Christianity A Copy of Egyptian Theology?

[Christos Anesti]

There may have been certain prefiguration's of Christian truths in Egyptian mythology and religion but there is much in Christianity that is unique... in fact much that is alien to traditional Egyptian pagan thought. It's the same case with Greek philosophy.

 

[Epiphoskei]

Okey, after talking about this on another forum I did some real heavy digging on this.

Many anti-religous websites bring this up but if look up the names Horus or Osrsis in a encyclopedia for an example you won't read the stories that Christianty is claimed to have copied. Why?

These claims comes from a book called "Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur.
Tom Harpurs book consists of very old theories(some almost 200 years old) brought back, the sources he uses most often in is book are: Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, Alvin Boyd Kuhn.

W. Ward Gasque, a Canadian Biblical scholar e-mailed 20 leading international Egyptologists asking about Kuhns claims:
"* That the name of Jesus was derived from the Egyptian Iusa, which means "the coming divine Son who heals or saves."
* That the god Horus is "an Egyptian Christos, or Christ . . . He and his mother, Isis, were the forerunners of the Christian Madonna and Child, and together they constituted a leading image in Egyptian religion for millennia prior to the Gospels."
* That Horus also "had a virgin birth, and that in one of his roles, he was 'a fisher of men with 12 followers.'"
* That "the letters KRST appear on Egyptian mummy coffins many centuries BCE, and . . . this word, when the vowels are filled in . . . is really Karast or Krist, signifying Christ."
* That the doctrine of the incarnation "is in fact the oldest, most universal mythos known to religion. It was current in the Osirian religion in Egypt at least 4,000 years BCE."

Notable is also that only one of the ten who answered had heard of these three.

"Professor Kenneth A. Kitchen of the University of Liverpool pointed out that not one of these men is mentioned in M.L. Bierbrier's Who Was Who in Egyptology (3rd ed, 1995); nor are any of their works listed in Ida B. Pratt's very extensive bibliography on Ancient Egypt (1925/1942)."

He also commented that Higgins died in 1834 which was before they had deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs. Therefore his work was not of any intrest.

All scholars who replied were unanimous in dismissing the suggested etymologies for 'Jesus' and 'Christ.'

Ron Leprohan from the University of Toronto pointed out that the name Iusa doesn't exist in egyptian.

I hope this was to any help.

I've always wondered where that junk came from. I found the more extensive source for that page here:
The Leading Religion Writer in Canada ... Does He Know What He's Talking About?

For what it's worth, it should probably be pointed out that qrst, "burial," is written with a pretty hard q sound (a uvular stop), whereas the ch in Christ is in reality a very rough h. Greek would most reasonably transliterate a uvular stop with a Kappa, not a Chi, in which case it would be Krist, not Christ.

 

[kamalayka]

There is always going to be a small group of people believing nonsense like this, even several with "credentials."

But then again, you can find "historians" who believe that UFOs built the pyramids, or that the early middle ages didn't exist( yes, there ARE people claiming that, believe it or not!)

Here is my advice when someone makes an outlandish claim such as this one:

Remember that there are A LOT of prominent people and authors who absolutely hate Christianity, and belief in God in general.

There are a lot of famous authors who are atheists. They would do anything to try to attack Christianity.

Wanna know why those people are not making claims like this?

Because they know it's not true! They are not going to risk their reputation with nonsense claims.

Believe me, if it had ANY truth to it, the anti-Christians and atheists would literally be all over it. Just the fact that they aren't should say something.

(I feel bad for the people who peddle this nonsense. They are going to scandalize a lot of people, probably causing some to loose faith over these asinine claims. They will be held accountable to God on that Day.
I hope God is merciful towards them!! I really do.)

 

[kamalayka]

"...The LORD was with Judah; and he drave out the inhabitants of the mountain; but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron." -- Judges 1:19

As a former atheist (and a former fan of the pompous Richard Dawkins), I can tell you that your arguments are really nothing. I don't mean it as an insult. I just am being straightforward. We've all heard it before.

As for the quote from Judges, you copied it wrong.
It REALLY says:

The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had iron chariots.

The pronoun is THEY, not HE.

Please have some integrity and be a little more honest.




And, you took it out of context. I assume that because you are an atheist, you are not well acquainted with Scripture, meaning you didn't actually look up these verses yourself.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you just copied and pasted somebody else's (dishonest) work.

