- The cult of Isis become so important, so vigorous and so popular that in terms of just sheer number of adherence 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 and 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 hole in 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.

- [Charles] African, no question about it.

- [Listervelt] Was African-- - [Charles] In fact-- - [Listervelt] Not just black on the surface?

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

Because if you look at, even if you look at some of the frescos in Pompeii and they show the practice of the cult or the religion of Isis.

She's depicted again as an African or Ethiopian looking woman, and all of her priests invariably are Ethiopians, always, at least in that fresco.

- Okay.

Good evening and welcome to the final segment of our interview with Dr. Charles Finch of the Morehouse School of Medicine on the Egyptian origin of Christianity.

In this segment, we asked Dr. Finch to describe the first human representation of Jesus Christ.

- I should preface that by saying is that in the Christian iconography of about the first four centuries or so, or even longer.

When I say iconography, I mean representations of religious images.

There was no human figure of Jesus ever represented.

There was no human figure placed on the cross as the crucified figure.

There were no human figures of Jesus painted or pictured.

That didn't come until rather late, or I shouldn't say late, but later, well on after Christianity had been well established.

Some of the earliest forms of the Egyptian or of Jesus was among the Coptic peoples, and the Coptic peoples who are probably have the oldest tradition of Christianity still extending.

They live in Egypt even today.

And if you look at some of their earliest depictions of the human figure of Jesus, you see a figure who has peppercorn hair, peppercorn African hair, very thick lips and broad noses and dark skin.

Then there is a coin of Justinian.

Justinian reigned in about the fifth or sixth century AD in Rome.

And on the opposite side of the coin of Justinian, of this particular... No, I'm sorry.

Justinian didn't reign in Rome.

I think he reigned in Byzantium or the eastern part of the Roman Empire.

But in any case, there is a coin that has his picture on it, and on the obverse, on the opposite side of the coin is a picture of Jesus.

And again, this picture of Jesus has a man with the peppercorn hair and black of skin.

And so these are two of the earliest representations of the figure of Jesus, and they're represented as a black man.

- Now, this is all happening before people had racial hangups or what?

- [Charles] Yes, you might say it.

(Listervelt laughing) - Or what?

I mean today, somebody might say, well, might not understand how a black goddess or a black God can be accepted by people whose skin might be white in different parts of the world.

- Well, that brings us to another question.

Racism, as we now experience and understanding it is a relatively recent phenomenon in history and particularly modern racism is, was directly fueled and really created by the experience, the historical experience of slavery and colonialism that were experienced by afro-American peoples in this entire hemisphere.

But whatever you may say ill or good about the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, racism in the modern sense of the word did not seem to be one of their failings.

Now, it's not to say that they did not have an ethnocentrism, that they did not believe themselves superior to other peoples.

But it was their superiority or their sense of superiority to other people's was never based on any racial factors.

In fact, if you look at their descriptions of other peoples in the world, the peoples who they seem to have the most admiration for were the Ethiopians and Egyptians, particularly the Ethiopians, and you see that among the Greeks.

And Homer describes the Greek gods, Zeus, the highest Greek God, the most important Greek God.

When he comes down to earth to mingle among humankind, he doesn't go and mingle among the Greeks.

He goes and mingles among the blameless Ethiopians.

And Homer says this.

And so racism, as we understand it, did not exist in the low antiquity or the period of the Greek and Romans to anything like it does today.

And the more enlightened Greeks and Romans were very, very cognizant of where some of their religious forms and practices came from, and they weren't, had no hesitation about admitting such.

Everyone from Eruditus to Deodatus to Pliny to Plutarch and Avid and Lucian who wrote the metamorphosis or "The Golden Ass" were very ready, very ready to admit that many, many of the religious practices of Greece and Rome came right outta Egypt and Africa beyond.

So for them there was no, the racial identity of Jesus was no issue for them, it didn't matter.

- Tell us something about the historical Jesus, please.

- Okay.

The one thing about the gospel of Jesus, that seems to really strike the enlightened and impartial investigator is that there's grave questions whether he ever existed, at least as depicted in the gospels.

I mean, that figure depicted in the gospels, although it may have had a core of historical truth, seems to be somebody who could not possibly exist.

And that's not just based on internal evidence.

