So the big Carrier-Jabari debate went down last week. That all began with my article Some Problems with Modern Kemetic Mythology, which caught numerous catastrophic errors in the crank efforts of Jabari Osaze (who goes by Brother Jabari) to argue a confused conspiracy theory about how (we’re to understand, white) Christianity is a rip-off of (we’re to understand, black) African religion; and then the Christians destroyed all the evidence to cover that up; except for all the evidence Jabari can still find for some reason, all of which was preserved…by Christians. Here I will present a selection of what I presented in that debate with some hindsight discussion—and bibliographies, because Brother Jabari kept complaining about sources, even though I directed him and everyone to where they could be found if actually needed.

Brother Jabari Has No Coherent Theory

I tried multiple times in our debate to get Brother Jabari to explain what his thesis even was. What was he defending in this debate? And thus, what was I supposed to be arguing against (if I even disagreed with it)? He could never articulate any specific causal hypothesis. He hid under unspecified abstractions. And then jumped around all over the place between what I think can be isolated down to three unrelated hypotheses:

1. That the original Christians (the Jews who invented the sect that would later become a world religion) “stole” the core distinctive attributes of that new religion “from Egypt.” Even though Jabari could never specify what he meant by “stole,” and he could never specify exactly how they went about doing this or why, nor could he coherently specify what those “distinctive attributes” were, and in the end he lost the entire debate when he denied any such attributes as actually exist—like atonement theology and apocalypticism (more on that shortly).
2. That centuries later, when Christianity became an imperial cult in service to the state, it started destroying things or appropriating them—literally stealing them in some cases, e.g. taking Isis-with-Horus statues and moving them into churches and calling them Mary-with-Jesus statues, which totally did happen in the Middle Ages. But Brother Jabari never established this was in any way distinctive to Egypt: in fact those later Christian imperialists did this to all cultures, e.g. the destruction and appropriation of Celtic and Germanic religion is still documented in England today; even in our Holidays now—where do you think Easter bunnies and Christmas trees come from?
3. That thousands of years earlier, Egypt Practically Invented Everything, and therefore when any similar idea appears anywhere in the world, even as far away as Persia, it was therefore Stolen From Egypt. Jabari never presented any evidence for this—he didn’t even seem to understand how to, despite my explaining to him repeatedly how one establishes causal (and not merely chronological) relationships (because correlation is not causation). For example, he kept insisting that merely because we have earlier surviving records from Egypt that therefore every similar thing was stolen from them. He doesn’t seem aware that human religion spanned the globe for tens of thousands of years before writing recorded any of it. He also seemed incapable of understanding that humans can come up with ideas independently of each other.

Now, the main problem here (despite the secondary problem that Jabari proved none of these theories with any pertinent evidence) is that these are not related theories. We were there to debate the origins of Christianity—was Christianity created out of Egyptian ideas. The other two theories have exactly nothing to do with answering that question. And yet Jabari would jump around chronologically, and hence illogically. As soon as he was caught screwing something up (whether facts or logic), he would drop the thesis he was supposed to be defending, and leap to one of the other two theories (which we weren’t there to debate), and when he got nozzled on that, he’d jump to another one, and thus it became a standard Whack-a-Mole Game, where he would return back to the ground he lost, after retreating through (by then) two other unrelated hills to die on. And round and round it went. Uselessly. This is a modified Motte and Bailey defense, indicative of a crank.

For example:

Consider Brother Jabari’s complaints about Christian imperialists. No one at the dawn of Christianity (or even for two centuries after) did any of that. So this has no bearing on explaining the origins of Christianity. Nor would those originators have endorsed any of it. They would more likely have been so appalled the world even still existed three centuries later for the state to coopt their entire movement (and in the cause of fascism, the very thing they were inventing it to passively resist: see Not the Impossible Faith for evidence and sources) that they’d likely have abandoned their religion altogether as thereby proved false. Jesus was supposed to be the firstfruits of the end-times resurrection; the end was supposed to come in their lifetime. That it hadn’t happened for centuries (worse, now two millennia) later would have immediately disproved their entire belief system. Later Christians kept the movement alive only by reinterpreting it, to kick that can down the road, which was only possible to do because it had been around long enough to enjoy the benefits of lock-in; it wasn’t a new movement then. But it was when it started. And then their movement was a reaction to imperialism, a way to create communal, loving, non-fascist communities to survive within fascism without recourse to violence. The very idea that their movement would become a fascist arm of the state would have been soul-crushing. They’d have given up at once. But in any event, you can’t accuse first-century Christians for the crimes of fourth-century Christians. They weren’t the same people, and they didn’t have the same goals. The originators of the cult did not anticipate their imperialist descendants.

Conversely, as I explained at length in our debate—with examples—what happened two thousand years before also would be irrelevant to explaining those originators’ decisions. Christianity was originally a Jewish sect, even though within years it was expanded into a Gentile movement that eventually completely eclipsed and even in some respects erased its original Jewish basis (a far clearer case of destructive appropriation that, oddly, Brother Jabari had no concern for). When the Jews who created the Christian sect formulated their distinctive ideas, they were looking around at a world awash with, for example, dying-and-rising gods and heroes, and virgin-born ones, and cults galore with Baptismal initiations and Lord’s Suppers. They would have had no way of knowing where those ideas originally came from. Even if any of that had derived from Egypt thousands of years before, they would have had no knowledge of that fact. So when they lifted culturally popular ideas, there is no indication they had any idea those were originally Egyptian ideas, even if any had been. If anyone stole any of that from Egypt, it wasn’t the Christians, but pagans or Jews centuries before them.

So when we want to explain the origins of Christianity, we need specific evidence of causal direction in their borrowings. We can’t look at ten different cultures with dying and rising gods and say, “Oh, they stole only the Egyptian one.” Maybe they did. But you need specific evidence that that is what they did. As I showed in the debate, the evidence goes the other way: they appear to have stolen their ideas about resurrection generally, and dying-and-rising heroes specifically, from a syncretism of what they perceived to be Jewish and general Near Eastern ideas. Even were it true that those all at some far earlier point “came from Egypt,” they didn’t know that. Moreover, they ignored the still-extant Egyptian version (such as involving the dismemberment and manual reassembly of the hero, and the casting of spells—the performing of supernatural rituals—to revive him), and lifted instead non-Egyptian versions—which, even had they been stolen from Egypt, by then they had been changed, and the Christians preferred those changes (such as a crucified hero raised directly by God’s will, without ritual). So maybe someone else stole from Egypt (that remained to be proved). But it wasn’t the Christians doing that.

Brother Jabari constantly confused these three theories, and couldn’t settle on any of them. In any event, we were there to debate the first one only: the origins of Christianity. We were not supposed to be debating the origins of Judaism, for example (or of Persian Zoroastrianism, or anything else like that). That’s a completely different debate, resolved on completely different evidence. Likewise, we were not supposed to be debating the much later crimes of Imperial Christianity. I’d agree with most of that anyway. It just has no ability to explain the origins of Christianity.

How to Actually Do This

I gave an example of what Brother Jabari needed to show, where we actually can show the very thing he wants: that what the first Christians believed to be native Jewish ideas that they adapted into their own resurrection cult actually came from Persia. Though that was the Jews centuries before “stealing,” not the Christians; and they were “stealing” from Persia, not Egypt. The word “stealing” isn’t even sensible for this or most anything Brother Jabari was concerned with. Cultural diffusion is not theft.

