Does Jesus seem like a Horus copy?

• Gerald Massey (d. 1907): “The karast is literally the god or person who has been mummified, embalmed, and anointed or christified. [218.] … there is no other origin for Christ the anointed than ‘Horus the Karast’ or ‘anointed son of god the father’. There is no other origin for a Messiah as the anointed than for the Masu or anointed.” [Ancient Egypt (1907), 219.]
• Tom Harpur: “Significantly, Horus was called the KRST, or “anointed one”, from a word that was inscribed or painted on the lid of a mummy’s coffin millennia before Christianity duplicated the story.” [84.] “There is so much more to explore and share—how the letters KRST appear on Egyptian mummy coffins many centuries B.C.E.” …“the letters KRST appear on Egyptian mummy coffins many centuries B.C.E., …this word when vowels are filled in (they were frequently omitted in ancient languages) is really Karast or Krist, signifying Christ.” [6.] “I remind the reader again that the coffin bore the letters KRST, meaning Karast or Christ (i.e., the anointed one).” [The Pagan Christ (Thomas Allen Publishers, 2007), 101.]

• Gerald Massey: “A comparative list of some pre-existing and pre-Christian data which were Christianized… Horus the Good Shepherd, with the crook upon his shoulder… Jesus the Good Shepherd, with the lamb or kid upon his shoulder.” [Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (Cosmo Classics, 2007 ed.), 665.] (For an example of a borrower: Tom Harpur: “Horus was the good shepherd, the lamb of God, the bread of life, the son of man, the Word, and the fisher; so was Jesus.” [The Pagan Christ, 84.])

• Gerald Massey: “As already shown, Iu, the ass in ancient Egypt, was a type of Atum-Ra, and his son Iusa in the Kamite mythos.” [Ancient Egypt, 753.]
Predictably, layman Alvin Boyd Kuhn cites Massey (Who is This King of Glory, 409), and repeats the argument. Likewise, as usual, layman author Tom Harpur cites Kuhn: • “Where did the name Jesus originate? Simply put, it was derived from the Late Iesus, which was derived from the Greek Iesous, which in turn was derived from the Egyptian Iusa. “Jesus” has Egyptian roots.” [The Pagan Christ, 219.]

“For many thousands of years before Christ, the prototype of all coming saviors was the Egyptian Iusa. Then name is from Iu (Ia, Ie, Io, or Ja, Je, Jo, Ju), the original name of biune divinity, combined with the Egyptian suffix sa (or se, si, su, or saf, sef, sif, suf), meaning with the grammatical masculine “f”, the male heir, son, successor, or prince.” [Lost Light, 544.]

However, the title Iusa does not even exist.
• W. Ward Gasque: “Ron Leprohan, Professor of Egyptology at the University of Toronto, pointed out that while “sa” means “son” in ancient Egyptian and “iu” means “to come”, Kuhn/Harpur have the syntax all wrong. In any event, the name “Iusa” simply does not exist in Egyptian.” [At History News Network historynewsnetwork.org]]

Kuhn is making stuff up again:
• Glenn Miller: “I have looked at probably 50 epithets of the various Horus deities, and most major indices of the standard Egyptology reference works and come up virtually empty-handed. I can find a city named “Iusaas” [Gods of Egypt:1.85], a pre-Islamic Arab deity by the name of “Iusaas”, thought by some to be the same as the Egyptian god Tehuti/Thoth [Ibid:2.289], and a female counterpart to Tem, named “Iusaaset” [Ibid:1.354]. But no reference to Horus as being “Iusa”...] [christianthink-tank.com]

• Gerald Massey: “In another of the pictures from the catacombs the good shepherd is accompanied by both the lamb and the ram, which are at least equivalent to the dual type of the equinox in Aries. He carries the lamb upon his shoulders, whilst the ram is resting at his feet (Lundy). Horus was the lamb upon the western and the ram upon the eastern horizon, both being united in a figure of the double power.” [Ancient Egypt, 343.]