- [Listervelt] Are we talking to a Catholic?

- Yes.

- [Listervelt] You?

- Yes.

I am a practicing Catholic.

Yes, I am.

- [Listervelt] Okay.

Go ahead.

- Indeed.

I was born and raised a Catholic and practiced and I'm now a practicing Catholic.

If you look at the independent commentators writing in the Greco-Roman Hebraic world of that time, Philo Judaeus, Tacitus, even Josephus, although there's supposedly some reference to the Christians and Josephus, but people have later found out to be a forgery.

If you look at the writers, both religious and secular who would have been expected to know something about a man as described in the gospels, the record is almost entirely silent.

The only reference to the man Jesus, as described in the gospels, comes from the gospels themselves.

The only reliable, I mean the only record.

I mean all other reliable records or reliable references to that man do not exist, which does not say there was not a historical Jesus, because there indubitably was.

The only man in the historical record who can be considered to have been the historical Jesus is a man by the name of Joshua or Jeshu Ben Pandira.

Jeshua son of the panther, who was born about 120 BC.

Who lived in Egypt, a good part of his life, and became an Essen and studied under an Essen sage.

Now, remember we said earlier that Essenism, as a sect of Judaism was strongly steeped and influenced by the doctrines of Egyptian religion.

He was the disciple of a Essen sage by the name of Ben Parakia.

Somewhere in his fourth or fifth decade, he left Egypt, went into what is today Palestine, and began teaching and healing the sick.

And even the record says, performing wonders of various kinds.

He was arrested by the magistrates, the Jewish magistrates, tried and convicted for "Practicing magic."

Because to practice magic is a capital offense in Hebrew law.

He was convicted and therefore was hanged on the Passover in 70 BC in a place called Lita.

So you can see in this individual who was a historical person, who evidently was a very wise, very compassionate individual who had healing powers and who was obviously a mystic, a great teacher.

Who because of his life and his work stirred up the authorities against him and for that reason lost his life, you can see the skeleton of the outline of the story of Jesus as we understand it.

Now, what I surmise happened, and this a surmise in opinion, and I have to state it as such, is that the savior mythology that was extend in the world at that time, as we have personified through our discussion of the Egyptian religion.

Coalesced around this person, Yeshu ben Pandira.

In fact, the word Jesus, the name Jesus is a Greek word or Greek form of the name Joshua or Jeshu.

So Jesus is really Joshua or Jeshu.

And this man was named Jeshu or Joshua Ben Pandira.

Now, at that time in the world, the entire world, at least all the Mediterranean world, was expecting a messiah or a great figure to appear and usher in a new age.

So there was this tremendous expectation of this person.

And it seems to me that that expectation and the corpus of mythology and symbolism that already existed and had already been existing for maybe 4,000 years sort of settled around this person, giving rise to the canonical gospels and therefore what we call historical Christianity.

One thing you must realize, there were maybe a dozen or more gospels.

Four were selected as being canonical.

That means correct or acceptable or orthodox.

The others were called apocryphal or false gospels.

So they chose, there were many, many gospels and only four were taken.

There were many other sects that had attributes that were very similar to what Christianity practiced in that time.

But Christianity is the one who survived.

My own surmise historically as to why Christianity was able to emerge as just an offshoot of Judaism.

It was just for a long time considered just a sect of Judaism, a form of Judaism.

Just a obscure insignificant little Judaistic sect has to do with the fall of the temple in 70 AD.

Up to that time, the Jewish religion, the Hebrew religion, had an expectation of an earthly messiah who would come and free them from their oppressors, and inaugurate a golden age.

What discredited that idea, that messianic idea was the fall of the temple of Jerusalem, when the Romans captured Jerusalem in 70 AD and destroyed the temple and dispersed the Jews.

What that meant then was that the Christian idea that the Messiah or the great man that was expected was not a earthly figure or historical figure, but it was a spiritual messiah, and it was a spiritual kingdom that was meant in these prophecies and in this expectation.

Therefore gained credibility or credence because this expectation of an earthly messiah was found to be, was just discredited because it failed against the might of the Roman legions.

So you find very soon after that, what we call the canonical gospels cropping up.

