By Spencer Alexander McDaniel (who has studied both the Bible and ancient history for years)
https://www.quora.com/profile/Spencer-Alexander-McDaniel). Updated Nov 26, 2018.
Ah yes, that old meme about Jesus being a copy of Horus.
Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity.
One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD.
Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.
The truth is all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity is wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus.
The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition.
While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.
Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd.
I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them.
I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus:
A review of the alleged Jesus-Horus connection
There are many different iterations of the Jesus-as-Horus story, but, for my purposes here, I will use the version of it given by Bill Maher in his 2008 anti-religion comedy film Religulous because it is one of the most prominent examples.
In one scene, the following words appear on the screen over a montage of clips from Bible films while the song “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles plays: “Written in 1280 BC, the Book of the Dead describes a God, Horus.
Horus is the son of the god Osiris, born to a virgin mother. He was baptized in a river by Anup the Baptizer who was later beheaded. Like Jesus, Horus was tempted while alone in the desert, healed the sick, the blind, cast out demons, and walked on water.
He raised Asar from the dead. ‘Asar’ translates to ‘Lazarus.’ Oh, yeah, he also had twelve disciples. Yes, Horus was crucified first, and after three days, two women announced Horus, the saviour of humanity, had been resurrected.”
Virtually every word of this is dead wrong.
Horus was a real Egyptian deity, the Book of the Dead is a real thing that exists, and Horus is mentioned in the Book of the Dead, but pretty much everything else here is wrong.
Misunderstanding The Book of the Dead is a real thing, but Bill Maher clearly does not have even the faintest clue what it really is.
First of all, there was no single version of the Book of the Dead that existed at any point in ancient times. Starting around the time of the beginning of the New Kingdom (c.1550 – c.1069 BC), wealthy Egyptians began to be buried with various funerary texts, generally written on papyrus, which contained various spells intended to assist the deceased individual in the afterlife.
These texts were often also lavishly illustrated with colourful vignettes. They were usually personalised, with the deceased person’s name being written in for many of the spells. The spells and illustrations vary drastically between texts; some texts have completely different spells from other texts.
In modern times, scholars have studied these funerary texts, identified the specific spells that are used in them, assigned numbers to those spells, and compiled them into a book known as the Book of the Dead.
There was no single, canonical Book of the Dead that existed in ancient times, though. The Book of the Dead as we know it today, then, is a modern collection of various spells from ancient Egyptian funerary texts.
These spells do not all date to the same time period; some of them go back to the time of the Old Kingdom (lasted c.2600 BC – c.2100 BC) while others of them were only composed in the Third Intermediate Period (lasted c.1069 – c.664 BC).
I have no idea where Bill Maher got the impression that the Book of the Dead was a single book written in exactly 1280 BC. Secondly, the Book of the Dead contains absolutely none of the things Bill Maher claims it contains.
Bill Maher leaves his audience with the impression that the Book of the Dead was a narrative text describing the ministry of the god Horus.
It is no such thing.
In fact, it contains essentially no narrative whatsoever; it is instead a collection of spells that were intended to aid the deceased in the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians had spells for just about every possible situation that could conceivably arise in the afterlife.
Many of the spells in the Book of the Dead are just plain bizarre. For instance, the spell numbered 53 is titled “For Not Eating Faeces or Drinking Urine in the Realm of the Dead.”
Here is an actual translation of it by Egyptologist Raymond O. Faulkner: “I am the horned bull who rules the sky, Lord of Celestial Appearings, the Great Illuminator who came forth from the heat, who harnesses the years; the Double Lion is glad, and the movement of the sunshine has been granted to me. I detest what is detestable, I will not eat faeces, I will not drink urine, I will not walk head downward.”
“I am the owner of bread in Heliopolis, the bread of mine is in the sky with Re, the bread of mine is on earth with Geb, and it is the Night-bark and the Day-bark which will bring it to me from the house of the Great God who is in Heliopolis. I am loosed from my windings, I make ready the ferry-boat of the sky, I eat of what they eat, I live on what they live on, I have eaten bread in every pleasant room.”
In other words, Bill Maher would have honestly been closer to the truth if he had claimed the Book of the Dead was a magical instruction manual about how to avoid eating your own poop.
The virgin birth of Horus? Many people, including Bill Maher, have claimed that the ancient Egyptians believed that Horus was born of a virgin. This is completely false. We have no record of a myth in which Horus was born of a virgin and, in the version of the story of Horus’s birth that we do have, Horus’s mother Isis is most certainly not a virgin when she gives birth to him.
The myth of the birth of Horus is not told in the Book of the Dead, but versions of the story are recorded in other extant sources.
The most complete account of the story of Isis, Osiris, and Horus comes from the treatise On Isis and Osiris, which was written by the Greek historian and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c.46 – c.120 AD), who lived at a time when Isis, Osiris, and Horus were still actively being worshipped.
Ploutarchos’s account is problematic in some ways because he was not an Egyptian himself, but rather a foreigner writing about Egyptian culture from the outside. Nonetheless, while some of the details in Ploutarchos’s version may not be entirely accurate, we do know that, overall, the story he tells is a real Egyptian story that, in various forms, goes all the way back to at least the New Kingdom.
According to Ploutarchos, Osiris was the king of the gods and Isis was his wife. Set (whom Ploutarchos calls “Typhaon”) was Osiris’s brother and he was jealous of him.
One day, at a banquet, Set brought forth a magnificent coffin and declared that he would give it as a gift to whoever could fit inside. Unbeknownst to the other guests, Set had secretly taken Osiris’s exact body measurements, so he knew that only Osiris would fit in the coffin.
When Osiris laid in the coffin, Set slammed the lid shut and, together with his accomplices, sealed the coffin and hurled it into the Nile. Osiris died in the coffin and the coffin washed ashore at Byblos, where a tree grew around it.
The king of Byblos had the tree chopped down and made into a column for his palace, with Osiris’s coffin with his body still inside.
Eventually, Isis, who had been searching for Osiris’s body this whole time, found out where the coffin was and removed the coffin from the column.
