Was the Resurrection Borrowed from Pagan Myths?

Did Christianity copy its dying-and-rising God from Osiris, Mithras, and other ancient cults?

The objection, at its strongest:

The story of a God who dies and rises again was already common in the ancient world: Osiris in Egypt, Dionysus and Adonis in Greece, Mithras in Rome. Christianity simply absorbed a familiar myth, attached it to a Galilean preacher, and passed it off as history. The Resurrection is one more version of a tale the pagans had been telling for centuries.

The response:

The parallels look impressive at a distance and shrink the moment they are examined.

First, the alleged resurrections are mostly nothing of the kind. Osiris is not restored to earthly life but reassembled to reign as lord of the underworld: he stays dead, in the realm of the dead. Others are seasonal fertility symbols, dying and returning with the crops year by year, with no bodily rising of a real person at a particular time and place in history. And several of the closest-looking rising stories are attested in detail only in sources later than the New Testament, too late to be where the Christian claim came from. Press the sources and the neat dying-and-rising God template, much of it assembled by nineteenth-century writers, does not survive contact with the actual myths.

Second, the framework is wrong. Pagan myths are cyclical and timeless, located once upon a time in a mythic past. The Christian claim is stubbornly historical: a particular man, under a named governor, in a named city, witnessed by people who gave their names and their lives. It is offered not as a seasonal symbol but as an event you could in principle have investigated.

Third, the people among whom the claim arose were the least likely borrowers imaginable. The first Christians were monotheistic Jews who regarded pagan cults with horror and guarded their faith against exactly this kind of contamination. They did not raid the mystery religions for plot devices; they proclaimed, to their own scandal, that a crucified countryman had been raised.

The Resurrection is not one more retelling of a familiar myth. It is the sort of claim the myths never actually made: that a known man, at a known time, really died and was really seen alive again. That is why it has to be weighed as history rather than dismissed as legend.