I’m writing a book on secret societies at the moment for a publisher and as I looked at the ancient Greek mystery cults, and all their strange practices and beliefs, I began to see elements of Christianity. Ideas of sacrifice, resurrection, redemption, and the rituals performed in both belief systems. Because the Old and New Testaments didn’t evolve in a vacuum. They were influenced by surrounding cultures. Often the prophets expressed a murderous hatred towards the religious beliefs of their neighbours but was the paganism they condemned with so much vitriol actually shaping their views?
It’s something that orthodox believers and evangelicals in the Abrahamic faiths reject vehemently – that narratives, images, rituals, and theological concepts we find in the bible were borrowed, adapted, and transformed from polytheistic cultures that surrounded the authors of the Old and New Testaments.
This is not a fringe position. It is the consensus of mainstream biblical scholarship, archaeology, and comparative religion. To say that biblical stories have pagan antecedents is not to dismiss them or to deny their power. It is simply to read them honestly, as products of a living ancient world in which ideas, myths, and symbols moved fluidly across borders, languages, and centuries. The Bible is, among other things, a magnificent work of cultural synthesis.
What follows is a survey of the most significant examples — drawn from Mesopotamia, Egypt, Canaan, Persia, Greece, and the mystery cults of the Hellenistic world — of the pagan roots that lie beneath both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
DISCOVER: Which Jesus Christ is true?
The Hebrew Bible and Its Ancient Near Eastern Inheritance
The Flood: Ut-napishtim Before Noah
Of all the parallels between the Bible and older literature, none is more striking or better documented than the flood narrative. The story of Noah — the righteous man warned by God, who builds an ark, loads it with animals, survives a divine deluge, and releases birds to find land — appears in the Book of Genesis (chapters 6–9) in a form that is unmistakably related to stories told in Mesopotamia more than a thousand years earlier.
The most famous precursor is found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian-Babylonian poem whose flood account was first translated from cuneiform tablets in 1872 by Assyriologist George Smith, causing a sensation in Victorian England. In it, the god Ea warns a man called Ut-napishtim of a coming flood decreed by the divine council. Ut-napishtim builds a boat to precise dimensions, loads it with “the seed of all living creatures,” his family, and craftsmen. The flood lasts seven days and nights. When the waters recede, Ut-napishtim sends out a dove, a swallow, and a raven to test conditions — the same sequence, in slightly different order, as Noah’s birds. He lands on a mountain, offers a sacrifice, and the gods smell the “sweet savour” and regret the destruction.
The parallels with Genesis are not merely thematic; they extend to specific phrases and plot details, strongly suggesting direct literary borrowing, mediated through the long centuries in which Israelites were in contact with — and subjugated by — Mesopotamian civilisations. The Babylonian Captivity (586–538 BCE), during which Israelite elites lived in Babylon, is the most obvious point of transmission. Scholars such as Alexander Heidel and Jeffrey Tigay have argued at length that the Genesis account is a theological reworking of the older material, stripped of its polytheism and recast to celebrate a single, moral deity.
There is also an earlier Sumerian flood story, the Eridu Genesis, featuring a king-priest named Ziusudra, and the Akkadian Atrahasis Epic, which frames the flood explicitly as population control by gods tired of human noise — a bleakly comic premise that the biblical writers understandably chose not to preserve.
Creation: The Enuma Elish and the Tehom
Genesis opens with God creating the world from formless chaos. The Hebrew word for that primordial deep is tehom — “the deep.” Linguists have long noted its close relationship to Tiamat, the Babylonian chaos-dragon of salt water whose defeat by the storm god Marduk is narrated in the Enuma Elish, Babylon’s great creation epic. In that poem, Marduk splits Tiamat’s body in two — one half becomes the sky, the other the earth — and creates human beings from the blood of her consort Kingu to serve the gods as labourers. The conceptual framework of creation from watery chaos, and the linguistic echo of Tiamat in tehom, strongly suggest that Genesis 1 is engaging with — and consciously revising — this older Babylonian cosmogony.
The Priestly creation account in Genesis 1 appears to have been composed or finalised during or shortly after the Babylonian exile. Its majestic, liturgical cadences may in part be a theological response to the Enuma Elish, reclaiming the cosmological narrative for Yahweh alone, stripping out the divine politics and the blood of a slain monster, and presenting instead a serene, purposeful creation by spoken command.