Set, however, stole Osiris’s body again, chopped it up into tiny pieces, and scattered those pieces all over Egypt. Isis went out and collected all the pieces of her husband’s dismembered body and joined them back together.
She found all the pieces except one: Osiris’s penis, which had been thrown into the Nile and devoured by pikes. Isis, therefore, fashioned a magical fake for Osiris (presumably out of wood).
Then she had sex with Osiris’s corpse and conceived a son: Harpokrates, the infant Horus.
Oh, I’m sorry. You think that bit about the magical fake penis is a little too weird? Well, take it from Ploutarchos himself.
Here is what he says, as translated by Frank Cole Babbitt: “Of the parts of Osiris’s body the only one which Isis did not find was the male member, for the reason that this had been at once tossed into the river, and the lepidote, the sea-bream, and the pike had fed upon it; and it is from these very fishes the Egyptians are most scrupulous in abstaining.
But Isis made a replica of the member to take its place, and consecrated the phallus, in honour of which the Egyptians even at the present day celebrate a festival.”
Yup. So Isis making a magical fake penis so she can commit necrophilia with her dead husband is totally a thing -- at least as far as Ploutarchos’s account is concerned.
Plutarch's account is the most complete and it is admittedly rather late, but we have plenty of Egyptian depictions of various part of this myth going back to much earlier times. We know the Egyptians did not consider Isis a virgin at the time when she gave birth to Horus because we literally have depictions of Isis in the act of copulating with Osiris to conceive Horus.
There is a relief carving from a temple at Abydos that was constructed by Pharaoh Seti I (ruled c. 1290 – c.1279 BC) that depicts Isis in the form of a bird having sexual intercourse with the corpse of Osiris, which is shown resting atop a dais.
To show that the child is conceived is Horus, an adult, falcon-headed Horus is shown beside the dais watching over his conception and, to show that Isis is the one in the form of a bird having sex with Osiris, Isis is depicted in human form on the right, also watching over the conception.
The hieroglyphic text above the carving also explains it, leaving absolutely no ambiguity. There is absolutely no way anyone could reasonably construe this as a story of a “virgin birth.”
Having sex in the form of a bird with your mummified husband who has a magic wooden penis is still sex.
Baptism of Horus? Maher claims that Horus was baptised by “Anup the Baptizer who was later beheaded.” This is codswallop. There is no figure by the name of “Anup the Baptizer” in ancient Egyptian mythology; the name Anup is a transliteration of the Coptic spelling of the name of the Egyptian god Anubis (ⲁⲛⲟⲩⲡ in Coptic), who was not associated with “baptism” in any way and who was not said to have “baptised” Horus in any sense.
Furthermore, there is no myth in which Anubis is beheaded. In historical reality, Anubis was a deity closely associated with death and embalming. He is often depicted in works of ancient Egyptian funerary art with the head of a jackal. He was believed to act as a psychopomp, who would lead the deceased into the afterlife.
Surprisingly, even though he was one of the most important deities in ancient Egyptian religion and he is one of the most commonly depicted deities in works of ancient Egyptian art, Anubis rarely appears in Egyptian mythology.
During the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, the Greeks and Romans syncretised Anubis with their gods Hermes and Mercurius, who also acted as psychopomps of the dead. (For more information about syncretism in the ancient world, I suggest reading this article I wrote in September 2019.)
While the ancient Egyptians did have a variety of purification rituals, some of which did involve ritual bathing, they did not practice the ritual of baptism in any form that Christians would recognize.
The Christian ritual of baptism most likely arose from Jewish bathing purification rituals described in the Torah, which were supposed to be performed for purification from sin. Baptism in modern Christianity, however, is seen as far more than just a ritual bath; it is seen as an act of spiritual transformation and initiation into the Christian faith.
No ritual of this kind is known to have existed in ancient Egypt. Healed the sick, the blind and cast out demons? It is true that the ancient Egyptians sometimes invoked Horus to heal the sick and drive away demons, but this is not really a meaningful parallel between Jesus and Horus since nearly all Egyptian deities were called upon at various points for healing and protection from demons.
Healing people and protecting them from demons were two of the most common things that deities in the ancient world were invoked for. In fact, the vast majority of all deities that have ever been worshipped by any culture have been invoked at some point for the healing of some kind.
Furthermore, the kind of healing the Egyptians believed Horus could bring was not the same kind of healing Jesus is described as doing in the canonical gospels.
In the canonical gospels, Jesus is described as travelling around from town to town, laying his hands on people and performing other rituals to heal them. The role of Jesus in the canonical gospels is one of an itinerant preacher and faith healer.
These sorts of people were common in Galilee during the first century AD.
Horus, on the other hand, was never envisioned as an itinerant preacher healing people by laying his hands on them. Instead, he was prayed to as a deity and was believed to heal people from afar in the same way that deities are usually envisioned as healing people.
Walked on water? There is no surviving ancient Egyptian account of Horus walking on water. The claim about him walking on water is just made up.
Raised “Asar” from the dead, whose name means “Lazarus”? The name Asar a badly Anglicized form of war, the ancient Egyptian form of the name of the god Osiris, the father of Horus, husband of the goddess Isis, and ruler of the afterlife.
As you can tell, the actual Egyptian name sounds a lot less like “Lazarus” than the bad transliteration given by Maher in Religulous. The exact etymology of the name wsjr is unclear, but the second element of the name is generally thought to be derived from the Egyptian verb jrj, meaning “to do” or “to make.”
Meanwhile, the name Lazarus is the Latinised form of the name Λάζαρος (Lā́zāros), which is used in the Greek New Testament as the Greek form of the Hebrew name אלעזר (ʾelʿāzār), meaning “God has helped.”
The first element of the name, אֵל (ʾel), is the most basic word for “God” in Biblical Hebrew. The same element occurs in many other personal names throughout the Hebrew Bible and is derived from the same Proto-Semitic root as the Arabic word ٱللَّٰه (Allāh), which is still used as the word for “God” by Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, and Jews throughout the Middle East.
