Jesus and Osiris: How Christianity Adapted Egyptian Myths

The solar cycle, dying and rising gods, and the vulgarity of Christian spirituality

Image by Dmitrii Zhodzishskii, from Unsplash

Imagine that Christianity lasts for another thousand years and that after the flourishing of the story of Jesus’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension for those three millennia, another religion replaces Christianity, but only by adapting the key themes and presuppositions of that former religion to a post-Christian social context.

Now suppose that the priests of this post-Christian faith use their quasi-Christian mythos not to elevate the practitioners but to degrade and control them, so that the very question of whether the post-Christian religion is syncretically related to the worship of Jesus becomes taboo.

The fact that most Christians could engage in that thought experiment without seeing the irony in Christianity’s actual relation to the ancient Egyptian worship of Osiris, Isis, and Horus is astonishing.

Osiris, Isis, Horus, and Set

Unless you’re so emotionally committed to Christianity that you’d be willing to overlook a mountain of contrary evidence, you need merely consult some encyclopedia articles or books on ancient Egyptian religion to understand the essence of what happened with the rise of Christianity.

Osiris became one of Egypt’s most important gods, together with Isis and Horus, and he was indeed worshipped for roughly three thousand years, “from shortly before the Early Dynastic Period (c. 3150–2613 BCE) to the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323–30 BCE), the last dynasty to rule Egypt before the coming of Rome.”

Reflect, then, on the global impact of two thousand years of Christianity, in terms of how its theology and institutions have influenced other cultures. Now add a thousand years to that influence. That was the impact of the myth of Osiris.

But talking about Osiris as a lone deity is empty because the Egyptian trinity represents a convoluted dynamic that dramatized the Egyptians’ yearning for personal immortality. Osiris was the lord of the underworld, the judge of souls in the afterlife, and the god of fertility, resurrection, and the renewal of life.

The myth of Osiris is the story of how the first lord of the earth became the first mummy, and how, with the help of his partner Isis and their son Horus — and despite the betrayal of Osiris’s brother Set — Osiris conquers death and paves the way for everyone else’s immortality.

Set is jealous of Osiris’s success as a ruler of paradise, so he tricks Osiris into entering a coffin, which Set seals and hurls into the river. The coffin lodges itself in a tree, which quickly grows around it, and the king of that area orders that the tree be used as a pillar in his palace, unaware that Osiris’s coffin is held within it.

With the help of Anubis, Isis eventually finds the pillar and discovers that Osiris has died while trapped inside it. She brings the coffin back to Egypt, extracts the coffin, and consecrates the pillar with myrrh and linen. But before she can practice her magic to return the corpse to life, Set discovers that the body has returned, and he cuts it into many pieces and scatters them across Egypt to foil her plans.

Isis is undaunted when she learns what Set has done, and with the help of Nephthys, one of the other original gods who were born from the union of earth and sky, the pair find all the pieces of the corpse except Osiris’s genitals, which had been eaten by fish in the Nile. Like Doctor Frankenstein, Isis resurrects Osiris, and she turns herself into a hawk and beats her wings to draw Osiris’s seed into her so she can give birth to Horus.

As a result of his emasculation, Osiris can’t remain long on earth, so he takes his place as lord of the underworld and as judge of the dead. Meanwhile, Isis protects young Horus until he’s ready to battle against Set and restore order to the land.

The cult of Osiris

As the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE) summarizes, “Killing Osiris turned out not such a bad idea. He was resurrected through the magic of his wife long enough to impregnate her with [their] son Horus, who would later avenge his father and recapture the throne of Egypt. Then Osiris departed to the Otherworld to rule over the deceased, thus ensuring resurrection and the cycle of life.”

And as a World History article points out, “The kings of Egypt identified with Horus during life (they each had a personal name and a ‘Horus Name’ they took at the beginning of their reign) and with Osiris in death.” Pharaohs thus mummified themselves in imitation of Osiris, to ensure that they would be resurrected in Osirian fashion.

Moreover, “As Isis was the mother of Horus, she was considered the mother of every king, the king was her son, and Osiris was both their father and their higher aspect and hope of salvation after death.”

