- Good evening, and welcome to the third segment of our interview with Dr. Charles Finch on the Egyptian origin of Christianity.

We begin this segment by asking Dr. Finch, who was an assistant professor of community medicine and family practice at the Morehouse School of Medicine, to discuss another episode from the gospels, which has a much earlier occurrence in the religion practiced by the early Black Egyptians.

That gospel episode deals with the deaf and dumb man in the seventh chapter of Mark.

- One of the things that you find in the Opening of the Mouth ceremony is the dead person re-obtaining the word, because the word becomes the image of life.

Now, we heard about how Jesus restores hearing to the deaf man by rubbing his ears and opening up his ears, and also by giving him the word.

This concept of the word, again, goes right back to the very sources of Egyptian religion, because the word, it's what brings all life, all creation into existence.

Now, that being the case, when a man dies, he is said to be dumb, that is deaf and dumb, that is without the word.

Now, in the earliest ritual or the earliest part of the ritual of resurrection of the Egyptians, there is a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth ceremony.

After the man, there's a long ceremony of death and resurrection.

And the first part of that, described ad infinitum on all the Egyptian descriptions, religious descriptions, is the Opening of the Mouth ceremony.

Now, that has been very obscure to a lot of people for a long time, what that meant and what the significance of that was.

And it wasn't always clear to me what it meant until, interestingly enough, my wife gave me the clue to the answer.

Now, what she told me was, if you note the phenomenon of birth, when a baby comes out, the first sign of life in an infant is when the baby opens its mouth and cries, that is, issues a word.

That is the image of life.

Now, what happens, you know, and I got to thinking about that and I got to elaborate on it further, what happens when that baby opens its mouth and cries, and before that happens, it has to take an inrush of air or breath, i.e an inrush of spirit.

Because in the Egyptian conception, breath and spirit are the same thing.

And then it opens its mouth and utters the word, i.e.

that which calls things into life, the word, of course, being the cry of the infant.

Well, if you look at the Opening of the Mouth ceremony of the Egyptians, that is exactly what is happening when they're doing to the dead man.

By opening of the mouth, they are symbolically creating a situation where the spirit can enter, the dead man can open his mouth symbolically and utter the word, and therefore restore himself to life.

And we find that, again, allegorically or symbolically, in the very natural phenomenon of childbirth.

- Okay, let's get back to Shu.

Explain what Shu was again.

- Okay, I'm sorry, Shu is- - I wanna make a comment.

Go ahead.

- Yeah.

Shu is the god of air.

- Okay.

- He is the god of air and the god of wind, but he is also the Egyptian form of the later Greek Atlas, because he is the one who separates the earth from the sky, and you see him represented with his hands separating the earth from the sky.

And he is the one, interestingly enough, that divides the firmaments, divides the firmaments by separating the waters of the heavens from the waters below.

- But you mentioned the sneezing thing.

- Yes, well... - Well, I say that, because when I was growing up, we'd sneeze, and we'd say, "Achoo!"

- Yes.

- You know?

And so, when you said that, that really, I wonder... (chuckles) - Exactly.

Well... - This is what I'm saying.

- That's what we used to say.

You know, when we, after you'd literally sneeze, and then you're playing, you know, you say, "Achoo!"

(chuckles) You know?

- Well, I'm going to throw a big Greek word at you.

It's called onomatopoeia.

Onomatopoeia.

It means "that word which sounds like the thing that it represents," i.e.

the word boom is an onomatopoeic word.

It means it sounds like the thing that you're trying to represent.

The word bang is a similar onomatopoeic word.

It sounds like the thing you're trying to represent.

Well, the Egyptian language is chock-full of words and meanings that are, words that have meanings that are onomatopoeic in origin.

And Shu is a clear example of that, of the act of expelling breath in a sneeze, giving you the achoo or the hachoo, and the Egyptians taking that sound and creating a word meaning "something divine" out of it.

Now, interestingly enough, the reason why we say, "Bless you" after we sneeze, or someone says, "Bless you" to somebody after you sneeze, is because, remember, we're talking about air being the spirit of life.

By sneezing, you are, in a way, expelling the breath of life, expelling the spirit of life.

So "bless you" is a way of reanimating you, so to speak, of restoring that breath back to you so that life can continue.

- So now we know the whole story.

(both laugh) Let me throw some words from the Christian vocabulary past you and ask you to tell us where they come from.

Messiah.

- Messiah.

Okay, messiah, traditionally speaking, is a Hebrew or Aramaic word, means "the anointed one," or "the anointed king."