This is why Jabari had to conflate completely unrelated eras: the first Christians destroyed nothing; every idea they took, they simply copied, leaving the donor culture still fully in possession of the original, and everyone could see that, so it wasn’t much hidden from anyone then; it was completely different Christians centuries later who tried destroying things to cover up any such borrowing. Though that wasn’t always their motive—mostly they did that to stop apostasy, returning to old ways; indeed the entire Inquisition suppressed “witches” because that was just code for “pagans,” i.e. people rejecting or spurning Christian belief and authority. But they did do some destroying to hide stuff. It’s just, as I noted, they didn’t single out Egypt for that treatment. For example, I survey evidence for the intentional destruction of data concerning the Hellenistic mystery religions in On the Historicity of Jesus (Chapter 8.4; e.g. two chapters Hippolytus devoted to the mystery cults were torn out and purged, and remain lost to this day). That didn’t single out Egypt. One can point to medieval records of burning down Germanic and Celtic temples and icons and sacred groves; and the destruction of the Christians’ own books later deemed “heretical,” even when they would have otherwise preserved more original data concerning the sect’s original form (which was sometimes the point).

One can try to preserve the word “theft” if one acknowledges it is only figurative: meaning, actually, appropriation, which means, not acknowledging its donor’s role in producing it. The Greeks did not “steal” math from Egypt even in this sense, for example, since they openly acknowledged their indebtedness to Egypt for what they did get. One can accuse the original Christians of this, except when you can’t. For example, they acknowledged their indebtedness to Judaism, which formed the bulk of their ideas. They did not acknowledge their indebtedness to the Hellenistic mystery cults, which formed the rest of their ideas; so one can say they “stole” those in this limited sense. The problem is that most of that wasn’t Egyptian. The entire cultural package arose from the Aegean region; it was a Hellenic memeplex, developed possibly in early Mycenae before any pertinent written records there. Even when this concept-package appeared in Egypt by the time Christianity began—for example, in Hellenized Osiris cult, as I explained in the debate—that was a diffusion from Greece to Egypt; that concept-package was not natively Egyptian. One might want to accuse the Egyptians of stealing there, although in that case it was foreign imperialists forcing the syncretism on the Egyptians, so not really a theft; whereas the Egyptian elements were acknowledged as such, so weren’t being “stolen” either. In any event, the mystery cult package wasn’t Egyptian. So stealing it wasn’t stealing from the Egyptians. Maybe had the Christians stolen the Egyptian version of that, you could loosely say they were stealing from the Egyptians, but the pieces they took from that package were culturally ubiquitous, not distinctively Egyptian. They were the parts that didn’t originate in Egypt.

Which is not to say absolutely nothing of early Christianity came from Egypt (even at its origin or in its later development of founding myths); nor is it to say anything “couldn’t” have (Egypt was right next door and well traveled, and had lots of accessible information still). But nothing fundamental did. And what few bits and bobs may have, you still have to prove. You need to show the causal direction really was such, and (ideally) you need to explain how that happened: what did the first Christians do to “get” that stuff; and why did they do that? Brother Jabari couldn’t even do that much. A good, solid case for any such bit or bob has yet to be made. Even my own suggestions over the years have been weak tea (e.g., see The Empty Tomb, p. 159). Which at most demonstrates an awareness of Egyptian models, but not any especial concern to build from them.

For an example of what I mean, see Tim Brookins, “Dispute with Stoicism in the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus,” Journal of Greco-Roman Christianity and Judaism 8 (2011–2012), pp. 34–50, which surveys how, maybe, an Egyptian parable came to be retooled by Luke into the Parable of Lazarus. Brookins points out the connection with the Egyptian version might be too weak to make that case. And even if we accepted it did derive in some way from Egypt, that doesn’t help us much—this is not a component of the origin of Christianity, but just one little thing one later auteur emulated to make a point-of-the-moment; and the evidence suggests the causal direction was into Judaism first, as common folklore, such that even that auteur may have had no idea it originated in Egypt when he adopted it. To him it may have just been a Palestinian parable he heard or read once. Like I said, weak tea.

The Persian Case

But, by contrast, consider the Persian connection. Persian Zoroastrianism has always held, since records for it began, to several unusual doctrines that ended up defining popular Judaism:

• The whole world order can be explained as resulting from a cosmic war between a Good God and an Evil One.
• Prophecy centrally drives the religion’s religious expectations, predicting in particular that…
• A “Messiah” will come in the future and fix everything, in particular…
• Defeating the “Evil One” once and for all…
• …at a final cosmic Apocalypse…
• Bringing a Resurrection of all people all at once…
• And destroying the world and replacing it with an eternal paradise for all.

You can check the Old Testament and notice that none of these ideas existed in Judaism before Persian influence (which began during the Hebrew exile in the 6th century B.C.); yet they all appear in Jewish texts soon afterward. And we have early attestation of these being Zoroastrian beliefs, without awareness of them yet having become Jewish beliefs (e.g. such details were recorded by the 4th century B.C. historians Theopompus and Eudemus, in quotes preserved in later anthologies). And of course, this is all confirmed in the Zoroastrian scriptures themselves, which are written in a dialect distinctive of Iranian culture prior to 1000 B.C. These three evidences together triangulate to establish the conclusion that the causal direction was, indeed, Persian —> Jewish, and that it occurred, indeed, sometime across the 6th–5th century B.C.

The most important component of this empirical argument is the peculiarity of the Persian memeplex: nowhere else in history (from any relevant period or place) can we find any of those listed components, much less all of them together. Many religions have warring gods, good and evil; none before this explained the entire world as an ongoing war of such kind, with two supreme deities duking it out, explaining all the world’s continuing ills. Many religions have prophecy; none before this made prophecy (and its interpretation) the central driving component of the entire religion. For example, pre-Persian Judaism has prophecy (and arguably even more avidly than surrounding cultures already), but it isn’t the central component of the religion until after Persian influence, as we see in the Old Testament, where as you move from early to later books, the prophetic books come to dominate over the historical ones; and the craze to interpret those prophecies increasingly became a central occupation of the entire religion. Many religions, likewise, have apocalypses (predicted catastrophes), but none had until then a Final Cosmic Apocalypse, ending the whole world. Many religions have prophesied heroes; but none have the idea of a final cosmically triumphant Chosen One who will set right the entire world once and for all (a concept of linear time that is unusual culturally; most religions then adopted cyclical models of time). Many religions had some idea of resurrection (of gods or even ordinary people), but none had this bizarre idea of all human beings being resurrected at the final hour, at the will of God Himself. And many religions had conceptions of eternal paradises for the blessed dead; but none before then imagined the existing world would be torn down and replaced with one.

So here we have good evidence—because it is specific and peculiar, and triangulated with corroborating evidence of time and direction—of a causal appropriation: Judaism most definitely borrowed this memeplex from Persia. It did not get it from anywhere else. And it did not simply “become Zoroastrianism” (it borrowed only these things, not the rest, and altered or merged them with existing Judaism, to create a unique amalgam, which is how syncretism works the world over). This is the kind of evidence Brother Jabari needs for Egypt. But he never could present any. One can certainly show Judaism adopted Egyptian ideas—circumcision and pork taboo, for example (although the latter can be questioned)—but none of those became core to Christianity (which soon abandoned circumcision and pork taboo); nor were they recognizably Egyptian to the originators of Christianity (by their day, they could easily have had no idea that those features came from Egypt). Still, one could argue there are things that followed the causal pathway Egyptian —> Jewish —> Christianity, just as we can for Persia. It’s just that Jabari didn’t show any such evidence, nothing capable of proving that; and it wouldn’t help his thesis even if he did. Because Christians were no more aware of the ideas they were borrowing from Judaism were originally Persian than that they’d have been aware any were originally Egyptian. So “stealing” is no longer a relevant descriptor. As far as the Christians knew, these were Jewish ideas, and they were borrowing from their own native Jewish traditions—and acknowledged it as such. They weren’t being sneaky about it.