Psalm 74 and Isaiah 51 preserve what appear to be older, rawer fragments of this mythology, in which Yahweh actively fights and defeats the sea-monster Leviathan — suggesting that early Israelite religion was not as distant from Babylonian dragon-slaying cosmology as the sanitised Genesis account implies.
The Garden of Eden and Sumerian Paradise
The concept of a primordial garden, an original state of human innocence, and a Fall is often treated as uniquely biblical. But the motifs involved — a paradise garden, divine trees, a wise serpent, naked humans in communion with gods — appear in Sumerian literature centuries earlier. The poem Enki and Ninhursag describes Dilmun, a pure and sacred land where there is no sickness, death, or conflict, before a series of transgressions. The Adapa Myth tells of a wise man who is offered immortality by the god Anu but refuses the food and water of eternal life on the advice of Enki — a striking parallel to the tree of life in Eden.
The serpent as a figure of wisdom, ambiguity, and hidden knowledge was pervasive across ancient Near Eastern cultures. In Mesopotamian iconography, serpents were frequently associated with the goddess Ishtar and with sacred trees. The image of the serpent in Eden — subtle, knowledgeable, and responsible for humanity’s alienation from divine life — draws on this deep cultural reservoir.
The Birth of Moses: Sargon of Akkad
The story of Moses’ infancy — placed in a basket of reeds among bulrushes on the Nile, discovered by a royal woman, and raised in a palace — closely mirrors the birth legend of Sargon of Akkad, who ruled Mesopotamia around 2300 BCE, well over a thousand years before any plausible historical Moses.
The Legend of Sargon, preserved in cuneiform, reads: “My mother was a high priestess; my father I knew not… She placed me in a basket of rushes, sealed my lid with bitumen… The river bore me up and carried me to Aqqi, the drawer of water. Aqqi the drawer of water adopted me as his son.” Sargon goes on to become a great king. The structure — noble or divine origins, hidden birth, rescue from water, adoption, eventual greatness — is a standard motif in what scholars call the “hero birth narrative,” found also in the legends of Romulus and Remus, Cyrus of Persia, and later Perseus and Heracles. Moses is Israel’s contribution to this ancient and widespread pattern.
Wisdom Literature and Egyptian Instruction Texts
The Book of Proverbs contains a section (22:17–24:22) known as the “Thirty Sayings of the Wise,” which bears a relationship to the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope so close that the borrowing is not seriously disputed. Amenemope was an Egyptian wisdom text composed between 1300 and 1000 BCE; portions of it appear in Proverbs in nearly verbatim translation. This is not metaphorical influence but direct literary adoption. The compilers of Proverbs were drawing on a corpus of international wisdom literature that circulated throughout the ancient Near East, unconcerned with its Egyptian origin.
Similarly, Ecclesiastes (“Qohelet”) shares striking thematic and linguistic similarities with the Dialogue of a Man with His Soul (the “Dispute of a Man Who Contemplates Suicide with His Ba”) and other Egyptian reflections on the futility of life. The phrase in Ecclesiastes — “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” — appears in Mesopotamian literature as well, in a tavern speech from the Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Psalms and Canaanite Poetry
Recent scholarship has emphasised the deep continuities between Israelite and Canaanite religion. The Israelites did not arrive in Canaan as a blank slate; they were, in many respects, a Canaanite people who gradually differentiated themselves through theological reform. The Psalms show this origin clearly. Psalm 29, widely regarded as one of the oldest in the collection, is now understood by most scholars to be a barely modified Canaanite hymn to Baal, the storm god. The description of a deity riding through the storm, thundering over the waters, shattering cedars, and shaking the wilderness — all characteristics associated with Baal in the Ugaritic texts — has simply been transferred wholesale to Yahweh.
The Ugaritic literature discovered at Ras Shamra in Syria from 1929 onwards revolutionised Old Testament scholarship precisely because it revealed the extent to which Hebrew poetry, mythology, and even the epithets used for God were shared with Canaanite religious literature. The title El — the name of the chief Canaanite deity and head of the divine council — is of course also one of the primary Hebrew names for God. Yahweh appears to have been assimilated to, or perhaps identified with, this older Canaanite high god during the formative period of Israelite religion.
