Forbidden History - The Hidden Legacy of Ancient Egypt in Christianity

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

What if Christianity was shaped as much by Egypt as it was by Rome or Jerusalem? In this episode, Tony McMahon explores how one of the world’s oldest civilisations could have influenced the rise of a new faith.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. We're an independent podcast, and advertisements help keep us going. Thanks for supporting the show. For more than 3,000 years, ancient Egypt dominated the religious and cultural landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean. Its myths and symbols shaped the thinking of entire civilizations. But could those ideas have survived long enough to influence one of the world's most major religions? In this episode of Forbidden History, historian Tony McMahon explores the possible connections between ancient Egyptian religion and the development of early Christian ideas,

diving deep into the fierce arguments and the complex religious world of late antiquity. Many Christians really intensely dislike the idea that there were ancient Egyptian influences on Christianity. Egypt becomes this major centre of Christianity. For thousands of years, Egypt was a massive influence in the Middle East, culturally, spiritually, politically. This was a superpower of the ancient world. So it's not surprising that Egyptian ideas would have permeated into the Abrahamic religions. Now, having said that, this is a... a source of heated debate.

Many Christians really intensely dislike the idea that there were ancient Egyptian influences on Christianity. But let's consider the arguments anyway to get going and to see whether or not there's any truth in what some scholars assert. Long before the rise of Rome, Greek thinkers like Plato and Pythagoras were said to be traveling to the Nile. They were there to study geometry, astronomy, and the soul at temple schools. Even Herodotus, a man known as the father of history, was obsessed with the place,

famously calling it the gift of the Nile, while marveling at a priestly class that seemed to guard the very secrets of existence. For much of Western history, Egypt remained a locked vault of magic and sacred riddle. Their mysterious form of writing, hieroglyphs, stayed silent for centuries until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. It is a civilization defined by an almost incomprehensible scale of time. To put its age in perspective, when Cleopatra the 7th was navigating her famous alliances with the Romans, she was chronologically closer to the invention of the iPhone than she was to the building. of the great pyramids at Giza. It was a land so old

that it was already ancient to the ancients. It's one thing to acknowledge Egypt as a cultural behemoth, but it's quite another to claim its fingerprints are actually on the New Testament. If we move past the general atmosphere of ancient wisdom

and the broad reach of a superpower, what are the actual tangible historical receipts? What are the specific overlapping parallels that have led scholars to suggest the foundations of the church were actually laid in the temples of the pharaohs? So some scholars argue that if you look at the Christian concept of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, or Holy Ghost, that there is an analogy with the ancient Egyptian triad of Osiris, Isis and Holy Ghost. Horus.

Osiris was the king of the afterlife and the first to be resurrected. More on him later. His wife, Isis, was the powerful mother goddess, who used her magic to bring him back to life and protect their son. That son, Horus, was the sky god, who eventually defeated evil to take his father's throne, establishing a divine cycle of a father's death and a son's triumph that would echo through history for millennia. The idea of a divine triad was the ancient world's blueprint for understanding God. Long before the church officially defined the Trinity in 325 AD,

Egyptian hymns were already singing about a three-in-one divinity. One text from 1300 BC, the laden hymn puts it plainly, all gods are three. And yet they are one. This threiness was everywhere in Egypt, usually centered around the family, a father, a mother, and a son. And then we also have the image of ISIS carrying her child Horus, which looks very simple. similar in some depictions to the Virgin Mary holding the Christ child. And we should remember, of course, that the cult of ISIS was very popular in the Roman Empire at the same time that Christianity was emerging as a cult and, of course, later, the global

religion of the Roman Empire. The cult of ISIS was one of the first truly global religions, spreading far beyond the Nile to the heart of the Roman Empire. At its peak, her temples were found as far away as London and Spain, offering a deeply personal promise of salvation and eternal life that the traditional Roman gods lacked. By the time Christianity began to rise, ISIS was already being worshipped as the Queen of Heaven and the Mother of God,

perhaps creating a ready-made blueprint for the devotion that would later surround the Virgin Mary. And then, of course, there's the whole line. idea of resurrection, of the afterlife. I mean, it's not difficult to say the ancient Egyptians had a very complex set of beliefs around the afterlife, including the whole concept of judgment in the underworld. In fact, that's something that isn't detailed very much in the Bible, but certainly appears very heavily in Christian theology. So did it come from Egyptian influences? And of course, in ancient Egypt, we have the Book of the Dead, which goes through the whole journey of the soul to the afterlife and so on.

