In 2009, the late D.M. Murdock wrote a book called ‘Christ in Egypt’. It’s a very disorganized book, primarily using secondary sources and ‘scholarly opinions’ to make un-justified mythological assertions about Jesus being an invention based on Egyptian relgious ideas. Nevertheless, it is easy to just throw the baby out with the bathwater (a metaphor for dismissing the whole quest, not an obscure Egyptian religious practice 
).
I have recently read an English translation of the Corpus Hermiticum, a syncretic Greek-Egyptian religious work, surfacing in the 15th Century, but thought to be put together in its current form from between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD, (parts of which were re-discovered at Nag-Hamadi), but containing religious ideas that almost certainly date from pre-Christian, pre-Gnostic Egypt and may be very ancient.
What inpressed me was some similarities to Jesus’s Teaching, to Joahnine Christology and also to some concepts which I think are foreign to Jesus’s Gallillean-Palestinian Jewish background. These inlcude the following:
Only God being ‘good alone’, God being ‘The Father’ (of all); the Logos being involved in creation, Light, Life; the Logos being involved in creation (cf John 1), the Logos being the Son of God; the double nature of man (spirit and matter – Jesus in John and Paul eg 1Cor 15:53); being born again (maybe Nicodemus as a ‘Teacher of Israel’ and his fellow Jews really weren’t familiar with this idea); denying the flesh (Paul); demons torturing the ungodly after death; God’s power being clearly shown in the creation; worshippping the creator rather than the creation (cf Romans 1;12); not being able to serve both the mortal and the divine; the importance of ‘hating’ one’s own body and not serving bodily pleasures (cf Jesus & Paul). There is more as well, but I can’t recall it all. There are also similarities to the Psalms with hymns of praise being offered to the creator of the Cosmos and God being too great for a name and just ‘being’ (echoes of YHVH and the the dialogue at the burning bush).
Even if Jesus was only in Egypt as a child, is it possible that the family and others that went with him were at least influenced by Egyptian teaching and passed it on to Jesus?
Very helpful, especially the information about the founder of the Pharisees, thank you.
Were these ideas just as prominent in Jerusalem as say in Gallilee and further out in the Greek empire, such as Tarsus, of Pauline fame? Can we distinguish beteeen the Greek and the Egyptian ideas and does this matter? I get the impression that God being a Father, along with the concept of re-birth are more Egyptian, whereas Logos of course came from Heraclitus orignally, then was taken up by the Stoics and then by Philo who seems to have added mystical personification to Logos and joined it to the first born of creation (?Egyptian) and hybridised it with Jewish thought. I gather Plato was influenced by Egyptian ideas, Aristotle seems more of a purist Greek! Going back a bit, Parmenides poem on nature has the all being one idea. It’s very confusing!
Many thanks again for this background. Let me ask some of specific questions. Were the following concepts new for Jewish listeners (Heleneiszed or otherwise)?:
1. Jesus’s preaching about God being his ‘Father’ (and our Father) in Heaven
2. Jesus’s identification with being a ‘Son of God’ (ie Son of the Father and hence of God)
3. Jesus’s & Paul’s preaching about spirit and body
4. Jesus’s preaching about being the light of the World
I think the last one is only from John’s Gospel (?) and this would obviously be important
If any of these themes were new to Judaism at the time , could they have come from Hermetic sources?
Angus
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
1 Guest(s)