Bibliography on Persian Influence on Judaism:

• Richard Carrier, Not the Impossible Faith, pp. 85–99, 119–24.
• Werner Sundermann, “Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 18.2 (2008), pp. 155–65.
• Alan Segal, “Iranian Views of the Afterlife and Ascent to the Heavens,” Life after Death: A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion (2004), pp. 173–203.
• Lloyd Applegate, “Zoroastrianism and Its Probable Influence on Judaism and Christianity,” Journal of Religion & Psychical Research 23.4 (2000), pp. 184–96.
• John Hinnells, Zoroastrian and Parsi Studies (2000), esp. pp. 29-92.
• Robert Zaehner, The Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism (1961), esp. pp. 20–21, 316.
• Albert De Jong, Traditions of the Magi: Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (1997).
• Mary Boyce, Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (2000).
• Mary Boyce, A History of Zoroastrianism, 4 vols. (cf. vol. 1, 1975, esp. 325–30; vol. 3, 1991, esp. pp. 367–68 and 392–440).

Doing This with the Hellenic “Mystery Religion” Memeplex

That would be an example of indirect cultural diffusion. Later here I’ll go more into models of cultural diffusion and the need for specific evidence to tell them apart. But to continue the point from above, we can then look at what it takes to prove direct diffusion. The example I gave in the debate is the Hellenic Mystery Cults. Christian apologists have long sought to deny any influence of those on the formation of Christianity, but they do so with the same kind of semantic games Brother Jabari would play, such as “redefining” something in a way meant to conceal the reality of what’s at issue. For example, Christian apologists will redefine the word “resurrection” so that only Jesus gets to be resurrected; all other rescues from death get erased from history with such legerdemain as saying a different body or method of restoring life doesn’t count. But being dead and then no longer being dead (whether in a new or restored body) is the same thing, It does not matter what you call it; the diversity in mechanics imagined are irrelevant. Likewise baptism, or any other thing—even the word “borrowed” will be toyed with to make it go away.

But once you shunt aside all that apologetic rhetoric, word games and all, what you have left is an unmistakable fact: Christianity is a Jewish mystery cult (On the Historicity of Jesus, pp. 96-108, 168-73). When Christianity arose, there were nearly a dozen Mystery Cults all across the Mediterranean, and they all shared a common “package” of features. Or if not all of them, certainly most; we often lack evidence to be sure in every case, but the trendline suggests it was indeed very nearly if not actually all. In each case that package would be married and thus adapted to and merged with a local ethnic religion—so all the parts distinctive of any one of those cults come from that ethnic source, whereas all the parts common to all, across all the ethnic versions, came from elsewhere. And that “elsewhere” appears to be Greece (or at least Greek-speaking peoples of the Aegean region). As with Persian influence on Judaism, key evidence is that these ideas only appear in non-Greek cultures (and rather rapidly) after Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Middle East (in the 4th century B.C.).

This cultural package had already spread across the Mediterranean centuries before Christianity arose, and so it cannot be assumed its inventors knew where this package came from, either. For they would see it in almost a dozen different cults; including the Isis-Osiris cult of Egypt (which by then had been Hellenized by this imported package). But that would have been to them one of a dozen or so examples; it would not have been evident where the “package” came from, only that it was everywhere.

Like Judaism’s adoption of new core ideas from Persian Zoroastrianism, we can adduce specific evidence of Christianity’s adoption of new core ideas from Hellenic Mystery Cult. Which does not then mean “from Greece” however, because the memeplex that is “Mystery Cult” was in their day no longer distinctively Greek. It neither was solely located in Greece (the cults were now everywhere; literally in every region of the Roman Empire, and all around Judea, in every direction), nor was it culturally Greek. While it represented Hellenization, and thus an infusion of Greek culture, each cult remained distinctively localized to its central ethnic religion. For example, the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris were recognizably Egyptian, everywhere it was (which by then was literally everywhere in the Empire; certainly in the Near East, while conquering the West sometime in the same century). The Greek components were not labeled as Greek, any more than the Persian elements in Second Temple Judaism were labeled as Persian. And because it looked like it was in every major ethnic group, it looked more like some cosmic universal thing, and thus not an artifact of any one culture. Which actually would have lent to the idea that God intended the Jews to have one. If he gave one to every other group, and their popularity was astounding (and it was), surely God meant there to be a Jewish mystery cult, too. And to make one, all one had to do was grab the package common to all of them, and merge it and alter it to suit a Jewish model. Greek bones; Jewish flesh.

Thus, all that the first Christians would have been aware of was the fact that their new religion was Jewish, and insofar as it added anything at all new to that, it was something everywhere and thus “universal,” and thus in their eyes arguably from their universal God, and thus warranting no credit to any specific culture. Because as they would have seen it, it was a feature of the universe; and their God made that universe. They could, of course, attribute it to Satan instead (and later Christians even did). But one could also see it as a message from God, particularly if one read the Jewish scriptures that way; if they “saw” it there, that would be all they’d need to believe it was. Because the Jews who created Christianity sincerely believed it was the inspiration of God himself that allowed them to have those “eureka” moments reading out new things hidden in scripture. And so they could easily have seen the mystery elements they would embrace from the universal package as the hidden truths of God (as Paul pretty much says), and only the diverse ethnic trappings of each cult as Satan’s corruption of God’s intended package (which was, in fact, the very argument of Justin Martyr). So if you purified the seemingly-universal package into one conformed to the will of God as found in Scripture, you’d have the One True Religion.

And that is what the evidence shows most likely happened. As with Persian influence on Judaism, when we subtract everything distinctively Jewish from early first-century Christianity, what we have left over matches most (if not all) the other Mystery Cults surrounding them at the time. That is not even remotely probable as a mere coincidence. The most probable explanation (by far) is direct cultural diffusion, from the Mystery Cults in their general universal framework, into an innovative sect of Judaism, forming “Christianity.” And this is proved by the number of specific peculiarities. They definitely predate Christianity; and they definitely surrounded it geographically. And other examples of this kind of diffusion (from Hellenism into Judaism; and on past models, Persia into Judaism) are abundant. So there’s no real case to make against it.

Christianity as the Jewish Mysteries

The chronological, geographical, and causal evidence of cultural diffusion (and thus of “influence” or “borrowing”) thus matches the following, which has no particular place for Egypt specifically:

The world the first Christians were looking at in the early first century A.D. literally surrounded them with cultures associated with mystery cults or similar resurrection or savior cults, wherein Egypt is not all that distinguishable:

Egypt was not the center of attention. Instead, they saw this world…

Bacchic Mysteries (Bacchus / Dionysus)	Original Hellenistic cult (many influences, predates writing)
Eleusinian Mysteries (Demeter & Persephone)	Combined Hellenistic elements with Phoenician / Mesopotamian
Mysteries of Adonis-Tammuz	Combined Hellenistic elements with Syrian / Mesopotamian
Mysteries of Attis & Cybele	…with Phrygian (Northern Asia Minor)
( Cult of Romulus ) *not a “personal” savior	…with Roman
Mysteries of Hercules-Melqart	…with Phoenician (on Israel’s Coast)
Mysteries of Baal-Dolichenus	…with Syrian
Mysteries of Zalmoxis	…with Bulgarian
Mysteries of Mithras (Mithraism) *not a dying god	…with Persian
Mysteries of Isis & Osiris	…with Egyptian
Christianity	…with Jewish

And thus Christianity was an assembly of what were then Jewish ideas with what were everywhere the common elements of all these diverse cultural adaptations of the mysteries:

Greek Element	Jewish Element
Savior Son / Daughter of God	Apocalyptic & Messianic Resurrection Cult
…who faces an ordeal by which s/he obtains victory over death…	…based on blood-atonement (substitutionary sacrifice) …
… which s/he shares with those initiated into their cult, granting individual salvation …	… Jewish Passover and Yom Kippur …
… to a universal brotherhood …	… through Jewish kingdom-covenant theology …
… through a baptismal initiation and communal meal.	… using a baptismal initiation and communal meal.

One can find in Egyptian religion elements of some of these things, but to Christians, none of this was Egyptian. In their time, everything on the left column was universal, found across countless cultures, and thus not distinctively Egyptian; while everything on the right column was distinctively Jewish, and thus also not distinctively Egyptian. In fact, everything on the right column is peculiarly not Egyptian, and yet sits at the absolute core of Christianity, such that if you removed that column from its description, Christianity would cease to exist as a religion (certainly any version prior to modernity).