This kind of chimes with the way in which the soul is judged in the afterlife in the book of the dead chimes a great deal. Some people believe with the Christian concept of judgment, judgment day, and what's going to happen to the dead, the final day of judgment, and how to achieve salvation, how to avoid hell. And the concept also, even of a judgment of the heart found in the book of the dead, is also seen in some Christian biblical texts. The ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead wasn't a single book,

but a customized collection of magical spells, almost like cheat codes, buried with the deceased, to help them navigate the dangers of the underworld. It acted as a guidebook for the soul, providing the specific passwords and prayers needed to bypass monstrous guardians and reach the Hall of Truth for final judgments. judgment. Many find it intriguing that the Christian New Testament and later theology

share striking parallels with these Egyptian concepts. Both describe a formal judgment day where every deed is accounted for, a second death for the wicked, and a trial where the heart, the core of human intent, is the primary piece of evidence. The moral courtroom suggests to believers of this theory that the path to Christian salvation follows a map drawn by Egyptian scribes centuries earlier. Some have looked at the whole idea of a savior, Jesus Christ, as the savior of the world, who's come into the world to save humanity. And they make a comparison with the story of Osiris, that he too was killed and resurrect

and is there a parallel in those two stories? Osiris was the legendary king who brought civilization to Egypt, only to be murdered and dismembered by his jealous brother, Set. His wife, Isis, lovingly recovered his pieces and used her magic to bring him back to life, making him the first being to overcome death. Instead of returning to the living world, he became the eternal judge of the dead, offering the promise of an afterlife to all who followed his path of righteousness.

The parallels are hard to miss. Both figures are seen as saviors, who conquered the finality of death, offering their followers a path to eternal life through their own sacrifice. In Egypt, the pharaohs and eventually common citizens hoped to become an Osiris after death. just as Christians seek to be in Christ. Even the Egyptian, the ancient Egyptian ceremony of raising the Jedded pillar, which symbolizes resurrection, is seen as very similar to the whole idea of Jesus carrying his cross. And speaking of cross, of course, there's the symbol of the cross. And some see that it's been very, very similar to the Unc, the Egyptian symbol,

of life and eternity that this was a possible precursor to the Christian cross. The Jed Pillar represented the backbone of Osiris. Each year it was physically raised in a ceremony to symbolize the God standing up from the dead, powerful precursor to the raising of the Christian cross as a victory over death. Meanwhile, the Ankh was the Egyptian key of life. It's teetheuror its T-shape and top loop made it such a natural ancestor to the cross. So much was the similarity that early Egyptian Christians, known as Copts, adopted it as their own symbol for immortality. There's also, of course, we have the depiction of women mourning the death of Jesus,

and similarly we have women who mourn the death of Osiris, women given a very prominent role in that event. In the Egyptian myth, the sisters Isis and Nephthists are the great mourners, whose ritual grief literally powers the resurrection of Osiris. Some claim that the parallel is no coincidence. As in both traditions, while the men flee or remain in the background, it is the women who serve as the gatekeepers of the transition from death to life. From the mother and child to the rising God and the mourning sisters,

The visual evidence is undeniably haunting. But is it definitive? Critics of these theories argue that these similarities are mere parallelomania, the human tendency to find patterns where none exists. They contend that basic human experiences like birth, death, and the hope for an afterlife will naturally produce similar stories in any culture. However, as historians, we have to ask, was it just a coincidence, or was there a physical bridge? Is there any actual evidence rather than visual and narrative similarities?

And how might it have been that these Egyptian influences were transmitted into Christianity? Well, one way is that, I mean, the proximity of Judea, of what's now Israel, to Egypt, I mean, the two countries are next to each other today. But there would have been a great deal of movement of people and ideas between Egypt and ancient Judea and Galilee in ancient times. And, of course, we even have the flight of the Holy Family into Egypt. I mean, let's remember that Mary and Joseph actually go physically into Egypt. So that's another connection with Egypt.

The story of the flight into Egypt places the infinite. Jesus right in the heart of the land of the pharaohs. While some see this as a literal historical escape, others argue it's a powerful symbolic link, placing the new King of Kings in the same cradle that nurtured the myth of Horace thousands of years earlier. All of this, of course, is heavily contested especially by evangelical Christians who believe that all of these parallels are entirely bogus, and that there are no comparisons, as has been stated, these are not comparisons, they are coincidences, or even traumatic rereadings of both ancient Egyptian religion and Christian teaching.

Egypt becomes this major centre of Christianity. There are basically, in the early Christian church, there are five patriarchs in the Christian church. Rome is just one of the patriarchs, the others being Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. Alexandria, very, very important. This city produced the world's first great Christian thinkers and hosted the fierce debates that define the Bible as we know it today.

In the lecture halls of Alexandria, the church put on the robes of a philosopher. Leaders like Clement argued that Greek logic wasn't an enemy of the faith, but a tutor sent by God to prepare the pagan mind for Christ. His successor, Origin, took this even further by using the Greek art of allegory to peel back the literal surface of the Bible. By treating the scriptures like a deep philosophical layer cake, these thinkers satisfied the most skeptical scholars of the age,

transforming a grassroots movement into a sophisticated system that could outthink the greatest minds of the Roman Empire. Before the Arab conquests of the 7th century, the intellectual heavyweights of Alexandria were Christians who decided how the world would understand the nature of God. In fact, patriarch of Alexandria most of the time in the early church regarded itself as being more important, frankly, than, for example, the Bishop of Rome.

