Please, allow me to inform you that this is a misconception.
There is no similarity between the Egyptian god, Horus, and Jesus Christ.
The alleged claims that Jesus is an imitation of Horus are the following, including those you listed, according to some movies like Zeitgeist, The God Who Wasn’t There, and Religulous:
- Horus walked on water
- Horus was born from a virgin mother, Isis (Egyptian goddess), on December 25th
- Horus was born in a cave or stable
- Horus became a child prodigy at the age of twelve
- Horus had twelve disciples
- Horus’s proclaimed arrival was because of a star
- Horus’s birth attracted the attention of three “kings”
- Horus held titles like “KRST” (Christ), “the Son of Man,” “the Good Shepherd,” “Iusa,” “the Holy Child,” and “Lamb of God”
- Horus was baptized (supposedly by Anubis/Anup)
- Horus began a ministry when he was thirty years old
- Horus was betrayed
- Horus was incarnated into human flesh
- Horus was identified via a fish
- Horus was crucified with a pair of thieves
- Horus was resurrected after being buried for three days
These movies cite their works from researchers like Gerald Massey, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Tom Harpur (his book The Pagan Christ), and Godfrey Higgins. Keep in mind that none of them are considered experts in Egyptology. These four receive no support from other Egyptologists or scholars. For the myth that Jesus derives from Horus, I offer information that debunks these assertions.
- Horus has not been documented walking on water at all, let alone in the same fashion as Jesus. Even if Horus did, he would have undoubtedly had a different reason to be walking on a body of water.
- Neither Horus nor Jesus were born on December 25th. Plutarch, a Greek philosopher, dates Horus’s birth to being around the winter solstice, not documenting a specific date. Jesus is postulated by many to have been born in various times ranging from January to November, none of which are deemed true. The Bible never claims that December 25th was the birth date of Jesus. Some theorize that Jesus was born during spring. Also, Isis was not a virgin, as she had intercourse with Osiris after she rebuilt him. The story goes that Set, a sky god, killed Osiris, cutting him into multiple pieces to take the latter’s place as the king of Egypt. Mournful, Isis reconstructed Osiris’s body, including his penis since a fish ate it, and Isis became pregnant soon after with Horus. So, Isis was no virgin. Additionally, Mary (originally named Miriam) was human, while Isis was a goddess, so that is another major difference.
- Horus was not born in a cave or stable, as the Egyptian myth tells; Isis’s narrative, which was written around the 2,000s B.C., clearly states that she gave birth to Horus in a nest of papyrus plants, not a cave or stable. The Bible does not state that Jesus was born in a cave or stable, either, but it can instead be implied that Jesus was born in Joseph’s ancestral home on the ground floor.
- Horus was never documented to become any “child prodigy” when he was twelve years old. No evidence from Egyptian records comes close to Horus being deemed a prodigy at a young age.
- Horus was never recorded by Egyptians to have twelve disciples. Some articles I read explain that Horus may have had demigod followers and many worshippers, but there were certainly no disciples who learned any teachings and distributed them to a wide range of people. And the number of these demigod followers was not twelve. In Egypt, these “twelve” were rather based on the Zodiac signs, and there is no reason to believe that Israelites would take the twelve Zodiac signs and make them the twelve tribes in Israel. The Zodiac names and the names of the twelve Israelite tribes have zero association with one another. It simply makes no sense.
- Horus’s birth had no relation to a certain star. No documentation supports the assertion. The claim that Horus’s birth related to a star that served as a sign is not defended by anything but baseless claims. The Egyptians never described Horus’s birth as having been announced via a shining star.
- Horus’s birth did not attract three “kings,” as no Egyptian writings claim this. Not one. Furthermore, the Bible does not offer a precise number of “kings” who went to see Jesus’s birth. We cannot assume the Bible stated three. These “kings” are not kings, they are shepherds, as made obvious in the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
- Horus held no titles like “KRST” (Christ), “the Son of Man,” “the Good Shepherd,” “Iusa,” “the Holy Child,” or “the Lamb of God.” There is nothing to support this claim. No records from Egyptians state that Horus had any such titles. “KRST” in Egyptian translates to “burial,” not “anointed one.” Horus was never believed to be an “anointed” figure.
