Audio only:
Joe debunks common belief that Jesus’s virgin birth was borrowed from pagan sources across the ancient world. Check out the article on the topic by Jon Sorensen here: https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/cleaning-up-the-horus-manure
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery. I’m Joe Heschmeyer, and as Christians prepare to celebrate the virgin birth of Jesus Christ, many non-Christians are preparing to tell their Christian friends and neighbors that actually the virgin birth is a pagan story that Christianity stole.
CLIP:
Does it ever bother you that the story of a man who was born of a virgin was resurrected? Your bio was something that was going around the Mediterranean for at least a thousand years.
Why do so many gods from ancient cultures share the same stories? Why are virgin births, crucifixions, resurrections and divine sons of gods so common?
Joe:
So is this true? Did Christianity steal details like the virgin birth and even the crucifixion from Paganism? Now, I’ve done videos exploring the alleged borrowing from paganism of the December 25th date for Christmas, as well as other things like the Christmas tree, but I haven’t done just the virgin birth. I want to focus on that specifically now with these kind of religious borrowing or stealing claims. There’s really three things. The first one is what we’ve already heard these seemingly distinctive features of Christianity, things like the virgin birth are actually common. They’re found in many other religion stories. That’s the claim. And I’m going to leave aside the more absurd things like claiming the crucifixion is found in all these different cultures, which if you know anything about the history of crucifixion is heavily tied historically to the Roman Empire. It only predates the Roman empire about a thousand years, and most cultures didn’t practice crucifixion.
The Romans very famously did. But we’re going to leave all that aside and just focus on the virgin birth. So is it really true that you can find virgin birth stories in a bunch of other religious stories? That’s the first of really three things we’re looking for because it’s actually not enough to just say, oh, look, we can find these Christ figures or these details that look very much like Christianity because if they’re coming after Christ, this is an established pattern. Even Christ figure has become a term to refer to stories and fiction where the characters obviously modeled off of Jesus Christ. So showing that some other religion or some other myth or some other historical account has a fictional character that looks like Jesus doesn’t disprove Christianity at all. It just points to the importance and the influence of Christianity. So you not only have to show that there are these common things between Christianity and these various pagan religions, but also that those other religious stories are older than Christianity and ideally that Christianity borrowed from them because as you say, like, oh look, here’s this very old story that sounds like the Christian story, but it’s let’s say from the new world where it couldn’t possibly have influenced Christianity.
Well, that’s hardly evidence against Christianity. So the religious borrowing claims, and this is everything from Bill Maher to zeitgeist to people you see on Facebook, these claims are built on the idea that there are these older pagan stories that Christianity is co-opting, borrowing, adapting, and specifically when it comes to the virgin birth, there are several candidates that get mentioned. I’m going to look at five that come up a lot. The first one is Mirus. So what is the claim about Mirus being born of a virgin?
CLIP:
The story of Jesus is not the first to speak of a God born of a virgin in ancient Persia. The God myths was said to be born from a virgin on December 25th. He was worshiped by Roman soldiers hundreds of years before Jesus.
Joe:
Now that claim is from a YouTube channel called Cold Reason. That’s the same channel that claim that these were very common stories and Mirus is the first one they allege was born of a virgin on December 25th. And I want to turn to Bart Airman to lay out both an answer to this claim but also to give us a good, helpful standard to use throughout. Anytime you hear this, whether it’s Mirus or Bku or Krishna or anyone else, this is a good test that airman’s going give to what you should use kind of in response. Now, to give a little bit of backstory, I am a Christian apologist. Bart Airman is neither of those things.
CLIP:
I’m absolutely concerned to see what the similarities are between Jesus and other divine men in the ancient world. And I’m not doing it as a Christian apologist because I’m not an apologist and I’m not a Christian. But as a historian, I do want to know, is this just like everyone else or is it different?
Joe:
Airman not only isn’t a Christian, he’s made several books that are very critical of Christianity. He regularly debates Christianity on the negative, but he is a fair scholar in the sense that when he hears a ridiculously bad argument, he’s not afraid to call it out. And when it comes to these claims that MIRIs, for instance, was born on December 25th of a virgin, he has a very reasonable question to ask in response.