Not only did you quote it incorrectly, but (as with the rest of the OT quotes you gave) you took it completely out of context.

Here is the passage put back into context:

verses 15-30
She replied, "Do me a special favor. Since you have given me land in the Negev, give me also springs of water." Then Caleb gave her the upper and lower springs.

The descendants of Moses' father-in-law, the Kenite, went up from the City of Palms with the men of Judah to live among the people of the Desert of Judah in the Negev near Arad.

Then the men of Judah went with the Simeonites their brothers and attacked the Canaanites living in Zephath, and they totally destroyed the city. Therefore it was called Hormah. The men of Judah also took Gaza, Ashkelon and Ekron—each city with its territory.

The LORD was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had iron chariots. As Moses had promised, Hebron was given to Caleb, who drove from it the three sons of Anak. The Benjamites, however, failed to dislodge the Jebusites, who were living in Jerusalem; to this day the Jebusites live there with the Benjamites.

Now the house of Joseph attacked Bethel, and the LORD was with them. When they sent men to spy out Bethel (formerly called Luz), the spies saw a man coming out of the city and they said to him, "Show us how to get into the city and we will see that you are treated well." So he showed them, and they put the city to the sword but spared the man and his whole family. He then went to the land of the Hittites, where he built a city and called it Luz, which is its name to this day.

But Manasseh did not drive out the people of Beth Shan or Taanach or Dor or Ibleam or Megiddo and their surrounding settlements, for the Canaanites were determined to live in that land. When Israel became strong, they pressed the Canaanites into forced labor but never drove them out completely. Nor did Ephraim drive out the Canaanites living in Gezer, but the Canaanites continued to live there among them. Neither did Zebulun drive out the Canaanites living in Kitron or Nahalol, who remained among them; but they did subject them to forced labor.

 

[kamalayka]

To Timmeh:

I suppose you think that the 70,000 to 100,000 who saw the events of Fatima in 1917 are either liars or hallucinated?


I suppose that right off the bat you think this link Our Lady of Good Success is false, even though it was published before the event?.
There is no way to argue around something that accurately tells events centuries before they happen.

And don't try to compare it to some quack like Nostradamus. Nostradamus wrote vague nonsense. This is very specific. For example,


On December 8, 1634, Our Lady declared that, in the latter half of the 19th century, "His [the Pope's] Pontifical Infallibility will be declared a Dogma of the Faith by the same Pope chosen to proclaim the Dogma of the Mystery of My Immaculate Conception. He will be persecuted and imprisoned in the Vatican by the unjust usurpation of the Pontifical States through the iniquity, envy and avarice of an earthly monarch."
(This was a direct quote.)

In other words, the prediction was that:

1.)there would be a pope in the latter half of the 19th century who would declare the Dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Dogma of Papal Infallibility.
2.)He would be later imprisoned in the Vatican by people who wanted a king as ruler (instead of the Pope).

That is the ONLY way to read it. There is nothing vague about it. I am not "interpreting" in any way. I am just reading it for face value.


Now, guess what?

This happened exactly to Blessed Pius IX ( died February 7, 1878) when he convened the First Vatican Council.


Our Lady also stated (that around the time of the pope mentioned above): "In the 19th Century there will be a truly Catholic president [of Ecuador], a man of character whom God Our Lord will give the palm of martyrdom on the square adjoining this Convent. He will consecrate the Republic to the Sacred Heart of My Most Holy Son, and this consecration will sustain the Catholic Religion in the years that will follow, which will be ill-fated ones for the Church. These years, during which the evil sect of Masonry will take control of the civil government - will see a cruel persecution of all religious communities, and they will also strike out violently against this one of mine."

In other words,

1.) There will be a very devout Catholic president of Ecuador in the 19th century.
2.) He will consecrate the country to The Sacred Heart of Jesus.
3.) He will die as a martyr on the square adjoining this Convent [where this nun writing this lived.]

Again, I am not interpreting it or reading into it. I just read it at face value.

Well. . .

The "truly Catholic" president of Ecuador, Gabriel Garcia Moreno (1821-1875), consecrated the republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1873.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
So, you have either two options (As an atheist/materialist) :

Either,

A.) It was a lucky coincidence
or
B.) It was a massive conspiracy involving the pope, the Italians who imprisoned him, the president of Ecuador, and the indigenous people who killed him.