It comes from a... Its root is from the Egyptian word mes, M-E-S, which means "born of," "birth," "child of," "son of," sometimes "young man," too, okay?

The messiah, therefore, is the anointed king.

Its root has to be M-E-S. One of the Egyptian deities was Iu, I-U, who was the prototype of the God Jah, who was a prototype of Jehovah or Yahweh.

Now, if you take the word mes, M-E-S, and add onto it Iu, you get mesiu, which means "born of Yahweh or Jehovah," which gives you the real, gives you one of the aspects or manifestations of Jesus or manifestations of the term Messiah, okay?

The mes, the mesu, M-E-S-U, was also called "the anointed child."

So again, we have a direct, a Hebrew word taking its direct antecedents from Egyptian concept and Egyptian word.

- Christ.

- Now Christ, the word Christ comes directly from the Greek word Kristos, K-R-I-S-T-O-S.

It is a word that means "anointed," and is a Greek translation directly from the Hebrew word, messiah.

Now, again, as you may expect, there is a Egyptian origin to that word, too.

Now, one the manifestations of Osiris was as the mummified resurrected one, the mummified resurrected one.

And by definition, the mummified one is also the anointed one, because in the process of mummification, excuse me, they use special oils and myrrhs and things like that to wrap up or do the process of mummification.

Then, of course, as a part of the ritual of resurrection, the mummy is anointed.

So he is the mummified one.

He is the anointed mummified one.

Now, the Egyptian word for the anointed mummy, in the form of Osiris, is Krst.

Now, if you, again, take the Egyptian words, Egyptian letters, and transliterate them directly, they come out like this.

Now, before I get to that, let me just back up a little bit and show the audience, if they can- - Push it back to you somewhat.

- Yeah, if they can focus in on this chart a little bit.

Here is the Greek word Asar, as we talked about before.

Here is, excuse me, here is the Egyptian word Asar, as we talked about before.

Here is the Greek word Osiris.

Osiris is just a Greek form of the word Asar.

Here is the Egyptian word Ast.

Here is the Greek word Isis.

Here is the Egyptian word Heru.

We talked about that earlier.

And here is the Greek word Horus.

Now, the Krst mummy that we talked about, the anointed mummified resurrected one, is spelt this: K-R-S-T if you transliterate it directly.

Compare this to the Greek word for the anointed resurrected one, Kristos, which gives us our word, Christ.

So again, you take our word Christ, which means the anointed one, the resurrected one, it goes right back to the Egyptian origin, Krst.

And again, that relates to the anointed one, who is the mummified one, and who is, therefore, the resurrected one.

So again, we see a direct connection, not merely a parallel, but a direct connection between a word and a concept, which is fundamental to our conception of our religion, that is Christ, going back to an Egyptian original.

- Now, this one I found fascinating: Lazarus.

- (chuckles) Yes, Lazarus.

A number of scholars and researchers had made mention of the nature of Lazarus as depicted in the gospels.

Now, let's recount who Lazarus is in the Christian gospels.

He is the brother of two sisters, Martha and Mary.

He dies.

He is... Martha and Mary go to Jesus and ask him to come to see and administer to their brother Lazarus, who had died.

Jesus comes.

First of all, he says, "I am the resurrection, and I am the life."

He comes to Lazarus.

He says to Lazarus, "Lazarus, rise and come forth.

Rise and come forth."

Lazarus comes out, swathed in linen bandages, rises up, and then comes out, walks out swathed in linen bandages.

Okay, let's take the example of Osiris.

Osiris has two sisters, Isis and Nephthys.

He dies, or he is the dead one, okay, murdered by his brother, Set.

The two sisters are depicted as mourning over him, just the way Martha and Mary mourned over Lazarus.

Then he is, then they call upon Horus, who is Osiris's son, to come and minister to him.

Osiris anoints him, and then tells him to, "Rise and come forth to thy house."

In some versions of this story, it is the two sisters who say, "Rise and come forth," but in others, it is Horus, and you actually see Horus telling the mummified Osiris to rise up and come forth.

Osiris comes up, wrapped in linen bandages in mummified form, just like Lazarus rises and come forth, comes forth, excuse me, wrapped in linen bandages.

So again, if you look at the parallels between the two episodes, they are almost identical, just almost the names have been changed.

But it gets even more interesting when you consider the name of Lazarus himself.

We have to break down the name Lazarus in this fashion.

I almost think I should write this down, but I think it'd be difficult under the circumstances.

- We'll put it on the screen.

