Christianity Is A Myth?

I haven’t seen Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous, but I’ve heard a little about it. Within his broad criticism of organized religion, Maher reveals that Jesus was suspiciously similar to the ancient Egyptian god, Horus, who was believed to have been born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, walked on water, died and was resurrected.

By pointing out this similarity, Maher probably wants to shock a lot of Christians. And maybe we should be shocked and worried a little. Maybe we have something to learn from Maher. Let us not simply scoff and dismiss him as some evil atheist and look for the first shallow reason we can find to discredit him. We’re not running for political office, are we?

So is Christianity a myth? That depends on what ‘myth’ means. As opposed to seeing ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘something false that was made up,’ let’s look at a more classical definition of ‘myth’ as, roughly, something that communicates reality to the senses or to the imagination. In this way, Christianity is a myth, because it certainly communicates reality to our hearts and souls and imaginations as well as to our brains.

But is it just a myth that copied earlier myths? Was Jesus just a copycat of Horus? Here we can turn to one much wiser than we and Bill Maher, particularly in the realm of literature and mythology, C.S. Lewis:

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history…We pass from a Balder or an Osiris [that’s Horus’ dad by the way], dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified…We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t” (God in the Dock, 66-67).

I think what Lewis is getting at is this: some of these ‘myth’ realities are in our DNA. These have echoed throughout human history—here in Egyptian mythology, here in Greek mythology, here in a peasant farmer who wrote a poem one day that no one will ever read, about a god who died and rose from the dead.

So Jesus was a copycat: that’s the whole point. He was a copycat of the entire Old Testament (see Luke 24), and not just that, but he was the copycat of the true ‘myths’—the ones that contained some grain of reality—that popped up throughout history.

But he was more than a copycat. He was the fulfillment of all of these hopes, these prophecies, these ‘myths’—Jewish and Egyptian (and Greek and Roman and Babylonian…). What these imagined, or prefigured, he embodied—literally. He was the body, the human being, who was the dying god who rose again. He was and is the real fulfillment, not just of Jewish prophecies, but of the deepest longings in every human heart, portrayed in the very best myths across cultures and across history.