We Christians obviously know it was from God. But, you are a free moral agent. You can choose to accept the truth, or you can choose to believe whatever lie makes you the most comfortable.


Check it, Google it, whatever.

You'll see this is all legitimate.

You can either believe the brainwash of atheism, or turn to the True God.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wanna know something funny?

The skeptics and so-called liberal biblical scholars, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed that early Christians changed the Old Testament to make it seem like Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls (first discovered around the late 1940s) contain copies of every single book of the OT (except for Esther). They date from between 50-150 B.C., and they read exactly like the books we have in the Bible today.
In other words, the early Christians did NOT change them to fit the life of Jesus.

There is even a belief among skeptics concerning the writing of the Torah. They call it the JEPD theory, the belief (based on nothing but assumptions, guesses, and "internal" evidence of the text) that the author/authors used four different sources to write the Torah.

The JEPD theory was first proposed as early as the late 17th century.

What is funny though, is that archaeology (which didn't even exist as a science until about 150 years ago) has virtually disproved this idea. Archaeology seems to support what is known as the Toledoth theory. (look it up if you care)

 

[lesliedellow]

I just saw a program on a local tv channel that was saying that Christianity is a copy of what the Egyptians came up with first. The Biblical account of Jesus is copied from the Egyptian writings. The account of Noah is also a copy of Egyptian writings. The Biblical account of Moses is also a copy of Egyptian writings. Hope this is the right forum to get help with this. I don't believe that Christianity is a copy of Egyptian writings but they seem to make a compelling case that it is.

They have been watching too much of the Zeitgeist movie. When it first came out it had atheists going, "Whoopee! this will fix those Christians." However, it is so fall of inaccuracies that even atheists are embarrassed by it now.

Most of the crap you hear about Jesus being a rip off of Osiris/Horus originated with an English poet, and amateur Egyptologist, called Gerald Massey, who lived at the end of the nineteenth century. You will find nobody in academia who takes him seriously.

 

[Hairy Tic]

There is always going to be a small group of people believing nonsense like this, even several with "credentials."

But then again, you can find "historians" who believe that UFOs built the pyramids, or that the early middle ages didn't exist( yes, there ARE people claiming that, believe it or not!)

Here is my advice when someone makes an outlandish claim such as this one:

Remember that there are A LOT of prominent people and authors who absolutely hate Christianity, and belief in God in general.

There are a lot of famous authors who are atheists. They would do anything to try to attack Christianity.

Wanna know why those people are not making claims like this?

Because they know it's not true! They are not going to risk their reputation with nonsense claims.

Believe me, if it had ANY truth to it, the anti-Christians and atheists would literally be all over it. Just the fact that they aren't should say something.

(I feel bad for the people who peddle this nonsense. They are going to scandalize a lot of people, probably causing some to loose faith over these asinine claims. They will be held accountable to God on that Day.
I hope God is merciful towards them!! I really do.)

## There is a Russian mathematician called Anatoly Fomenko who claims all ancient history was made up during the 16-17th centuries, & that Jesus, as well as being a Russian (natch) lived in the 12th century. And that all Europe, Britain included, was part of an enormous Russian empire. Naturally enough, the Byzantine Emperors turn out to be the same people as the kings of Anglo-Saxon England. There are seven volumes of this.

Where do people get this stuff ?

In 1998 he wrote:

A.T.Fomenko, G.V.Nosovskij
NEW HYPOTHETICAL CHRONOLOGY AND CONCEPT OF THE ENGLISH HISTORY.
BRITISH EMPIRE AS A DIRECT SUCCESSOR OF BYZANTINE-ROMAN EMPIRE.
(SHORT SCHEME)
​

http://www.revisedhistory.org/Investigation-eng-history.htm

He shows how Byzantine & Anglo-Saxon rulers are the same individuals. A specimen of the reasoning follows:

As a resume we present the follows hypothesis.

1) According to English history of 1-400 A.D. England at that time was a Roman province. English history of that period speaks more about events in Rome itself then in England. It was proved in [1],[24] that Roman history of that time reflects real events from 9-13th cc. A.D.

2) That chronicles which are supposed now to speak about English history of 400-830 A.D. appear to describe Rome and Byzantine empire-0. Therefore these chronicles reflect some real events of 9-15th cc. which took place in Byzantine empire.

