the Suffering Servant of Isaiah, and Second Temple hopes for bodily resurrection at the end of history, not Greco-Roman myth. Paul, writing within two decades of the crucifixion to communities including hostile Jewish critics, appeals to hundreds of named eyewitnesses (1 Corinthians 15:3-8) in a way no mystery cult ever did, since mystery religions were explicitly secretive and symbolic rather than claiming public, falsifiable historical events.
• • None of this proves the resurrection happened, but it does show that 'it's just recycled pagan myth' is a much weaker explanation than it first appears, since the specific content, structure, and mode of early Christian claims differ sharply from the alleged parallels once they are examined rather than merely gestured at.

Christian counterresponse

Later liturgical or calendrical borrowing (fourth century and after) is a different question from whether the core first-century resurrection claim originated as myth-copying; the earliest layers of tradition, dated by most scholars including skeptics like Bart Ehrman to within years of the crucifixion, show no such dependence, and the burden is on the copycat theory to explain why the earliest sources look thoroughly Jewish rather than Hellenistic.