At first, the pharaohs were the primary worshippers of Osiris since they were foundational to Egyptian society, and they alone could afford to take the many practical steps to ensure their identification with the god and thus their immortality. But “While this venerable practice was originally extended only to the bodies of pharaohs, it came to be an accepted portion of the funeral liturgy. As such, Osiris was seen as an immanent part of the death (and assumed resurrection) of human believers.” Indeed, “deceased mortals came to be directly identified with the deity, to the extent that their names were appended onto the god’s name during funerary rites.”

Osiris and the Sun god

Another reason why Osiris can’t be discussed in isolation is that Egyptian religion took him to be fused with the sun god Ra. And both the Osiris myth and the solar cycle or Egyptian cosmology are metaphors for the self’s inward journey.

As ARCE explains the myth of the Celestial Cow, the sun god creates the world but decides to exterminate humanity for rebelling against him. He ravages the earth with a fierce lioness that emerges from his “tearful”, fiery eye, but he takes pity on the creatures.

Ra “stopped the massacre but refused to live more among humans. This led to his journey to the Otherworld, where Ra created the 12 hours of day by sailing the sky from the Eastern horizon to the West, illuminating the world and allowing all creations to flourish under his rays. Reaching the Western horizon, Ra then left the earth in darkness for 12 hours of night while he sailed the Underworld, illuminating the dead, destroying the enemies of creation, and regenerating himself in a union with Osiris, the god of resurrection.”

Thus, although the sun god ruled the sky during the day, Egyptians imagined the sun as struggling to regain its lofty stature while trapped in the underworld at night. As a New World Encyclopedia article points out, ‘the synthesis between Ra (the quintessential “over-world” god) and the dusky realms of death was accomplished by including a subjugating voyage through this realm into the mythic time line. More specifically, the sun god, who was understood to navigate the heavens each day in his celestial barque [or boat], was thought to descend below the disc of the world at [sunset] and to battle his way through the forces of chaos each night.’

In The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, the Egyptologist Jan Assmann lays out how Egyptian theology, cosmology, and anthropology eventually related to each other:

Because of the analogy between the sun’s course and the fate of the dead, on which the mythic organization of the sun’s course is based…similar concepts are also found in the older solar religion. At night, the sun god descends from the sky and into the netherworld as a ba [a personality or personal soul] to unite with his corpse. In the theological explanation of this process, Osiris was understood to be the netherworldly corpse of the sun god, so that it could be said of both the sun god and Osiris that his ba was in the sky and his mummy in the netherworld.

Indeed, Ra and Osiris formed what Assmann calls a “constellation,” meaning that they were understood only in relation to each other.

The Egyptians imagined the constellation in which Re [another spelling of “Ra”] and Osiris work together as embodiments of the two antinomic or complementary aspects of time, as a ba and a corpse, by analogy with the two aspects of the person in which the deceased led an eternal life…Ba and corpse would unite at night, the ba alighting on the mummy in bird form, thus ensuring the continuity of the person. In the constellation of Re and Osiris, this model was applied to cosmic totality as a sort of formula.

Assmann elaborates on the theological aspect of this underworldly union (with my emphasis):

The nightly journey of the sun…brought the sun god into constellations with the inhabitants of the netherworld, the transfigured dead. His light, and in particular his speech, awoke them from the sleep of death and allowed them to participate in the life-giving order that emanated from his course. But in this, the god himself experienced the form of existence of the transfigured dead and set an example for them by overcoming death. For in the depths of the night and the netherworld — and this was the most mysterious constellation of all — he united with Osiris, the son with the deceased father, the ba with the corpse, and from this union, he received the strength for a fresh life cycle.

The fusing didn’t stop with Osiris, though, since all the stages of Ra’s ascent and descent were dramatized theologically, as Assmann explains in The Mind of Egypt:

Each phase in the circuit of the sun is characterized by different constellations: birth by the mother, rearing by divine nurses, ascent of the throne by acclamatory worshippers, confrontation with the enemy by adjuvant gods, sunset as return to the womb. The model for correct dying leads to regeneration by way of a netherworldly union with Osiris, with a consequent rebirth in the morning from the primal waters that itself repeats the initial cosmogonic ignition, the First Moment. Each phase also has its own meaning and drama and requires specific efforts to ensure the triumph of the light. For time is not cyclical “in itself” [for the Egyptians]. Cyclicality is rather a cultural form imposed on the world by semantic and ritual efforts.