Go ahead.

- Okay.

You can break down Lazarus as L, capital L, dash azar, A-Z-A-R, which is the middle name of the word Lazarus, and then the terminal is U-S, okay?

Let's break it down linguistically or etymologically.

The letter L is equivalent to the, in the Semitic languages, el, E-L, which means the.

We see this, by the way, in Spanish, which el also means the.

Le in French, L-E, le, also means the.

So what I'm saying is that word el in the word Lazarus means the.

It is what we call, I think, the definitive article.

Now, azar, which is the middle part, and therefore the real part of Lazarus's name, L-A-Z-A-R, is equivalent to this word Asar, which means Osiris.

Now, for a long time, I looked at that terminal us in Lazarus, us, U-S, as being a form that converted into a Latin type of the name.

But then I was looking through the Egyptian dictionary, and I came across a little word, A-S, A with a little dot over it, as.

Now, the meaning of that word is "to call" or "to hail."

So if you put 'em all together, el, meaning the, Asar, meaning Osiris, us, meaning "called" or "to hail," the word Lazarus, therefore, means "the Osiris called forth."

- Mm-hm.

Mm-hm.

Now, what time span are we talking about, the time span between Lazarus, the Lazarus story, and the Osirian drama?

- Somewhere between two and 3,000 years, maybe 4,000.

- The Lazarus thing coming later.

- Much later.

I mean, the Lazarus thing coming during the Christian era, which is, you know, in the, I forget which gospel it is, but remember the first gospel was written sometime, we'll talk about this later, sometime 80 to 89 AD.

The last gospel was written about 120 AD.

So you're talking about 100 years AD, 100 years AD, more or less, and you're talking about the Osiris story going back three to 4,000 years.

- Okay, now, let me get clear on what you're saying here, and are you saying that the Lazarus thing was taken directly, Lazarus story was taken directly.

- It had to have been.

It had to have been.

Had to have been.

And we can talk, maybe later if you want to, about how that happened or what was the transition between the Kemetic religion and- - Well, I think you can mention it now if you want to.

Could you?

- There are- (Listervelt chuckles) - Yes.

It's a little complicated, but we can reduce it down to basically this: On the one hand, you had the religion of Osiris and Isis being the one form of Egyptian religion, which survived the demise of Egypt itself, particularly the Cult of Isis and her husband, Serapis, which was a form of Osiris.

Now, Isis became a very, very vigorous and popular cult, a religion among the Ptolemies, that is the Greek people who ruled Egypt in the last 300 years BC.

She was always figured, by the way, always shown as a Black female figure holding a Black baby.

When Rome conquered Egypt, the Isis cult, again, with... And, actually, she was, in this sense, more predominant than Osiris, interestingly enough.

Osiris, even though he was part of this as Serapis, he was not nearly as important as Isis and her infant, Horus.

The Isis cult, Isis Serapis cult, moves, or is transported, to Rome and despite great opposition, not only survives there, but flourishes there.

And again, you're talking about a homegrown Egyptian religion that is taken up, not only by the Greeks of Alexandria, but also, eventually, by large segments of the Roman population and of the Roman Empire.

The Cult of Isis becomes so important, so vigorous, and so popular that, in terms of just sheer number of adherents or worshipers, it rivals the cult or the religion of Jupiter and of Mithra.

The Roman soldiers, when they conquer Europe, take her cult, take her religion and her figure all over the parts of Europe where they conquered, in what is today, Spain, France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and they set up shrines to her, the Black Isis with the Black child.

Christianity in 400, 500 AD also later on moves into Europe.

And instead of destroying those shrines, because they had such a hold on the populace, they took that Black Isis and child and turned it into the Black Madonna and child, i.e.- - [Listervelt] And this Black Isis, physiologically speaking, in terms of its physionomy- - [Dr. Finch] African, no question about it.

- is African.

- In fact- - [Listervelt] Not just Black on the surface.

- No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

'Cause if you look at, even if you look at some of the frescoes in Pompeii, and they show the practice of the cult or the religion of Isis, she is depicted, again, as an African or Ethiopian-looking woman, and all of her priests, invariably, are Ethiopians, always, at least in that fresco.

- Okay.

- So that is one way in which Egyptian religious ideas, through Isis, the Cult of Isis, very readily made its, gained currency throughout the Mediterranean.

And, in fact, many people, many commentators in Rome, said that there's no, in the early days of Christianity, said they couldn't see any difference between Christians and those who worship Serapis and Isis, because their practices were so closely the same.

Then there is the... Then there are the Essenes.