By that exceptionally convincing logic, it is undeniable that the US is the entire inhabited world - why otherwise would it have a sports event called the World Series ? To make things worse, he treats a patriotic concoction such as Geoffrey of Monmouth's "History of the Kings of Britain" (c.1140) as though it were historically reliable:

Galfridus [= Geoffrey] calls Brutus as FIRST king of Britts ([9],p.5). In brief, the story of conquest of Britain is as follows. After the end of the Trojan War and after the fall of Troy, the Trojan hero Aeneas arrived on the ship in Italy. After two or three generation his great-grandson Brutus was born ([9],p.6-7). By the way, Nennius thinks that "time distance" between Aeneas and Brutus is sufficiently more ([8],p.173). He states that "the distance" between Trojan war and Brutus is about several hundreds years. However, this difference is not so important for us.

Then Brutus leaved Italy and arrived it Greece, where becomes the leader of Trojans survived after war. Brutus collects the large fleet and then his army (on the fleet) leaves Greece. After some time they landed on some "island", began the battle with local people, won the war and founded the new kingdom.

This is Britain.

This is as intellectually respectable as treating "King Kong" or the Godzilla films or "Lost in Space" as historically & scientifically trustworthy. Fomenko omits to mention the giants [not "local people"] found on the island of Britain, the war with King Pandrasus of Greece, the marriage of Brutus with Ignoge daughter of Pandrasus, or the oracle of the goddess Diana in Italy which prophecied the future imperial power & glory of Britain - the single detail in all this farrago that has been abundantly verified. Which is like writing a biography of JFK that omitted all mention of his visit to Berlin or of the Cuban missile crisis. One is surprised & disappointed to find no mention of the Greek prince Gathelos, Patriarch of the Scottish Gaels, & his royal bride Scota, daughter of the Pharaoh of the Exodus. At the very least, Fomenko should have proved the identity of Gathelos with Moses & Aeneas. If history-writing by lunatics is to be the price of the end of the Cold War, it's far too high.

Such is also the intellectual value of the myths about Christianity that are composed of shreds of various religions and are found complete in none of them.

 

[Hairy Tic]

To Timmeh:

I suppose you think that the 70,000 to 100,000 who saw the events of Fatima in 1917 are either liars or hallucinated?


I suppose that right off the bat you think this link Our Lady of Good Success is false, even though it was published before the event?.
There is no way to argue around something that accurately tells events centuries before they happen.

And don't try to compare it to some quack like Nostradamus. Nostradamus wrote vague nonsense. This is very specific. For example,


On December 8, 1634, Our Lady declared that, in the latter half of the 19th century, "His [the Pope's] Pontifical Infallibility will be declared a Dogma of the Faith by the same Pope chosen to proclaim the Dogma of the Mystery of My Immaculate Conception. He will be persecuted and imprisoned in the Vatican by the unjust usurpation of the Pontifical States through the iniquity, envy and avarice of an earthly monarch."
(This was a direct quote.)

In other words, the prediction was that:

1.)there would be a pope in the latter half of the 19th century who would declare the Dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Dogma of Papal Infallibility.
2.)He would be later imprisoned in the Vatican by people who wanted a king as ruler (instead of the Pope).

That is the ONLY way to read it. There is nothing vague about it. I am not "interpreting" in any way. I am just reading it for face value.


Now, guess what?

This happened exactly to Blessed Pius IX ( died February 7, 1878) when he convened the First Vatican Council.


Our Lady also stated (that around the time of the pope mentioned above): "In the 19th Century there will be a truly Catholic president [of Ecuador], a man of character whom God Our Lord will give the palm of martyrdom on the square adjoining this Convent. He will consecrate the Republic to the Sacred Heart of My Most Holy Son, and this consecration will sustain the Catholic Religion in the years that will follow, which will be ill-fated ones for the Church. These years, during which the evil sect of Masonry will take control of the civil government - will see a cruel persecution of all religious communities, and they will also strike out violently against this one of mine."

In other words,

1.) There will be a very devout Catholic president of Ecuador in the 19th century.
2.) He will consecrate the country to The Sacred Heart of Jesus.
3.) He will die as a martyr on the square adjoining this Convent [where this nun writing this lived.]

Again, I am not interpreting it or reading into it. I just read it at face value.

Well. . .

The "truly Catholic" president of Ecuador, Gabriel Garcia Moreno (1821-1875), consecrated the republic to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in 1873.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
So, you have either two options (As an atheist/materialist) :

Either,

A.) It was a lucky coincidence
or
B.) It was a massive conspiracy involving the pope, the Italians who imprisoned him, the president of Ecuador, and the indigenous people who killed him.