The ending of the name, עָזַר (‘azár), is the third-person masculine singular past-tense form of a pa’ál verbal construction meaning “He has helped.” It is a normal Hebrew verb construction and it has no connection to Osiris.
The name Lazarus has absolutely no etymological connection whatsoever to the Egyptian name wsjr. The two names do not even come from the same language. Nonetheless, people continue to intentionally rely on this faulty transliteration of the Egyptian name wsjr to make it sound more like Lazarus.
Furthermore, there is no story from Egyptian mythology in which Horus brings Osiris back from the dead. In some stories, Horus’s mother Isis does temporarily resuscitate Osiris long enough for them to have sex, thereby allowing him to impregnate her with Horus.
In all versions of the story, though, Osiris cannot remain revived and ultimately goes to the afterlife to rule as king of the dead.
Horus’s twelve disciples? There are no stories in Egyptian mythology about Horus having called disciples, let alone specifically twelve of them. The Egyptians did not regard Horus as having led any kind of earthly ministry that might be comparable to the ministry of Jesus in any way.
Meanwhile, although Horus is sometimes portrayed in scenes from Egyptian art alongside other deities or alongside various attendants, the number of deities or attendants he is shown with never amounts to exactly twelve.
The reason why Jesus had twelve apostles was that each of the twelve apostles was supposed to rule over one of the twelve tribes of Israel in the coming Kingdom of God.
The Gospel of Matthew 19:28 reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV): “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’”
In other words, the reason why Jesus has twelve apostles in the canonical gospels is not that Horus had twelve apostles and Jesus was copied off Horus, but rather because each of the twelve apostles was supposed to rule over one of the twelve tribes of Israel in the coming Kingdom of God.
The tradition of the twelve apostles is firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, not Egyptian tradition.
Horus crucified? Bill Maher claims that Horus was crucified, but, in fact, there is no story anywhere in Egyptian mythology in which Horus is actually crucified.
Furthermore, although Bill Maher claims that there was a myth of Horus being crucified that was written down in around 1280 BC, the ancient Egyptians during the New Kingdom actually did not practice crucifixion and they probably did not even know what crucifixion was.
In fact, we have no reliable records of crucifixion having been practised anywhere in the world at all at that time. Crucifixion may have been invented by the Neo-Assyrians, whose empire lasted c.911 – c.609 BC, but the evidence is a bit ambiguous.
Crucifixion is first known to have been used systematically as a form of capital punishment by the Achaemenid Persians, whose empire arose around 550 BC or thereabouts, over half a millennium after the time when Bill Maher claims the Egyptians were telling stories of Horus being crucified.
The Achaemenids, however, seem to have mainly used crucifixion as a punishment for wartime enemies and rebels. The classical Greeks, who knew about crucifixion from the Persians, almost never used crucifixion, which they regarded as inhumane and brutal.
Crucifixion was later used as a method of execution by Alexander the Great, by various Hellenistic kings, and by the Carthaginians. Like the Achaemenids before them, however, they mainly only used it as a method of execution for their enemies during times of war or people who led rebellions against their rule.
Eventually, crucifixion became a signature execution method of the Romans. The Romans were the first ones to use crucifixion extensively against civilian criminals. Even among the Romans, though, crucifixion was reserved for slaves, foreigners, and the worst of criminals.
Roman citizens were not allowed to be crucified. In fact, while there is at least one problematic ancient post-Christian account of a non-Christian deity being crucified (in Loukianos of Samosata’s satirical dialogue Prometheus, a work making fun of traditional stories about the gods, dating to the late second century AD, long after the gospels were written), we actually have absolutely zero pre-Christian accounts of crucified deities.
The idea of a crucified deity, therefore, seems to have originated with Christianity.
A resurrection after three days, announced by women? There is no story from Egyptian mythology in which Horus undergoes a genuine “resurrection.” One piece of evidence that is often cited to support the idea of a resurrected Horus is the Metternich Stele, also known as the Cippus of Horus, a stele carved from black sandstone dating to sometime roughly between c.360 and c.343 BC, currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Metternich Stele bears an inscribed text in Egyptian hieroglyphics describing a magical cure to poisonous bites and wounds. As evidence of the cure’s effectiveness, the stele describes an elaborate backstory. It claims that, when Isis and Horus were living in the marshes, Horus was stung by a deadly scorpion and became deathly ill. Isis cried out for help and the gods sent the sun-boat to help her.
Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and writing, got off the sun-boat to help Isis. He healed Horus using the spells described on the stele. The stele promises that, if anyone uses the spells on the stele, they will be healed, just as Horus was. The stele says nothing about Horus actually dying because Thoth heals him before he actually dies.
The whole narrative, then, is not a resurrection story at all, but rather a story of a deity being healed by another deity. In any case, the Metternich Stele contains nothing about Horus being crucified, or him returning from the dead three days later.
For more information, here is a link to a detailed summary of the inscription on the stele from the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself. “Horus, the saviour of humanity”
Ironically, one of the very, very few things Bill Maher got right is that Horus was indeed known as “Horus the Savior.” In fact, he is proclaimed “Horus the Savior” in the inscription on the Metternich Stele. Bill Maher and his fellow supporters of the Jesus-as-Horus argument, however, misunderstand what this title means in an Egyptian context.
Christians regard Jesus as the “saviour of humanity” because they believe that, through his suffering and death on the cross, Jesus has saved all human beings who are willing to believe his message from being punished with eternal damnation for their sins.
We have no record whatsoever of anyone in ancient Egypt ever having believed that Horus had died to redeem people of their sins. Instead, the Egyptians saw Horus as a “saviour” in a much more literal sense; they believed that Horus rescued people from physical harm.
The dangers that Horus saved people from were things like diseases, famines, venomous snakes and scorpions, dangerous carnivores like lions and crocodiles, and so forth. Thus, the Egyptians really did regard Horus as a “saviour,” but not at all in the same sense that most Christians regard Jesus as a “saviour” today.