The figure of Asherah, El’s consort in Canaanite religion, appears to have been worshipped alongside Yahweh in some early Israelite contexts. Inscriptions found at Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom, dated to the 8th century BCE, contain the phrases “Yahweh and his Asherah” — suggesting that strict monotheism was a relatively late theological development, and that for much of the period covered by the Hebrew Bible, ordinary Israelites may have practised something closer to monolatry (worship of one god without denying the existence of others) or even polytheism.
The Dying and Rising God: Baal and the Vegetation Cycle
The pattern of a dying and rising deity — a god who descends to the underworld, dies, and returns to life, typically associated with seasonal agricultural cycles — is one of the most widespread in ancient religion. In Ugaritic mythology, Baal dies at the hands of Mot (Death), descends to the underworld, and is eventually resurrected through the intervention of his sister Anat. The earth becomes barren in his absence and flourishes upon his return — a mythologisation of the agricultural year.
This motif appears to have influenced Israelite religion significantly. The prophet Ezekiel (8:14) condemns the women of Jerusalem for weeping for Tammuz at the very gate of the Temple — Tammuz being the Mesopotamian dying god (equivalent to the Sumerian Dumuzi), whose death and descent to the underworld was mourned in annual ritual lamentation. That this was happening at the Temple in Jerusalem indicates how deeply integrated these practices were in popular Israelite religion, whatever the official theology said.
The New Testament and the World of Hellenistic Religion
The world into which Christianity was born was saturated with Hellenistic religious culture — a rich syncretistic mix of Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian ideas that had been blending since the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE. Early Christianity did not emerge in isolation from this environment; it was shaped by it, responded to it, and borrowed from it in ways that are theologically significant.
Mystery Cults and the Pattern of Initiation
The most structurally important parallel between early Christianity and pagan religion is the mystery cult — a form of private, initiatory religious association common throughout the Hellenistic and Roman world, dedicated to deities such as Dionysus, Demeter, Orpheus, Isis, Mithras, and Cybele. Mystery religions shared a characteristic pattern: a prospective initiate went through a process of purification, instruction in secret teachings, symbolic death and rebirth, and emerging into a new life as a member of a sacred community. They offered personal salvation, a relationship with a divine figure, and hope of a blessed afterlife.
The structural parallels with Christian initiation — baptism as symbolic death and rebirth (explicitly articulated in Romans 6), the Eucharist as a sacred communal meal, instruction in hidden wisdom, membership in a community of the saved — were noted by early Christian writers themselves, most notably Justin Martyr, who in the 2nd century attributed the similarities to “diabolical mimicry” (the devil had counterfeited Christian sacraments in advance to confuse the faithful). This was, admittedly, not a very persuasive explanation, but the fact that Justin felt obliged to offer it shows that the resemblances were impossible to ignore.
Dionysus: The God of Wine and Resurrection
The parallels between Jesus and Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, ecstasy, and theatre, are among the most striking in comparative religion. Dionysus was:
- Born of a divine father (Zeus) and a mortal mother (Semele)
- Born through an exceptional, supernatural birth
- A worker of miracles, particularly associated with wine
- Killed (in Orphic tradition, torn apart by Titans and resurrected)
- A god whose death and rebirth promised his initiates immortality
- Often portrayed as a wanderer and outsider among the Olympians
- The subject of a communal ritual meal involving wine as his divine substance
The miracle at Cana in John 2 — where Jesus transforms water into wine at a wedding — occurs at the precise moment in the Jewish calendar that overlapped with the Dionysia festival in the Greek world, and the act of turning water into wine was specifically associated with Dionysian miracle-working in popular Hellenistic culture. The Gospel of John, the most theologically sophisticated of the four Gospels and the one most deeply engaged with Greek philosophical ideas, may well be conscious of this resonance.
The Dionysian thiasus (sacred community of initiates who shared ritual meals, ecstatic worship, and shared the god’s life) is structurally very similar to early Christian congregations. The Pauline letters, particularly 1 Corinthians, show a community already wrestling with the boundaries between Christian practice and analogous pagan ritual — Paul explicitly compares the Eucharist to pagan sacrificial meals and insists on differentiation (1 Cor. 10:21).