• Gerald Massey: “…there was a ‘Son of Man’ with an esoteric and mystical significance, who was known to the gnostic teachers as Anthropos the son of Anthropos; also as Monogenes. Horus the Savior in his first advent was the child of Isis; this is, the son of woman when the woman is divine. In his second advent he is Iu, the Su or Son of God the Father, who became the Son of Man by title thus: Atum-ra, son of Ptah, was the earliest god in the likeness of the perfect man. he was the first man in the same sense that the Jew-god Ieou in the Pistis Sophia is called ‘First Man’ (333) as the divine begetter in the human likeness. Ieou is the first man, and Iao is his son. Thus, Iao, or Jesus, is ‘the Son of Man.’” [Ancient Egypt, 793.]

• Alvin Boyd Kuhn: “that same incarnation of the divine ideal in the character of Iusa [or Horus],” [_Who is This King of Glory? (Kessinger Publishing, 1992), 109.]
• Tom Harpur: “The truth is that the Gospels are indeed the old manuscripts of the dramatized rituals of the incarnation and resurrection of the sun god Osiris/Horus, rituals that were first Egyptian, later Gnostic and Hellenic, then Hebrew, and finally adopted ignorantly by the Christian movement and transferred to the arena of history.” [The Pagan Christ, 80.]
• D. M. Murdock (Acharya S.): “Indeed, Horus is the living god, the earthly incarnation of the father, precisely as was said of Christ and God the Father.” [Christ in Egypt, 62.]

• W. Ward Gasque (Biblical scholar, consulting 10 Egyptologists): “Kuhn/Harper's redefinition of ‘incarnation’ and rooting this in Egyptian religion is regarded as bogus by all of the Egyptologists with whom I have consulted. According to one: “Only the pharaoh was believed to have a divine aspect, the divine power of kingship, incarnated in the human being currently serving as the king. No other Egyptians ever believed they possessed even ‘a little bit of the divine’.” [“The Leading Religion Writer in Canada … Does He Know What He's Talking About?” at History News Network historynewsnetwork.org]

• D. M. Murdock (Acharya S.): “Concerning this cycle in Egypt, in “Isis and Osiris” (65, 378C), Plutarch remarked that Horus the Child—or “Harpocrates,” his Greek name—was “born about the winter solstice, unfinished and infant-like” (Budge, Mummy (1894), 271-272.)”, adding that the winter solstice is December 25. [Christ in Egypt, 83.] Cf. Peter Joseph & D.M. Murdock, The ZEITGIEST Sourcebook, 34.

• D. M. Murdock (Acharya S.): “As part of the changing Egyptian calendar, five epagomenal days were eventually added to the old calendar of 360 days, the first of these five constituting Osiris’s birthday, while his brother Horus (“the Elder”) was born the next day. This period came to represent the beginning of the “Egyptian sacred year”. Therefore, it could be said that, with Sirius preceding the inundation and new year, the star in the east announced the births of both Osiris and Horus.” [Christ in Egypt, 200.]

• D.M. Murdock: “The truth is that, as is typical of myths, Christ’s birthday from the earliest times of his conception has been variously placed, on a myriad of dates such as: January 5th, January 6th, March 25th, March 28th, April 19th, April 20th, May 20th, August 21st, November 17th and November 19th. Many if not all of these dates are, like December 25th, mythological and astrotheological, representing milestones in the cycles of the sun, moon, planets and so on.”[Christ in Egypt, 347.]

II. The Narrative of Isis: “I am Isis, who conceived a child by her husband, and she became heavy with Horus, the divine [child]. I gave birth to Horus, the son of Osiris, in a nest of papyrus plants.” [“II. The Narrative of Isis.”, in Legends of the Gods: The Egyptian Texts, ed with trans. by Budge (1912).]
Scholars agree:
• A Dictionary of Egyptian Gods and Goddesses: “Born at Khemmis in the north-east Delta, the young god was hidden in the papyrus marshes, hence the epithet 'Har-hery-adj' or 'Horus who is upon his papyrus plants'. This appears visually in a wall relief in the temple of Stey 1 at Abydos as a hawk on a column in the shape of papryus reed.” [George Hart (Routledge, 1998), 89.]
• Dictionary of Gods and Goddesses 2nd ed.: “By tradition born at Khemmis in the Nile delta region, Horus's father was the dead Osiris, his mother was Isis,” [(Michael Jordan, 2004), 128.]
• A Handbook of Egyptian Religion: “To escape the machination of Set, she thereupon fled to the swamps of the Delta, and in this region, at a spot where later Khemmis stood, she gave birth to a boy, Horus, and suckled the child in solitude, no one knew where.” [Adolf Erman (Archibald Constable & Co, 1907), 34.]
• Jan Assmann: “Khemmis was a mythic place in the delta, hidden and inaccessible, where Isis raised her child Horus in total seclusion. … In the holy of holies of this Hathor chapel is a representation of a cow emerging from the papyrus thicket of Khemmis, with the royal child kneeling and nursing from her udder.” [The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (Cornell, 2001), 133.]

