Christ in Egypt: Truth, Light, Good Shepherd

[Robert Tulip]

Christ in Egypt: The Truth, The Light and The Good Shepherd

We are used to thinking of Jesus Christ as the name of a person. However, as Murdock explains in this chapter, Jesus Christ is a title. Jesus means Savior, while Christ means Anointed, so Jesus Christ means Anointed Savior. This is a mythical idea with clear roots in Egyptian belief from thousands of years before Christ.

WR Cooper says that the Egyptians called Horus the 'Beloved Son of the Father' and 'Word of the Father Osiris' (p309). Perhaps this will give a shiver of deja vu for anyone familiar with the Christmas Carol O Come All Ye Faithful, whose concepts almost all seem to have been written in stone in Egypt long before the Gospel era, as Murdock observes in long lists of titles for Horus and other Gods (p320 and 329).

As Murdock states, "many people remain unaware of these facts regarding the worship and religiosity of prior so called Pagan cultures, which ignorance creates a needless amount of disparagement and divisiveness... such an attitude has allowed for the massive and tragic destruction of cultures around the world." (p309-10)

Horus, Osiris and Ra were routinely understood as good shepherd and saviour. Murdock notes the interesting comment from Egyptologist Gerald Massey that the Egyptian term for mummy is krst, so "Christ the anointed is none other than the Osiris-karast" (p313). (Incidentally this illustrates Stuart Mason's point about how the Christ myth derives from both Osiris and Horus). Murdock checked Massey's assertion in Dictionaries of Hieroglyphics, since it is taboo for Christian theologians, and found that "Massey is correct in his contentions and did not innovate his transliteration and definition of the Egyptian words karas ... krst etc..." (p316). Such findings are routinely passed over in embarrassed silence by mainstream academia, due to their cowardly fear of the church.

Further, we find that the Egyptian krst links to the Christian idea of embalming or anointing with oil, as in the Christian motif of the 23rd Psalm, which is redolent with Egyptian resonance, as are the gifts of the three kings to the baby Jesus.

In fact, Murdock points out that the title 'Christos' is used 40 times in the Greek Old Testament, applied to David, Solomon and Samuel, signifying God's anointed one. The Egyptian link appears again, with Murdock noting that this 'Christing' or anointing, also appears with the term 'masu', equivalent to messiah, so that "Osiris and Horus were Christs and Messiahs" (p319).

Budge notes that Horus and Thoth are equated to the Word (p321) in ancient Egypt, an idea that carried over into early Christian belief, before the origins of Christian myth in Egypt was banned from discussion. So it is unsurprising that early Christian amulets showed belief in both the old Egyptian deities and the new faith of Christ (p321).

[tat tvam asi]

Yes Robert, but what about the alchemy? What about the New Age Aquarian supernatural mysticism? And what about the ancient alien astronauts for crying out loud? Murdock must not get it!!! What is she, stupid or something? lol

Good thing she has so many crack pot cyber stockers to put her in place and keep her in line...

[Robert Tulip]

What about the New Age Aquarian supernatural mysticism?

Hi Tat. Many readers find it impossible to tell the difference between scientific discussion of precession and supernatural mysticism. In this chapter, Murdock states "the 'lamb of God' ... at times refers to the Age of Aries and ... may be applicable to Horus 'the golden calf' after the end of the precessional Age of Taurus" (p331).

It is worth pointing out that there is no need to believe anything magical to understand this idea. The depiction of the constellation Taurus as a bull is very old, apparently older than the depiction of Aries as a ram.

There is no question that supernatural ideas entered the Biblical use of this zodiac symbolism. For example the association between Jesus and the fish taking on the symbolism of Pisces, conventionally understood in astrology as compassionate mystical belief, seems to appear especially in the Gospel of John as a zeitgeist for the Age of Pisces, with his continual focus on belief as the basis of salvation.

Murdock does not, as far as I am aware, enter any debate on whether such astrological myth could have any scientific basis, in the sense that the Age of Pisces could 'really' have been a time when Piscean attitudes were naturally dominant. I have long quite liked this meme because of its correspondence with the idea that the shift from Pisces to Aquarius is a shift from belief to knowledge. This involves the idea that the zodiac months are physically real temporal patterns which map to the ages as a natural cycle of time. None of this is scientifically provable. Certainly, postulating supernatural agency does nothing to advance such ideas.

This is actually a key part of why Murdock is excluded from public debate. The reflex modern hatred of astrology kicks in to attack any discussion of precession in myth, as another part of the rejection of astrotheology by both apologists and atheists.