A World History article elaborates on Ra’s struggles in the netherworld:

Ra confers with Osiris on the deepest of [cosmological] levels, perhaps confirming which souls have been rightly justified before transporting them, and then traveling on through the underworld darkness toward the dawn of paradise. As the barge rolls through the underworld, it is attacked by the serpent Apophis (or Apep) who tries to kill Ra and prevent the sunrise. The gods onboard fight the serpent off with the help of the justified dead while, on earth, the living encourage the defenders through ritual ceremonies, channeling positive energies to strengthen those on board. Every night Apophis attacks, and every night he is defeated. Ra and his crew sail on toward dawn, the justified dead are delivered to their destination, and the sunrise was then seen as the sign that Ra was again victorious, and the Egyptians would see another day.

ARCE adds that, “When Ra appeared at dawn in the Eastern horizon, he took the form of a falcon, known as Horakhty, or Horus of the Horizon, the falcon who flies high in the sky (Horus = one who is high up.)”

As Ancient Egypt Online says, “Horakhty was depicted as a falcon or a falcon-headed man wearing the solar disk and the double crown, or the atef crown, and the uraeus (royal cobra).” This god further fused with Ra as Ra-Horakhty, “a combined god of Horus and Ra who represented the sun as it traveled across the sky.”

Thus, Horus isn’t just Osiris’s son in a biological sense, but is Osiris’s next phase insofar as they’re both parts of the solar cycle. Osiris is the defeated corpse of the sun, stuck in the underworld, but who magically rises again as Horus (theologically or mythically speaking) and as the triumphant sun god’s fiery ba or liberated daytime spirit (“cosmologically” speaking).

Comparing the Egyptian and Christian narratives

Let’s turn now to the comparison of Egyptian and Christian theologies. What, then, is the point of the Osiris myth? Cosmologically, it’s about the imagined phases of the sun, which are taken to be analogous to people’s longing for immortality. Osiris and Isis are personifications of those phases, the archetypal heroes who conquer death, restoring order and triumphing over disorder and evil (Set’s envy).

Resurrection is essential to that myth because the myth is structured around the cycle of the sun’s perceived ascents and descents. As in Zoroastrianism, the religious person’s task is to participate in this cosmic drama and to celebrate or facilitate the divine order with rituals and verbal reassurances. Just as Ra merges with Osiris, and Osiris and Horus with the pharaoh, the average Egyptian hoped to meet with Osiris’s approval in the netherworld and to ascend to the realm of the gods in Ra’s barque.

More esoterically, as a writer like Algis Uzdavinys pointed out, the philosopher or elite intellectual’s task was to understand the psychological meaning of these myths, and to prepare for physical death by dying spiritually to his or her lower self within life.

Judgment of the soul, escape from death through resurrection, personal immortality by mimicking Osiris, such as by mummifying the corpse — these were primary themes of Egyptian religion for some three thousand years!

What, then, is the essence of the Christian narrative? According to the New Testament, God’s son descended to earth and died so that his followers could live on after they die. Jesus sacrificed himself to save us from the consequences of our sin, or from our dire fate of losing out on immortality. In the words of John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”

Without going into the details for the moment, clearly the two religions are preoccupied with solving the same fundamental problem. The details of the myths are bound to differ, even if the Egyptian narrative impacted the Christian one, because that’s how syncretism works. As we’ll see, the god Serapis had already fused some Egyptian and Greek gods in the Hellenistic period, so what we can hypothesize is that there was a further fusion of the Egyptian gods with some heroes of Jewish scripture, such as the miracle-working Moses and Elisha.

More precisely, as Dennis MacDonald shows in his writings, the authors of the Christian narrative might have been engaged in mimesis in the sense of imitating earlier works, often to implicitly critique them with the discrepancies. Thus, the point would have been to create a Jewish version of the Egyptian god who had already been spun out as the various dying and rising gods throughout the Mediterranean. The Christian writers took the ancient theme of the triumph over death via a magical resurrection and dramatized it in a Jewish historical context.

The setting that inspired the Jewish syncretism was the Roman occupation of Judea, which led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the Jewish Temple right when Christianity got started, in the first and second centuries. This was evidently the nadir or dark “netherworld” of Judaism. Could Jews overcome this catastrophic defeat? Christians assured themselves that they could, by following the heroic Jesus.

