D.M. Murdock

Dorothy Milne Murdock, born in 1960 and writing as Acharya S before publishing later work under her own name, died on 25 December 2015. She held no degree in Egyptology, classics, Indology or comparative religion. Her books, The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold (1999), Suns of God: Krishna, Buddha and Christ Unveiled (2004) and Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection (2009), restated Gerald Massey's nineteenth century Horus argument for a new audience and extended the same method to Krishna and Buddha.

Her single largest influence on public awareness of these claims came through a collaboration rather than a book. She worked directly with filmmaker Peter Joseph on The ZEITGEIST Sourcebook, Part 1, a companion volume defending the specific claims made in Part One of his 2007 documentary Zeitgeist: The Movie, titled The Greatest Story Ever Told. That film, distributed freely online, reached an audience of many millions, far larger than her books had reached on their own, and it is the reason the Massey to Murdock claim chain became a familiar internet-era argument rather than a footnote in the history of fringe Egyptology.

Her work is recorded here as the direct transmission link between a nineteenth century self-taught writer and a twenty-first century mass audience, honestly, because that transmission is itself a real and traceable fact even where the underlying claims are not.

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.