Isis and Osiris: Death, Resurrection, and Divine Motherhood
The Isis-Osiris cult of Egypt was one of the most internationally successful mystery religions of the ancient world by the time of early Christianity; temples to Isis could be found across the Roman Empire, from Rome itself to Britain. The myth — Osiris killed by Set, his body gathered by Isis, his resurrection and judgment of the dead, his conception of a posthumous child (Horus) — offered a narrative of death, resurrection, and divine sonship that resonated deeply with early Christian themes.
The image of Isis nursing the infant Horus — depicted in thousands of Egyptian artworks — is the acknowledged artistic prototype for the Madonna and Child image that became ubiquitous in Christian iconography. The stylistic continuity is not coincidental: in Alexandria, where Egyptian and Christian communities overlapped for centuries, the transition from Isis-and-Horus to Mary-and-Jesus appears to have been gradual and partially conscious. The Egyptian city of Alexandria was also, not incidentally, where early Christian theology was most philosophically sophisticated and where the synthesis of Greek, Jewish, and Egyptian religious ideas was most advanced.
The Osirian promise — that the righteous dead would be resurrected and enjoy eternal life in the presence of the divine — closely parallels Christian soteriology. Osiris was also called “Lord of Lords” and “King of Kings,” titles that appear in the New Testament applied to Christ.
Mithras: The Bull-Slayer and the Cosmic Saviour
The cult of Mithras, a Persian deity absorbed into Roman religious life and enormously popular among soldiers and merchants from the 1st to 4th centuries CE, offers one of the most contested set of parallels with Christianity. The Roman Mithraic mysteries were a secretive, male-only initiatory religion whose adherents shared a sacred meal of bread and wine, underwent ritual baptism, progressed through grades of initiation, worshipped in underground temples (mithraea) oriented toward the winter solstice, and celebrated their god’s birth on December 25th.
Scholars debate the degree of direct influence, partly because Mithraic ritual was genuinely secret and our knowledge of it comes largely from iconography rather than texts. But the structural parallels — birth on December 25th, communal meal of bread and wine, baptism, resurrection imagery, cosmic combat between light and darkness — were noted in antiquity by Christian apologists such as Tertullian, who again resorted to the explanation that the devil had mimicked Christian rites in advance.
The Persian roots of Mithraism also fed into the more general influence of Zoroastrianism on Jewish and Christian thought. The dualistic framework of cosmic conflict between light and darkness, truth and lie, good and evil — so central to Zoroastrian theology — appears to have significantly influenced Jewish apocalypticism after the Persian period (post-538 BCE), and through that channel entered Christian thought. The figure of Satan as a powerful cosmic adversary of God is largely absent from the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible; he appears in developed form only in the late books of Job, Zechariah, and Chronicles, and in the intertestamental literature, precisely as Persian influence was at its height.
The Logos: Greek Philosophy Meets Theology
The opening of the Gospel of John — “In the beginning was the Word [Logos], and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” — is perhaps the most explicit importation of Greek philosophical vocabulary into the New Testament. The concept of the Logos (Word or Reason) was central to Stoic philosophy, which held that a rational principle pervaded and governed the cosmos. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE – 50 CE) had already attempted a synthesis of Jewish theology and Greek philosophy, describing the Logos as God’s instrument of creation and a mediating divine power — an idea he borrowed substantially from Platonic thought.
The author of the Fourth Gospel drew on this tradition directly. In doing so, he placed Jesus within a philosophical framework that would have been immediately recognisable to educated Greeks and Hellenised Jews throughout the Roman Empire. The Jesus of John’s Gospel is not merely a Jewish messiah; he is the cosmic Logos of Stoic and Platonic philosophy made flesh.
Similarly, the concept of the divine Trinity — one God in three persons — whilst not straightforwardly pagan, developed through centuries of theological debate conducted in the language and conceptual framework of Greek metaphysics: ousia (substance), hypostasis (person), homoousios (of the same substance). The official Trinitarian theology adopted at the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE cannot be understood apart from the Neoplatonic and Stoic philosophy that pervaded educated Roman culture.
Asclepius and the Healer God
Throughout the Graeco-Roman world, the healing deity Asclepius attracted enormous popular devotion. His sanctuaries — the most famous at Epidaurus — were centres of miraculous healing where the sick would sleep in the god’s temple and receive cures in dreams. Inscriptions from Epidaurus record healings of the blind, the lame, and the chronically ill, in language strikingly similar to gospel miracle accounts. Asclepius was called Soter (Saviour), a title applied extensively to Jesus in the New Testament. He was also said to have raised the dead.