- Horus was never recorded to be baptized, and Anubis (the god of funerals, protector of graves, and guide of the underworld) did not baptize anybody. There is no “Anubis the Baptist” in Egyptian records. Baptism was never one of Anubis’s tasks. In contrast, John the Baptist is widely regarded as a historical figure due to an adequate amount of evidence analyzed by scholars, primarily reliable references to him from the first century.
- Horus did not start any ministry, especially not at the age of thirty, as no Egyptian sources make such a story. The claim is backed by nothing.
- Horus was never betrayed by anybody close to him, especially not a friend or disciple. Not one reliable source documents this, neither Egyptian nor non-Egyptian.
- Horus was not incarnated into human flesh, as some claim. Egyptian sources do not suggest this, according to the story of Horus’s life. In actuality, it was the pharaohs who were believed to be Horus in the flesh, which is what most believe is nonsense. Each time a pharaoh died and a new one took the throne, Egyptians believed that this was the symbolic representation of Horus’s eternal and recurring nature. This is nothing like Jesus Christ, who died only one time. W. Ward Gasque, a biblical scholar who consulted with ten Egyptologists on this matter, has established with them the fact that Horus was not incarnated into human flesh. He states, “Kuhn/Harper's redefinition of ‘incarnation’ and rooting this in Egyptian religion is regarded as bogus by all of the Egyptologists with whom I have consulted. According to one: ‘Only the pharaoh was believed to have a divine aspect, the divine power of kingship, incarnated in the human being currently serving as the king. No other Egyptians ever believed they possessed even ‘a little bit of the divine’.”
- Horus was not documented by Egyptian sources or non-Egyptian sources to have been associated with fish. He has a falcon’s head, after all. Even if Horus had some connection to fish, it is nothing like the Christ-fish idea, as that did not exist at the time. Additionally, Jesus would have never been associated with fish in a way Horus might have been.
- Horus did not die at any time, according to multiple sources I read, for he was an immortal god. Osiris, on the other hand, was killed by Set. Even if he did die, there is no evidence or reasoning to suggest Horus would die by crucifixion. But generally, no Egyptian records claim Horus ever died. Osiris never died by crucifixion, either. No Egyptian record makes that claim, and Egyptians were not known to have practiced crucifixion (they could have partaken in this punishment during the Roman Empire, but that is uncertain). It mainly began with the ancient Persians. Moreover, Jesus’s death was voluntary, while Horus’s death would have not been so. Since no Egyptian sources state that Horus died with two thieves, it can be concluded that Horus did not die with any thieves, while Jesus certainly did.
- Horus was not buried for three days, as no Egyptian sources tell us this. Horus did not resurrect in the way people think. Osiris only came back to life, leading to Horus’s birth, because of Isis’s influence. Jesus, on the other hand, overcame death alone, as the Gospels inform us. There is no historical or mythological documentation of the Egyptian god Horus being crucified and resurrected three days later. The story of Horus does include elements of death and rebirth, but it does not closely parallel the crucifixion and resurrection narrative associated with Jesus in Christian tradition. The idea that the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection was borrowed from the mythology of Horus is a claim that has been debunked by scholars.
It is quite clear that Horus and Jesus hold no connection whatsoever. It is a pitiful attempt by atheists to debunk the existence of Jesus. The Zeitgeist, The God Who Wasn’t There, and Religulous movies, as well as Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ, are very wrong. Some atheists like Richard Carrier attempt to debunk Jesus’s historicity, but they fail. Carrier is a Jesus mythicist, and he has been met with criticism from a multitude of scholars. Almost all scholars do not find his works against the modern consensus convincing.