CLIP:
People tell me this all the time, and they’ll name somebody myths or somebody. Oh yeah, myths. Yeah. He had 12 disciples and he was like, you go on with mirus. You say, okay, what ancient sources talk about mirus, the mythic religion that we know about has no literary sources. There are no written documents about it. It’s all of our evidence comes from statuary, from archeological fines of mythic shrines. And so where are you getting 20 December 25th from here?
Joe:
So I hope you do this. When you hear this claim, just respond, oh, what sources? What are the ancient sources that talk about that? Because what you’ll quickly find is that no one who makes these kind of claims has the first clue what they’re talking about. Because as we’re going to see with all of these sources, it just is not true that you have a bunch of different gods and goddesses that are born of virgin. It’s simply not the case. And in the case of people like MIRIs, people like Gods like MIRIs, myths like mires, one of the things that makes this more complicated is that this has come out of what is called mystery religion. So David o and the origins of the mythic mysteries, cosmology and salvation in the ancient world points out that of the many riddles left to us by antiquity, none is more intriguing than that of the ancient Roman religion known as the mythic mysteries.
And he explains, these are one of the so-called mystery cults of the Greco-Roman world, along with the Eiser mysteries, the mysteries of isis. We’re going to get into this with Isis, o Cyrus and Horace in a second, and these in the mythic mysteries here, but they centered around a secret which was revealed only to those who were initiated into the cult. So the whole shtick of a mystery cult or mystery religion is you can’t know in the general public the teachings of the religion. If you want to know what the religion’s really teaching, you got to join the super secret society. They would meet in caves, they would do all this secretive stuff. And so that was a lot of the appeal that you got to be part of a secret society with a secret religion. And as a result of this secrecy, as he points out the teachings of the cult were, as far as we know, never written down.
Now that is going to obviously throw into doubt name one claiming that they know all of the details of these ancient mystery religions. And the whole point is that you couldn’t possibly know because no one writes it down. Nobody talks about it. It’s like coming out and saying, you know all the rules of fight club. How could you? So modern scholars are attempting to understand the nature of myth racism, but they’ve been left with practically no literary evidence relating to the cult, which would help them to reconstruct its esoteric doctrines. Now, we do know a few things and one of the things we know is that this claim of cold reason, that this is this hundreds of years before Jesus kind of religion is simply not true myth. Racism began to spread throughout the Roman Empire in the first century CE that is a D.
So in other words, the same time Christianity spreading, it reached its peak in the third century and it finally succumbed to Christianity at the end of the fourth century. So it contemporary with Christianity, it’s not hundreds of years older and it doesn’t have any reference to virgin birth that we know of. Now, maybe the person making this YouTube video is part of a 2000 year old secret society that’s been quietly continuing the mythic traditions, but they should give some evidence of that because scholars are unaware of this group. Roger Beck in the Religion of the Myth Risk Cult and the Roman Empire Mysteries of the Unconquered Son points out as well that it’s a complete myth that he was born on December 25th. Now, I’ve done another video exploring that. I’m not going to cover that this time except to say that Beck calls this the Horst of facts about Mirus and that the only evidence we have that you could even plausibly try to get that is that there’s a Roman calendar in 3 54 ad, not BC 354 years roughly after the birth of Christ.
You have a calendar that mentions the birth of the Uncon son on December 25th. And this LED scholars to think, ah, this is solar worship. There’s actually all sorts of skepticism on whether that’s actually Steve Himms has a good thing, but how that’s probably not what’s actually happening on that calendar. But either way they go from that to say, aha, well then maybe that meant they also worshiped mires on that day. But that is a stretch upon a stretch. We simply can’t say a December 25th birth at all. It’s not there in the evidence, nor is born of a virgin nor any of these kinds of claims being made about mi. This stuff is just not true. The actual details we have about the beginning come from Christian opponents of mirus. So St. Justin Martyr read in the mid one hundreds talks about those who record the mysteries of mires say that he was begotten of a rock.