• Ben Witherington: “Also, when Luke uses the word kataluma in his Gospel (22:11 and par: cf. 1 Kings 1:18), it clearly does not mean an inn but a guest room. It is also worth pointing out that the Arabic and Syriac versions of the NT have never translated kataluma as inn. It becomes more likely that by kataluma Luke means either house or guest room, and the latter translation must have the edge precisely because in the vast majority of ancient Near-Eastern peasant homes for which we have archaeological and literary evidence, the manger was within the home, not in some separate barn. The animals as well as the family slept within one large enclosed space that was divided so that usually the animals would be on the lower level, and the family would sleep on a raised dais (Bailey).” [Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, eds. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight, I. Howard Marshall, 69.]

• D. M. Murdock (Acharya S.): “Coincidentally, there happen to be three very conspicuous stars in the ‘best’ of the constellation of Orion that are also called the ‘Three Kings’” [_Christ in Egypt, 199.]
• D. M. Murdock (Acharya S.): “As noted, the three highly visible ‘king-stars’ of the splendid constellation of Orion are named Mintaka, Aniltak and Anilam or Alnilam, the latter of which means “string of pearls”, while the former two signify ‘belt’.[957.] The statement in the Egyptian texts that Sothis ‘leads Orion’ thus constitutes the motif of the bright star followed by these three ‘kings’,” [Christ in Egypt, 205.] (cf. Peter Joseph & D.M. Murdock, The ZEITGIEST Sourcebook, 41, 53.) [Note: the names Mintaka, Aniltak and Anilam were assigned by Giuseppe Piazzi (1746-1826)]

Matthew 2:1-12 -- “Now after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king, magi from the east arrived in Jerusalem … the star, which they had seen in the east, went on before them until it came and stood over the place where the Child was. … opening their treasures, they presented to Him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”

• Gerald Massey: “Amongst the numerous types of Horus repeated in Rome as symbols of the alleged “historic” Jesus are… Horus as Icthus, the fish; Horus as the bennu or phoenix; Horus as the dove; Horus as…” [Ancient Egypt, 752.] (cf. Kuhn who literally just copied Massey here. Alvin Boyd Kuhn: Among numerous types of Horus repeated in Roman symbols of the alleged historic Jesus are… Horus as Icthys the Fish; Horus as bennu or phoenix; Horus as the dove….” [Who is this King of Glory? (The Book Tree, 1984, 2007) 202.])
• Gerald Massey: “Horus was the prototypal fish, the same type of sacrifice that is still eaten in the penitential meal to-day, as it was in On when Sebek-Horus was the Savior as the fish… Horus as the fish preceded Horus as the fisher when Sebek, the crocodile-headed god, was the typical great fisher. It is said of the first two fishers, “These are the two hands of Horus which had become fishes,” that is, as types of Horus the fisher, according to the mystery of Nekhen (Rit. ch. 113). The followers of Horus as fishers (ch. 153A) are called “the fisherman who are fishing.” Thus the total group who were the twelve as reapers in the harvest-field of Amenta are also the twelve as the fishers. The first fishes caught for Horus are then eaten at the sacramental meal. As it is said (Rit. ch. 153A), the fishes are laid on the table of Horus. They had been brought to him when the festival was founded by Ra; “they were brought to Horus and displayed before his face at the feast of the 15th day of the month, when the fishes were produces” (Rit., ch. 113).” [Ancient Egypt, 860-861.]
• Gerald Massey: “Horus, or Jesus, the fulfiller of time and law, the saviour who came by water, by blood and in the spirit, Horus the fish and the bread of life, was due according to procession in the sign of the fishes about the year 255 B.C. A new point of departure for the religion of Icthus in Rome is indicated astronomically when Jesus or Horus was portrayed with the sign of the fish upon his head, and the crocodile beneath his feet. This would be about the year 255 B.C. (so-called).” [Ancient Egypt, 473.]
• Gerald Massey: “A kindred representation is portrayed upon a gnostic stone now in the British Museum. This is Horus the gnostic Jesus as Icthus the fish. That the scene occurs in the sign of Pisces is shown by the two fishes, one of which is over the head of Horus, the other under his feet.” [Ancient Egypt, 343.]

