Parallelism: Because Apparently Everything Is a Copy of Something Older

In certain corners of religious criticism, it’s become trendy to “debunk” Christianity by pointing out that other religions had gods who healed people, were born in strange ways, or even—gasp—died and came back. This tactic, known as parallelism, assumes that if anything vaguely resembles the story of Jesus, it must mean the Gospel writers were just plagiarizing ancient myths. Because clearly, two things being similar in theme means one had to copy the other. Historical method? Context? Who needs those?

Take, for example, the frequent comparisons to Horus, Mithras, or Asclepius. These figures supposedly shared traits with Jesus: divine birth, healing powers, even resurrection. Never mind that Horus’s “virgin birth” involves a resurrected Osiris and magical sex, or that Mithras was born from a rock and doesn’t heal anyone. The logic goes: "If Asclepius healed people and Jesus healed people, Christianity is just warmed-over Greek mythology." As scholar Larry Hurtado dryly notes, "There is no evidence that the early Christian claims about Jesus were derived from or directly modeled on figures like Asclepius" (68). But who cares about evidence when you've got YouTube documentaries?

Let’s also not pretend these so-called parallels are even remotely comparable in theological substance. The story of Jesus is presented as a historical, physical event with cosmic and eschatological significance. Meanwhile, Asclepius is sometimes deified after death or turned into a constellation. “Resurrection” in myth usually means “honored later” or “symbolically lives on,” not “bodily came back and ate fish with his friends” (Wright 32).

Even better, most of these comparisons are reverse-engineered. Critics find a detail in Christianity and then go hunting for anything vaguely similar in older myths. It's like saying J.K. Rowling ripped off Tolkien because both books have wizards. As N.T. Wright puts it, “The early Christians did not construct a resurrection belief by borrowing from pagan myths, but by reinterpreting Jewish eschatology around what they believed had happened to Jesus” (32). But of course, ignoring Judaism’s influence and pretending Paul was cribbing from mystery cults is much more exciting.

The most charitable thing one can say about the parallelism approach is that it reflects humanity’s shared existential themes—life, death, hope. The less charitable (and more accurate) thing to say is that it’s a lazy substitute for real scholarship. As the Edelsteins point out in their classic work on Asclepius, “there is no suggestion in the ancient sources that Asclepius’ cult influenced Christian conceptions of healing or resurrection” (622). Translation: just because both figures healed people doesn’t mean Jesus was reading Greek mythology in his spare time.

Of course, these arguments are often promoted most enthusiastically not by neutral scholars but by a specific brand of dogmatic atheism—the kind that treats any spiritual claim as intellectual treason and sees ancient myth-hunting as a cudgel against belief. It's not that this kind of skeptic is curious about religious history; it’s that they’ve already decided what must be true and now just need to find enough shallow parallels to back it up. Ironically, this mirrors the very fundamentalism they mock—clinging to a pre-made narrative and ignoring any evidence that might complicate it.

In sum, parallelism without evidence of direct influence is not history—it’s conspiracy theory with a thesaurus. If two stories share themes, that’s interesting. If you can prove borrowing, now we’re talking. But vague similarities across time and culture? That’s just called being human.

Works Cited

Edelstein, Emma J., and Ludwig Edelstein. Asclepius: A Collection and Interpretation of the Testimonies. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1945. Reprinted in Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 18, no. 4, 1945, pp. 607–624. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1584712.

Hurtado, Larry W. Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity. Eerdmans, 2003.

Wright, N.T. The Resurrection of the Son of God. Fortress Press, 2003.