“Among
European Egyptologists, there is one whose research and discovery have
contravened the Christian claims relative to the first-century origin of New
Testament scriptures. Gerald Massey,
rated in British literature as a minor poet, is far more accomplished in the
field of Egyptian studies. Nothing but a full reading of his six major works
and lesser volumes would be adequate to the significance of his material, the
sum of which is that not only the canonized scriptures of Christianity and
Judaism, but much apocryphal and pseudo-epigraphic afloat in these early
centuries, is demonstrably of Egyptian origin.
“The
question of what may have been a still more remote source from which Egypt in
turn drew this material is one that lies hidden in the darkness of antiquity.
It is asserted, for example, that the Egyptians knew the interior of the atom.
Their mechanical resources for the building of the pyramids are still a
mystery. Their knowledge of the astronomical periodicities was amazingly
accurate. Many hints are found in the literature of Greece that her wisdom
derived from remote Egyptian sources. Plato recounts the legend of Atlantis
told by an aged Egyptian priest to Solon.
“Fixed in
the opinion that nothing could have been embalmed in literature save facts
(although we realize today that even the most scrupulous accounts of events are
always colored by the observer or narrator, even if only by the selection of
what is reported), the scholarly mind has gone off on many a wild goose chase
after the ghosts of history entified out of allegorical and dramatic-type figures.
The ancients, to whom facts were far less powerful than they are today, did not
write a mere chronology of events; they wrote tales depicting the meaning of
all history. The venerable scriptures will never be read aright until the
spiritual essence of the events; and not the events themselves, are understood
to be the heart of the narrative. The
events that never occurred, and the actors and characters that never lived,
still carry the significance that is always and finally the true event of life.
To the ancients, it was the soul and not body that held the essential being of
existence; the one uppermost objective in antiquity was to devise ways to
represent the pilgrimage of the soul. And because the system of hieroglyphics
was developed to conceal as well as to reveal, empirical study has been unable
to sift the gold of meaning out of the gravel of mythical events.”
--A REBIRTH
FOR CHRISTIANITY, by Alvin Boyd Kuhn,
pp. 66-68 (2005)
