The Bible’s Nemesis
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 thrived on falseness. 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 systematic believes and practices. 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.
The “Rosetta Stone” was discovered by French soldiers who were rebuilding a fort in Egypt. The “Rosetta Stone” was written in three scripts that were used in Egypt at around 200 BCE. The scripts were 1) Hieroglyphics – that was used for important religious documents; 2) Demotic – which was a common script of Egypt; 3) Greek – which was the language of rules of Egypt at the time.
With this new knowledge all the ancient Egyptian texts could be translated. What was the most fascinating to translate was the; Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, and the Book of Thoth.
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 reassurance. But the sheer fact that even amid the murk’s 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.
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 BCE, 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 that never lived, but was a purely dramatic figure portraying the divinity in man. With this one revelation of lost truth the structure of historical Christianity topples to the ground.
The ineptitude of scholarly acumen in the face of the mountainous evidence supplied by the study of comparative religion, especially since the recovery of Chaldean and Egyptian antiquities, surpasses all belief and flouts all conscience. It has been exhibited on so colossal a scale, with consequences of the direst nature that the question whether ignorance or deliberate chicanery engineered the total suppression of truth that has glared its overwhelming obviousness in the face of studentship, inevitably raises to the foreground of thought. It must be assumed that both ignorance and disingenuousness combined to produce the catastrophic result. A thousand big and little items of comparative religion, many of them sufficient in their single weight to clinch decisive determinations fatal to Christian claims, conspire to erect a positively impregnable fortress of proof of Christian errancy. This mass of data has been blithely ignored, brazenly flouted, or damned with slighting notice, by the ecclesiastical regime which would lose its easy hold on the masses by honest recognition of the truth.
A noted present-day clergyman in New York City, the eminent Dr. John Haynes Holmes, has declared in a printed sermon, Christianity’s Debt to Judaism; Why Not Acknowledge It?, that Christianity drew its Founder from the Jewish people, along with five-sixths of its Bible, the Hebrew Old Testament, as well as everything that the character Jesus has spoken in the New Testament. Practically every word uttered by the Christ figure in the Gospels is to be found in the Mishna, the Gemara, the Talmud and the Hagadoth of the Jews, he asserted. But what now must be the astonishment of the eminent minister to be confronted with the mountainous evidence that all the material of both Christian and Hebrew systems has emanated from ancient Egypt’s crypts of secret wisdom! Truly the “Rosetta Stone” is to be the Nemesis of a falsity that has shrouded religion in gloom and obscurity and shot it through with insincerity and dishonesty for some twenty-four centuries.
It is a sign of the aberration in religious thinking now prevailing that the presentation of the case for the non-historic Christ will conflict with many persons of general probity who, even when measurably convinced that the Jesus story is a fable. As Pope Leo X [“What profit hath not the fable of Christ brought us!”] so glibly asserted, will still adhere to the persuasion that it is better to suppress the bald and revolutionary truth and prolong the "beautiful illusion" of the Christ’s personal existence. The original perpetration and now the perpetuation of blank falsehood concerning the fact of Jesus’ existence is argued to be morally justifiable, even highly good, on the ground that it has wrought a prodigious psychological and moral beneficence. However, this is, at bottom, to argue that Christianity can be better promoted by a lie than by the truth. The holy scriptures of that same faith that our only freedom comes from knowing the truth adjures us. While the world is hoping and planning to establish the better course of its life upon four fundamental freedoms, it might be well to remind ourselves that in a democracy there is a fifth freedom upon which the salutary influences of the four and all other freedoms are dependent and contingent. That is the freedom of all to be put in possession of the truth, to the farthest limit of its availability. In minor situations, it often appears both judicious and beneficent to withhold the truth. However, the justification is always secondary to larger objectives and temporary. Every situation must ultimately be resolved by a facing of the truth. Final issues ever demand that life be met on its own terms. The extensive concealment of historical truth at once argues something unlovely and sinister. A great world faith, soliciting the loyalty of millions, could offer no surer evidence of its integrity than an unbroken record of instant eagerness to examine and accept every sincere presentment of the truth. This work is given forth with no other motive than to present the available evidence beating upon an issue of transcendent importance. In the hurly-burly of human affairs, truth is not always welcome or pleasant. That is understandable. However, far more vital is the understanding that it must be faced.
Our attitude toward truth seeking is one of the supreme tests of our worthiness to take on the responsibilities and enjoy the liberties of a democracy.
