Horus, Mithras and Krishna Against Their Own Sources

Murdock's specific parallel claims fail against the same primary sources this atlas already cites for each figure. For Horus, she leans heavily on a scene at the Luxor temple depicting the divine birth of a pharaoh, read as a virgin nativity; the historian Richard Carrier, who himself argues Jesus was not a historical figure and so has no religious motive to defend, has separately examined and rejected her reading of that inscription, which shows the evidentiary problem is independent of any apologetic stake in the outcome.

For Mithras, Murdock's Suns of God repeats claims of a virgin birth and a 25 December date; the Roman cult's own central myth instead has Mithras born fully grown from solid rock, and no surviving Mithraic evidence fixes 25 December as the god's own festival date earlier than evidence for the Christian date itself. For Krishna, she asserts a crucifixion; the Mahabharata and the Puranas instead record Krishna's death by an arrow shot by the hunter Jara, who mistook his exposed foot for a deer, and his mother Devaki conceived him by ordinary marriage to Vasudeva as her eighth child, not virginally.

Bart Ehrman's Did Jesus Exist? (2012) reviews this entire family of claims and rejects them on the same grounds argued here: not one Zeitgeist-popularized parallel survives a direct check against the actual ancient sources for Horus, Mithras or Krishna.