That Christianity is a mystery religion, and just a Jewish version of one, I will not belabor here. But you can find demonstrations, evidence, and scholarship on it in Historicity, pp. 96–124. And for demonstrations of the elements here listed (that happen to be in common with Christianity yet predate it):

Bibliography on the Shared Features of Mystery Religions:

• Jaime Alvar, Romanising Oriental Gods: Myth, Salvation and Ethics in the Cults of Cybele, Isis and Mithras (Leiden: Brill, 2008), esp. pp. 396–97, 420–21.
• Petra Pakkanen, Interpreting Early Hellenistic Religion: A Study Based on the Mystery Cult of Demeter and the Cult of Isis (1996), esp. pp. 65–83.
• Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic: Empedocles and Pythagorean Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 261–69.
• Marvin Meyer, ed., The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts (1987), esp. pp. 225–27, 252–54.
• Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (1963).

Rather, what is important now is to discuss what was in fact Christianity—what lay at the core of it, what were its fundamentals, distinguishing it from any other religion, particularly other mystery cults, and Judaism.

What Was Christianity?

Christianity has evolved a lot since its inception. There are such bizarre things now as Mormonism, Christian Science, Process Theology, Aryan Christology (not to be confused with Arian Christology), even Christian atheism. What is “essentially” Christian is today extremely watered-down and nebulous. Even what many modern Christians want it to be (like adherence to a Nicene Trinitarian creed), it isn’t (plenty of non-Trinitarian Christianity abounds), and wasn’t (no such concept as the Trinity existed at its founding or in its first century of existence, and it only became central by fascist operations of state force in the 4th century A.D.: see Bart Ehrman, How Jesus Became God).

But what we are supposed to be talking about is the origins of Christianity. What, fundamentally, was it when it began, and perhaps for at least a couple hundred years? And the answer to that question remains the answer for the bulk of Christianity still today. It is the thing that Christianity is most particularly known for, and that most particularly sets it apart from other religious systems (that weren’t fundamentally influenced by it, like Hinduism or Buddhism or Taoism—as opposed to Islam, which can be described as, really, a sect of Christianity; and Judaism, which Christianity can be described as, really, a sect of).

Those core features are these:

• It is Fundamentally Apocalyptic: God promised to end the world and rescue only the elect, and that’s a problem you need to solve. This meme is Judeo-Persian. No such idea exists in ancient Egypt.
• It is Fundamentally Messianic: A prophesied “Savior” will bring you that promised solution. This is also Judeo-Persian. No such idea exists in ancient Egypt.
• It is Fundamentally Based on Blood-Atonement: The Savior must be killed to atone for all the world’s sins. This might have been a fringe pre-Christian Jewish idea, but it became the central distinguishing element of Christianity as a sect to claim (as early as the 30s A.D.) that this had already happened (while Judaism continued relying on blood-atonement animal sacrifice for the same purpose, cf. Hebrews 9, until the destruction of its temple cult in 70 A.D. forced a re-think). This is also not Egyptian.
• It was Built Around a Particular Concept of Baptism and Communion: Early Christianity operated through a singular baptismal initiation and a repeated meal-ritual communion with their Savior. This appears to be Judeo-Greek, merging Jewish water and meal rituals with a common element of mystery cult in using baptism as initiation into communion with their Lord and Savior, followed by Lord’s Meals where this communion was maintained, in community with other initiates, by a regular ritual consumption of food that in some fashion represented continued unification with that Lord. There is no Egyptian precedent for this. It had water and food rituals; but none with this kind of function. And the elements of the Christian adoption of this function that are not common to all cults are particularly Jewish (based on Passover and Hemerobaptism), not Egyptian.
• Its Core Myth Centers Crucifixion, not Dismemberment: “We preach Christ crucified.” The Egyptian dying-and-rising savior myth, before and after Hellenistic influence, was of dismemberment (of Osiris) and manual reassembly (by his wife-sister, Isis). Christianity did not adopt this. Instead, they chose a humiliated-and-crucified savior model, which has closer parallels in Mesopotamia. The Sumerian goddess Inanna is the only other resurrected god who was humiliated and crucified (see Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer: Thirty-Nine Firsts in Man’s Recorded History, 3rd ed. (1981), pp. 154-67). Although the humiliation element most likely is Jewish, reifying a repeated Jewish prophetic refrain over the Jews being humiliated as a people and rising nevertheless triumphant; and crucifixion was a common mode of execution across the Middle East even when the Romans adopted it, and it had a Jewish scriptural basis before Christians took it up (Historicity, pp. 61–62, 73–76, 143, 408).
• Its Core Belief Centers Kingdom by Covenant: Christianity was at its inception (and for most Christians still today) an initiation into a covenant with God that secures our inheritance to rule a promised future kingdom. This is not an Egyptian concept; it appears to be natively Jewish. The “New” Covenant replaced the “Old” one. And it involved inheriting a future supernatural kingdom through a contract with God (e.g., 1 Corinthians 15:50; 1 Corinthians 6:9; Galatians 5:21; 1 Corinthians 11:25; 2 Corinthians 3:6-8; 1 Thessalonians 2:12; Hebrews 8).

Needless to say, this is Christianity. And none of it is Egyptian.

The most central element of Christianity among all of this is the idea of sin-atonement sacrifice, particularly human sacrifice. The idea of blood atonement sacrifice (animal or human) is Euro-Mesopotamian, not Egyptian. Egypt only performed retainer sacrifice: killing servants to attend their deceased masters. They had no particular concept of atonement sacrifice: that bloodletting in general, or human sacrifice in particular, could clear anyone’s sins in the afterlife, or gain salvation from the gods for one’s people. But this concept appears across Europe and Mesopotamia. For example, Roman culture had a ritual called devotio, whereby a voluntary human sacrifice could be made by an army’s general to secure its victory and hence save his people. The Greeks had various sacrifices for purging the anger or curses of gods after sins or crimes. The Mesopotamians employed human and animal sacrifice to similar ends. The Jews evidently inherited and adapted their own form of this concept, using animals as substitutes for humans. The entire Isaac myth became an etiology for the Yom Kippur, the central sacrifice of Jewish temple cult, atoning for all Israel’s sins so they’d be accepted into the future paradise (see Historicity, pp. 143–46, 209–14). The Passover also celebrates a similar ritual, whereby the blood of sacrificed animals protects the Jews from entities coming to kill all firstborn sons. The central and distinguishing teaching of Christianity is that Jesus’s death replaces these (Hebrews 9; 1 Corinthians 5:7; Romans 3:25; and most importantly, 1 Corinthians 15:3).

Brother Jabari never presented any evidence any of these ideas had relevant parallels in ancient Egypt. He waffled instead, trying to claim things like that the existence of food rituals of any kind at all meant the same thing as Lord’s communion rituals. And in the end, he insisted none of the things I listed were actually central to Christianity, claiming I made all that up and had no sources, even daring me to find any of this in the letters of Paul! It is, of course, all throughout the letters of Paul. Not only in the same chapter he tried to quote from to argue otherwise (1 Corinthians 15, which mentions almost every single element), but even the very part of that chapter that he quoted!

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to [various apostles, i.e. “messengers,” calling them into service; cf. Romans 10:14-16].

1 Cor. 15:3–11

Died for our sins. Blood atonement. The very first thing Paul lists as of first importance. He then goes on to mention the core centrality of baptism (1 Cor. 15:29), the messianic apocalypse (1 Cor 15:20–28), and the kingdom-covenant (1 Cor. 15:24; 1 Cor. 15:50; 1 Cor. 15:56-57). He repeatedly mentions the central importance of prophecy (“Scripture”), the need for God to win the cosmic war explaining our current ills, his destroying the present world to replace it with a new one, and a final resurrection of all people.

