The Parallels Zeitgeist Popularized, and Why Scholars Reject Them

Part One's claim list is checkable, and every specific point in it fails the check against the actual ancient sources rather than against later retellings of them. No Egyptian text gives Horus a virgin birth: Isis conceives him after reviving her murdered husband Osiris's body long enough to conceive, a resurrection story attached to a conception, not a virgin conception, and Horus has no twelve named followers and is never crucified; his myth is a succession dispute settled by a divine tribunal. The Roman cult of Mithras has its god born directly from rock, not a virgin, and no surviving Mithraic evidence fixes 25 December as his own festival date. Krishna is Devaki's eighth child by ordinary marriage, not virgin-born, and dies from a hunter's arrow, not crucifixion.

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (2012), a work by a scholar who is not a believing Christian and has no religious motive to defend the parallels' rejection, reviews this entire "godman" claim family and finds no ancient source supporting any item on it. The pattern the film's own claim list exhibits, borrowing a scholar's later description, is reading a late or invented detail back into an earlier myth and then treating the resemblance as proof of copying, rather than checking the earlier myth's own actual content first. This atlas's entries on Horus, Mithras, Mithraism and Krishna each carry that same point-by-point comparison directly on their own pages.