Now it talks about him being born in a cave and all of this. And so he recognizes the cave as being kind of relevant. Jesus is born in a manger, but him being begotten of a rock, it obviously quite unlike Christianity. Now we don’t know that from mythic sources themselves. We know that from Christian opponents, but that seems to track as David Nancy points out, this actually is fairly similar to what we have with Perseus. And so we might have myth risks coming emerging from a rock as if by some hidden magic power. That’s not really a virgin birth, I don’t think. I mean only if you assume a virgin in rock are the same thing. Might be a miraculous birth, might be a supernatural birth, not really a virgin birth. So, so much for our first candidate. How about our second candidate, Horace? So this is going to be from zeitgeist, which really I could have used for all of these, but zeitgeist is going to claim that Horace of Isis and Osirus fame was also virgin born.
CLIP:
Horace was born on December 25th of the Virgin Icees Mary. His birth was accompanied by a star in the east, and upon his birth he was adored by three kings. At the age of 12, he was a prodigal child teacher and at the age of 30, he was baptized by a figure known as Anup, and thus began his ministry.
Joe:
And like none of the details you just heard there were true. These are just things being said to credulous students and people who aren’t going to actually bother to do the research. Now, this is not new information that I’m breaking. This has been a longstanding kind of joke that Christians sort of make fun of the ho manure of claiming that Christianity isn’t coming from its obvious forebears Judaism, it’s coming from Egyptian religion instead centuries after the Jews left Egypt, okay, fine, whatever. But then all of the details are just things that are very obviously not true. Lutheran satire, a very funny satirical channel, made fun of this years ago.
CLIP:
There’s no reference in Egyptian mythology to Horace being crucified or resurrected three days later. There’s no documentation anywhere for the existence of a figure named Anup. The Baptizer Horace, his mother was not a virgin woman, but the goddess Isis. And there is no specific date anywhere tied to the birth of Horace.
I’m pretty sure there is
Actually no, all of these claims and many others indicating that early Christians yanked the mythology of Horace and stuck it on top of Jesus were all completely made up by Gerald Massey, a 19th century cuckoo banana bird self-taught Egyptologist who never provided the slightest shred of evidence for any of these claims and who was laughed out of the room by every serious Egyptologist on the planet.
Joe:
But you don’t need to take my word for it. You don’t need to take Lutheran Satire’s word for it. You can actually go and look for yourself. Some of the funeral attacks things, there’s something called coffin text spell 1 48, which describes pretty graphically how Isis is both the sister and wife of Osiris and has been inseminated by him. Additionally, there are various forms of the tradition and she is invoked for sexual spells and prayers as well, not treated as a virgin. There is a late Egyptian text, so a much later tradition that describes her as giving birth to a son without male cooperation. But even here, she’s not a virgin mother in the sense of it being a virgin birth rather what’s happening? Well, you know what? I’m going to let this bizarrely graphic PBS documentary explained to you how she manages to conceive a child using the resuscitated corpse of her dead and mutilated brother and husband.
CLIP:
Once again, ISIS set out in search of osirus. She soon tracked down 13 parts of the body, which she lovingly stitched back together, but they had a little problem. Osirus has penis had been eaten by a fish. Isis had come too far to be thwarted by this. Some say that she fashioned a new member for osirus with others. Adding that she drew out his last sexual powers with her beating wings. Either way, the two used osirus final moments on earth to conceive and air.
Joe:
So I think it’s fair to say that the story of Horace comes pretty close to being the opposite of a story of a virgin birth. It is sexualized to the point where even corpses aren’t safe. If you want more on this, I would encourage you to check out catholic.com Catholic Answers website. John Sorenson has a piece called Cleaning Up the Horace Manure. And while you’re there, you should tell him to give me a raise. How about that? But in all seriousness, it’s pretty well documented that this connection just simply doesn’t exist. It’s just people making claims about Egyptian mythology expecting no one’s going to fact check. What about the third suspect, Krishna? Or if you want Krishna Gen Ami, that will be funny later to me. Here’s Bill Maher. In the longer version of a clip, we already heard a little bit of claiming that this is one of those Mediterranean stories from thousands of years before the time of Christ in which a God is born of a virgin.
CLIP:
Does it ever bother you that the story of a man who was born of a virgin was resurrected? Your bio was something that was going around the Mediterranean for at least a thousand years. We’ve got Krishna who was in India a thousand years before Christ Krishna was a carpenter born of a virgin baptized in a river. Are you saying that was written in history, that was written down in history is what you’re saying? Absolutely.