Obviously taken from the vast corpus of religion and mythology and metaphysics and symbols already existing and put together in the form of a history or a pseudo history of a man that existed true, but the history being created in such a way that it reflected a transcendent, shall we say, a mythical personage.

And that this grain gain credence because of the fall of the temple.

So it's interesting that the gospels, the gospels that we use as the foundation of Christianity begin about eight 80 AD, and the last gospel was written about 120 AD.

So yes, there was a historical Jesus.

- Okay.

- Let me just finish this thought.

There was a man, Jesus.

There was a man who was a great teacher, a great healer, a great leader, a man who was succor to the poor, who was a comforter, a paraclete to use the word.

Who apparently at least tradition assigns him the ability to work wonders, however you define that, I.E.

miracles.

And that man was indeed hanged on the Passover I.E.

at the Equinox just like Jesus was.

But these things happened some hundred years before the time that the Jesus story is supposed to actually occur.

- Okay.

When you began to discover that Christianity had its roots in the religion of the black people of Egypt, how did you feel?

- Well, I don't know how to answer that, because it was such a gradual process, okay.

- What's the effect now?

What's the total effect?

- Well, let me just describe how it personally affected my own relationship to the religion of Christianity.

I was born in the Christian Church as a Catholic.

When I was about 18 or 19, I basically left the Catholic Church for about 16 years.

There was nothing in Christianity that spoke to me in any sense of the word.

When I did return to Christianity, the Catholic fold, so to speak, and I am a practicing Catholic, am now.

My road back was through this road of Egypt, of seeing that the rituals that are still maintained, at least in the Catholic church and in many Christian churches of all sects and all the nominations.

The rituals had an antiquity, had a history going back almost to the dawn of mankind, certainly to the dawn of civilization, dawn of history, perhaps even dawn of consciousness.

And that that road led through Africa and out of Africa through Egypt.

And it was those signposts, those ritualistic signposts outta Africa that survived in Christianity, particularly in the Catholic church, that allowed me to go back, because it is those things that speak to me.

It is those rituals that speak to me.

Those things that recreate the incredible hoary antiquity of the Christ hood.

And I should say something about the Christ hood, because the Christ hood is as old as humankind and human consciousness itself.

Because where Christianity has made its mistake among many is assuming that Christ was only a man, historical man, externally manifested in history.

And that originally was not merely meant, was not merely what he was supposed to have been.

He was as much an external, real historical feature as he was an internal condition in the human being.

He is the manifestation of the ultimate human possibility.

And the ultimate human possibility is that which allows or gives the man a possibility of becoming as God himself.

That Christ is the possibility within to become as God, to become as the God man.

So that the seed of divinity that's in every human being is manifested itself as the Christ-hood.

So it is that emphasis, that total exclusive emphasis on Christ as an external figure that I think has been the detriment of Christianity, because it was not meant merely to be that.

Although yes, there was an external history, historical figure around religion coalesced.

It was also meant to reflect or to in some way manifest or reveal the inner Christ-hood, which has a history, as I say, going back to the dawn of human consciousness as we see developed to its sublimest extent or to a very sublime extent in Africa through Egypt, in the Egyptian religion, the Egyptian religious symbols.

And forging a direct road out of the Osireion drama, out of the comedic religious system or mysteries into historic Christianity.

And that Christianity, if it would only allow itself to see, has a history or has a umbilical cord that goes back to the dawn of history.

And indeed, I often like to think of it as, of Christianity being the mouth of the delta, of the Nile River, which has its beginnings, its umbilicus in the great lakes of Africa, some 4,000 miles to the south.

And Christianity is very much like that in its relationship to the comedic religion of Egypt and Africa.

- How do you think most people will respond to this information?

- Oh, I think they would probably be frightened, as I mentioned, threatened, disturbed, angry.

All of those things.

I think that...

I think a lot of black people will give it serious consideration, even in the process of being threatened by it.

And the reason why I say this is because I have found that a number of clergymen who I've had conversations about this have expressed a tremendous amount of interest and have had listened to it with a very attentive ear.

I always the fondest saying that this doesn't have to and really shouldn't threaten your faith.

If anything, it should strengthen it if you understand the true antecedents and the true roots of this religion that you are a part of.

I have even heard, I have even, like I said, I am a Catholic, and I've even given my talk about this before a couple of black Catholic priests.