The root of all this Horus mania Jesus and Horus are so unlike in so many ways that it may seem baffling to many of my readers that anyone could compare them at all. I mean, if you are going to argue that Jesus was copied off a pagan deity, you would think you would at least pick a deity that bears some kind of vague resemblance to him -- like, say, Asklepios, the ancient Greek god of healing and medicine.
There is no good reason to think that Jesus was “copied off” Asklepios, or at least not in the way that Mythicists think of when they use that sort of expression.
Nonetheless, Jesus and Asklepios have a whole lot more in common, frankly, than Jesus and Horus.
Instead, though, Mythicists on the internet latch onto Horus. The reason why they do this is because of a highly eccentric nineteenth-century English spiritualist writer named Gerald Massey (lived 1828 - 1907).
Massey was an amateur who had no formal education or training in Egyptology. Furthermore, he lived well over a century ago at a time when even scholars with bona fide credentials knew a lot less about ancient Egypt than scholars do today.
In any case, Gerald Massey wrote three books about ancient Egypt: A Book of the Beginnings (published in 1881), The Natural Genesis (published in 1883), and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (published in 1907).
Throughout these writings, Massey basically argues that all the major religious traditions of the world, including Christianity, are corruptions of the original ancient Egyptian religion. He saw parallels between contemporary religions and ancient Egyptian religion everywhere, even when no real parallels actually existed.
The reason why Gerald Massey saw Horus as analogous to Jesus, then, was because he already viewed Christianity as a corruption of ancient Egyptian religion. On account of this, Massey felt the need to find a “Jesus figure” in ancient Egyptian religion.
Since Horus was one of the most important deities in ancient Egyptian religion and Jesus was the most important figure in Christianity, Massey evidently concluded that they were analogous and then sought out parallels to prove that they were analogous.
Nearly all the claims Bill Maher makes about Horus in Religulous, as well as nearly all the claims made about Horus in the 2007 conspiracy theory film Zeitgeist: The Movie and nearly all the claims about Horus you see in memes on the internet, can be traced directly back to Gerald Massey.
Gerald Massey, however, made even more bizarre and radical claims about the connections between Jesus and Horus than even Bill Maher was willing to make.
For instance, Gerald Massey at one point seems to suggest that King Herod mentioned in the gospels is a mythical figure based on the mythical hydra serpent Herrut from Egyptian mythology.
In reality, the existence of King Herod the Great is extremely well-established and his reign is documented extensively in non-Christian sources. We even have the remains of King Herod’s tomb.
Claiming that King Herod did not exist is about as reasonable as claiming that Julius Caesar did not exist.
All in all, Gerald Massey actually makes a very strange hero for New Atheist polemicists. The guy was a kook whose ideas have been completely dismissed by modern Egyptologists.
It is also ironic to see atheists championing Massey’s ideas since Massey himself was an avowed spiritualist who did not believe in Darwinian evolution because he believed it failed to account for humanity’s “spiritual evolution” (whatever that means).
A real connection between Jesus and Horus As I hope I have amply shown, nearly all the alleged parallels between Jesus and Horus that you hear people repeating on the internet and in popular films are absolute bunkum.
Nonetheless, it is not entirely true to assert that there are no parallels between Jesus and Horus whatsoever. There is, in fact, at least one parallel that might be the result of genuine influence.
It is, however, an extremely superficial parallel that does not really have anything to do with the Biblical account, but rather has to do with later iconography.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in December 2017, when Christianity first became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, early Christians had no developed iconography, so, in many cases, they drew on older, pagan iconography for their depictions of Christian figures.
There are many surviving ancient Egyptian depictions of the infant Horus being nursed by his mother Isis while sitting on her lap. In later times, depictions of the infant Jesus being nursed by his mother Mary while sitting on her lap became popular.
Incidentally, it so happens that the earliest known representation of the infant Jesus resting on his mother Mary’s lap is an icon that probably dates to around the sixth century AD or thereabouts from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
It is quite possible -- and, in my view, rather likely -- that Egyptian depictions of Isis nursing Horus may have influenced the development of similar depictions of Mary nursing Jesus. Obviously, this is an extremely superficial similarity that really only pertains to iconography and has very little religious significance to most Christians today.
Furthermore, there is a lot more that goes into Christian depictions of Jesus and Mary than just Egyptian iconography. These depictions were also heavily shaped by Christian attitudes and theology, as I discuss in great depth this article I wrote in October 2019, in which I explain why medieval paintings of the infant Jesus portray him looking like a miniature adult.
Conclusion: The Book of the Dead is a collection of spells from Egyptian funerary texts, not a “Gospel of Horus.”
Horus wasn’t “born of a virgin.” Horus wasn’t “baptized by Anup the Baptizer.” Horus didn’t walk on water. Horus didn’t raise someone called “Asar” from the dead. Horus wasn’t crucified. Horus wasn’t resurrected from the dead.
Furthermore, all these false claims go back to a crazy amateur who died over a century ago, who was obsessed with spiritualism, who thought basically all religions were derived from ancient Egyptian religion, and whose ideas are not even taken seriously by Egyptologists today.
If I remember and I have time, I will eventually get around to writing articles debunking the alleged parallels between Jesus and Mithras and Jesus and Dionysos, but I will save those for another time.
https://www.quora.com/q/christianschristianity?sort=top
https://www.quora.com/profile/Spencer-Alexander-McDaniel). Updated Nov 26, 2018.
Ah yes, that old meme about Jesus being a copy of Horus.
Every year, around this time, you start seeing memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” some pre-Christian deity.
One of the most popular deities for people to claim Jesus is “a copy of” is Horus, a god who was worshipped in ancient Egypt from prehistoric times until after the rise of Christianity in around the fourth century AD.
Horus was believed to have been the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis. He was closely associated with the pharaoh and he is usually depicted in ancient Egyptian art with the head of a falcon.
The truth is all the memes claiming that Jesus is “a copy of” such-and-such deity is wrong. Historians agree that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical figure who lived in Galilee in the early first century AD and who was crucified in Jerusalem in either 30 or 33 AD under the orders of the Roman governor of Judaea, Pontius Pilatus.
