Ancient myths echo a deeper truth planted in every heart by God, not stolen from Him.
A reader wrote in recently after reading our piece on whether God’s demand for glory makes Him a narcissist; something worth reflecting on. It’s one of the oldest objections to the Bible there is, and it deserves a real answer instead of a dismissive one. A portion of that comment follows:
Literally every part of the Bible can be traced back to pagan religions. The resurrection, the flood, the virgin birth, dying for our sins — it’s all borrowed from older stories that Christians now call nonsense. The miracles weren’t even in the earliest accounts of Jesus; those got added centuries later, lifted from things like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Even Christmas and Easter were stolen holidays.
A Fair Question, Asked Honestly
Here is how I responded… As a Biblical Christian, I actually agree that the echoes are real. Flood stories show up on nearly every continent. Dying-and-rising gods populate ancient mythology from Egypt to Mesopotamia. The question isn’t whether the parallels exist — they do. The question is which direction the borrowing runs.
Every Culture Remembers a Flood
Think about that for a second. If a global flood really happened, wiping out everyone except one family, you’d expect the memory of it to survive in scattered form all over the earth — distorted, embellished, mixed with local gods, but still there. That’s exactly what we find. The Sumerians, the Aztecs, the Greeks, and tribes in China and India — all carry some version of a great flood and a survivor. That’s not evidence the Bible copied Babylon. It’s evidence that something like Genesis actually happened, and every culture kept a blurry photograph of it.
Eternity Written on Every Heart
Scripture doesn’t pretend other nations were left with nothing. Paul says as much in Romans.
For when Gentiles, who do not have the law, by nature do what the law requires, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts, while their conscience also bears witness, and their conflicting thoughts accuse or even excuse them. [Romans 2:14-15]
And Solomon says God has put “eternity into man’s heart” (Ecclesiastes 3:11). Every human being made in God’s image carries some residue of the truth, whether they’ve ever opened a Bible or not. So when a pagan myth stumbles onto a dying god who somehow brings life, or a virgin birth, or a hero saving his people through blood — I don’t read that as theft. I read it as a fingerprint. Fallen, warped, mixed up with idolatry, sure. But a fingerprint of the real thing, not the source of it.
Echo Is Not Origin
This is the piece the “Christianity copied paganism” argument keeps missing. Similarity doesn’t tell you who copied whom. If God planted a longing for rescue, sacrifice, and resurrection into every culture on earth — and Scripture says He did — then we’d expect exactly what we see: dim, twisted versions of the real story showing up in Gilgamesh, in Egyptian myth, and in Norse legend. The gospel isn’t one more myth in that pile. It’s the actual event the myths were groping toward without knowing it.
What the Earliest Manuscripts Actually Show
The claim that miracles were “added later, centuries after the fact,” doesn’t hold up against the manuscript evidence. Paul hands on a creed about Christ’s death and resurrection that scholars date to within just a few years of the crucifixion itself.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, [1 Corinthians 15:3-4]
That’s not a legend that grew slowly over generations like a game of telephone. That’s an early, tight, repeated confession from people who claimed to have seen the risen Christ themselves. The miracle accounts sit in our earliest Gospel manuscripts, not tacked on centuries afterward.
Borrowed Calendars, Unborrowed Events
As for December 25 and the timing of Easter — sure, the church often sets its celebrations near existing pagan festivals. That’s a calendar decision, not a historical claim. Nobody in the early church thought Jesus was literally born on that date; they picked a day to mark the event publicly. Confusing “when we chose to celebrate it” with “whether it happened” is a mix-up, not a discovery.
What the Parallels Actually Prove
So yes, I told my reader — the parallels are there, and I won’t pretend otherwise. But they don’t unravel the Bible. They point past every pagan myth toward the one true story those myths were always straining to imitate. God didn’t borrow from Babylon. He wrote the original, and the whole world has been telling half-remembered copies of it ever since.