The only thing Paul doesn’t mention specifically here is the crucifixion (he merely mentions Jesus dying) and the Eucharist (the communion meal). But he definitely mentions those things elsewhere. The centrality of the Eucharist: 1 Cor. 11:23-27 (cf. 17–34) and 1 Corinthians 10:14-33. The centrality of the crucifixion: 1 Corinthians 2:2-8, Galatians 3:1 (cf. Romans 6:6, 1 Corinthians 1:13, 1 Corinthians 1:23, Galatians 2:20, Galatians 5:24, Galatians 6:14). Paul discusses the centrality of the messianic apocalypse elsewhere, too (e.g. 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18, which he is referencing in fact in 1 Cor. 15:12–24 and 1 Cor 15:50-58—that’s how central it is; cf. 1 Corinthians 1:8, 1 Thessalonians 1:10, and various places in Romans). And of baptism, extensively (Romans 6:2-4; Galatians 3:26-29; and various places in 1 Corinthians). Likewise, the kingdom-covenant basis for the religion; practically the entire letter to the Romans is about this, but see also the list of verses under the corresponding bullet above.

So there can be no doubt all this is what Christianity was. And none of it comes from Egypt.

Telling the Difference

I’ll pick two examples from all the above discourse to illustrate how we can tell causal direction when we find parallels across religions. Specificity or complexity is important (the correlations have to be in some way improbable by chance alone); as is establishing when something actually first arose (not when it first appeared in the surviving record), both generally and in the adopting culture; and there has to be some actual evidence of contact at that time. You also have to rule out indirect diffusion (e.g. the Christians did not “steal from Persia,” as they had no idea the Judaism they took for granted had done that centuries before). We also need to distinguish different causal models of diffusion, because those differences matter (something Brother Jabari never got to, despite my repeatedly trying to get him to, e.g. his causal model diagram was completely non-specific and could not distinguish between models, nor had any specific elements explaining what was adopted or why).

The key thing is always: you need to be more specific. You can’t just say “the Christians stole stuff” and offer no specific evidence or even a specific hypothesis. For example, the only shared element between two prominent dying-and-rising gods, Osiris and Dionysus, is dismemberment. This is a problem for Jabari, because this is precisely the kind of specific detail (“dismemberment”) that he needs (whereas the vague “killed and resurrected” doesn’t get you to any specific culture when dozens have this). And yet that was conspicuously rejected by Christians, not adopted. His hypothesis fails. They spurned the Egyptian model. If they had instead adopted this version of a dying-and-rising god—and moreover, did not take up the Dionysian variant (where a dismembered Dionysus gets made into a slushy that is drunk by a woman who then gives birth to him reassembled), but specifically the Osirian one (where a god is hacked up and scattered and a woman hunts down all his parts and reassembles them and then performs a ritual to resurrect him)—that would be good evidence of a lift from Egypt. Because it would be specific to Egypt. Instead, the Christians rejected that, and borrowed their ideas from elsewhere.

The actual causal here model looks like this:

Notice when we look at specific details, the evidence disproves Jabari’s hypothesis, and confirms another: the Christians got their specific idea of resurrection from Judaism, which got those details in turn from Persia, not Egypt (as I already explained earlier). It does not matter whether the Persian ideas are an evolution from some influence from Egypt. That is not probable, and Jabari presented no evidence whatsoever for it, but regardless: to explain the origin of Christianity, no such forgotten prior sequence is relevant. They are using Jewish, not Egyptian, resurrection beliefs. And those peculiar beliefs came to Judaism through Persia, not Egypt. That is all the evidence can prove. Everything else is implausible speculation and of no relevance to explaining the origins of Christianity, which occurred in the first century A.D., not thousands of years before.

I’ll pause to note that Brother Jabari tried to make an issue out of my use of words like “spells” and “magic,” and I think he assumes I was taking the Christian apologetic stance that magic and religion are fundamentally different. I do not. To the contrary, I see no meaningful difference between them; a religious power or ritual is just as magical as any sorcery, and plenty of sorcery lacks the detailed accoutrements of spellcasting. Rather, my point was that in the Osiris tale, a ritual was performed by a third party (Isis) to bring about the effect. That is a specific detail missing from Christianity. Mary does not perform a ritual over the corpse of Jesus to bring him back to life. The distinction is not “religion vs. magic,” but “elaborate third-party ritual vs. direct intervention by God.” Notice that if the Christian story had Mary do what Isis did then we’d have good evidence of borrowing the Egyptian-specific myth-model. But she didn’t. So we don’t.

Conversely, I am also not taking the Christian apologetical pose that because the parallels Jesus shares with other dying-rising saviors are generic and non-specific that therefore there was no influence at all (and those generic similarities are “just a coincidence”). Rather, my point (which is the only objectively correct one to make here) is that Christians borrowed that generic theme from the entire field of examples, and not from any specific instantiation of that genre. We would need specific evidence for that. Since all we have is generic evidence, instead, only the generic hypothesis survives all test: Christians borrowed the dying-and-rising genre, not a specific myth about a specific dying-and-rising hero. Because that’s what the evidence shows. No more. And no less. Christian apologists are thus just as wrong about this as Brother Jabari—indeed, these represent two opposite extremes in dealing with the evidence ideologically rather than objectively.

As I pointed out in the debate (and as you see across 1 Corinthians 15), Christians regarded Jesus as heralding the general resurrection of everyone—he is the “firstfruits,” not a separate individual resurrection. That’s why Paul attests they expected the end to come any day now, not centuries later. Also, in pre-Hellenized Osiris cult, Osiris himself plays no inherent role in resurrecting anyone else. His resurrection did not “make possible” other resurrections; he was resurrected by an already-existent ritual. His being the first recipient of it does not mean he invented it or made it possible. And Osiris is not resurrecting anyone by direct act of will; at most Horus, his child, can be summoned to assist, but the ritual still had to be performed. None of these specific details is emulated in the Christian version. In their story and imagination, God simply wills Jesus back to life—no ritual, no third parties. And by uniting one’s spirit with his, through communion and baptism, you got to share in that same surety, that God will do the same for you, time come. None of this is in the Egyptian model. Until, that is, the same Hellenistic mystery-cult package reached Egypt and transformed it into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, just as it transformed a messianic Judaism into the Mysteries of Jesus.

Hence the profound difference in how resurrection started to work there:

Notice the difference. First, in pre-Hellenic Egypt you had to carve spells into stone and perform complex rituals (mummification, arrangement of grave goods), to summon Horus, Isis, or other entities to complete the resurrection. This required a third party (the sorcerer who set all that up, carved those invocations and evocations, and so on). Osiris isn’t doing it (no one is saying “Osiris, please resurrect me!”). Osiris is only mentioned as the earlier precedent they want to be treated like. Osiris is not a savior figure here. And you can tell from other ancient Egyptian texts, Osiris isn’t even a judge of the dead; he’s just a steward of the blessed dead, taking care of those assigned to his care by Maat, who did the actual judging of people (weighing their soul or spiritual heart against a feather, to decide whether they go to the good place, or the bad). Nor is there anyone (Osiris or otherwise) whose death gains you a free pass to avoid being judged by any Maat in the first place (which is what Jesus functionally does in the Christian system of belief—the entire point of his “dying for our sins”).

But after Greek mystery cult entered Egypt and transformed Egyptian religion into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris, we get a completely different thing going on, as we can see from Apuleius, a second century Roman author who devoted a whole chapter of his novel to describing the matter. There, we see what has changed: now the individual while alive undergoes a ritual securing their future resurrection; the ritual is a baptism that emulates and thus recapitulates a death-and-resurrection; and the gods named are the ones who ensure it will carry forward into the afterlife. One is now seeking to become united with Osiris so Osiris can be your savior. Apuleius goes on to explain this as being “born again.” The gods will intervene directly. It isn’t a third party ritual over your corpse after you are dead. It’s a personal initiation you undergo, uniting with the Lord in spirit (emulating his death and resurrection through live ritual reenactment). This is not Egyptian. It’s Greek. Of course, by then it had become Egyptian, just as the Persian model of resurrection became Jewish. But it’s not coming from there. And in fact it is clear the first Christians knew this: they saw this model everywhere, not just in Egypt, and adopted the generic Hellenic package, not anything specifically Egyptian.