Jesus wasn’t a pharaoh, of course, but a humble carpenter. Here, then, were the makings of a critique of Egypt’s elitism. Although the Egyptians eventually generalized their myths to some extent, they didn’t universalize them, which is to say they weren’t monotheistic in the zealous, exclusivist sense. Egyptians didn’t pledge to eradicate all foreign cultures. By contrast, Christianity grew out of the Jewish experience of being the long-suffering servants of a fearsome, all-powerful God.

Combining that resentment against the mighty empires that had ruled over them (from the Assyrians to the Romans), with Greek ethical philosophy which had formulated a cosmopolitan, universally judgmental perspective (as in Cynicism and Stoicism, via perhaps the influence of Buddhism), Christians could have turned to the Osiris myth not for fictional details — which any competent writer could invent at will — but for its theological concepts and narrative structure.

Moreover, Christianity spread in a “catholic,” universal, which is to say simplified or vulgar form. Whereas most historians think the Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the synoptic gospels because it’s the most theologically naïve, it’s possible for a more elaborate, even convoluted narrative to come first and to be later simplified for lower-class consumption. This is the purpose of Coles Notes, for example. Many of the myths’ details were likewise bound to differ, then, because Christianity’s function may have been to simplify Egypt’s complicated theology, which entailed leaving out many of the details that mattered mainly to Egyptians.

The signature of Osiris

Nevertheless, there are striking specific similarities between the two narratives and theologies:

• Jesus’s mother Mary was venerated as a miraculous, holy virgin, just as Horus’s mother Isis was worshipped as a goddess. The image of Mary nursing Jesus is drawn from the Egyptian icon of Isis nursing Horus.

• Jesus is supposed to have been born miraculously to a virginal mother, just as Horus’s birth is miraculous since Isis compensates for Osiris’s lack of a penis with magic.

• Christians believe Jesus needed to sacrifice himself to save us from original sin since the corruption that results from human free will prevents us from atoning with a judgmental God.

Likewise, Egyptians believed the moral order was divided between Ma’at and Isfet, between order and disorder or chaos. Isfet was represented by the god of chaos, Apophis or Apep, who is the huge serpent that tries to defeat the sun each night at its lowest ebb, near midnight. Apophis was born from Ra’s umbilical cord or was depicted as swimming in the primordial waters of chaos and eluding Neith before she used magic to create the natural order. Apophis is responsible for duality and conflict and was thus comparable to the serpent of Eden that provoked Adam and Eve to commit the first sin, corrupting Creation.

• Jesus as the incarnation of God, or his relationship as the divine Father’s Son, is like the relationships between Osiris and Ra, and between Osiris and Horus. Add the Holy Spirit, and you have the trinity of Osiris, Horus, and Isis. In both cases, there’s a family of gods that are united by a greater god, by Ra or the monotheistic essence of the Trinity. (Patriarchal Judaism and Christianity downgraded feminine divinity, whereas Egyptian religion ranked Isis and Hathor as the official partners of their male counterparts.)

• As the Gospel of John says, Jesus as the Logos descends to earth to prove with his miraculous signs that there’s a way out of death. This Gnostic aspect of Christianity, together with the “light shining in the darkness” metaphor, is grounded in the Egyptian solar cycle. The sun physically seems to descend so that it can rise again in the morning.

• Jesus and Osiris are both gods who live as humans. Osiris was depicted as the king of Egypt, whose body floated down a river in a coffin. As Ancient Egypt Online says, “The oldest religious texts known to us refer to him [Osiris] as the great god of the dead, who once possessed human form and lived upon earth. After his murder by Set, Osiris became the king of the underworld and presided over the judgment of dead souls.”

• Jesus is betrayed and effectively killed by Judas, just as Osiris is betrayed and killed by Set.

• Christians revere the cross of crucifixion as the symbol of Jesus’s triumph over death. Long before Christianity, though, Egyptians revered the ubiquitous symbol of the Pillar of Djed, which was associated in later Egyptian history with Osiris’s backbone. This was the pillar made from the tree that had grown around Osiris’s coffin, and its form in the hieroglyph looks like a cross, with stylized vertical lines at the top representing cut branches or segments of spine.

The Handbook of Egyptian Mythology, by Geraldine Pinch, says, “The Book of the Dead contains a spell to be spoken over a gold djed amulet hung round the neck of a mummy. This spell promises that the dead person will get back the use of his or her spine and be able to sit up again like Osiris.”