[tat tvam asi]

With all of these crack pot cyberstalkers following her from place to place, preaching New Age mysticism, Alchemy, and UFOlogy, it certainly doesn't help to bring discussion of astrotheology and mythicism to serious audiences. But I guess that's just how it is. We're discussing ideas which are branded as fringe by some, so we get surrounded by all of the other fringe ideas out there in the world. But, the deeper question is whether or not we deserve to be stuck in the same crack pot with the rest of these folks?

I have to wonder, is it really all that crack pot to take a scientific standard approach towards the Gospels? How crazy is it to question whether or not Jesus really existed when there's no contemporary source evidence to support the claim? That doesn't seem all that crazy to me. It seems logical and rational to take that approach. Why in the hell wouldn't or shouldn't I question such a thing? And why in the world should I or anyone else - knowing full well how far and wide spread astronomical aligned megalithic structures are - expect to see anything other than deeply embedded astrotheological allegory in mythology and the religions which have spawned from ancient mythology? Maybe that's just plain freakin nuts, but it makes perfect sense to me. And all of these fantasy theories from the real fringe world of crack pot theories make very little sense...

[Robert Tulip]

With all of these crack pot cyber stockers following her from place to place, preaching New Age mysticism, Alchemy, and UFOlogy, it certainly doesn't help to bring discussion of astrotheology and mythicism to serious audiences. But I guess that's just how it is. We're discussing ideas which are branded as fringe by some, so we get surrounded by all of the other fringe ideas out there in the world. But, the deeper question is whether or not we deserve to be stuck in the same crack pot with the rest of these folks?

Tat, what it illustrates is that a new paradigm for understanding this material has not yet been articulated. There is a brilliant book by EO Wilson, called Consilience, in which he explains that new theories start out as plausible hypotheses, and then become persuasive due to their logical coherence, and finally become compelling, accepted as mainstream, when they are shown to explain the evidence better than previous theories. The current situation of religious ferment means there are many people who can see the old beliefs are empty, but few who can envision a new approach that is compatible with all the evidence. This is where I think Murdock is a brilliant pioneer. (btw I think you meant to say stalker rather than stocker.)

I have to wonder, is it really all that crack pot to take a scientific standard approach towards the Gospels? How crazy is it to question whether or not Jesus really existed when there's no contemporary source evidence to support the claim? That doesn't seem all that crazy to me. It seems logical and rational to take that approach. Why in the hell wouldn't or shouldn't I question such a thing? And why in the world should I or anyone else - knowing full well how far and wide spread astronomical aligned megalithic structures are - expect to see anything other than deeply embedded astrotheological allegory in mythology and the religions which have spawned from ancient mythology? Maybe that's just plain freakin nuts, but it makes perfect sense to me. And all of these fantasy theories from the real fringe world of crack pot theories make very little sense...

I'm looking forward to finishing and reviewing Earl Doherty's book on the christ myth, as it seems to me to set the foundation for a new paradigm in Biblical studies, by junking the rose-tinted glasses that saw everything through an assumption the Gospels were historical. But where I differ from Earl, and see Murdock as having a powerful insight, is in the question raised in CIE about the continuity between Christianity and earlier myth, which Doherty treats only in passing. This continuity is essential to understanding the natural evolution of myth.

A key issue here for this natural interpretation of myth is the Great Year as a framework for a new paradigm. Copernicus and Newton et al established the modern de-centered paradigm, but recognition that the wobble of the earth's axis is reflected in myth seems to me to be a way once again to restore the centrality of humanity in the cosmos, so that our cosmology is grounded in our human perspective, based on a long term understanding of the scientific nature of time.

[D.M. Murdock]

You guys are amusing! It's always nice to have an intelligent conversation about these fascinating topics, so once again I appreciate this opportunity very much.

I wanted to share with you what was one of the hardest nuts to crack - and one of the most fascinating, which is why I spent hours upon hours working on it. (Representing the culmination, of course, of years and decades of research. )

Osiris the Christ?

The particular nugget in my book Christ in Egypt that I nearly killed myself mining was the Christ-KRST comparison, as found in the "Truth, Light and Good Shepherd" chapter. Of course, this similarity between the titles "Christ" and "KRST" or "Karast," etc., represents one of the controversial contentions made by various mythicists of prior ages. Admittedly, it was not easy to find, but neither was the original key that allowed for the translation of the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the first place: To wit, the Rosetta Stone, excavated out of the ground in Egypt by Napoleon's troops. One of my sources, in fact, is the main decoder of the hieroglyphs and translator of the Rosetta Stone, the French linguist Champollion.

