Ingestion of a god to represent a ritual union? Purification through drinking his blood, represented as wine? These are the key similarities between Dionysus, the last of the gods to be admitted to Olympus, and Jesus — particularly through the Catholic eucharist. 

Greek myths weren’t bound into a single, inviolable tome, and some elements of Dionysus’ story differ over time. Notably, his birth, which ultimately involves a Herod-like Hera seeking to slay the unborn Dionysus because he was the offspring of one of Zeus’ affairs. In the end, Zeus protects Dionysus by sewing him into his thigh, from which he was later born; hence Dionysus was called “dimetor” (of two mothers), as Greek Gods and Goddesses says. And similar to Osiris, he was torn apart by Titans, as Britannica explains. But his heart survived, Athena resurrected him — like Isis did Osiris — and Zeus annihilated the Titans in retaliation, which created humanity.

Known as Bacchus to the Romans, after which drunken party-orgies “bacchanalia” get their name, Dionysus was a beneficent, world-wandering god. He traveled the countryside, a representation of the “lifeblood of nature,” preaching of liberation. In this case, not through repenting sins, but through the consciousness alteration of intoxication, sex, theater, the arts, and anything that elevated emotional or physical ecstasy. Followers of Dionysus shared his “blood” — wine — with others to pass his essence around, per Classroom.

Out of all the figures whose stories contain similar elements to Jesus’ — or who serve “similar sociological functions,” as Professor Hansie Wolmarans on the Journal of Early Christian History puts it — the Greek Asclepius (Aesculapius to the Romans) is definitely one of the most heavily researched in a scholarly sense. Asclepius lives on as a figure of healing in the Staff of Asclepius, which is a single snake wound around a staff. This is different from the Caduceus, the staff with two intertwined snakes, as Premium Care Internal Medicine explains.

Asclepius, a man from Greek myth first written down around 800 B.C., was another demi-god from a sexually complicated family, like Dionysus or Adonis. This time, he came from an adulterous union between Apollo and a human woman. Asclepius grew up at the temple Epidaurus, where he learned about healing the sick. The methods varied and were not as simple as Jesus merely speaking about healing (Matthew 8:5-13) or healing based on the faith of friends (Mark 2:1-12). They more resembled how Jesus’ disciples healed: Peter through his shadow (Acts 5:12-16) or Paul through his clothes (Acts 19:11-20). Asclepius got his advice from gods in dreams, used cleansing water, plasters of herbs and spices, cloth over the eyes — things like that. 

Most pointedly, Asclepius also raised the dead, as Jesus did with Lazarus. Zeus, however, got upset with this and struck Asclepius dead. Ironically, this is what transformed Asclepius into an immortal god.

There are other mythological characters such as Mithras, a Persian god related to Mitra in India, whose stories are sometimes cited as resembling Jesus’. Mithras’ tale, though, doesn’t contain any such commonalities and is more the by-product of incomplete research, World History cites. So, we can wrap up by reintroducing the figure mentioned at the beginning of this article: Krishna.

Krishna, like Jesus to God the Father, was an aspect of the divine entity Vishnu. As Emory University summarizes, Vishnu was created by Brahma — the supreme creator deity — as one of his own aspects in a triumvirate along with the god Shiva. Vishnu is the “guardian, protector and preserver of the world” who sleeps in the “cosmic ocean of milk” (our Milky Way galaxy), and who has “full control of time and space and subjective realities.” In order to uphold the laws of the universe chronicled in the sacred Hindu text “The Vedas” (first written down 1,500-500 B.C., per World History), Vishnu periodically incarnates here on Earth in the form of a human. Krishna was the ninth such form.

Krishna features prominently in numerous Hindu stores, especially the Bhagavad Gita, as Learn Religions cites. Like Jesus, he was born to lowly circumstances (a prison, not a manger), was viewed as a cowherd (not a shepherd), was simultaneously god and man, emphasized righteousness and right action, and spoke of compassion for all people.