And it also becomes a part of the Christian world which has a very distinctive form of Christianity, what's called a monophyte version of Christianity, and it's often at odds with the rest of the Christian world. Monophysitism, also known as Miafocitism, is the belief that Jesus possessed one single unified nature, where the divine and human were perfectly fused. While the Roman Church condemned this as heresy,

at the Council of Chalcedon. For the Egyptians, it became a badge of spiritual independence. This one-nature theology became the foundation of the Coptic Orthodox Church, a unique branch of Christianity that has survived in the heart of Egypt for nearly 2,000 years. And what we also see in Egypt are very violent clashes between Christians and what's left of the pagan world. When we say the pagans, we mean the people who believe in the state religion, what had been the state religion of the Roman Empire up until Constantine.

We see monks in Egypt pulling down pagan temples, murdering Christians even, and there is notoriously awful incident which involves a philosopher and mathematician, a woman called Hypatia. And she is one of the leading intellectuals of Alexandria in the early 5th century. Now, the Roman Empire has gone Christian, this stage, but there are still large pagan elements in the empire, especially among the elite and among the intelligentsia who reject Christianity. They're not impressed by the Christian arguments. And Hypatia is one of these people. She is a woman who is teaching young, bright

people in Alexandria, but she is murdered by a group of Christians who drag her, in fact, behind a chariot. I mean, the whole thing is pretty horrible. And this was dramatized brilliantly by the actor Rachel Weiss in the film Agora, which came out about 15 years ago. And it's a story really which should be better known in fact because she was a really an outstanding female figure in the ancient world. Now the Christians, I think they were a bit embarrassed about this murder of Hypatia and they kind of changed her into a Christian figure, believes or not. They reinvented the whole story and they reinvented Hypatia as St. Catherine of Alexander. and made out that the woman who'd been murdered was a Christian, murdered by Romans at the

order of pagan Roman emperor called Maxentius. So Hypatia is turned from a pagan into a Christian who's murdered by pagans. I mean, a brilliant piece of propaganda. Traditionalists argue that the Catherine Hypatia connection is a reach, pointing out that Catherine's story is set a full century before Hypatia's birth. They suggest that ancient Alexandria, as the world's intellectual capital, was more than capable of producing two separate, exceptionally brilliant women who both met tragic ends. And even the Vatican has wrestled with her ghost. In 1969, the Catholic Church took the radical step of removing St. Catherine from the General

Roman calendar, admitting that her historical existence simply couldn't be proven. But some icons are too powerful to erase. Driven by her immense popularity and centuries of tradition, Pope John Paul II, restored her to the calendar in 2002. What this shows basically is that Egypt was really central to the growth of Christianity, to clashes with the pagan world, and in fact, of course, to the eventual wiping out of the last priests, of ancient Egypt. There's a great story about Christians appearing on the island of Philly to

basically shut down the last pagan temple where hieroglyphs were still being used in the 5th century. The final chapter of this cultural takeover was written on the island of Philei. For centuries, this temple remained the last sanctuary where the old gods were still worshipped and hieroglyphs were still carved. Filey survived longer because of an old treaty with the Blemies, who were a nomadic people from Nubia and still worshipped ISIS. But in the 6th century, by order of the Emperor Justinian, the temple doors were finally bolted shut.

The ancient statues were carted off to Constantinople, and the sanctuary was repurposed as a church. It was the moment the ancient world finally fell silent, buried under the weight of a new, triumphant faith. The closure of Fai Li was a cultural earthquake. When the priests were imprisoned, and the statues of ISIS were hauled away to Constantinople, the living connection to 3,000 years of Egyptian history was severed.

Hieroglyphs then disappeared, and we couldn't decipher them for, centuries because the Christians basically wiped out the priests who used to write with hieroglyphs. So there is this controversial, lively history between Christianity and paganism in Egypt, but also Egypt being the center of the evolution of Christian thought. Whether one views these parallels as a divine blueprint or a natural cultural evolution, The story of Egypt and Christianity remains one of the most fascinating chapters in human history. To some, these connections are a testament to how a new faith can clothe itself in the familiar symbols of an older world to reach the hearts of the people.

To others, it is evidence of a deeper, universal spiritual truth that transcends any single time or place. Maybe the ancient world did not simply die at Fili. Perhaps it transformed. Today, the Coptic chants echoing through Cairo and the philosophical debates born in Alexandria serve as a living reminder that our search for meaning is a continuous stream, one that has been flowing from the peaks of the pyramids to the altars of the present day for over 5,000 years. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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