Joe:
Alright, so Bill Maher is trying to claim that the story of these virgin born people or virgin born gods, this is at least a thousand years old and it’s just circling around the Mediterranean. And the example he gives is Krishna, who is not from the Mediterranean. And the story is not more than a thousand years before Christianity, but actually seems to have come after Christianity in India, nowhere near the Mediterranean, India culturally much closer to China, but really just its own culture centered around the Indus Valley, which is where the name India comes from. There are various forms of the birth of Krishna, but the haa is I think the oldest version. And this is from between the first and third century ad. So it is at oldest about as old as Christianity could easily be younger than Christianity. And this is the oldest stratum in terms of the CNA story.
Now that kind of doesn’t matter because it’s not just that Bill Maher’s claim about the Virgin born God isn’t from the Mediterranean or the time period that claiming. It’s also simply not a story of a virgin birth. As I said, Krishna John Mash, that means Krishna Thei born because the whole story is that Krishna is the eighth child of his parents who are conceiving children in the natural way. The backstory here is that he has a wicked uncle who receives a prophecy that his sister’s eighth child is going to kill him. And so he’s originally going to kill the sister, but then he decides to just put the sister and her new husband in jail together. They didn’t even separate them. It’s a stupid story.
CLIP:
As soon as the wedding is over when he’s taking them for a procession, that is when he hears an ash shavani, a voice in the heavens that says the eighth child of this woman is going to be responsible for your death. So comes as first reaction is he wants to kill his sister. So it’s Eva who implores him and says, don’t look, the danger to you is through the eighth child, right? So we will give you the eighth child and why eighth child, we’ll give you all the children that we have so that there is absolutely no danger to your life. So Kaza instructs for them to be put into a jail, Eva and his cousin, sister and her husband. And initially when the first few children are born also, he doesn’t even take them. He doesn’t because he knows what he’s been told that the eighth child is the problem child, literally.
Joe:
So yeah, they lock the newlyweds up together where all they can do is just have a bunch of babies and they proceed to have a bunch of babies. And then the eighth child is miraculously saved. This is again, very much not a virgin birth story and this family willing to sacrifice their first seven kids to the wicked uncle so they can save their own lives at the expense of the lives of their children. This isn’t the holy family. This is a very different kind of story. By the way, you can just read all of this for yourself. You can go and find an English translation or the Hari Vaha, and you don’t have to take my word for it or the word of word of Indian YouTubers. It’s right there. This is by no means a virgin birth and was never claimed to be. Interestingly, I think the strongest candidate of the Virgin birth allegations is the really bizarre story of Addis, which is not one of the better known stories. And I actually don’t normally hear this even raised. I hear people regularly say, oh, Horace oh, oh oh, Krishna, when they’re obviously wrong, Addis. We’ll just say it’s an interesting one.
CLIP:
Addis a Regia, born in the virgin non on December 25th, crucified placed in a tomb and after three days was resurrected.
Joe:
So here’s the thing with the story of Addis. First of all, there’s not a story. There’s a bunch of different stories. Some of the stories I think you could arguably call them a virgin birth story, but you have to get there in a pretty weird way. And it’s not the knock against Christianity I think people want it to be. So we have to go back to a second century ad text called Description of Greece by the historian Peu. Now that’s important because it’s coming after the rise of Christianity. And one of the things the author does, he says, as to Addis, I could learn no secret about him. Again, remember to think like mystery religions. There’s all sorts of stuff you’re not allowed to know unless you’re initiated. But there is a Allic poet, so one of the older poets who describes that he was the son of Gallian, that he was a eunuch from birth, so notably not a virgin birth.
And he’s remarkable simply in that he was a eunuch from the time he’s born. He also isn’t crucified and resurrected, just as an aside, he’s rather at least in this version of the story, killed by boars or by a bore, and that he explains is why they abstain from pork in that area. But Pius mentions that there is a newer version of the story, and in this newer version of the story, Zeus decides to castrate the hermaphroditic parent of Addis. So agist is a demon with male and female body parts, and the male body parts get torn off. There’s a noose tide and they wake ’em up and surprise them or it up and I don’t know. And agist wakes up and surprise and jolts and loses body parts. And from the blood that results from this gory episode there grows an almond tree and the daughter of the river receives one of these almonds into her bosom and gets pregnant from it.