The stories about Jesus’s life recorded in the gospels are certainly heavily embellished with legend and fiction, but, ultimately, there was a real man who stands behind the mythological tradition.
While the stories about Jesus recorded in the gospels have probably been influenced to varying extents by stories of various pagan deities, it is entirely wrong for anyone to claim that the whole story of Jesus is copied directly from any single pagan deity.
Of all the deities Jesus is often claimed to have been copied off of, Horus is one of the most commonly mentioned, but also one of the most absurd.
I actually included an extremely brief debunking of the claim that Jesus is based on Horus in this article I published on my website in March 2018, but I received some flak over the fact that I did not quote any specific claims from proponents of the Jesus-Horus connection and respond to them.
I suppose, then, it is about time that I wrote a more complete response to the alleged connections between Jesus and Horus:
A review of the alleged Jesus-Horus connection
There are many different iterations of the Jesus-as-Horus story, but, for my purposes here, I will use the version of it given by Bill Maher in his 2008 anti-religion comedy film Religulous because it is one of the most prominent examples.
In one scene, the following words appear on the screen over a montage of clips from Bible films while the song “Walk Like an Egyptian” by the Bangles plays: “Written in 1280 BC, the Book of the Dead describes a God, Horus.
Horus is the son of the god Osiris, born to a virgin mother. He was baptized in a river by Anup the Baptizer who was later beheaded. Like Jesus, Horus was tempted while alone in the desert, healed the sick, the blind, cast out demons, and walked on water.
He raised Asar from the dead. ‘Asar’ translates to ‘Lazarus.’ Oh, yeah, he also had twelve disciples. Yes, Horus was crucified first, and after three days, two women announced Horus, the saviour of humanity, had been resurrected.”
Virtually every word of this is dead wrong.
Horus was a real Egyptian deity, the Book of the Dead is a real thing that exists, and Horus is mentioned in the Book of the Dead, but pretty much everything else here is wrong.
Misunderstanding The Book of the Dead is a real thing, but Bill Maher clearly does not have even the faintest clue what it really is.
First of all, there was no single version of the Book of the Dead that existed at any point in ancient times. Starting around the time of the beginning of the New Kingdom (c.1550 – c.1069 BC), wealthy Egyptians began to be buried with various funerary texts, generally written on papyrus, which contained various spells intended to assist the deceased individual in the afterlife.
These texts were often also lavishly illustrated with colourful vignettes. They were usually personalised, with the deceased person’s name being written in for many of the spells. The spells and illustrations vary drastically between texts; some texts have completely different spells from other texts.
In modern times, scholars have studied these funerary texts, identified the specific spells that are used in them, assigned numbers to those spells, and compiled them into a book known as the Book of the Dead.
There was no single, canonical Book of the Dead that existed in ancient times, though. The Book of the Dead as we know it today, then, is a modern collection of various spells from ancient Egyptian funerary texts.
These spells do not all date to the same time period; some of them go back to the time of the Old Kingdom (lasted c.2600 BC – c.2100 BC) while others of them were only composed in the Third Intermediate Period (lasted c.1069 – c.664 BC).
I have no idea where Bill Maher got the impression that the Book of the Dead was a single book written in exactly 1280 BC. Secondly, the Book of the Dead contains absolutely none of the things Bill Maher claims it contains.
Bill Maher leaves his audience with the impression that the Book of the Dead was a narrative text describing the ministry of the god Horus.
It is no such thing.
In fact, it contains essentially no narrative whatsoever; it is instead a collection of spells that were intended to aid the deceased in the afterlife. The ancient Egyptians had spells for just about every possible situation that could conceivably arise in the afterlife.
Many of the spells in the Book of the Dead are just plain bizarre. For instance, the spell numbered 53 is titled “For Not Eating Faeces or Drinking Urine in the Realm of the Dead.”
Here is an actual translation of it by Egyptologist Raymond O. Faulkner: “I am the horned bull who rules the sky, Lord of Celestial Appearings, the Great Illuminator who came forth from the heat, who harnesses the years; the Double Lion is glad, and the movement of the sunshine has been granted to me. I detest what is detestable, I will not eat faeces, I will not drink urine, I will not walk head downward.”
“I am the owner of bread in Heliopolis, the bread of mine is in the sky with Re, the bread of mine is on earth with Geb, and it is the Night-bark and the Day-bark which will bring it to me from the house of the Great God who is in Heliopolis. I am loosed from my windings, I make ready the ferry-boat of the sky, I eat of what they eat, I live on what they live on, I have eaten bread in every pleasant room.”
In other words, Bill Maher would have honestly been closer to the truth if he had claimed the Book of the Dead was a magical instruction manual about how to avoid eating your own poop.
The virgin birth of Horus? Many people, including Bill Maher, have claimed that the ancient Egyptians believed that Horus was born of a virgin. This is completely false. We have no record of a myth in which Horus was born of a virgin and, in the version of the story of Horus’s birth that we do have, Horus’s mother Isis is most certainly not a virgin when she gives birth to him.
The myth of the birth of Horus is not told in the Book of the Dead, but versions of the story are recorded in other extant sources.
The most complete account of the story of Isis, Osiris, and Horus comes from the treatise On Isis and Osiris, which was written by the Greek historian and Middle Platonist philosopher Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c.46 – c.120 AD), who lived at a time when Isis, Osiris, and Horus were still actively being worshipped.
Ploutarchos’s account is problematic in some ways because he was not an Egyptian himself, but rather a foreigner writing about Egyptian culture from the outside. Nonetheless, while some of the details in Ploutarchos’s version may not be entirely accurate, we do know that, overall, the story he tells is a real Egyptian story that, in various forms, goes all the way back to at least the New Kingdom.
According to Ploutarchos, Osiris was the king of the gods and Isis was his wife. Set (whom Ploutarchos calls “Typhaon”) was Osiris’s brother and he was jealous of him.