A World History article says, “The djed pillar not only symbolized stability in life and after death but also the enduring presence of the gods in one’s life. The symbol assured the ancient Egyptians that the gods were with them every step of their journey through their earthly travels and would continue with them after death. The djed symbol promised human beings that, like Osiris, they would rise from death to life and continue on to live eternally in the Field of Reeds.”

In Philosophy and Theurgy in Late Antiquity, Algis Uzdavinys says the djed came to represent Osiris’s “regenerative power.” Thus, “the royal ritual of Rising the Djed Pillar was aimed at the reestablishment of stability, of the cosmic order, and symbolized the rebirth both of the deceased pharaoh and of the initiate.”

This association with the pillar and backbone of Osiris helps explain Christians’ otherwise bizarre choice to revere the cross as the comparable symbol of Jesus’s regenerative power, since Jesus was supposedly resurrected in a tomb, not on the cross. A more fitting independent Christian symbol, then, would have been the empty tomb with the rolled-away stone.

• The Egyptian ceremony of raising the djed pillar is like the Christian symbol of Jesus carrying his cross, which Christians reenact in the Stations of the Cross, following Simon of Cyrene, who carried Jesus’s cross, according to Matt. 27:32.

• Women alone are present to mourn Jesus’s death (as in Mark 15:40), just as Isis and Nephthys mourn the slain Osiris.

• Jesus dies and is resurrected, as is Osiris, and both do so to save humanity from death. Due to cultural differences, Egyptians emphasized the magical, lurid aspects of the resurrection and the heroism of Horus in defeating Set, while Judeo-Christians emphasized the humility involved in a human self-sacrifice.

Still, both Jesus and Osiris suffer the agony of incarnation in a fallen world. Jesus suffered on the cross as a victim of Roman and Jewish persecution. And to repeat a crucial remark by Jan Assmann: the sun god himself “experienced the form of existence of the transfigured dead and set an example for them by overcoming death.” Again, Ra struggles and is tormented in his nightly journey beneath the disk of the earth, defending against the attacks of the serpent Apophis, the god of chaos who tries to stop the boat with his hypnotic stare.

• Both Jesus and Osiris do the lion’s share of the salvific work, while followers of the religion mainly follow their examples.

• Both Jesus and Osiris descend to the underworld. In Christianity, this is called the “harrowing of Hell,” and it’s stated in the Apostles’ Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and 1 Pet. 4:6 and Eph. 4:9.

• Neither Jesus nor Osiris tarry in their resurrected forms but pass on quickly to another world. The resurrected Jesus spends forty days on earth before ascending to the heavens, according to Acts 1:3 (like Osiris from the underworld in his union with Ra), while Osiris descends to the underworld shortly after copulating with Isis.

• Jesus is expected to return to defeat the forces of evil (as depicted in the Book of Revelation), just as Osiris returns as Horus, who defeats Set. Horus is the second coming of Osiris, just as each dawning sun succeeds the last one in the solar cycle. The “second coming of Jesus” hints, then, at a more elaborate cycle.

• Jesus preaches about the “Son of Man” who will come with his angels and judge sinners, separating the righteous from the wicked (as in Matt. 25:31–32). Osiris fulfills the same function in the underworld, and Egypt practically invented the idea of the immaterial spirit that can be morally assessed to determine its fate.

• The stations of the cross, which outline the Christian’s spiritual pilgrimage, reflect the solar cycle in that they amount to codified stages that are ritually repeated.

From a Catholic website: “The Stations of the Cross are a 14-step Catholic devotion that commemorates Jesus Christ’s last day on Earth as a man. The 14 devotions, or stations, focus on specific events of His last day, beginning with His condemnation. The stations are commonly used as a mini pilgrimage as the individual moves from station to station.” Likewise, the sun and thus Osiris and Horus move from hour to hour, each day and night, conquering chaos and restoring life and order.

• Christians believe they’re united with Jesus in rituals such as baptism and the Eucharist, as in Galatians 3:26–27: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” Indeed, the phrase “in Christ” appears 216 times in Paul’s epistles and 26 times in the Johannine literature. Union with Christ is part of the theological “order of salvation,” following faith and preceding adoption. Likewise, pharaoh and Egyptian initiates generally identified themselves in life and death with Osiris and Horus and thus with the sun god as it routinely demonstrates its power to conquer its death (the darkness of nighttime), and to bring itself back to life for a new day.