That’s the story. And so is that a virgin birth sort of. She’s impregnated from the male fluid, but they didn’t directly have sexual contact. It’s a very weird story, very Greek story. And fascinatingly, that version of that later version of the story of Addis is one that Christian apologists were aware of. So there’s a third century Christian ap, just Arna Bika who mentions this same story as well. And there you have Addiss poor parent who has been partially castrated. As an aside in this version of the story, Addis grows up and gets married, but then on the wedding day goes crazy and castrates himself, it’s a family habit I guess. And then agist repent of what he’d done to Addis and persuade Zeus to grant the body of Addis should neither nor decay. But notably, this isn’t a crucifixion, this is not a resurrection. So all those details are basically wrong.
You can stretch it sort of and get a virgin birth out of this, but only in the weirdest sense, I don’t think someone is going to mistake that for the Christmas story. I don’t think you should try a version of that at your nativity play. Seems sufficiently different that it doesn’t look like there’s any borrowing. And oh, by the way, if you’re worried about borrowing, remember that detail that the old versions of the story weren’t like that. And the new versions that is seemingly the post rise of Christianity versions have introduced this whole weird element. Now, I’m not even sure that the pagans are copying this from Christianity, but chronologically, if anybody’s copying, it looks much more like the pagans are copying the Christians rather than vice versa. But I think the best case is just they came up with a really weird story to describe what was otherwise a kind of boring story. Alright, that leaves us with a fifth and final candidate, DiUS or Bakis. So this is the god of wine, and so obviously that’s just like Jesus, right? Because he turns water into wine and turns wine into his blood. And DiUS was born of a virgin on December 25th because it turns out you can claim that about anybody and most of the people aren’t going to bother to check
CLIP:
Dion of Greece. Born of a virgin on December 25th was a traveling teacher who performed miracles such as turning water into wine. He was referred to as the king of kings, God’s only begotten son, the Alpha and Omega and many others. And upon his death he was resurrected,
Joe:
As I suspect you’re not shocked to find out that’s not true. Rather, his mother had relations with Zeus, as did many women in ancient Greek mythology, and it was, again, very much not a virgin birth. Rather, she joined with him in love and bore him a splendid son. So none of these are virgin births, which leads to the obvious conclusion that if people like the Bill Mars of the world and the people who post badly cropped Facebook posts claiming all these similarities between Paganism and Christianity, if these people want to make that claim, we should press them as Bart Airman does and say, oh great. What ancient sources are you talking about that point to this? Because the reality is this is largely coming from a couple of places. There was, as you heard, a crazy 19th century Egyptologist. There was a terrible book called The Golden Bow that tried to claim all these connections between religions.
And there was Alexander Slops, the two babylons, where he tried to connect all these things from paganism to the Catholic church, and none of these have held up well because when you actually read the ancient sources, you just don’t see all these different cultures retelling the same stories. If you zoom out and squint enough, you can make any story, look, any other story. But when you try to make specific claims like virgin birth December 25th, you’re just not going to find that in the research, at least not with any normal meaning of terms like virgin birth. If you want to say a guy coming from Iraq is a virgin birth, I think you don’t know what the term virgin birth means, but fine. You can say supernatural birth, you can say supernatural conception. There’s plenty of those kinds of things. But a virgin birth is a specific claim and Christianity is actually quite unique.
If you want to know where the virgin birth is coming from, I would suggest the obvious place to look would be Isaiah seven with the prophecy of a virgin conceiving and burying a son. If you want to go back even further, I would suggest Genesis three, which talks about a battle between the serpent and the woman and between her seed and his. This is remarkable since seed is normally measured through the man here, it appears to be because of a virgin birth. So all that’s to say, if you’re worried that the virgin birth isn’t authentic to Christianity, it’s not coming from the Old Testament, it’s coming from Greek paganism. Or if you’re excited about that, the news, I’ve got to tell you either way is it’s simply not true. Now, if you want much more in terms of the other claims, oh, December 25th is coming from Paganism eight, reindeers coming from nor mythology, all of that stuff, I’ve debunked all of those things, and you can watch this video rights here for more information on that. For Shameless Popery, I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you, Merry Christmas.