• The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church: “In Christian art and literature the fish is a symbol of Christ, also sometimes of the newly baptized and of the Eucharist. It came into use in the 2nd cent., but neither its origin nor its meaning have so far been completely elucidated.” [3rd edition. eds. Frank Cross and Elizabeth Livingstone (Oxford, 2005), 617.]

“[First] The ‘major ancient literature’ I refer to consists of the ‘canonical’ ANE documents (COS1,2,3 in my Book Abbrvs) and other Egyptian literature that I have stored on my harddrive. The attached biblio lists the 1100+ documents/books I have on the harddrive, and I have highlighted in RED the most pertinent ones. But I can keyword search ALL of them in seconds, and I looked for every combo of horus, anup, asup, and baptize – with ZERO results.
Two. Additionally, I checked some 20 hard-books in my library. Not a single description of Horus (in his many forms) even MENTIONED baptism – or anything like it—even in books specifically on Egyptian deities or religion.
Three. Then, I looked at references/articles in books on baptism. The Encyclopedia of Religion had one paragraph on baptism in Egypt, describing it as applying ONLY to newborns and to dead people. Not a whisper of Horus, or 30 years… The only reference I found to anything CLOSE to this was in the so-called Baptism of Pharaoh, a coronation ritual of the pharaoh. [CANE:277]: “An early coronation ceremony seems to have been the so-called Baptism of Pharaoh, a symbolic purification of the king by the gods of the four cardinal points. The reliefs show not only water but also the symbols for life and dominion being poured over the pharaoh.” The reason it is referred to as ‘so-called’ is probably because it is NOT immersion (the proper meaning of baptizo).
When I looked for more references to the Baptism of Pharaoh (since the Pharaoh was sometimes identified with one version of Horus—as the Son of Re—I thought maybe that would be a possible research line), I found out that it was the OPPOSITE: it was Horus DOING the ‘baptizing’ of the Pharaoh. [“Anup the Baptiser?” christianthinktank.com/anup.html]

• D.M. Murdock (Acharya S.): [Admits] “Modern scholarship thus has disassociated the zodiac from Egypt and denied Egyptian influence on the much later Babylonian. [“Christ in Egypt”]
• Erik Hornun: “The zodiac was adopted early in the Ptolemaic Period. The earliest, still rectangular example stems from an older temple at Esna and belongs to the time of Ptolemy III and Ptolemy IV.” [The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, trans. by Lorton (Cornell University Press, 2001), 30-31.]
• Robert Powell: “This coordinate system of twelve zodiacal signs, i.e. twelve equal-length zodiacal constellations each 30° long, emerged in Babylonian astronomy during the fifth century B.C. and was transmitted from Babylon to Greece, Hellenistic Egypt, Rome, and India.” [“The Definition of the Babylonian Zodiac and the Influence of Babylonian Astronomy on the Subsequent Defining of the Zodiac” (Doctoral Dissertation) (2005).]
[Note: Murdock argues against this, but her case is a string of one unconvincing maybe built on another and another. Among her case is the existence of a theme centered on the number twelve. (See footnotes below.) She first concludes, “[my evidence] make[s] for an intriguing hypothesis for further study” and then “it is reasonable to suggest that the Egyptians possessed the rudiments of the zodiac.”]