The Mysteries of Isis in the Hellenistic period

Even if you grant such comparisons, perhaps you’re wondering whether the two cultures ever came into contact to provide an opportunity for the Egyptian myth’s transmission to Judea. Alas for the defensive Christian, as it happens, there was such contact via the intermediaries of the Hellenistic period and the Mysteries of Isis.

The worship of Isis wasn’t confined to Egypt. “The conquests of Alexander the Great late in that century created Hellenistic kingdoms around the Mediterranean and Near East, including Ptolemaic Egypt, and put Greek and non-Greek religions in much closer contact. The resulting diffusion of cultures allowed many religious traditions to spread across the Hellenistic world in the last three centuries BCE. The new mobile cults adapted greatly to appeal to people from a variety of cultures.”

In the Hellenistic period, then, one of Alexander the Great’s generals conquered Egypt, and Isis was fused with the Greek goddess Demeter because of the similarity between Isis’s search for Osiris and the Greek story of Demeter’s missing daughter Persephone. Both goddesses rose to prominence outside Egypt, with the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Moreover, “Isis was one of many non-Greek deities whose cults diffused beyond their home lands and became part of Greek and Roman religion during the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), when Greek people and culture spread to lands across the Mediterranean and most of those same lands were conquered by the Roman Republic. Under the influence of Greco-Roman tradition, some of these cults, including that of Isis, developed their own mystery rites.”

Indeed, the separate Mysteries of Isis developed as the Greeks’ way of honouring the depth of Egyptian religion.

The Isis cult developed its mysteries in response to the widespread belief that the Greek mystery cults had originated with Isis and Osiris in Egypt. As the classicist Miguel John Verlsuys puts it, “For the Greeks, the image of Egypt as old and religious was so strong that they could not but imagine Isis as a mystery goddess.” Isis’s devotees may have adapted aspects of Egyptian ritual to fit the model of the Eleusinian mysteries, perhaps incorporating Dionysian elements as well. The end product would have seemed to the Greeks like an authentic Egyptian precursor to Greek mysteries.

Also, the Egyptian gods were known to have fused with foreign ones, as in the case of Serapis, who

was a Graeco-Egyptian god of the Ptolemaic Period (323–30 BCE) of Egypt developed by the monarch Ptolemy I Soter (r. 305–282 BCE) as part of his vision to unite his Egyptian and Greek subjects…Serapis was a blend of the Egyptian gods Osiris and Apis with the Greek god Zeus (and others) to create a composite deity who would resonate with the multicultural society Ptolemy I envisioned for Egypt. Serapis embodied the transformative powers of Osiris and Apis — already established through the cult of Osirapis, which had joined the two — and the heavenly authority of Zeus. He was therefore understood as Lord of All from the underworld to the ethereal realm of the gods in the sky.

Like the Mysteries of Isis, which were popular throughout the Greco-Roman world, “The cult of Serapis spread from Egypt to Greece and was among the most popular in Rome by the 1st century CE. The cult remained a powerful religious force until the 4th century CE when Christianity gained the upper hand. The Roman emperor Theodosius I proscribed the cult in his decrees of 389–391 CE, and the Serapeum, Serapis’ cult center in Alexandria, was destroyed by Christians in 391/392 CE, effectively ending the worship of the god.”

As for the fate of the Mysteries of Isis, “In 391 CE, the Roman emperor Theodosius I decreed that all pagan temples be closed and pagan rites outlawed. The worship of Isis continued, however, and her temple at Philae in Egypt remained open long after others had been shut down, destroyed, dismantled for other projects, or turned into churches. Philae continued as a vital site dedicated to Isis until the emperor Justinian closed it, along with other important centers of learning and worship in 529 CE.”

There was, then, a known mechanism of diffusion of the Osiris myth and the solar cycle from Egypt to the rest of the Mediterranean, including Judea, which occurred precisely in the few centuries leading up to Christianity (in the Hellenistic period). And Christianity directly terminated that influence by shutting down the pagan temples and banning those forms of worship.

Plus, there’s the fact that Egypt was practically right next door to Judea.