Now, again, the Essenes are a very obscure sect of Judaism who lived in isolated communities as brotherhoods, practiced a form of communal worship and communal sharing of all things, did not, were vegetarians, worshiped the Great Mother and Child, practiced a, you know, practiced a very, very peaceful form of living, and their most important center was in Egypt.

And if you look at some of the Essene gospels, it is clear that very pronounced Egyptian ideas and concepts crept into Essenism, which was a offshoot of Judaism.

Okay, that's one thing.

Then there is what we call the Gnostic or Hermetic tradition.

That is the Greeks who lived in Egypt for 300 years, took Egyptian ideas and gave them a Greek gloss, so to speak.

And that became known as Hermeticism and Gnosticism as two of the forms.

And again, particularly since Greek was the most widely spoken language, the lingua franca of all the Mediterranean, those ideas spread out all over the Mediterranean.

So you see three ways, three areas in which, or three modes of transmission of Egyptian religious and metaphysical ideas into the general body of Christianity.

Because Christianity absorbed all of the important religious ideas that were current in that part of the world at that time, at least the most important ones.

And most of the ones that had any real currency, you can trace them right back to Egypt through that three-pronged, those three paths that I just mentioned.

- Okay.

Next word: Mass.

- Mass.

Okay, the Mass is the Catholic Christian sacrifice, the Eucharist, okay?

A 2,000-year-old ceremony.

It is the eating of the body and the blood of Jesus Christ in the form of bread and wine.

Now, you take that word Mass, and it is derived directly.

Oh, and the Mass, I should say, is directly centered around the Supper.

The Last Supper sort of gives you the inspiration or is the central idea of the Mass.

So the idea of the eating of the meal or the sacramental meal is central to the idea of the Mass.

Capital M-A-S-S, that comes from the Egyptian word mes, M-E-S. By the way, remember we'd talk about that later?

One of another forms, one of the other meanings of the Egyptian word mes is "the evening supper" or "the evening bread."

- Okay.

Finally, you talked about this before, but if you can go over it again, Satan.

- Yes, I mentioned that the god Set, who became the great adversary in the Osirian drama, lends not only his prototype or his archetype, but also his name to the word Satan.

But it even goes further than that.

If you look at the medieval iconography, that is the medieval creation of religious images, Satan is represented as a red-colored being with cloven hooves, a tail, forked tail, and horns.

Okay?

- Mm-hm.

- Set's color, sacred color, was red, and he was called "the red one."

He was personified in one of his manifestations as the goat, therefore the horns and the cloven hooves.

So even if you look at the Christian iconography of Satan, the principle of evil, that, too, seems to have been taken almost directly out of Egyptian representations of the great adversary.

- In your paper, you give an interesting explanation of the term spirit by writing about Osiris as a corn or grain deity.

- Okay, well, this is one aspect of what that concept spirit meant.

- [Listervelt] Okay.

- Now, in one of his manifestations or aspects, Osiris was the personification of the grape.

And if you remember, when I said earlier, he was the one who taught mankind the science of the cultivation of the grape.

Okay?

- Mm-hm.

- Wine is considered the blood of the grape, and, therefore, it is the blood of Osiris.

It is also, because of its intoxicating properties, called the spirit of the grape, and, therefore, the spirit of Osiris.

Therefore, to imbibe wine or drink wine was drinking the blood and the spirit of Osiris.

The reason we give the term spirits today to alcoholic beverages derives from that original early concept of the spirit of the grape.

Now, you notice that Osiris, again, is a personification of the wine.

The wine is, in some sense, his blood.

Osiris is also, in fact, in his earliest manifestation, he is a corn or grain deity.

And there are representations of him lying flat with stalks of grain growing out from his body.

And, therefore, he becomes a, one of his personifications becomes that of the bread.

And indeed, in ancient Egyptian, when you break the bread, you are reenacting the dismemberment of the body of Osiris.

So when you eat the bread, in the Egyptian sacrament, you're eating, and when you break the bread, you are dismembering the body of Osiris and eating the body of Osiris.

When you drink the wine, you are eating the blood, drinking the blood of Osiris, again, relates directly to the sacramental meal of the Last Supper and to the Mass, in which it is said, "Take ye and eat of it, for this is my body."

And they take the wafer, which is a form of unleavened bread, and give it to the communicant.

"Take ye and drink of this, for this is my blood."

And they take some wine and give it to the communicant.

So it becomes almost inescapable that the fundamental rituals of Christianity come directly out of the original Egyptian.