And again, got at least an attentive ear.

And that's basically all you can ask for is an enlightened, an impartial, well, maybe not impartial, but certainly an ear that listens with a willingness to listen seriously to it if it's valid, so that it should be rebutted or validated on its merits.

- [Listervelt] Yep.

- Which by the way I also should mention may be a little impossible because there's nothing about religion that is rational in that sense.

I mean, a person's religion is as close to him or her as anything or everything else about him or her.

And it's not anything that one can have a rational look at or rational response to or a rational view of.

So that may be asking a lot.

But what I find is that if I had been talking like this, say five or 10 years ago, I probably would've gotten a deaf ear all around.

But I think that there is now a willingness to re-look at, to re-examine this faith for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which have to do with a political, cultural, social changes that have been going on in our society.

And also because I begin to think that a lot of people, black and white, are tired of the same old platitudes being recycled.

I mean, you go listen to a sermon or go and listen to someone preach, and they're saying the same things that basically they've been saying for generations on end, and it's lost its capacity to inform, let alone fulfill.

So I did not offer this, by the way, as a antidote to that.

No, I did not offer that for that reason.

Although some people have taken it in that light.

I offer it because it is, from my perspective, the truth.

- What should this information do for black and white people?

- It should make them realize that the truth will out.

Now, the fact that this and this information I've been discussing, and all this I have been saying has been suppressed and repressed for well on 2000 years, and it has been.

Says something right there.

It says something about Christianity such as we practice it today, was not meant to be predicated on the truthful or valid experiences of man in any fashion, spiritual, religious, social, political or otherwise.

In fact, after the third century, what happened to Christianity is it became an instrument of control, social and political control.

And none of us can be blind to the outright crimes against humanity created in the name, I mean, perpetuated in the name of Christ.

We can't turn a blind eye to that.

And if what I'm doing is holding up a mirror to Christianity and those who profess Christianity do not like what they see in the mirror, well, that's very often what happens when the truth will out.

When the truth is out, it forges itself into, as people have said, a two-way sword.

And it cuts both ways.

And it can be very, very painful.

It can even be devastating.

Either you will just turn a blind, you will shut your eyes so you cannot see, close your ears so you cannot hear and tape over your mouth so you will not speak.

Well if that is the response that is a response.

- But most growth, growth can be painful?

- Well, I think all growth and liberation I might add is by definition painful.

Even physiologically, that young people experience growing pains.

And certainly Christianity, certainly to a large extent, has lost its capacity to engage the mass number of its followers to really give meaning and substance to their lives.

No matter how many people claim to be born-again Christians or how many people claim to listen to the old time gospel hour, or how many followers of this or that or the other denomination of Christianity there exist.

There's no question that Christianity and its leaders every day are losing the ability to mold the minds, let alone the spirits of the people who profess Christianity.

And part of that is because the lie that has been told on behalf of Christianity and it is the real blasphemy.

Things that I'm talking about are not blasphemous.

The truth is never blasphemous.

The blasphemy comes for the willful perversion, distortion of the truth, particularly when it is used to the ends of controlling people and ruling people.

That is the blasphemy.

And the truth always stands by itself.

And you can never, never suppress it forever.

So that perhaps beginning to deal with this is a way of beginning to deal with the truth within oneself, because as I say, the Christ-hood is within as well as without.

And it is that what man intrinsically is.

And without getting too metaphysical about it.

It was gonna come out one way or the other.

From somebody from some quarter from some source.

If I happen to be one of those persons that's doing that, so be it.

But if I hadn't, somebody else would've or it would have in some other fashion.

And there's only on that basis that a true reclaiming of Christianity as it was meant to be, can begin to happen.

- Thank you, sir.

In our post conversation with Dr. Finch, he told me that Eve, in the much older Egyptian language spelled "Yf" Y-F spelled "Yf" means great mother or serpent.

Adam or "Atem," A-T-E-M in the Egyptian language means first man or completion.

Noah or "Nua" in the Egyptian language, N-U-A means the great flood of the heavens.

"Nhu," N-H-U means drunkenness.

Isaac "Ysak," Y-S-A-K, means burnt offering.

That's our program.

We hope you found it enlightening.

Good evening.

(upbeat music)