And once again we have specific evidence demonstrating this: at one point Paul casually mentions baptism for the dead, as if that was a standard feature of Christianity in its original days. He says, “Now if there is no resurrection, what will those do who are baptized for the dead? If the dead are not raised at all, why are people baptized for them?” This is very peculiar. The Christian baptism was not merely, as for Apuleius, a ritual death and resurrection (again, see Romans 6:2-4); it was a ritual someone could perform in proxy for someone else who had already died. There is certainly no Egyptian precedent for this—other than, we might suspect, in Hellenized Osiris cult. But we know it didn’t come from there. Because we have pre-Christian inscriptions establishing this as a feature of Bacchus cult, the most ancient mystery cult we can discern (see Hans Conzelmann, 1 Corinthians: A Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians (1975), pp. 275-76; also alluded to in Plato, Republic 364e-365a; for a more extensive discussion of pagan baptism: Fritz Graf, “Baptism and Graeco-Roman Mystery Cults,” in David Hellholm, Tor Vegge, Oyvind Norderval, and Christer Hellholm, eds., Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity (2011)).

This is what we call a clue. That something so oddly specific is already standard in Christianity at its inception tells us where they are getting their ideas from. And it wasn’t Egypt. Even insofar as this proxy-baptism might have also found its way into other mystery cults (including, perhaps, Osiris cult), it is coming from the generic package, which is Hellenistic, not Egyptian. Hence the evidence confirms this influence model…

We see the same with the Eucharist, the Christian variant of the mystery cult communion meal:

The meal is a ritual performed repeatedly by the living, so as to unify them with their community and Lord and Savior, to ensure their salvation in the beyond. There is nothing like this in pre-Hellenized Egypt. It comes from the Greeks. See, for example, Jae Hyung Cho, This Is My Flesh: John’s Eucharist and the Dionysus Cult (2022) and Jan Bremmer, Initiation into the Mysteries of the Ancient World (2014).

Note that I am not declaring that the Christian Eucharist is a direct copy of any mystery cult’s meal; the way it is formulated and understood is peculiarly Jewish, just as each meal in every other cult is peculiarly adapted to its own local cult. But there are central thematic similarities that cannot be explained by chance: the meals are central to the cult and its expected salvation, they relate to its fraternity, and they involve emulating or communing with the savior. In the case of Bacchus-Dionysus that may even have included the element of figurative cannibalism (grapes were often referenced as his blood, and he was after all resurrected by being literally consumed himself). But that wouldn’t be necessary to what is being compared. As long as the meal plays a role in salvation through communion with the savior deity, then that does indeed appear to be held in common across the mystery religions, is in common with the Christian Eucharist, and does not derive in any distinct way from Egypt.

Hence even the obsolete and apologetical work of John McConnell, “The Eucharist and the Mystery Religions,” The Catholic Biblical Quarterly 10.1 (January 1948), pp. 29-41, documents well enough the common theme shared by all; the elements distinctive of the Christian version are simply a product of its being grafted into Judaism (see J. Brumberg-Kraus, J. “‘Not by Bread Alone…’: The Ritualization of Food and Table Talk in the Passover Seder and in the Last Supper,” Semeia 86 (1999), pp. 165–91). Although the concept of uniting with the god through consumption of what s/he represents or embodies (like grapes for Dionysus, grain for Demeter) does appear to have been extant in pagan thought. But what we cannot find any evidence of is the Egyptians coming up with any such idea and linking it to salvation. You don’t eat Osiris. So we can be pretty sure the Eucharist was not stolen from Egypt.

How Do We Know Where Anything Came From?

Generally, causation is shown through specific and peculiar details, or even unique generic ones, appearing in a movement or culture after demonstrable exposure to the donor culture. Which means you need substantial enough records of that movement or culture prior to that event so as to establish it wasn’t already there (and thus did indeed appear then, as we can do with the Persian impact on Judaism or the Mystery Cult impact on Christianity). This becomes a problem when we don’t have that information. For beliefs that always appear in a culture immediately as soon as writing appears there, we cannot argue “that’s when it began there.” Because we don’t know that information. We only get to see what was there then, not before. Brother Jabari falls victim to this fallacy a lot: he confuses the fact that Egypt invented durable literary records before everyone else with Egypt invented everything in them. We actually can’t tell the one from the other. And the fact is, there are many different models of diffusion that could explain an idea—and when we have no evidence to tell them apart, we cannot claim to know. This is a hard reality I think Brother Jabari cannot stand. But alas, it’s the truth.

Many of the things he wants the Egyptians to have invented could be prehistoric and derived from elsewhere. Just as the mystery cult memeplex diffused into Egypt under the Greeks, so did many other things. Literary writing (which alone allows us to see ideas) appears only well after the dawn of the Egyptian empire. So we cannot actually tell if something diffused into Egypt before then. Yet we know it could have. For example, the harp (certainly the angular harp) was adopted by Egypt (c. 3000 B.C.) from Sumer (c. 3500), and we only know this because harps are physical objects we can dig up; we don’t have to wait around for someone to write a sentence about them (and on something durable enough that will survive for us to read it now). But this means culture was diffusing into Egypt before any textual evidence begins there. The first full sentences appear in the surviving record in Egypt around 2700 B.C., centuries after any particular harp design was “stolen” by Egypt from Sumer (although we don’t really call that stealing, and neither should Brother Jabari). This is mid-dynastic diffusion. Anything else could have come along with it. Ideas travel even more easily than artifacts. A different example is the chariot, which archaeology shows diffused from Indo-Iran (c. 1800) soon to the Hittites, then (via the Hyksos) to the Egyptians (c. 1650 B.C.). This we can confirm in writing for Egypt; but we couldn’t for the Indo-Iranians: we can only know it acme from there because of archaeology; we otherwise would not know, because they left us no writing sufficient to answer such questions.

So, consider elements of universal prehistoric folk religion, which we can find all over the globe, and thus possibly none of it came from Egypt, but more likely traveled there from elsewhere, as it did most everywhere else:

• Gods begetting children.
• People becoming gods.
• Sacrifices and Sorcery.
• Astrology and Astrotheology.
• Healing magic / folk magic.
• Prophets and oracles.
• Gods enduring struggles.
• Gods dying and returning to life (except in early Asia – this meme is Western)

So we can’t credit Egypt with inventing these things. Not on the evidence we have. Take the most controversial of these items: dying-and-rising gods. Of course we can’t have archaeological evidence of that; we can only “see” it once writing appears. But in fact it appears in numerous cultures as soon as writing does there. For example, the moment we start getting literary data from Mesopotamia (around the 21st century B.C.), we start getting dying-and-rising stories (Inanna’s tale survives on clay tablets from that period). As soon as literary writing begins in Italy, we have Romulus. As soon as we get literary writing in Greece, we see Dionysus. As soon as we get any writing about the Thracian-Bulgarians, we hear about the dying-and rising Zalmoxis. The earliest Persian records that could attest it, attest belief in the resurrection of the dead. And so on. Christianity is the only religion whose god does not appear the moment writing does—that sect arose out of Judaism, which left us a record going centuries back, which passed on an ideology of resurrection, but the Christians were the first to make a specific dying-and-rising hero out of it. All the others appear effectively prehistoric. So the fact that we hear of one in Egypt in the 25th century could be simply because that’s when writing began there in sufficient quantity to leave mention of it, and not because they invented it. Earliest on record does not mean earliest ever.