Something to note about Richard Carrier is his outspoken, harsh, unjustified viewpoint against Christianity. For example, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci criticized him for his severe intolerance of those who disagree with him, also displeased with Carrier’s radicalization of his “Atheism Plus” political agenda. Pigliucci also quoted the originator of "Atheism Plus", Jen McCreight, criticizing Carrier, stating, "Finally had time 2 read Richard Carrier's #atheismplus piece. His language was unnecessarily harsh, divisive & ableist. Doesn't represent A+."
Carrier argues that the probability of Jesus's existence is somewhere in the range of 1/3 to 1/12000, depending on the estimates used for the computation. Several critics have rejected Carrier's ideas and methodology, calling it "tenuous", or "problematic and unpersuasive". Simon Gathercole writes that Carrier's arguments "are contradicted by the historical data."
Here is what Wikipedia states about the reception of Carrier’s position.
However, most contemporary scholarship has been critical of Carrier's methodology and conclusions. According to James F. McGrath, Carrier misuses Rank and Raglan and stretches their scales to make Jesus appear to score high on mythotype. According to Christopher Hansen, Carrier misuses and manipulates Raglan's scale to make Jesus appear more aligned with a mythotype by scoring him high, thus more mythical, when other scholars have scored Jesus as low, thus more historical. He argues that other scholars have assessed Jesus to be low on Raglan's scale and when Hansen looks at multiple other examples of historical figures he notes that "Historical figures regularly become Raglan heroes. They often score twelve or more points on the Raglan archetype" which casts doubts on the usefulness of the Raglan scale for historicity.
Both classicists and biblical scholars agree that there is a historical basis for a person called Jesus of Nazareth. Writing in 2004, Michael Grant stated, "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." More recently, Patrick Gray posited, "That Jesus did in fact walk the face of the earth in the first century is no longer seriously doubted even by those who believe that very little about his life or death can be known with any certainty." For this reason, the views of Carrier and other proponents of the belief that a historical Jesus did not exist are frequently dismissed as "fringe theories" within classical scholarship.
Aviezer Tucker, previously an advocate of applying Bayesian techniques to history, expressed some sympathy for Carrier's view of the gospels, stating: "The problem with the Synoptic Gospels as evidence for a historical Jesus from a Bayesian perspective is that the evidence that coheres does not seem to be independent, whereas the evidence that is independent does not seem to cohere." However, Tucker argues that historians have been able to use theories about the transmission and preservation of information to identify reliable parts of the gospels. He says that "Carrier is too dismissive of such methods because he is focused on hypotheses about the historical Jesus rather than on the best explanations of the evidence."
Even New Testament scholar, Bart Ehrman, is not convinced by Carrier’s assertions.
Discussing Carrier's theory that some Jews believed in a "humiliated messiah" prior to the existence of Christianity, Ehrman criticizes Carrier for "idiosyncratic" readings of the Old Testament that ignore modern critical scholarship on the Bible. Ehrman concludes by saying "[w]e do not have a shred of evidence to suggest that any Jew prior to the birth of Christianity anticipated that there would be a future messiah who would be killed for sins—or killed at all—let alone one who would be unceremoniously destroyed by the enemies of the Jews, tortured and crucified in full public view. This was the opposite of what Jews thought the messiah would be." Ehrman has also publicly addressed Carrier's use of Bayes' Theorem, stating that "most historians simply don't think you can do history that way." He said he only knows of two historians who have used Bayes' Theorem, Carrier and Richard Swinburne, and noted the irony of the fact that Swinburne used it to prove Jesus was raised from the dead. Ehrman rejected both Carrier and Swinburne's conclusions, but conceded that he was unqualified to assess specifics about how they applied the theorem. "I'm not a statistician myself. I've had statisticians who tell me that both people are misemploying it, but I have no way of evaluating it."
Wikipedia states more on criticisms of Carrier’s works attempting to make the case that Jesus never existed, noting that Carrier had been dismissive of the evidence and misrepresenting it, too.
