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…