The pick that struck the Rosetta Stone in the loamy soil of the Nile
delta in 1796 also struck a mighty blow at historical Christianity. For
it released the voice of a long-voiceless past to refute nearly every
one of Christianity's historical claims with a withering negative. The
cryptic literature of old Egypt, sealed in silence when Christianity
took its rise, but haunting it like a taunting specter after the third
century, now stalks forth like a living ghost out of the tomb to point
its long finger of accusation at a faith that has too long thriven on
falsity. For that literature now rises out of oblivion to proclaim the
true source of every doctrine of Christianity as Egyptian, the product
and heritage of a remote past. The translation of the Egyptian Book of
the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, and the Book of Thoth lays on the table the
irrefutable data which show that, far from being the first gleam of true
light in a world previously benighted in heathenism, Christianity was
but a poor and crippled orphan, appearing--after the third
century--without evidence of its true parentage and sadly belying in its
outward form the semblance of its real ancestral lineage. The books of
old Egypt now unroll the sagas of wisdom which announce the inexorable
truth that not a single doctrine, rite, tenet or usage in Christianity
was a new contribution to world religion, but that every article and
practice of that faith was a disfigured copy of ancient Egyptian
systematism. Christianity, it proclaims, not only did not register a
single advance in any line of wisdom or truth, but deplorably vitiated
and disfigured the beautiful structure of religion which it ignorantly
adopted and so wretchedly purveyed as its own alleged new creation. The
shadow that pursued the faith with the semblance of outward similarity
for sixteen centuries, now resolves into the substance of veridical
proof of original identity. The entire body of Christian doctrinism is
now seen to be nothing but revamped and terribly mutilated Egyptianism.
Through the chance stroke of a trench-digger's pick Christianity is
brought to book to face its Nemesis. The heathen parentage that it
strove so desperately to deny and the marks of which it so sedulously
endeavored to obliterate in the early centuries now rises from the dead
past to charge its ungenerous offspring with faithlessness and deceit.
And Christianity, as Edward Carpenter so frankly asserts, must now
acknowledge its parentage in a pagan past or, failing to do so, must perish.
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 which knew neither their true
origin nor their fathomless meaning. Long after Egypt's voice, expressed
through the inscribed hieroglyphics, was hushed in silence, the
perpetuated relics of Hamitic wisdom, with their cryptic message utterly
lost, were brought forth and presented to the world by parties of
ignorant zealots as a new body of truth. The only new thing about it was
the pitiable exegesis that inspired and accompanied the reissuance. But
the sheer fact that even amid the murks of ignorance and superstition
the mere ghost, shell, husk and shadow of Egypt's wisdom inspired
religious piety to extremes of faith and zealotry is singular
attestation of its original power and majesty. Only by acknowledging and
regaining its parenthood in that sublime pagan source will Christianity
rise at last to its true nobility and splendor.
There can be no question of this necessity on its part. Almost alone one
significant item enforces it. 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 Maries present, the
non-historical prototype of the incident related (only) in John's
Gospel. From the walls of the temple of Luxor, carved there at a date at
least 1700 years B.C., 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 nativity: the angel's pronouncement
to the shepherds tending their flocks by night in the fields; the
annunciation of the angel to the virgin; the adoration of the infant by
three Magi; and the nativity scene itself. Egypt had used the symbol of
a star rising in the east as the portent of coming deity for millennia
anterior to the Christian era. Egypt had knelt at the shrine of the
Madonna and child, Isis and Horus, for long centuries before a
historical Mary lifted a historical Jesus in her arms. Egypt had from
remote times adored a Christ who had raised the dead and healed the lame,
halt, blind, paralytic, leprous and all afflicted, who had restored speech to
the dumb, exorcized demons from the possessed, dispersed his enemies
with a word or look, wrestled with his Satan adversary, overcome all
temptation and performed the works of his heavenly Father to the
victorious end. Egypt had long known a Jesus, Iusa, who had been born
amid celestial portents of an immaculate parenthood, circumcised,
baptized, tempted, glorified on the mount, persecuted, arrested, tried,
condemned, crucified, buried, resurrected and elevated to heaven. Egypt
had listened to the Sermon on the Mount and the Sayings of Iusa for
ages. Egypt had known a Jesus who long antedated the Gospel Messiah and
who presents to the student some one hundred and eighty items of
identity, similarity and correspondence in word, deed and function with
his later copy.
But Egypt's Christ was not a living person. It would have been equally
fatal to Christianity if he had been. But the fact of his
non-historicity rises now out of the past that Christianity thought it
had sealed in oblivion forever, to strike the death-knell of a false and
spurious religion. The Gospels' "life" of Jesus turns out to be nothing
but the garbled and fragmentary copy of an Egyptian prototype who never
lived, but was a purely typal dramatic figure, portraying the divinity
in man. With this one revelation of lost truth the structure of
historical Christianity topples to the ground. It must be replaced by a
purely spiritual Christianity. In the splendid light of ancient Egypt
Occidental religion can now find its way from Medieval darkness to
sunlit truth. The Dark Ages can be brought to their dismal end at last.
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