Reviewing On the Historicity of Jesus, Daniel N. Gullotta says that Carrier has provided a "rigorous and thorough academic treatise that will no doubt be held up as the standard by which the Jesus Myth theory can be measured"; but he finds Carrier's arguments "problematic and unpersuasive", his use of Bayesian probabilities "unnecessarily complicated and uninviting", and he criticizes Carrier's "lack of evidence, strained readings and troublesome assumptions." Furthermore, he observed that using Bayes theorem in history seems useless, or at least unreliable, since it leads to absurd and contradictory results such as Carrier using it to come up with low probability for the existence of Jesus and scholar Richard Swinburne using it to come up with high probability that Jesus actually resurrected. Gullotta also says that there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, either documentary or archaeological, that there was a period when Jews or Christians believed that Jesus only existed in heaven as a celestial being, which is Carrier's "foundational" thesis, rather than living as a human being on earth. Carrier is observed to constantly misinterpret and stretch sources and he also uses extensively fringe ideas like those of Dennis MacDonald on Homeric epics paralleling some of the Gospels, while downplaying the fact that MacDonald is still a historicist, not a mythicist. Gullotta also observes that Carrier relies on outdated and historically useless methods like Otto Rank and Lord Raglan's hero myth archetype events lists, which have been criticized and "have been almost universally rejected by scholars of folklore and mythology", in which Carrier alters the quantity and wording of these lists arbitrarily to his favor. Gullotta describes the belief that a historical Jesus never existed as a "fringe theory" that goes "unnoticed and unaddressed within scholarly circles".
Concerning the same book, Christina Petterson of the University of Newcastle writes, "Even if strictly correct, the methodology is tenuous. In addition, the numbers and the statistics seem like a diversion or an illusionary tactic which intentionally confuse and obfuscate". Unlike Gullotta, Petterson describes On the History of Jesus as somewhat amateurish: "Maths aside, nothing in the book shocked me, but seemed quite rudimentary first year New Testament stuff." With respect to Carrier's argument that the later tales of a historical Jesus should be studied for their literary and rhetorical purpose, and not for their historical content, Petterson says that this "reveals Carrier's ignorance of the field of New Testament studies and early Christianity."
M. David Litwa of Australian Catholic University, in a discussion of Carrier's work with a focus on On the Historicity of Jesus, notes that Carrier portrays himself "as a kind of crusader fighting for the truth of secular humanism", whose mission it is "to prove Christianity (or Carrier's understanding of it) wrong. He also notes that "Carrier's cavalier dismissal of the Bible and animosity toward the biblical deity would not seem to predispose him for careful biblical scholarship." Litwa describes Carrier as "on the fringes of the academic guild", although he is a trained scholar and does employ scholarly methods. Litwa goes on to argue against several arguments made by Carrier in On the Historicity of Jesus. Litwa writes that Carrier's application of the Rank-Raglan mythotype to Jesus relies on forced similarities and that "the pattern ignores major elements of [Jesus's] life." He also criticizes Carrier's attempts to derive Jesus from James Frazer's theory of the Near-Eastern dying-and-rising fertility god as relying on a "largely defunct" category in religious scholarship. He notes that few gods die and rise, usually staying dead in some way. Although Litwa acknowledges a parallel between the suffering experienced by dying deities and Jesus's suffering, he argues that pagan dying deities do not choose to die as Jesus does. Regarding Carrier's appeals to other ancient religious figures such as Romulus and the prophet Daniel who appear not to have existed, Litwa argues that Jesus is attested only twenty years after his death by Paul: "A name and a human character to go with it could not have been invented in this short period without invoking suspicion." Litwa dismisses Carrier's hypothesis that Paul's Jesus was an angelic being crucified on the celestial plane as relying on "baseless" speculation that the second-century Ascension of Isaiah was available to Paul and that its mention of Jesus's birth on earth and his crucifixion in Jerusalem are later additions, despite scholarship to the contrary.