One day, at a banquet, Set brought forth a magnificent coffin and declared that he would give it as a gift to whoever could fit inside. Unbeknownst to the other guests, Set had secretly taken Osiris’s exact body measurements, so he knew that only Osiris would fit in the coffin.
When Osiris laid in the coffin, Set slammed the lid shut and, together with his accomplices, sealed the coffin and hurled it into the Nile. Osiris died in the coffin and the coffin washed ashore at Byblos, where a tree grew around it.
The king of Byblos had the tree chopped down and made into a column for his palace, with Osiris’s coffin with his body still inside.
Eventually, Isis, who had been searching for Osiris’s body this whole time, found out where the coffin was and removed the coffin from the column.
Set, however, stole Osiris’s body again, chopped it up into tiny pieces, and scattered those pieces all over Egypt. Isis went out and collected all the pieces of her husband’s dismembered body and joined them back together.
She found all the pieces except one: Osiris’s penis, which had been thrown into the Nile and devoured by pikes. Isis, therefore, fashioned a magical fake for Osiris (presumably out of wood).
Then she had sex with Osiris’s corpse and conceived a son: Harpokrates, the infant Horus.
Oh, I’m sorry. You think that bit about the magical fake penis is a little too weird? Well, take it from Ploutarchos himself.
Here is what he says, as translated by Frank Cole Babbitt: “Of the parts of Osiris’s body the only one which Isis did not find was the male member, for the reason that this had been at once tossed into the river, and the lepidote, the sea-bream, and the pike had fed upon it; and it is from these very fishes the Egyptians are most scrupulous in abstaining.
But Isis made a replica of the member to take its place, and consecrated the phallus, in honour of which the Egyptians even at the present day celebrate a festival.”
Yup. So Isis making a magical fake penis so she can commit necrophilia with her dead husband is totally a thing -- at least as far as Ploutarchos’s account is concerned.
Plutarch's account is the most complete and it is admittedly rather late, but we have plenty of Egyptian depictions of various part of this myth going back to much earlier times. We know the Egyptians did not consider Isis a virgin at the time when she gave birth to Horus because we literally have depictions of Isis in the act of copulating with Osiris to conceive Horus.
There is a relief carving from a temple at Abydos that was constructed by Pharaoh Seti I (ruled c. 1290 – c.1279 BC) that depicts Isis in the form of a bird having sexual intercourse with the corpse of Osiris, which is shown resting atop a dais.
To show that the child is conceived is Horus, an adult, falcon-headed Horus is shown beside the dais watching over his conception and, to show that Isis is the one in the form of a bird having sex with Osiris, Isis is depicted in human form on the right, also watching over the conception.
The hieroglyphic text above the carving also explains it, leaving absolutely no ambiguity. There is absolutely no way anyone could reasonably construe this as a story of a “virgin birth.”
Having sex in the form of a bird with your mummified husband who has a magic wooden penis is still sex.
Baptism of Horus? Maher claims that Horus was baptised by “Anup the Baptizer who was later beheaded.” This is codswallop. There is no figure by the name of “Anup the Baptizer” in ancient Egyptian mythology; the name Anup is a transliteration of the Coptic spelling of the name of the Egyptian god Anubis (ⲁⲛⲟⲩⲡ in Coptic), who was not associated with “baptism” in any way and who was not said to have “baptised” Horus in any sense.
Furthermore, there is no myth in which Anubis is beheaded. In historical reality, Anubis was a deity closely associated with death and embalming. He is often depicted in works of ancient Egyptian funerary art with the head of a jackal. He was believed to act as a psychopomp, who would lead the deceased into the afterlife.
Surprisingly, even though he was one of the most important deities in ancient Egyptian religion and he is one of the most commonly depicted deities in works of ancient Egyptian art, Anubis rarely appears in Egyptian mythology.
During the Hellenistic and Roman Eras, the Greeks and Romans syncretised Anubis with their gods Hermes and Mercurius, who also acted as psychopomps of the dead. (For more information about syncretism in the ancient world, I suggest reading this article I wrote in September 2019.)
While the ancient Egyptians did have a variety of purification rituals, some of which did involve ritual bathing, they did not practice the ritual of baptism in any form that Christians would recognize.
The Christian ritual of baptism most likely arose from Jewish bathing purification rituals described in the Torah, which were supposed to be performed for purification from sin. Baptism in modern Christianity, however, is seen as far more than just a ritual bath; it is seen as an act of spiritual transformation and initiation into the Christian faith.
No ritual of this kind is known to have existed in ancient Egypt. Healed the sick, the blind and cast out demons? It is true that the ancient Egyptians sometimes invoked Horus to heal the sick and drive away demons, but this is not really a meaningful parallel between Jesus and Horus since nearly all Egyptian deities were called upon at various points for healing and protection from demons.
Healing people and protecting them from demons were two of the most common things that deities in the ancient world were invoked for. In fact, the vast majority of all deities that have ever been worshipped by any culture have been invoked at some point for the healing of some kind.
Furthermore, the kind of healing the Egyptians believed Horus could bring was not the same kind of healing Jesus is described as doing in the canonical gospels.
In the canonical gospels, Jesus is described as travelling around from town to town, laying his hands on people and performing other rituals to heal them. The role of Jesus in the canonical gospels is one of an itinerant preacher and faith healer.
These sorts of people were common in Galilee during the first century AD.
Horus, on the other hand, was never envisioned as an itinerant preacher healing people by laying his hands on them. Instead, he was prayed to as a deity and was believed to heal people from afar in the same way that deities are usually envisioned as healing people.
Walked on water? There is no surviving ancient Egyptian account of Horus walking on water. The claim about him walking on water is just made up.
Raised “Asar” from the dead, whose name means “Lazarus”? The name Asar a badly Anglicized form of war, the ancient Egyptian form of the name of the god Osiris, the father of Horus, husband of the goddess Isis, and ruler of the afterlife.
As you can tell, the actual Egyptian name sounds a lot less like “Lazarus” than the bad transliteration given by Maher in Religulous. The exact etymology of the name wsjr is unclear, but the second element of the name is generally thought to be derived from the Egyptian verb jrj, meaning “to do” or “to make.”
