Christianity's real origins

Philosophy Forums Religion and Spirituality
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I was writing about my name in the babble forum, and it occured to me that I had yet to present this question.

Do Christians actually pray to an ancient egyptian god? Lets look at a few things.

First, we must look at the Pharoh Akhenaten. As his role in this topic is secondary, granted he caused it, I will only state that:

Akhenaten was the first leader in any nation in written history to declare Egypt a Monotheistic state, praying to the Sun disk (the… physical disc of the sun itself) Aten (Amen).

-Aten was an aspect of Ra, the sun.

-Amen-Ra, of which Aten was an aspect along with Horus and other such gods, performed the following functions in the Akhenaten system:

Created the World
Gave man Life
Banished man from Paradise
Was the Beginning and End of all things
Was The only -real- god.
Horus, a major aspect of Amen-Ra, defeated Set, the 'Advisary"
Dwelled in the Heavens, seated on a throne (I.E. he -was- what you see when you look up at the Sun, simply too majestic to view)

-After Akhenaten’s reign ends, his priests are either murdered or driven out of Egypt.

Now then, we can begin.

In 2000ish BC Egyptian texts state that Canaan was an eyptian Province, this would have placed the Hebrew People as, as far as the egyptians were concerned, part of Egypt.
-This makes Hebrews the peoples of a province of Egypt.

Thutmoses III Proceeded to defeat and enslave these provinces.

Due to a Timeline Error (this can be looked up) the original date for Moses is now aligned with the rule of Akhenaten.
-This error is now corrected via mainstream archaeology, and Moses would have been alive during the time of Akhenaten.

Moses, being a priest in Akhenaten’s Egypt would have been practicing the worship of Aten, as all other gods were outlawed.

Moses, after Akhenaten’s death, would have been driven out of Egypt, along with his ‘Aten Cult’ following.

Thats a very brief overview, and am idly curious as to feedback before I provide more examples, comparisons, and evidence.
Note, at the end of every Christian prayer, the word Amen. (Amen was the term for Aten in the Evening, at the end of its travel across the sky)

Before someone throws something at me, I’d like to mention that Sigmund Freud proposed this many years ago.

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I’ve read this many times, as you suggested.
Honestly, I’d be more surprised if this weren’t the case, and I’m often confused how it’s not arrived at by more people with little more than natural thought based entirely on the Biblical account of the Hebrews in Egypt; it does nearly beg one to ask where the culture of nomads found it’s deep religious and civilized culture of religion and law.

And then the living with the Egyptians…well…it pretty well answers itself, but you do an excellent job summarizing the concept.

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Oh, btw, just to poke at it, one could reverse this and say that Akhenate borrowed the idea for the power play from the Hebrew culture among him; revamping to suit the design that he was looking for.

:wink:

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The hebrew culture of the time was not the monotheistic culture of today. One must remember, the bible states the world was created less than 6,000 years ago, as does the Talmud… the Egyptian concept on their religion, in terms of how it was viewed, and even in terms of their belief and worship of their dieties, as wildly different, however.

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Do you know how Coptic people adopted Christianity?
As far as I’ve read, they are the descendant of Egyptians judging from the language.

Do they still keep pre-Christian knowledge/tradition?

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I wasn’t aware that the Judaic faith counted the Torah in literal years of creation.
As far as I was aware, this was a primarily Catholic and Protestant holding.
Instead, I thought it was viewed more in symbol by the Judaic faith; at least any Jew I have met.

As far as I’m aware, Judaism holds that a separation between day and night, as we understand the rotational division, wasn’t made until after the first Sabbath; that light and dark, though separate, served together without planetary orbit or revolutions. Essentially, it’s held that the universe was on pause until the Sabbath.

And if they hold that time, as we know it’s measure, was on pause and that creation was done on another physical plane (another Judaic concept) of reality that we are familiar with, then it isn’t likely that they hold to a literal 6,000 years.

That said, they do celebrate the anniversary of Adam’s creation in reference to the 6,000 years time-line, but that is considered simply an anniversary and not a literal tradition.
As with most things in the Jewish faith, the number (6,000) is a value by numerological representation and not one of literal value.

The Hebrews are an extremely logical and scientifically minded people in general, so to assume that, collectively, they would fundamentally ignore artifacts carbon-dated (which is an accepted method of dating by the Judaic faith, as they use it to date Hebrew artifacts related to Judaic faith) that place the Chinese civilization to over 5,000 years ago alone (and that’s just the civilization; the people go back into the millions), as well as the ever increasing dates for Egyptian civilization seems odd.

They don’t ignore these, so to think they hold to a literal creationism would be awkward.

I’m sure there are some, but I’ve never heard of this as the normal tradition taught method of Judaism; only Protestantism and Catholicism.

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I think all we can say is that it’s possible.

Akhenaten lived 1353-1337, but we don’t even know if Moses was anything more than a biblical figure loosely based on one or several men: and there is no real evidence that the Israelites migrated en masse to Canaan–or migrated from Egypt at all.

I think we can say that Canaan was under Akhenaten’s influence, the Amarna letters being discovered in the site of Akhenaten’s capital, which he had moved there from Thebes when he came to power, with the capital being returned to Thebes after his death. At least one letter was from the (Canaanite?) ruler of Jerusalem–indicating that Jerusalem was a more substantial city during that period than archaeology has indicated.

In any case, I think we can also say that the Jews succeeded in their monotheism where Akhenaten failed, and that they improved on it, making the One God more omnipresent than the Sun disk Akhenaten worshiped. But even they attributed supernatural intervention/revelation to their one God.