The early Christian healing miracles — and the theological framework that presents Jesus as a physician of bodies and souls — engaged directly with the Asclepian tradition, which was the dominant healing-deity cult in the Roman world. Several early Christian writers compare Jesus explicitly and polemically to Asclepius, insisting that Jesus’ miracles are superior and genuine while Asclepius’ are fraudulent. The comparison would have made little rhetorical sense if the pagan population hadn’t already found the two figures obviously comparable.
Apocalypticism: Persia and the End of Time
Jewish apocalypticism — the belief in a cosmic end-time, a final judgment, a resurrection of the dead, and a renewed creation — is not a feature of the earliest strata of the Hebrew Bible. It appears in fully developed form only in the later books (Daniel, Zechariah) and in the intertestamental apocalyptic literature (1 Enoch, 4 Ezra, the Dead Sea Scrolls). Its emergence coincides precisely with extensive Jewish contact with Persian religion.
Zoroastrianism — the religion of the Persian Empire that freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity in 539 BCE — taught a linear view of history moving toward a final cosmic battle (Frashokereti) between the forces of good (Ahura Mazda) and evil (Angra Mainyu), culminating in the resurrection of the dead, a universal judgment, the renovation of the world, and eternal life for the righteous. This is not merely thematically similar to Jewish and Christian eschatology; it is, in the judgment of many scholars of religion, its direct ancestor.
The very concept of a cosmic adversary figure — a personified principle of evil opposing God — is essentially Zoroastrian in origin. The developed Satan of the New Testament, the “prince of this world,” ruler of a demonic hierarchy opposed to God, is a figure shaped at least as much by Zoroastrian dualism as by anything in the earlier Hebrew Bible.
What Does This Mean?
It would be a mistake to read the above as a debunking exercise. Ancient peoples were not naive and unsophisticated; they were entirely aware that they were in contact with other cultures and that ideas moved across borders. The Israelites, the early Christians, and their later interpreters did not believe they were operating in a cultural vacuum. What they believed — and this is actually the interesting theological question — was that truth, wherever it was found, belonged to God.
Justin Martyr, writing in the 2nd century, argued that the Logos — the divine reason incarnated in Christ — had been partially present in all human cultures, which is why pagan philosophers and poets had sometimes glimpsed aspects of divine truth. Augustine was steeped in Neoplatonism before his conversion and never fully abandoned its conceptual framework. The medieval Scholastics read Aristotle alongside Paul. The tradition of Christian theology has always been a tradition of synthesis.
The deeper point raised by comparative religion is not that the Bible is “merely” borrowed mythology. It is that human beings in every culture and era have been reaching for the same things: an explanation of suffering and death, an account of how the world began and how it will end, a story of a god who understands human vulnerability, a ritual that enacts belonging and transformation. These recurring themes across cultures are not evidence of plagiarism. They are evidence of a shared humanity.
What is distinctive about Judaism and Christianity is not that they invented these themes from nothing, but what they did with them — the particular theological, ethical, and narrative synthesis they achieved. A flood story becomes a meditation on justice and covenant. A dying god becomes an argument about the nature of love. A mystery initiation becomes a sacrament open to all, regardless of gender, class, or social standing. The borrowings are real. But so is the transformation.
To read the Bible as a document embedded in — and in creative dialogue with — the ancient world around it is to read it more honestly, and perhaps more richly, than to read it as something that fell from the sky fully formed. The history of religion is the history of human beings talking to one another across time, trading stories about what they have seen in the dark.
Further Reading: John Day, “Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan”; Mark S. Smith, “The Origins of Biblical Monotheism”; Bart Ehrman, “How Jesus Became God”; Karen Armstrong, “A History of God”; Alexander Heidel, “The Gilgamesh Epic and Old Testament Parallels”; Walter Burkert, “Ancient Mystery Cults.”
NOTE ON THE AUTHOR:
Tony McMahon is an investigative historian often see on TV: https://tony-mcmahon.com/
He is the author of several books on different historical topics including the Knights Templar: https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Knights-Templar-Hardback/p/51654
Tony is the co-host of the Talking Templars podcast on YouTube and other channels.