Meanwhile, the name Lazarus is the Latinised form of the name Λάζαρος (Lā́zāros), which is used in the Greek New Testament as the Greek form of the Hebrew name אלעזר (ʾelʿāzār), meaning “God has helped.”
The first element of the name, אֵל (ʾel), is the most basic word for “God” in Biblical Hebrew. The same element occurs in many other personal names throughout the Hebrew Bible and is derived from the same Proto-Semitic root as the Arabic word ٱللَّٰه (Allāh), which is still used as the word for “God” by Arabic-speaking Muslims, Christians, and Jews throughout the Middle East.
The ending of the name, עָזַר (‘azár), is the third-person masculine singular past-tense form of a pa’ál verbal construction meaning “He has helped.” It is a normal Hebrew verb construction and it has no connection to Osiris.
The name Lazarus has absolutely no etymological connection whatsoever to the Egyptian name wsjr. The two names do not even come from the same language. Nonetheless, people continue to intentionally rely on this faulty transliteration of the Egyptian name wsjr to make it sound more like Lazarus.
Furthermore, there is no story from Egyptian mythology in which Horus brings Osiris back from the dead. In some stories, Horus’s mother Isis does temporarily resuscitate Osiris long enough for them to have sex, thereby allowing him to impregnate her with Horus.
In all versions of the story, though, Osiris cannot remain revived and ultimately goes to the afterlife to rule as king of the dead.
Horus’s twelve disciples? There are no stories in Egyptian mythology about Horus having called disciples, let alone specifically twelve of them. The Egyptians did not regard Horus as having led any kind of earthly ministry that might be comparable to the ministry of Jesus in any way.
Meanwhile, although Horus is sometimes portrayed in scenes from Egyptian art alongside other deities or alongside various attendants, the number of deities or attendants he is shown with never amounts to exactly twelve.
The reason why Jesus had twelve apostles was that each of the twelve apostles was supposed to rule over one of the twelve tribes of Israel in the coming Kingdom of God.
The Gospel of Matthew 19:28 reads as follows, as translated in the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV): “Jesus said to them, ‘Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.’”
In other words, the reason why Jesus has twelve apostles in the canonical gospels is not that Horus had twelve apostles and Jesus was copied off Horus, but rather because each of the twelve apostles was supposed to rule over one of the twelve tribes of Israel in the coming Kingdom of God.
The tradition of the twelve apostles is firmly rooted in Jewish tradition, not Egyptian tradition.
Horus crucified? Bill Maher claims that Horus was crucified, but, in fact, there is no story anywhere in Egyptian mythology in which Horus is actually crucified.
Furthermore, although Bill Maher claims that there was a myth of Horus being crucified that was written down in around 1280 BC, the ancient Egyptians during the New Kingdom actually did not practice crucifixion and they probably did not even know what crucifixion was.
In fact, we have no reliable records of crucifixion having been practised anywhere in the world at all at that time. Crucifixion may have been invented by the Neo-Assyrians, whose empire lasted c.911 – c.609 BC, but the evidence is a bit ambiguous.
Crucifixion is first known to have been used systematically as a form of capital punishment by the Achaemenid Persians, whose empire arose around 550 BC or thereabouts, over half a millennium after the time when Bill Maher claims the Egyptians were telling stories of Horus being crucified.
The Achaemenids, however, seem to have mainly used crucifixion as a punishment for wartime enemies and rebels. The classical Greeks, who knew about crucifixion from the Persians, almost never used crucifixion, which they regarded as inhumane and brutal.
Crucifixion was later used as a method of execution by Alexander the Great, by various Hellenistic kings, and by the Carthaginians. Like the Achaemenids before them, however, they mainly only used it as a method of execution for their enemies during times of war or people who led rebellions against their rule.
Eventually, crucifixion became a signature execution method of the Romans. The Romans were the first ones to use crucifixion extensively against civilian criminals. Even among the Romans, though, crucifixion was reserved for slaves, foreigners, and the worst of criminals.
Roman citizens were not allowed to be crucified. In fact, while there is at least one problematic ancient post-Christian account of a non-Christian deity being crucified (in Loukianos of Samosata’s satirical dialogue Prometheus, a work making fun of traditional stories about the gods, dating to the late second century AD, long after the gospels were written), we actually have absolutely zero pre-Christian accounts of crucified deities.
The idea of a crucified deity, therefore, seems to have originated with Christianity.
A resurrection after three days, announced by women? There is no story from Egyptian mythology in which Horus undergoes a genuine “resurrection.” One piece of evidence that is often cited to support the idea of a resurrected Horus is the Metternich Stele, also known as the Cippus of Horus, a stele carved from black sandstone dating to sometime roughly between c.360 and c.343 BC, currently held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
The Metternich Stele bears an inscribed text in Egyptian hieroglyphics describing a magical cure to poisonous bites and wounds. As evidence of the cure’s effectiveness, the stele describes an elaborate backstory. It claims that, when Isis and Horus were living in the marshes, Horus was stung by a deadly scorpion and became deathly ill. Isis cried out for help and the gods sent the sun-boat to help her.
Thoth, the Egyptian god of knowledge and writing, got off the sun-boat to help Isis. He healed Horus using the spells described on the stele. The stele promises that, if anyone uses the spells on the stele, they will be healed, just as Horus was. The stele says nothing about Horus actually dying because Thoth heals him before he actually dies.
The whole narrative, then, is not a resurrection story at all, but rather a story of a deity being healed by another deity. In any case, the Metternich Stele contains nothing about Horus being crucified, or him returning from the dead three days later.
For more information, here is a link to a detailed summary of the inscription on the stele from the Metropolitan Museum of Art itself. “Horus, the saviour of humanity”
Ironically, one of the very, very few things Bill Maher got right is that Horus was indeed known as “Horus the Savior.” In fact, he is proclaimed “Horus the Savior” in the inscription on the Metternich Stele. Bill Maher and his fellow supporters of the Jesus-as-Horus argument, however, misunderstand what this title means in an Egyptian context.
