Christ in Egypt: Performing Miracles

[Robert Tulip]

Christ in Egypt: Performing Miracles

The chapter Performing Miracles, Walking on Water, Healing the Sick and Raising the Dead discusses the status of miracle in religion, demonstrating the continuity between Christian stories and ancient Egypt regarding the loaves and fishes, walking on water, healing and especially the raising of Lazarus from the dead by Christ.

Saint Paul said “Jews ask for signs, Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:22-3). Earl Doherty has pointed out that this is rather strange, because if Paul was aware of the story of Jesus he could have pointed to his miracles as evidence for the Jews, but he doesn’t. The ‘Christ crucified’ whom Paul preaches is a cosmic myth, not a historical man.

Murdoch looks at some of the main miracles to show how they derive from Egypt, which also had a strong emphasis on magic in its religious practices. The Egyptian virgin mother goddess Isis was widely worshiped across the Roman world as a wonder healer, in a time when the absence of scientific medicine led people to rely on faith for want of anything more reliable. Christianity had to displace Horus and Isis with Christ and Mary as primary wonder workers.

The miracle of the feeding of the five thousand through the magical production of abundant bread and fish is the only miracle that appears in all four gospels, and indeed it appears in two of them twice. It was obviously central to the Christian vision of Christ. Yet on the surface the story appears absurdly impossible. It is clearly some sort of allegory. As Tat Tvam Asi and I have discussed at some length, this miracle presents an obvious message of how the new age of Pisces provides a transformative framework for religion. I will discuss this theme in further posts. Murdock’s discussion of the loaves and fishes, and of the eucharist, shows how bread and wine figured as magic food in Egypt. Wine especially has a cosmic meaning, and Murdock notes that divinities who turn water into wine are traditionally sun gods. (p293)

Walking on water has a similar cosmic meaning, and Murdock discusses the old theme of the celestial river in this regard. This theme, especially the river of life, has clear association with the Milky Way galaxy.

The story of Lazarus presents perhaps the clearest borrowing by the gospels from Egypt, putting Christ in the role of Horus. Murdock explains in some detail how the names of Lazarus and Osiris are the same, how both are attended by two women, called Merta in the Egyptian book of the dead and the cognate names Mary and Martha in the Gospel of John, and how the role of Jesus directly copies the role of Horus. It is as though John is giving new life to Osiris, lightly concealed in a form suitable for universal belief in the common era.

These parallels must have been very obvious in the ancient world. It is a testament to the power of Christian double-think that this material has been so comprehensively forgotten. Yet, it sits there available for forensic reading, once we learn to take off the blinkers of dogma. .