An Alexandrian tet with an Isis/infant Horus (Harpokrates) reverse

It's not just a similarity of motifs but that worship of Isis Lactans was popular, not just in Egypt but in many places throughout the empire. It was amid this burgeoning popular cult of Isis that some suggest adoration of Mary may have developed, first as a popular movement, only later incorporated into orthodox Christianity. Yes, there is clearly a universality to images of motherhood. It is often the recognition of common elements that drives syncretism. The Isis/ Mary connection is controversial but the commonality is so striking that it can't be ignored.

 

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Not so much; impressionistically, 'coincidence' seems like too strong a word. More along the lines of, the further you go (discretely, and using the same, geo-chronological criteria) from the one collective ethos to the next, the likelier the operant meme is to be attributable to phenomena which are innately universal. Just starting with our (...sometimes duly esteemed) species.

 

...For some of us, it's fun that syncretism was written into the canonical Gospels. (Extant, Yep, Busted, Thank you, in 4th-c. manuscripts.) Especially in the context of Mary and Jesus, and so forth. You've got the family going to Egypt --thank you, if I was living then, Alexandria would look like Manhattan, minus the (remember this?) smog. Everybody was there: Egyptians, Jews, and Greeks, in that approximate chronological order, with the Romans as the Irish cop on the streetcorner. ...Thank you, Bebop, and Abstract Expressionism. I would be Having it.
And the Magi were following some sort of, what, maybe some kind of Zoroastrian-inspired astrology, when they 'saw the star in the east.'
...All of which is to say, I guess, where syncretism and the ostensible absence thereof are concerned, don't go looking for dichotomies where there just might not be any.
And, along similar lines, in a context in which so much was 'going off,' culturally, at the same time, easy, causal lines of transmission are likely to be overly simplistic.