Christians regard Jesus as the “saviour of humanity” because they believe that, through his suffering and death on the cross, Jesus has saved all human beings who are willing to believe his message from being punished with eternal damnation for their sins.
We have no record whatsoever of anyone in ancient Egypt ever having believed that Horus had died to redeem people of their sins. Instead, the Egyptians saw Horus as a “saviour” in a much more literal sense; they believed that Horus rescued people from physical harm.
The dangers that Horus saved people from were things like diseases, famines, venomous snakes and scorpions, dangerous carnivores like lions and crocodiles, and so forth. Thus, the Egyptians really did regard Horus as a “saviour,” but not at all in the same sense that most Christians regard Jesus as a “saviour” today.
The root of all this Horus mania Jesus and Horus are so unlike in so many ways that it may seem baffling to many of my readers that anyone could compare them at all. I mean, if you are going to argue that Jesus was copied off a pagan deity, you would think you would at least pick a deity that bears some kind of vague resemblance to him -- like, say, Asklepios, the ancient Greek god of healing and medicine.
There is no good reason to think that Jesus was “copied off” Asklepios, or at least not in the way that Mythicists think of when they use that sort of expression.
Nonetheless, Jesus and Asklepios have a whole lot more in common, frankly, than Jesus and Horus.
Instead, though, Mythicists on the internet latch onto Horus. The reason why they do this is because of a highly eccentric nineteenth-century English spiritualist writer named Gerald Massey (lived 1828 - 1907).
Massey was an amateur who had no formal education or training in Egyptology. Furthermore, he lived well over a century ago at a time when even scholars with bona fide credentials knew a lot less about ancient Egypt than scholars do today.
In any case, Gerald Massey wrote three books about ancient Egypt: A Book of the Beginnings (published in 1881), The Natural Genesis (published in 1883), and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (published in 1907).
Throughout these writings, Massey basically argues that all the major religious traditions of the world, including Christianity, are corruptions of the original ancient Egyptian religion. He saw parallels between contemporary religions and ancient Egyptian religion everywhere, even when no real parallels actually existed.
The reason why Gerald Massey saw Horus as analogous to Jesus, then, was because he already viewed Christianity as a corruption of ancient Egyptian religion. On account of this, Massey felt the need to find a “Jesus figure” in ancient Egyptian religion.
Since Horus was one of the most important deities in ancient Egyptian religion and Jesus was the most important figure in Christianity, Massey evidently concluded that they were analogous and then sought out parallels to prove that they were analogous.
Nearly all the claims Bill Maher makes about Horus in Religulous, as well as nearly all the claims made about Horus in the 2007 conspiracy theory film Zeitgeist: The Movie and nearly all the claims about Horus you see in memes on the internet, can be traced directly back to Gerald Massey.
Gerald Massey, however, made even more bizarre and radical claims about the connections between Jesus and Horus than even Bill Maher was willing to make.
For instance, Gerald Massey at one point seems to suggest that King Herod mentioned in the gospels is a mythical figure based on the mythical hydra serpent Herrut from Egyptian mythology.
In reality, the existence of King Herod the Great is extremely well-established and his reign is documented extensively in non-Christian sources. We even have the remains of King Herod’s tomb.
Claiming that King Herod did not exist is about as reasonable as claiming that Julius Caesar did not exist.
All in all, Gerald Massey actually makes a very strange hero for New Atheist polemicists. The guy was a kook whose ideas have been completely dismissed by modern Egyptologists.
It is also ironic to see atheists championing Massey’s ideas since Massey himself was an avowed spiritualist who did not believe in Darwinian evolution because he believed it failed to account for humanity’s “spiritual evolution” (whatever that means).
A real connection between Jesus and Horus As I hope I have amply shown, nearly all the alleged parallels between Jesus and Horus that you hear people repeating on the internet and in popular films are absolute bunkum.
Nonetheless, it is not entirely true to assert that there are no parallels between Jesus and Horus whatsoever. There is, in fact, at least one parallel that might be the result of genuine influence.
It is, however, an extremely superficial parallel that does not really have anything to do with the Biblical account, but rather has to do with later iconography.
As I discuss in this article I wrote in December 2017, when Christianity first became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century AD, early Christians had no developed iconography, so, in many cases, they drew on older, pagan iconography for their depictions of Christian figures.
There are many surviving ancient Egyptian depictions of the infant Horus being nursed by his mother Isis while sitting on her lap. In later times, depictions of the infant Jesus being nursed by his mother Mary while sitting on her lap became popular.
Incidentally, it so happens that the earliest known representation of the infant Jesus resting on his mother Mary’s lap is an icon that probably dates to around the sixth century AD or thereabouts from Saint Catherine’s Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt.
It is quite possible -- and, in my view, rather likely -- that Egyptian depictions of Isis nursing Horus may have influenced the development of similar depictions of Mary nursing Jesus. Obviously, this is an extremely superficial similarity that really only pertains to iconography and has very little religious significance to most Christians today.
Furthermore, there is a lot more that goes into Christian depictions of Jesus and Mary than just Egyptian iconography. These depictions were also heavily shaped by Christian attitudes and theology, as I discuss in great depth this article I wrote in October 2019, in which I explain why medieval paintings of the infant Jesus portray him looking like a miniature adult.
Conclusion: The Book of the Dead is a collection of spells from Egyptian funerary texts, not a “Gospel of Horus.”
Horus wasn’t “born of a virgin.” Horus wasn’t “baptized by Anup the Baptizer.” Horus didn’t walk on water. Horus didn’t raise someone called “Asar” from the dead. Horus wasn’t crucified. Horus wasn’t resurrected from the dead.
Furthermore, all these false claims go back to a crazy amateur who died over a century ago, who was obsessed with spiritualism, who thought basically all religions were derived from ancient Egyptian religion, and whose ideas are not even taken seriously by Egyptologists today.
If I remember and I have time, I will eventually get around to writing articles debunking the alleged parallels between Jesus and Mithras and Jesus and Dionysos, but I will save those for another time.
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