Hence the dying-and-rising god motif:

• Predates all writing. In every culture with one, they appear as soon as writing appears there. Which means the belief was already there. And therefore we cannot say how far back it did or did not go.
• Appears all over. As soon as we get records, we see it. Italy. Greece. Syria. Turkey. Bulgaria. Mesopotamia. Phoenicia. Egypt. When these regions start leaving a record varies a great deal. But they all show this the moment one appears.
• We therefore cannot date this mytheme. It is prehistoric. So we do not know where it came from or when it arose. It could be tens of thousands of years ago. It could have come from Iceland. We don’t know.
• Nor could anyone then. As I already explained, because it was so ancient and everywhere, this mytheme would have appeared to the first Christians as simply common to all cultures and not distinctively Egyptian.

Brother Jabari might not like this epistemological pickle. But it’s the pickle he is in all the same.

We can compare archaeological models and see the same models will also be possible for ideas:

So, for example, we have archaeological evidence that votive cult long predates civilization in Egypt and did not originate there; it diffused to there from elsewhere (the evidence so far suggests it originated in Europe; although South Africa, in the region of Botswana, has a competing claim, but unless you are Sarah Palin, you can’t conflate that with Egypt, either, as it’s again a far distant and different culture). The harp and chariot then provide two other distinct models. Votive cult is dual-influence or parallel influence: it diffused from central Europe to numerous other cultures at the same time (like Egypt and Mesopotamia and the Aegean). Harps represent direct influence: from Sumer to Egypt. Chariots represent indirect influence: from Indo-Iran to Egypt by way of other cultures (Hittite and Hyksos). The specific kind of resurrection belief the Christians chose to adopt matches the chariot model: Persian, by way of Judaism. The mystery cult elements are parallel diffusion: from Greece to a dozen cultures, and it went from all of them (collectively) to Christianity. The rest was direct diffusion, from Judaism to (eventually Gentile) Christianity.

So which model does the dying-and-rising god conform to? We can look at one attribute peculiar to Egypt and which is therefore at least capable of proving diffusion from there: the role of dismemberment and reassembly (as I noted earlier). Possibly that is an Egyptian mod to an earlier dying-and-rising concept that lacked it. And that “earlier concept” could itself be Egyptian. But we don’t know. There is no evidence left capable of indicating it. So we are left with many possible models, and no evidence capable of telling them apart:

Did the dying-and-rising mytheme begin with the dismembered God? Then why was that detail not exported with it? Almost no other examples use it. It appears weakly in the Romulan account and strongly in the Dionysian account, and even there was substantially modified—unless it originated there and was modified once it reached Egypt. Or maybe it originated somewhere else, in a culture that left us no records, and diffused in parallel to Greece and Egypt. It’s impossible to tell.

Herodotus: The Pagan Josh-McDowell

In our debate, Brother Jabari wisely ditched the idea of trying to argue from Herodotus. But he did try that before. But how we approach sources like that completes my point here. So let’s dig into that a bit. Herodotus is a deeply unreliable historian, both extremely gullible, uncritical, illogical, and ideologically biased. He wants, for example, for all religion to “really be” about the same gods and stories; so he twists all his data and trumps up dubious data to get this result: see Lateiner, Bowie, Luraghi, Ellis, Harrison & Irwin, and Brill’s Companion to Herodotus; although my favorite extended analysis of his biased and unreliable methodologies remains Stephanie Lynn Budin’s The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity.

Here is a pertinent example:

In fact, the names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. For I am convinced by inquiry that they have come from foreign parts, and I believe that they came chiefly from Egypt. Except [for various examples], the names of all the gods have always existed in Egypt. I only say what the Egyptians themselves say.

Herodotus, Histories 2.50

This is all false. There is no etymological link between Greek and Egyptian god-names. Herodotus is being gullible, indeed even admitting to it: “I only say what the Egyptians themselves say.” Yeah. Right. And I have some land in Florida to sell him.

Let’s stick to the dismembered god mytheme. We know from archaeology and linguistics that the worship of Dionysus arose in Mycenae, either natively or by influence from an earlier cult of the Hittites. His name means “god” (Zeus = Zdeus = [Z]deus = Dio, from the Mesopotamian Sanskrit Dyeus, hence also “deity”) “from Nysa,” a central Hittite (lit. Nyshite) city where he was nursed by the “Nysiads” (which is why some scholars suspect this cult was originally Hittite). Hence “Dio-nysius.” This is not Egyptian. It is not even Afro-Asiatic. It belongs to an entirely different language family: Indo-European. Likewise any other gods you might happen to pick. They have no linguistic connections to Egypt. So we know we can’t trust Herodotus.

Another example:

No gods are worshipped by all Egyptians in common except Isis and Osiris, who they say is Dionysus. [People] say that Heracles wanted very much to see Zeus and that Zeus did not want to be seen by him, but that finally, when Heracles prayed, Zeus contrived to show himself displaying the head and wearing the fleece of a ram which he had flayed and beheaded. It is from this that the Egyptian images of Zeus have a ram’s head.

Herodotus, Histories 2.42

“They say” this. Once again, Herodotus just believes provably false ethnocentric tourist lore. But here it’s even worse, because even what he relates is disconnected from any reality: the story he tells is Greek; it has no parallel in Egypt. Moreover, Khnum is the Egyptian god who has a ram’s head, not Amun (their actual closest analog to Zeus); and not for any such reason. There is no connection between Greek and Egyptian beliefs here at all. Herodotus has essentially just invented it. So even observing his own reasoning we know we can’t trust Herodotus.

So when we hear this…

Melampus taught the Greeks the name of Dionysus and the way of sacrificing to him [etc.] … and besides many other things which he learned from Egypt, he also taught the Greeks things concerning Dionysus, altering few of them. For I will not say [these things] originated independently: for they would then be of a Hellenic character and not recently introduced. Nor will I say the Egyptians took [any] custom from the Greeks.

Herodotus, Histories, 2.49

There is of course no actual connection between Melapmus and Egypt (Herodotus has simply made that up); and Dionysus-worship was in Greece even during the Mycenaean era (1500–1000 B.C.), so it was not “recently introduced.” And as we just saw, the “name” of Dionysus does not come from Egypt either. Herodotus’s facts are wrong. And his reasoning fallacious (his premise that the cult was recent in Greece is false, and thus so is his inference; and the only reason he gives for not believing it diffused into Egypt is that he just doesn’t want to; but facts don’t care about your feelings).

What we are left with is ignorance. The only shared element between Osiris and Dionysus is dismemberment; but that could be prehistoric, and could have diffused into Egypt and/or Greece like votive cult, the harp, or the chariot. It could come from Greece. It could come from prehistoric Hittite lands. It could come from somewhere else altogether. Or indeed it could come from Egypt. But we can’t say. Because we don’t know. If we leaned on what little evidence we have, it looks more like it diffused to Greece and Egypt from prehistoric Asia Minor. But the evidence even for that isn’t conclusive. But it’s better than we have for the Egyptian-source model. And even this is just one god. Few others share this theme anyway. What is more original? The non-dismemberment motif (which appears in the record more widely and diversely) or the dismemberment motif (which appears almost nowhere)? And even if you can answer this question (and we can’t), it’s not Christian. The one thing you could maybe almost possibly argue was Egyptian, is the one thing they didn’t borrow.

In the end, for anyone who wants to go all Christian-apologist and deny the dying-rising god mytheme was all over the place and prehistoric, you can check out my extensive bibliography of scholarship on it now in The Idea That Dying-and-Rising Gods Were Already Fashionable. The Christians therefore were not adopting any particular culture’s god (whether Egypt’s or anyone else’s). They were adopting a mytheme that, to them, was everywhere, and ancient beyond reckoning (see my article Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.).

