McGeddon << So, are you all telling me that there are no Egyptian stories that are similar to the Christian story of Christ?? >>
To be clear, you will find some “similarities” if you search the WRONG sources. Just today I received from
Amazon.com another book that argues this same line:
Christianity Before Christ by John Jackson (American Atheist Press, 1985). It is one of the sources for the “Zeitgeist” movie. I’ve been collecting these books over the past year. This book claims:
“The entire Christian Bible, creation legend, descent into and exodus from Egypt, ark and flood allegory, Israelite history, Hebrew prophecy and poetry, Gospels, Epistles and Revelation imagery, all are now proven to have been the transmission of ancient Egypt’s scrolls and papyri into the hands of later generations…
from the scrolls of papyri five thousand to ten thousand years old there comes stalking forth to view the whole story of an Egyptian Jesus raising from the dead an Egyptian Lazarus at an Egyptian Bethany, with two Egyptian Manes present, the non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John’s Gospel. From the walls of the temple of Luxor…there faces Christianity a group of four scenes that spell the non-historicity of four episodes purveyed as history in the Gospel’s recital of the Christ’s nativity…” (Alvin Boyd Kuhn, a “disciple” of Gerald Massey, from Kuhn’s book
Who Is This King of Glory? [1944], cited in Jackson [1985], page 116)
The problem is there are no citations in this chapter on “Osiris and Horus of Egypt” to original documents. There are vague references made to “scrolls of papyri” but none are cited. BTW, papyri do not go back 10,000 years. The oldest known Egyptian hierglyphs come from c. 3000 BC (see
Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, volume 2, on “Horus” p. 119ff).
There are also references to the “Luxor inscription” (see my link to Carrier’s article above) which I need to look up myself. I would grant the Genesis 6-9 flood story can be found in pre-Genesis sources, but not the rest.
As for the whole Horus = Jesus thing, you need to back that up from the primary Egyptian sources on Horus, and these are: (see the
Oxford Encyclopedia, vol 2, page 121ff)
– the Memphite Theology or Shabaqo Stone (generally dated as late as the New Kingdom, c. 1540-1070 BC);
– the Mystery Play of the Succession;
– the Pyramid Texts (from the late Old Kingdom, c. 2575-2150 BC);
– the Coffin Texts, especially Spell 148;
– the Great Osiris hymn in the Louvre;
– the Late Egyptian Contendings of Horus and Seth;
– the Metternich Stela and other cippus texts;
– the Ptolemaic Myth of Horus at Edfu (also known as the Triumph of Horus);
If you don’t find the Horus = Jesus stuff there, you aren’t gonna find it. What the “Zeitgeist” movie does is rely on outdated, unreliable, bogus sources that do not refer to the primary Egyptian sources. These people simply quote each other making assertions that “Christianity came before Christ” (for example: Kuhn relying on Massey, and then Jackson quoting Massey, Frazer, Churchward, and Kuhn, etc). None of these folks are professional Egyptologists. Gerald Massey, while he did write quite a bit on the subject, was an amateur and a poet. Like Kersey Graves (
World’s Sixteen Crucified Saviors), I do not believe Massey even graduated high school (I got this from Acharya S’s own web site, so don’t quote me on that).
In a review of Tom Harpur’s
The Pagan Christ which makes the same argument that “Christianity came from Egypt,” W. Ward Gasque found that only 1 in 10 modern professional Egyptologists he solicited for information had ever heard of Gerald Massey, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, or Godfrey Higgins (a third source cited by Harpur). The reason is they are not professional Egyptologists, and they lived over 100 years ago. Their material is outdated, speculative, and superceded by today’s scholarship.
See
All About Horus: An Egyptian Copy of Christ? for details.
Phil P