We Christians obviously know it was from God. But, you are a free moral agent. You can choose to accept the truth, or you can choose to believe whatever lie makes you the most comfortable.


Check it, Google it, whatever.

You'll see this is all legitimate.

You can either believe the brainwash of atheism, or turn to the True God.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wanna know something funny?

The skeptics and so-called liberal biblical scholars, prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, believed that early Christians changed the Old Testament to make it seem like Jesus fulfilled prophecy.

## As least as regards the scholars, that is a mistake. The text of the OT wasn't changed - it was applied to Jesus in hindsight. The discovery of the DSS is a matter of text, not of interpretation (which is the issue here). OT texts are applied to Jesus by the primitive Christian Tradition, & so, by the Evangelists, but the Prophets were not talking about Him: that is not how OT prediction works. He was not foretold by Isaiah or the rest of the OT - what they said about quite different subjects, was given a new, Christian, meaning once He was thought of as the Fulfilment of the OT quotations. Virgil's Fourth "Messianic" Eclogue gained him the title of "Maro, Prophet of the Gentiles", once that poem was applied to Christ, in much the same way as the OT is treated as predicting Him.

Well, the Dead Sea Scrolls (first discovered around the late 1940s) contain copies of every single book of the OT (except for Esther). They date from between 50-150 B.C., and they read exactly like the books we have in the Bible today.
In other words, the early Christians did NOT change them to fit the life of Jesus.

There is even a belief among skeptics concerning the writing of the Torah. They call it the JEPD theory, the belief (based on nothing but assumptions, guesses, and "internal" evidence of the text) that the author/authors used four different sources to write the Torah.

## I'll be kind, and call that remark not well informed.

The JEPD theory was first proposed as early as the late 17th century.

What is funny though, is that archaeology (which didn't even exist as a science until about 150 years ago) has virtually disproved this idea. Archaeology seems to support what is known as the Toledoth theory. (look it up if you care)

## Actually, JEPD is still going strong. The situation has become more complex, but the separation of sources into J, P, D (more doubtfully E), R1, & others, is still in use. That Wellhausen ignored Assyriology was a weakness, & understandable given the uncertainties as to how the cuneiform texts should be read. Others - notably the Assyriologist E. Schrader - had no difficulty in combining Assyriology with Higher Criticism.

Archaeology can disprove some things - for example, the discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder in 1882 disproves the validity of some objections to the reliability of the Book of Daniel; but it can't disprove the validity of literary judgements. Whether the story that Sargon of Akkad (c.2350 BC) was exposed by his mother & discovered by "Aqqi, the drawer of water" influenced the very similar tale about the infant Moses, is a matter not of historical but of literary judgement. A great deal of Biblical scholarship is a matter of literary judgement - this is not a confession of weakness, merely a fact.

And sometimes archaeology complicates the Biblical picture, with consequences for its interpretation. I've read D.J. Wiseman's book on the toledoth. That was before I discovered JEPD and made critical separations and judgements part of my approach to reading the OT. Critical judgements do not deny that the books are true - that's not an issue; they do often deny that the truth lies in what is narrated. To say that, on archaeological grounds, Joshua could not have taken Jericho, does not equal saying that "the Book of Joshua is not true" - it means that although the event related is probably, as it stands, a fiction, the truth, and the significance of the episode, lie elsewhere. It will be true in a different way.

To say that Israel & Jacob were originally different ancestor-figures, and that one of them - say, Jacob - was in due course made into the grandson of Abraham by the tradition, & that Israel was later identified with Jacob, is not an attack on the Bible or the truth of the Bible - it's an hypothesis to account for the facts of the text as we now have it. The text is just a text, from the Ancient Near East - it makes no claims for the historical accuracy of what it narrates. There is no reason to suppose it "must be" totally historically accurate -and there are far more interesting questions to ask of it anyway. It is Fundamentalists who are - & I say this with regret - obsessed with total inerrancy; so discussion on the Net often concentrates on issues which, at least for the understanding of the Biblical texts, are of very minor importance.

 

[perrfekt]

yeah.

A) this egyptology christianity is all a load of junk with no basis in fact, and
B) it appears some people cannot read. this subforum is for christians only and says so at the top of every theology page. either that or there must be some sort of mental incapacity to understand that two word statement.