As for the point of the IP, I don’t think the foundations of Judaism have much to do with Christianity, except maybe providing some prophesy to back into Jesus’ story. Jesus’ Jewish heritage, which he affirmed in the strongest terms, especially that JHWH was One God, was already being thoroughly undermined just 50 years after his death.

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A great thread!!!
I’ve often wondered about how beliefs in one part of the world affect those in others. India, for example, seems to be a central location on the ancient trade routes where ideas from the East meet ideas from the West, e.g., the Golden Rule expressed by Confucious and the same rule as espoused by Plato suggest an exchange of ideas, not just a zietgeist.
Some here claim Abraham started monotheism. I think you are correct. Aknaten (Amenhotep IV) started it. Ever consider how much the Christian cross symbol resembles the ankh?

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I think Confuscious and Plato divided the East and the West, respectively-speaking. – just a guess.

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Good insight. But what was the split? Divisive ideology? Idealism?
“East is East and West is West;
And never the twain shall meet.”–Kipling.
Pure nonsense!

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The split was physical-separation. There are a lot of mountains and monuments between Europe and China, especially-Islam.

The Europeans had enough trouble with their crusades. They did not expand Eastward past the Middle East.

I do not know so much about Chinese history and so I cannot say why they did not expand into Russia or India…

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Real,
Are you trying to tell me that no Westerner ever got to India before the Crusades or Marco Polo’s travels, that nobody from China got to India on the silk routes and that neither Easterners nor Westerners traded any belief stories in India?
Pythagoras on transmigration of souls-how Hindu!
The only obstacles to the tradings of beliefs were disbeliefs. Those must not have been many because Indian beliefs permeated China and Greece.

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No, I know that there was a cross-culture of ideas & ideals.

I just mean to say that the West v East dichotomy never completely-dominated each other, which is why they are both similar and dissimilar.

14

In the persuit of modernity, man has left a trail of dead languages, and religions, and cultures behind him.

15

Mankind is just getting started. I hope I live until the next world wars come about. They are going to be amazing to watch and participate in.

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Back to the OP–one must admit that Israel is closer to Egypt than China is to Greece, hence to trading of ideas among the former could have occured faster and with less need of translation. My problem still is–do the exchanges of beliefs among cultures account for any unanimity of belief? Or does the fact that certain beliefs are somehow universal indicators of specific human needs?

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Well, you know. All this stuff about a Creator God who banished man from paradise, it’s no mystery where they got that from, it was the Jews. So we’re talking about Judaism’s real origins, I suppose.
As far as Moses being around during the time of Akhenaten, that’s cool if you want to grant that, but just remember that even admitting the existence of a Moses in the first place is a pretty, uh, generous step for somebody taking a skeptical approach of history. But yeah, if you grant Moses, then what else do you want to grant? What motivation do we have other than bias, to say that Judaism was based on monotheistic Egyptology, vs. monotheistic Egyptology being based on Judaism? Certainly the most detailed source we have on the subject, Moses, whom you’ve granted as historical, presents a case that Jewish monotheism predates Akhenaten by a long, long time.
Your idea that Moses would be driven out of Egypt for his monotheistic ways seems to support, in my mind, that it was considered a foreign (Hebrew) influence.

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=D> Uccisore !!! =D>

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Me!!!

Hey Tabula, what’s up? Hard to do this for fun when you’re doing it ‘for a living’, you know. I’ll try to crash more parties.

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While I don’t doubt that there was a certain amount of cross-talk between the Egyptian and Israeli civilization, I don’t see why Israeli monotheism would have to be descended from the Aten-cult. After all, the Aten-cult was just an extreme conclusion to a trend that already exists within paganism, which is synthesis. Since cults to various gods have political power and implications, if one cult arises to preeminence, it makes sense that you’d be left with something resembling monotheism. So there is no need to think of monotheism as a singular event.

Once we’re liberated from that constraint, we need to examine the two gods and see how they measure up. First off, one is very clearly a sun god (which are generally loving and deal heavily with the cycle of rebirth) whereas the other one is pretty clearly a sky god (which are generally wrathful and demanding of sacrifice). So I don’t think they really look that similar.

Next there is the Horus/Set cycle. Since the roles of Horus, Set, and other gods was greatly diminished in the Aten-cult, I don’t really see what that brings to the table. Admittedly, I am not terribly familiar with how that cycle factored into the Ra-Harakhty mythology which would have preceded the Amara period. The conflict between Ra and Apep would probably be more evocative of what you are trying to suggest here. That works pretty well, right down to Apep being a fire-serpent. Except that it is my understanding that the concept of Hell as a pit of fire is a Christian invention and that the Hebrew conception of it is considerably more vague. Ironically, Set is a sky god so he looks a lot more like the Jewish God to me!

Admittedly, many of these factors can be fixed by talking about Christianity instead of Judaism. But that invites all sorts of other problems, including pretty much demanding that Christianity be correct. Right? Because Christianity would have been predicted some one-thousand-odd years before it happened. Which doesn’t make any sense unless their god is out there pulling the strings to make it so.

I think going back to the Amara period is too problematic and relies on too many coincidences. Especially since there is an easier explanation:

  1. Christianity started off as a mystery cult

  2. Egyptian-influenced mystery cults were very popular in the Roman empire around the first century CE (Isis is the best example but there are others too. Egypt was to Rome at that time as India was to America during the '60s).

So doesn’t it make sense that a mystery cult based off the Jewish God would borrow elements from a popular narrative? While I am sure devout Christians will bristle at the comparison, look at what New Age did: blending elements of the popular Hinduism/Buddhism with Christianity.