Christopher Hansen observed that Carrier believes Jews already believed in a preexisting a supernatural son of God named Jesus based Philo's interpretation Zech. 6.12. However, Hansen argues that his argument relies on weak arguments and no evidence. He states, following Daniel Gullotta, "there is not a single instance of a recorded celestial angel or Logos figure named Jesus/Joshua in ancient Jewish literature."
Professor Emeritus Larry Hurtado of the University of Edinburgh writes that, contrary to Carrier's claims, Philo of Alexandria never refers to an archangel named "Jesus". Hurtado also states that the Apostle Paul clearly believed Jesus to have been a real man who lived on earth, and that the deities of pagan saviour cults, such as Isis and Osiris, were not transformed in their devotees' ideas from heavenly deities to actual people living on earth.
Similar criticisms were voiced by Simon Gathercole of Cambridge, who concludes that Carrier's arguments, and more broadly, the mythicist positions on different aspects of Paul's letters, are contradicted by the historical data, and that Paul's description of Jesus' life on Earth, his personality and family, tend to establish that Paul regarded Jesus as a natural person, rather than an allegorical figure. According to Christopher Hansen, Carrier's understanding of Romans 1:3 as meaning that Jesus was born in heaven by God from a "cosmic sperm bank" is not supported by the Jewish or Christian sources and not supported even by the scholars that Carrier cites to make his argument.
In addition, Carrier's counter-consensus thesis that the early reference to Christ in the Roman historian Tacitus was a Christian interpolation has been recently rejected by Willem Blom, who finds that Carrier's thesis relies on unconvincing silences and mistaken understandings of the 1st and 2nd centuries.
As such, Carrier is not taken seriously on the matter of Jesus’s historicity. Nobody should take him seriously. While he is well-educated in ancient history, his assertion that Jesus is a mythical figure is not supported or suggested by the evidence.
Ever wonder why Jesus mythicists are never taken seriously by any serious Egyptologists or any serious scholars? This is one of those reasons. Jesus mythicists hold baseless claims and argue against the strong evidence that is not disputed by even the most non-Christian, most critical, and most skeptical of scholars and Egyptologists. Any Jesus mythicist, whether an Egyptologist or scholar, is considered unreliable by those who take these matters seriously.
UPDATE
Mark Henderson shared my answer with the following claim:
Sorry to inform you. The parallels of a “dying and rising” god are all there in the hieroglyphs at the Temple of Luxor. And, also at that time, which predate the “Jesus”, myths, it actually gets worse. Baptism, 12 helpers, resurrecting people, eating the body as bread and wine, all there. All predating the jesus myths.
I would like to point out that he provided no evidence to disprove my sources. Also, Jesus is a historical figure, unlike the Egyptian gods. Not one credible scholar, not even Bart Ehrman, doubts the existence of Jesus.
He simply claims these hieroglyphs to be there, but he provides nothing. Mark Henderson should view the answers of other Quora users who state exactly what I did.
I looked at the comments Mark posted to other answers, and his only evidence is this image:
In what way is this connected to Jesus? Twelve people standing before Horus does not indicate anything of significance.
Also, it is noted that Horus had many servants and worshippers, but again, the twelve people in this image show no relation to the Twelve Apostles who distributed Jesus’s teachings to a wide range of people. Mark is making a massive, unsubstantiated leap. There is no reason to believe that this image ties to Christianity in any way.
Andreas Buehler’s answer to the question is very good; I reviewed the comments between Andreas and Mark, and I noted that Mark provided zero evidence to support his claims. I reviewed numerous sources, Mark, seeing that none of your claims appear to be true. I went on Google to find evidence of Horus having twelve disciples, turning water into wine, resurrecting others, and baptizing. I found none.
No Egyptian records state that Horus had partaken in any of these, and neither did Osiris nor Isis. Please, do not spread false information without evidence. I recommend reading the comment that answers this question on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBibleScholars/comments/196tm68/how_much_of_the_mythology_around_jesus_derived/The person commenting makes it apparent that Jesus and Horus do not display any connection.
You may read more to receive further information regarding the “association” between Horus and Jesus. Here are my sources.