Moses and Akhenaten

Moreover, as Jan Assmann argues in Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism, Jews had already reflected on Egyptian religion, to the point of appropriating and claiming ownership of it:

Unlike Moses, Akhenaten, Pharaoh Amenophis IV, was a figure exclusively of history and not of memory…Immediately after the first publication of the rediscovered inscriptions of Akhenaten it was realized that he had done something very similar to what memory had ascribed to Moses: he had abolished the cults and idols of Egyptian polytheism and established a purely monotheistic worship of a new god of light, whom he called “Aton.”

Assmann’s book thus asks,

Was Akhenaten the Egyptian Moses? Was the Biblical image of Moses a mnemonic transformation of the forgotten pharaoh? Only “science fiction” can answer these questions by a simple “yes.” But mnemohistory is able to show that the connection between Egyptian and Biblical monotheism, or between an Egyptian counter-religion and the Biblical aversion to Egypt, has a certain foundation in history; the identification of Moses with a dislocated memory of Akhenaten had already been made in antiquity.

Syncretism, not a conspiracy theory

Finally, perhaps you’re wondering whether the early Christian writers directly copied from Egyptian or Hellenistic texts and deliberately perpetrated a conspiracy against their followers, plagiarizing the earlier myths and pretending their religion was original and the only true faith.

That entire issue of originality is a red herring. Ancient writers often wrote anonymously or in someone else’s name to associate themselves with a venerable tradition. There were no copyright protections in the ancient world. And large-scale orchestrated conspiracies are always improbable. What often happens instead is that history unfolds in a way that looks conspiratorial in hindsight, but that’s propelled more by incompetence, stupidity, greed, and other such commonplace vices rather than by evil genius.

No, Christianity began as a way of preserving Judaism in the face of the Roman Empire’s destruction of Jerusalem in the first and second centuries CE. What we know of today as Judaism was based on the rabbinic solution to that problem. Christianity was an alternative solution, a spiritualization of Judaism that made this defeated religion seem attractive by Hellenizing it, by combining Jewish themes with pagan ones. Those pagan themes derive largely from ancient Egyptian myths.

Specifically, if Jews could no longer please God with sacrifices at their temple, they could still undertake the inward journey that the Mystery Religions were popularizing. They could purify themselves and prepare for death, attributing this solution to a spiritual messiah character who could be shown to have paved the way. And these post-Jews could ignore Rome’s humiliation of monotheism, which had arguably revealed Temple-based Judaism as just another idealistic delusion.

The early Christians didn’t have to be spiritual geniuses. They needn’t have reinvented the wheel since Egyptian religion was chock-full of relevant, longstanding archetypes, dramatizations, and convoluted elaborations of various aspects of the dying and rising god mytheme. (Based on Jewish experience as the long-suffering underdogs, Jewish scriptures, too, included the idea of a holy suffering servant.)

But Egypt was the civilization that was famous for its preoccupation with the prospect of magically cheating death. Egyptians mummified their corpses. They built the pyramids, colossal tombs that were supposed to connect the heavens and the earth. Their religion featured the Osiris myth and the solar cycle, which have the same central themes as the Christian passion narrative.

The Vulgarity of Catholicism

If there’s a major difference between the two religions, it’s that Christianity’s vulgarity makes for only a cheap form of universality. The word “catholic” means “broad or wide-ranging in tastes, and universal in extent.” But the point of the Egyptian myths is that there’s real work to do to save ourselves from death. And by understanding that myths work as metaphors for existential truths, the Egyptians could fully participate in their theological drama.

By contrast, Catholic Christianity literalized and historicized their divine savior, thus privileging the orthodox institutions at the expense of ordinary Christians who are necessarily alienated from Jesus. Even if Jesus still somehow exists in a risen form that can dwell within the Christian believer, Christians would only be blaspheming if they claimed to occupy Christ’s role as the redeemer and as a liberated Son of God. Only a single alleged person from history could fulfill that role, namely Jesus, the only begotten Son of God.

Far from uniting Christians with their deity, then, orthodox Christianity effectively alienates and confuses its flock, which was a major cause of Europe’s eventual modernization and secularization. The hyper-vulgarization of the dying and rising god myth meant that Christians could worship Jesus without understanding how they could be like Jesus. The literalized myth became opaque and irrelevant. The Church had oversimplified the myths until they became more like political instruments for controlling the masses than inspirations for inner growth or enlightenment.

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