First: the widely stated view (which is wrong) that virgin births were common in pagan religious traditions.   I’ve dealt with this view in my book Did Jesus Exist?, and here I’ll simply cite an example of two authors who state this view, as if it were common knowledge and so needed no evidence to support it.

There are, as you know, a lot of books written by non-scholars claiming Jesus did not exist.  Here I deal with one of them that makes this claim about alleged virgin births among pagans:

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Appearing in 1999 was the (intended) blockbuster work by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy, The Jesus Mysteries: Was the ‘Original Jesus’ a Pagan God?    Freke and Gandy have collaborated on a number of books in recent years, most of them uncovering the conspiratorial secrets of our shared past.   In their book they argue that Jesus was invented by a group of Jews who resembled the Therapeutae in Alexandria Egypt, leading to the invention of a new mystery religion (the Jesus Mysteries) that flourished at the beginning of the third century CE.   In their view, however, Jesus was not a sun-God.  He was a creation based on the widespread mythologies of dying and rising gods known throughout the pagan world.   And so their main thesis:

The story of Jesus is not the biography of a historical Messiah, but a myth based on perennial Pagan stories.  Christianity was not a new and unique revelation but actually a Jewish adaptation of the ancient Pagan Mystery religion. (Jesus Mysteries, p. 2)

At the heart of all the various pagan mysteries, Freke and Gandy aver, was a myth of a godman who died and rose from the dead.  This divine figure was called by various names in the sundry pagan mysteries: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Adonis, Baccus, Mithras.  But “fundamentally all these godmen are the same mythical being” (p. 4).

The reason that Freke and Gandy think so is that all these figures share the same mythology: their father was God; their mother was a mortal virgin; they were each born in a cave on December 25 before three shepherds and wisemen; among their miracles they turned water to wine; they all rode into town on a donkey; they all were crucified at Eastertime as a sacrifice for the sins of the world; they descended to hell; and on the third day they rose again.   Since these same things are said of Jesus as well, it is obvious that the stories believed by the Christians are all simply invented as imitations of the pagan religions.

Real historians of antiquity are typically scandalized by such assertions – or at least they would be, if they bothered to read Freke and Gandy’s book.   The authors provide no evidence for their claims concerning the standard mythology of the godmen.  They cite no sources from the ancient world that can be checked.  It is not that they have provided an alternative interpretation of the available evidence.  They have not even cited the available evidence.  And for good reason.  No such evidence exists.

What, for example, is the proof that Osiris was born on December 25 before three shepherds?  Or that he was crucified?  And that his death brought an atonement for sin?  Or that he returned to life on earth by being raised from the dead?  In point of fact, no ancient source says any such thing about Osiris (or about the other gods).  But Freke and Gandy claim that this is common knowledge.  And they “prove” it by quoting other writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who have said so.  But these writers too do not cite any historical evidence.  This is all based on assertion, believed by Freke and Gandy simply because they read it somewhere.  This is not serious historical scholarship.  It is sensationalist writing driven by a desire to sell books.

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In my next post I’ll show what the typical pagan view actually was about the miraculous births of their sons of gods.   Their mothers were never virgins – quite the contrary.