On pp. 313-9, I go into a detailed discussion of the Egyptian word transliterated as "krst," "karast," "krst, "qeres-t," "qrst," etc., providing the Egyptian hieroglyphs. As I say there:

Not only is Osiris the “Lord of Truth,” the “good shepherd” and “sin-bearer,” but, as the “lord of the tomb,” he was essentially also called “Christ,” since one Egyptian term for “tomb,” “funeral,” “dead body” or “mummy” is qrst, likewise transliterated as krst, karast, qeres-t, qrs.t and qrst.

I then relate the contentions about this issue made by lay Egyptologist Gerald Massey. As I'm sure you or I have stated elsewhere in this forum thread, in CIE I discuss the work of Gerald Massey, which has received so much interest in the past few years. In my article, I show that his work was indeed peer-reviewed by some of the most renowned Egyptologists, Assyriologists and archaeologists of his day. In any event, there are only a certain few contentions about the Horus-Jesus connection to which I must turn to Massey for exegesis, and these too can be upheld in significant part. (For a further discussion, see my article "Who is Gerald Massey?," an excerpt from CIE.)

Says Massey:

We now proceed to show that Christ the anointed is none other than the Osiris-karast, and that the karast mummy risen to its feet as Osiris-sahu was the prototypal Christ. Unhappily these demonstrations cannot be made without a wearisome mass of detail.... Dr. Budge, in his book on the mummy, tells his readers that the Egyptian word for mummy is ges, which signifies to wrap up in bandages…. [The word] ges or kes, to embalm the corpse or make the mummy, is a reduced or abraded form of an earlier word, karas (whence krst for the mummy). The original word written in hieroglyphics is ---- krst, whence kas, to embalm, to bandage, to knot, to make the mummy or karast (Birch, Dictionary of the Hieroglyphics, pp. 415-416; Champollion, Gram. Egyptienne, 86). The word krs denotes the embalmment of the mummy, and the krst, as the mummy, was made in the process of preparation by purifying, anointing, and embalming. To karas the dead body was to embalm it, to bandage it, to make the mummy. The mummy was the Osirian Corpus Christi, prepared for burial as the laid-out dead, the karast by name. When raised to its feet, it was the risen mummy, or sahu. The place of embalmment was likewise the krs. Thus the process of making the mummy was to karas, the place in which it was laid is the karas, and the product was the krst, whose image is the upright mummy=the risen Christ. Hence, the name of the Christ, Christos in Greek, Chrestus in Latin, for the anointed, was derived…from the Egyptian word krst….

Say what you will or believe what you may, there is no other origin for Christ the anointed than for Horus the karast or anointed son of god the father. There is no other origin for a Messiah as the anointed than for the Masu or anointed....

Massey's difficulty here when he declares, "Unhappily these demonstrations cannot be made without a wearisome mass of detail," is that of any serious scientific researcher, who must prove a thesis that has hitherto remained unproved. If all facts were readily available in neat little packages, without need for further investigation, examination and research, then we would already know them, and scientists, scholars and researchers would be out of a job. In any case, the problem here and elsewhere is one of things not necessarily represented concretely in the written record, clearly spelled out and readily available. Hence, exegesis is necessary. Indeed, the mere existence of the word "exegesis" reflects the problem of the scientist, scholar and researcher to come up with concrete theories.

Such tediousness is why I spent some eight pages on this subject! This information was not neatly laid out in an easily accessible text from an approved source. It was scattered here and there in texts that were difficult to track down, obtain and read from authorities in other lands and eras, in a variety of languages. Hence, this book has some 2,400 citations - talk about a "wearisome mass of detail!" Moreover, I had to learn some Egyptian on the spot in order to find the various relevant words, which I then cited meticulously. (Like everyone else, I am not omniscient and do not know every language on Earth, but I am fortunate to be able to learn what I need when I encounter a new one - and there are many new ones to encounter, with thousands worldwide.)

Citing authorities such as Champollion, Birch, Budge and others, I discuss how the Egyptian word krst and its linguistic relatives refer to the burial, embalmment and mummy, which is why this term krst is associated with Osiris, the god of the underworld.


Hieroglyph, signifying KRST or Mummy
(Champollion, Grammaire Egyptienne, 80)


(Birch, Dictionary of Hieroglyphics, 316)

As we discover, the mummy - the deceased as "the Osiris" - is anointed for burial, a sacred ritual essentially the same as baptism, both of which are for purification. The anointing of the mummy constitutes its purification in order to pass into the desired afterlife. The Osiris is anointed = Osiris is KRST. In my book I go into detail about how Osiris and Horus are often interchangeable, as one's death gives rise to the other's birth, with the cycle endlessly repeated. I also explain more about the purification of the dead, the baptism provided by the beheaded Anubis the purifier.