The same is true for virgin births. And Brother Jabari had a hard time with this; he literally didn’t realize you can have a sexless conception without being a virgin (I give examples in my article Virgin Birth: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.). And he couldn’t connect anything distinctive of Egypt with the Christian belief in it (Jesus is not conceived by a thunderclap, for example). Nor could he even establish this was a core Christian belief. Unlike the resurrection, there is no evidence of a virgin birth belief in Paul. He certainly never lists it as essential or primary or fundamental; but he never even mentions it at all. It doesn’t even get a mention (not even a mention!) in the earliest biography of Jesus, and appears to have been invented by the Jewish author of Matthew over half a century after the religion had already been preached into three continents. So it wasn’t even original to the faith—and therefore “where that idea came from” is wholly uninformative for the origins of Christianity. But even when we look at specific markers indicating where it might have come from, we don’t see Egypt (which features, Jabari claims, thunderclaps, or as other texts indicate, dildos), but the Greek Perseus (whose mother was impregnated by a magical fluid of God).

Virgin birth wasn’t fundamental or even original to Christianity. But resurrection, atonement, apocalyptic, messianism, and all that were. And when you apply the creative reasoning of the Jews who invented Christianity, you get that whole package out of not Egyptian texts, but Jewish ones: the Wisdom of Solomon 2 and 5 can be read as predicting a dying-and-rising Son of God who judges the wicked in heaven; Isaiah 52–53, a dying-and-rising Chosen One of God whose death atones for everyone’s sins; Daniel 9 and 12, a dying Messiah (= Chosen One of God), conjoined with a final atonement for everyone’s sins, heralding the apocalypse; Zechariah 3 and 6, a “Rising Jesus,” Son of Jehovah the Righteous, who atones for all sins in a single day, and is crowned in heaven before God. While baptism and communion do not as explicitly derive from scripture, they had a Jewish basis as well (again, Passover and Hemerobaptism). The evidence for this is extremely good; the evidence for any Egyptian texts being similarly influential on them is essentially nil by comparison. The deep history of any of these ideas, meanwhile, is irrelevant to explaining what those first Christians were thinking.

Conclusion

Brother Jabari failed at the three most basic principles of scientific method:

• State your hypothesis clearly. What, exactly, are you claiming?
• Then try to disprove your hypothesis. Ask, “If my hypothesis is false, how could I found that out?” Then look for that. Only when you fail can you say you are on to something.
• Don’t elevate a non-result into a confirmation. If you can’t find any good evidence your hypothesis is true, if there remain other perfectly good explanations of all the same evidence, then admit you don’t know it’s true. Move on.

Brother Jabari could never specify what his hypothesis even was. He couldn’t even pick a hypothesis, dancing between three completely unrelated ones. But he also could never specify exactly what he meant by “stole” or “Christianity,” and he described no mechanism by which these connected to each other. If he wants to say there is a literary relationship between the earliest Christian literature and some piece of Egyptian literature, he never said what or how, nor did any proper mimesis criticism to demonstrate the Christian use of any text. For examples of how to do that, just check out how real scholars do it. For example, on proving the Gospels “stole” from Homer—again, not a word we use, but just to port in here Brother Jabari’s own theoretical language—see The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. On their “stealing” from the Septuagint, see The Birthing of the New Testament. On the Gospel of John stealing the story of Dionysus (not, unfortunately for Brother Jabari, Osiris), see The Dionysian Gospel. But that’s just the Gospels, which are late products, a lifetime after the religion began. If you want to explain the origins of the religion, you have to focus on the letters of Paul (and maybe 1 Clement, Hebrews, and 1 Peter), because those all predate the Gospels by decades, and are the earliest testimony we have.

Also, of course, don’t break the Nine Rules I enumerated last time as typical of cranks, where I gave an example of each from Brother Jabari’s lectures. He avoided some of them in our debate (he didn’t push much in the way of bullshit etymologies this time, for example), but repeated others. For example, he relied almost entirely on obsolete, even crank, 19th century scholarship; I warned him repeatedly he needs to look at more recent scholarship on the points he wants to make, and yet even when he did that (which was rarely), he didn’t quote them on any actual point being debated (for instance, he quoted Bojana Mojsov’s recent study of Osiris cult, but nothing he quoted advanced his particular thesis at all). I notice this is a common crank tactic: make a dubious claim, and either cite no peer-reviewed scholarship at all, or cite antiquated and bogus stuff (like amateurs, or hacks who have been dead for a century); then make a mundane claim, and there (somehow only there) cite real, current, peer-reviewed scholarship. The tactic gives the impression that you have cited up-to-date scholarship confirming your thesis, when in fact that is precisely what you have not done. Nor, incidentally, has Brother Jabari ever published his own thesis under peer-review. Nor can he cite anyone who has, in over a century. These are red flags.

Another is how Brother Jabari mishandles evidence, indicative of an amateur who doesn’t know what they are doing. For example, he tried to use the Late Hermetic text Kore Kosmou to argue for Osiris (?) being born of a virgin; and he erroneously said that text derived from the 5th century B.C. In fact it is from the 5th century A.D. And it is not an Egyptian text, but a Greek one, borrowing various motifs from Egyptian mythology (“stealing” again, according to Jabari), making points found in no actual Egyptian texts (or any earlier texts at all), and which could easily be influenced by Christianity by then. Moreover, that text never mentions a virgin birth. It never even says the “virgin” of the title is Isis, or anyone in particular (though that is generally assumed). Indeed, Korê actually just means “girl,” and is non-specific as to virginity; and it is in fact a pun on “pupil of the eye,” which pun the text actually plays on, implying cryptically that the Korê it is speaking about is the human soul. Any of this you could discern by checking the contemporary expert literature on this text (see, e.g., Sørensen).

In general, as I encountered in our debate, Brother Jabari is more interested in gaming and rhetoric than in doing this right. He has a tendency to misstate everything I say, twisting it into something I didn’t say, and then attacking that, and pretending he has thus refuted anything I actually said. For example: I said the Christian version of resurrection derives from Persia, and he turned that into my saying the very idea of resurrection came from Persia; I said a conception caused by a thunderclap does not attest virginity, and he turned that into my saying no text mentions a conception by thunderclap; I said he had no specific evidence of any borrowing, and he turned that into my saying there could be no borrowing; I asked for an Egyptian story of fleeing a specific tyrant to hide a baby in another city, and he turned that into asking for just any hiding of a pregnancy; and so on. Brother Jabari also does not seem interested in relying on contemporary, peer-reviewed research in this field. He does not seem interested in critical analysis of his sources, or even a coherent chronology of evidence. And he does not seem interested in publishing his own theories and research, through any reliably vetted academic publisher or journal. Yet he makes or quotes dubious hyperbole like “Christianity is a carbon copy of African spirituality,” while never even describing what the word “Christianity” refers to in that sentence, much less how it is a “carbon” copy of anything Egyptian—a statement that requires far more specificity of emulation than any example he can cobble.

That Egypt could have influenced Christianity in various ways is plausible. Likewise every other surrounding culture—Greece, Rome, Syria, Asia, Mesopotamia, and beyond. And I’m sympathetic to the idea of Christians adapting the components of their religion from pagan sources. I’ve argued that myself. But you need specific evidence of that actually happening in any given case. And for a big thesis like Brother Jabari’s, it needs to be relevant, something essential, not minor trivia. And so far, he hasn’t presented a single proper example of that. If, instead, all he wants to do is argue for some kind of generic influence, his thesis then needs that genre to be unique to Egypt when Christianity arose; and there just isn’t anything like that. The only genres Christianity emulated in its first centuries were culturally ubiquitous and not distinctively Egyptian. And again, none of this has heck to do with what imperialists did to Egypt centuries later; or what “might” have happened in prehistoric times.

In the end, even besides his amateurism and lack of critical acumen, Brother Jabari’s inability to pick a thesis and specify it and generate specific evidence for it pretty much condemns his project. I am left to conclude that the original Christians simply did not “loot Egypt” in any meaningful sense.