D.M. Murdock: “Also, in the tenth hour of the Amduat, Horus the Elder leaning on his staff is depicted as leading the 12 “drowned” or lost souls to their salvation in the “Fields of the Blessed.” (Erik Hornung, “The Valley of the Kings: Horizon of Eternity, tr. Warburton [Timken Publishers, 1990], 138, 144; “The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, tr. Lorton [Cornell, 1999_], 40, 51.”) “These 12 deceased, Hornung relates, are “saved from decay and decomposition by Horus, who leads them to a blessed posthumous existence…”
By way of response, however,…
• …It was likely only known by the priesthood. (See Jan Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom, 25). Murdock thinks the masses may have known and regardless, it was “well known by the powerful priesthood, i.e., those who make religions”!

• E. A. Wallis Budge: “On the right of the Boat of Afu-Rā, and facing it, are Horus, and the twelve gods of the hours, who protect the tombs of Osiris, and assist Rā in his journey…” [EHH, III, 85, 153.]
• Karl Baedeker: “Room XIII… On the Left Entrance Wall and the Left Wall appears the sun’s journey during the 7th hour of night… Bottom row. Horus, before whom are the twelve star-gods who conduct the sun at night…” [Egypt: Handbook for Travellers (1902), 275.]

• E. A. Wallis Budge: “On the right side of the boat of the god are twelve gods, who are described as the “bringers of their doubles,” and twelve jackal-headed figures, who are walking on the Lake of Life… On the left side of the boat of the god is Horus the Aged, who follows eleven human forms as they march behind the uraeus called Flame...to a shrine in which the god Osiris...stands upon a serpent. Behind Osiris are the twelve gods, “who are behind the shrine,” and four gods, who preside over the pits in the earth…” [“The Gods of the Egyptians, I, 184] (cf. Hornung, AEBA, 60, 69.”]

Gerald Massey: “…the place of rebirth for Horus the eternal Son was celebrated in the vernal equinox… The double birth of Horus at the two times, or the birth of the babe in the winter solstice and the rebirth as the adult in the Easter equinox is acknowledged in the Egyptian Book of the Divine Birth… it was commanded in the calendar of Esné that the precepts of the Book on the Second Divine Birth of the child Kahi “were to be performed on the first of the month Epiphi” (cited by Lockyer, Dawn of Astronomy, pp. 284-6). The child Kahi is a pseudonym for the child-Horus… Now the first and second “divine births” (or the birth and rebirth) of Horus were celebrated at the festivals of the winter solstice and the Easter equinox, and these are the two times of the two Horuses identified by Plutarch, the first as manifester for Isis, the Virgin Mother, the second as Horus, the Son of God the Father, when he tells us that “Harpocrates (Har the Khart, or child) is born about the winter solstice, immature and infant-like in the plants that flower and spring up early, for which reason they offer to him the first-fruits of growing lentils; and they celebrate her (Isis) being brought to bed after the vernal equinox” (of Is. and Os., ch. 65)... Two different birthdays were likewise assigned to the Greek Apollo. One of these was commemorated by the Delians at the time of the winter solstices; the other by the Delphians in the vernal equinox.” [Ancient Egypt: Light of the World, vol. II, (Kessinger, 1907), 739.] cf. Peter Joseph & D.M. Murdock, The ZEITGEIST Sourcebook, 32, 41.

Anthony Mercatante: “[Isis] hid [her son, Horus the child]… When she returned, she found him lying dead, foam on his lips,… he had been killed by Set, in the form of scorpion. Isis's cries brought out all the neighbors… Finally, on the advice of Nephtathys, her sister, she appeared before the sun god Ra. …[He as Thoth] descended to earth to comfort her and taught her the spell to restore Horus to life. Isis uttered the magic words, and the poison flowed from her son's body,… the boy was restored.” [Whos Who in Egyptian Mythology (Barnes & Noble, 1978), 74-75.]

Tryggve N.D. Mettinger:“…Osiris rose to new life in his son, Horus…” [The Riddle of the Resurrection, 172.] There is a lot to say in response, however, so a whole BeliefMap section will be devoted to the alleged parallel between Osiris's resurrection and Jesus's. For now it suffices to say that Horus and Osiris were absolutely not the same person; Osiris was Horus's biological father.