As there are in other chapters and subsections, there's a very interesting back story to this fascinating development, which is the history of the world's first Egyptian hieroglyphic dictionary, that of Dr. Samuel Birch - one of Massey's friends and mentors - who in the 1840s endeavored to organize and publish every Egyptian inscription in the British Museum. With great difficulty, including that there existed no hieroglyph font for the printers of the time, his book was published - in the back of the fifth volume of Bunsen's Egyptian chronology. Because Bunsen had died, interest in his work waned, and the volume went of print quickly. Scholars like Budge were compelled to visit the British Library in order to access what was clearly a highly valuable and important collection but which had been left by the wayside. We can see from this story how facts and theories can require a "wearisome mass of detail."

It was a great deal of work, but what I eventually dug up turned out to be fascinating!

[Robert Tulip]

The extraordinary thing here is that Murdock personally had to work with nineteenth century sources in order to prove this Egyptian source for the word Christ as the anointed one. This says much about the politics of Christianity and Egyptology, and how heavily basic research has been suppressed and forgotten. The research summarized in Murdock's post above is faultless. The only problem with it is a political one - that it proves an Egyptian source for the myth of Christ, and people find this emotionally repugnant.

The argument that academic research follows a path of linear progress is sometimes used to suggest that work from before the Second World War should be ignored. This line completely fails to see the power of the Christian backlash against the scholars such as Massey who conducted a rigorous study of the theological implications of the discovery of the hieroglyphics. The backlash starts from an emotional commitment to the core Christian belief that the Gospels are historical. It then latches on to any small error by writers who criticize the dogma and amplifies that as some supposed proof that Jesus was real in order to discredit and intimidate the entire area of study. There is also a dominant racist white myth that Greece is the 'cradle of civilization'. This Western myth finds the discovery that Greek thought stood on the shoulders of much older human cultures from Egypt and Babylon to be politically unacceptable. So, even in the scientific study of how Christ is a myth, leading authors such as Earl Doherty stick to a Greco-Judaean framework that basically ignores Egypt.

Many readers here will not know how intensely Murdock is reviled by Christian apologists for her work on Egypt. This revulsion is emotional, cultural, dogmatic and ignorant. The proof given above that the idea of Christ as the anointed one exhibits strong continuity with Egyptian belief regarding Osiris seems innocuous at first glance, but it is an important component of contemporary efforts to re-base understanding of religion on science rather than authoritarian tradition. Dogmatists are incapable of examining their own presuppositions, and assume that wide agreement to a proposition, such as that Jesus Christ was a man, is evidence for its truth.

The evolution of human psychology is a fascinating and complex topic. Belief in Jesus Christ is central to dominant popular theories of human identity. Showing that the evolution of this belief is actually completely different from common assumptions assists to put the evolution of psychology into a scientific framework. In showing that Jesus Christ is no more or less real than Osiris and Horus, Murdock proves how easily people can be gulled into false belief.

Embodying the myths of Horus and Osiris in the story of Christ, despite the ongoing supernatural content, actually served to support the emerging materialist assumptions of the ancient West. Popular culture in the mixing societies of the Roman Empire responded to a new myth that brought the old myths together on earth. Christianity cleverly aligned itself with the emerging materialist view that historical evidence was central to truth, putting spiritual beliefs into a historical story. There was no evidence available for Jesus, but when evidence was manufactured in the novels of Mark and others, using Egyptian myth as a template, it caught on like wildfire.

[tat tvam asi]

Looking back on the Christ myth it's so bloody obvious that it's playing off of the Egyptian religion of resurrection with it's mummification and so on. Especially when looking at Lazarus and Jesus. But as a Christian it never even dawned on me at the time. The Egyptian religion was one thing and Christianity was something entirely different. Some well read Protestants would readily admit that the name Jesus Christ is completely pagan in origin. The only solution offered is generally to revert to calling Jesus Yeshua the Messiah instead. But, once again, the name Yeshua can be just as easily broken down to pagan origins too when all is said and done so that's pretty much a dead end street for the strict Protestant sects. There's no possible way of excluding all pagan influence from the bible aside from walking to the trash can and dumping the entire book (Genesis to Revelation) in. I once joked about producing the "Paganless Bible", a book of empty pages. Just watch this poor sap trying: