What do you think?
Rate this book
Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs: The Essene Revelations on the Historical Jesus
A provocative thesis that the historical Jesus was connected to the royal 18th dynasty of Egypt• Contends that Jesus, Joshua, and Tutankhamun were the same person• Provides evidence from church documentation, the Koran, the Talmud, and archaeology that the Messiah came more than a millennium before the first century C.E.• Shows that Christianity evolved from Essene teachings Although it is commonly believed that Jesus lived during the first century C.E., there is no concrete evidence to support this fact from the Roman and Jewish historians who would have been his contemporaries. The Gospel writers themselves were of a later generation, and many accounts recorded in the Old Testament and Talmudic commentary refer to the coming of the Messiah as an event that had already occurred.Using the evidence available from archaeology, the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Koran, the Talmud, and biblical sources, Ahmed Osman provides a compelling case that both Jesus and Joshua were one and the same--a belief echoed by the early Church Fathers--and that this person was likewise the pharaoh Tutankhamun, who ruled Egypt between 1361 and 1352 B.C.E. and was regarded as the spiritual son of God. Osman contends that the Essene Christians--who followed Jesus’ teachings in secret after his murder--only came into the open following the execution of their prophet John the Baptist by Herod, many centuries later. Yet it was also the Essenes who, following the death of Tutankhamun and his father Akhenaten (Moses), secretly kept the monotheistic religion of Egypt alive. The Essenes believed themselves to be the people of the New Covenant established between their Lord and themselves by the Teacher of Righteousness, who was murdered by a wicked priest. The Dead Sea Scrolls support Osman’s contention that this Teacher of Righteousness was in fact Jesus.
352 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1994
10 people are currently reading
87 people want to read
About the author
Ahmed Osman
50 books46 followersAhmed Osman (Arabic: أحمد عثمان) is an Egyptian-born author and Egyptologist. He has put forward several theories which are mainly rejected by mainstream Egyptologists
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
December 26, 2020
I do not know how to rate this book. For entertainment — 4? For reliability — 2?
Ahmed Osman’s thesis in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs (2004) strikes me as preposterous. Yet it is such a daring performance that I am sort of in awe. The book delivers (figuratively) a blow to the brain, in a way reminiscent of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) or something by Erich von Däniken — it is such a radical reinterpretation of history that I am left not believing but, instead, holding my hat over my chest as a salute.
And like Jaynes’s and von Däniken’s work, and especially like Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), this book revolutionizes the past, in this case upending not only Jewish origin stories but Christian ones as well.
The sliver of plausibility for what Osman does lies in an interpretive difficulty: real history in the Bible before Ezra and Nehemiah is . . . problematic. Before the re-building of the Temple in Jerusalem the matching of story to archaeology proves iffy at best.
So one is tempted to dismiss much of the early Biblical “historical” matter as fiction, as myth, or as radically messed-up fact at the very least. The Jews, just back from Babylon — or while in it — constructed a mythology based on dim memory and oral tradition. And out of the need to tell good stories. The strange connection to Egypt sticks out in all this. Take, as just one oddity to be accounted for, the ancient Egyptian practice of circumcision — how did the Israelites’ adoption of it make them “separate”? Well, it made them different from the Mesopotamians. That it did.
Osman makes the connection with Egypt stronger than ever.
And what a whopper he expounds. In his first book, 1987’s Stranger in the Valley of Kings, he advanced the idea that Yuya, Master of the Horse under Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, was actually the Biblical Joseph. In subsequent books, especially this one, he reinterprets everything in terms of 18th and 19th Dynasty Pharaonic history.
Osman proposes that . . .
1. Thutmose III was the Biblical King David, ruler of lands between the Nile and Euphrates (which Thutmose was, but no Israelite ever was).
2. Abraham and Sarai went down to Egypt, with Abraham notoriously passing off his wife as his sister, allowing Thutmose (David) to take Sarai unto himself and sire a son, Isaac, whose birthright is as a prince in Egypt. But they are sent north by the disgusted pharaoh, because Abraham had lied to him.
3. Joseph, grandson of Isaac, is sold into slavery by his brothers and, in Egypt, rises from slavery to high position as Yuya, Father to Pharaohs, in the reign of Thutmose IV. He served on into the reign of the next pharaoh, Amenhotep III, “the Great,”
4. who is the Biblical Solomon. This long-lived ruler revives an ancient religion, an intellectual and spiritual worship of one deity, represented in the Sun Disk — Atenism.
5. His second son, Amenhotep IV, inherits the throne. He becomes a big believer and priest of Atenism, and redubs himself Akhenaten. And — get this — he is Moses!!!
6. Alhenaten/Moses is kicked out and flees with his most devoted followers to the Sinai. His son Tutankhaten becomes pharaoh at a young age. Tutankhaten is a peacelover and not as big of a fanatic as his father, and accepts Amenism back into the mainstream of Egyptian life, changes his name to Tutankhamen and then travels to Sinai to convince his father to come back to Egypt and accept his co-pharaonic position — all a big happy family — but is killed by an Atenist priest. This is the death on Sinai that Freud wrote about and attributed to the death of “the first Moses” — but it was young King Tut. Tut’s body was sent back to Egypt for a rather bizarre burial.
7. Now, Tut also believed in an afterlife, a resurrection. He was both Moses’ colleague Joshua and . . . drum roll . . . Jesus — of Christianity! This is the stone the builders rejected. The builders of Judaism. Amazing thesis.
8. He is buried and succeeded by his uncle, Pharaoh Ay, the son of Yuya/Joseph, the Biblical Ephraim, and the New Testament Joseph of Arimathea, all three!
9. The next pharaoh, Horemheb, is the persecutor of the Jews in Goshen.
10. After Horemheb croaks, back comes old Akhenaten/Moses, to reclaim the rest of his people. Though the 19th Dynasty pharaoh that Moses encounters does indeed recognize Akhenaten’s royal staff, he is none too impressed with Moses’ entreaties: conflict ensues, Moses sneaks his people out. etc., etc.
Now, that is a story.
The Essene connection is not clear to me (perhaps I read it too hastily, or too long ago, having stretched out my reading over too long a period) but then the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Teacher of Righteousness is himself pretty obscure. Osman identifies him with Jesus, and, as I said above, Tut. This stretching back of the messianic tradition is that notion taken to its extreme. In The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (1999), Michael O. Wise only pushed it back a century or so, and, with scholarly caution, did not identify the first “Messiah” with Jesus of Nazareth.
The Akhenaten-as-Moses theory is daring enough. But Osman’s no piker: he makes Christianity an underground movement in Judaism from the beginning.
Is this at all plausible? Well, I have long regarded Freud’s book as a “nut book,” more nutty than Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhenaten (1960). So how should I regard this?
Identifying the “historical Jesus” is an old game, for both scholars and nuts. Richard Carrier, in On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt (2014), does the best job advancing the thesis that there was no actual, historical Jesus. (Carrier cites Michael O. Wise, for example, but not Osman.) There is no good historical evidence for Jesus’s existence in Judea c. 30 A.D. — the gospels providing no evidence at all, really — so it is not nutty to say there was no such person. I know it sounds weirder than a walnut, but the literary nature of the gospels provides a huge hint: we are talking about religious fiction here, and there was a major strain of Christianity that did not assert the physical reality of the Messiah at all. I refer, of course, to Gnosticism. And Carrier rightly makes much of the “spiritual Jesus” tradition to be discerned in what remains of that bizarre non-canonical text, The Ascension of Isaiah.
But the real problem with the historical Jesus subject matter is not the paucity of candidates for the man, but the surfeit. Jesus is Yeshua is Joshua, and that was a common name among the Hebrews. Carrier wades into the most startling example, taking note of a “Jesus When” problem, discussing the Nazoreans’ messiah with that name, c. 100 B.C. (pp. 281-285). Indeed, this “Ben Stada” (son of the Unfaithful) or “Ben Pandera” (son of a man named Pandera who had sex with a woman named Mary) was the only executed Jesus the Babylonian Talmudic writers knew of.
That this tradition lived on in the propagandistic Toldoth Jesu is hard to miss. I had an argument with an incredibly smart Jew once about these stories. He refused to take this tradition seriously, though, even countenance it at all, apparently because he thought that it would raise the ire of today’s Christians, conjuring up Christian anti-semitism.
Today’s evangelical Christians (whom I know best) will not likely be budged, in no small part because they tend not to read the historical matter of the Nazoreans or Gnostics or much of anything else that might challenge their faith. They are told by Josh MacDowell and Bill O’Reilly that the evidence for the Son of God living and dying and resurrecting in Judea in the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate is clear. It is not. But that is OK. Harmless fictions? I hope so.
One problem Christians will not properly confront is the problem of pious fraud. Bart Ehrman’s Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (2011) makes the standard case clearly. But without getting into the thicket of the canon, note what we find in Josephus, a historian quite extra-canonical:
This is an obvious interpolation into the historian’s text. Almost all scholars are agreed upon this. It would be most out of character for the turncoat Jew to parade Christian piety in one passage and nowhere else. It makes no sense other than as a forgery.
But what follows is instructive. Well, what follows immediately are two brief tales of scandal, and then a new chapter, which begins like this:
This rout of a peaceful Samaritan religious figure, we learn, so upset the Samaritans that they petitioned the emperor, who called back Pontius Pilate to Rome. Pilate was removed from “service” in the area because of his execution of Samaritan pilgrims. This is interesting because it links Pilate to a religious execution. Of an unnamed Samaritan.
Why the lack of a name? Well, Josephus does not name every last one the people he writes about. But Charles Kos, a YouTuber and historian, suggests another reason. The name was elided. Because the name was Jesus. This man, a proverbial Good Samaritan — and the Samaritans were, after all, a people practicing an alternate form of Judaism — was, Kos speculates, the Jesus who spurred the creation of crucial historical elements of the gospels. The Pilate story, for one.
It seems to me not at all implausible that this Samaritan’s passion tale was united with the Nazoreans’ account and the Gnostics’ mythos to create the gospels as we know them.
But Ahmed Osman goes much further. He brings King Tut into the mix, and creates a re-interpretation almost as radically implausible as the standard Christian theological account of the Word and the crucifixion and the bizarre, ghostly Resurrection.
Osman’s story is impressive, I will not deny it. But does it convince?
He had me at Yuya. The idea of Ahkenaten as Moses is not altogether too bizarre a leap. But Tut as Jesus?
I will let the question hang there. As if on an Ankh cross.
Ahmed Osman’s thesis in Jesus in the House of the Pharaohs (2004) strikes me as preposterous. Yet it is such a daring performance that I am sort of in awe. The book delivers (figuratively) a blow to the brain, in a way reminiscent of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976) or something by Erich von Däniken — it is such a radical reinterpretation of history that I am left not believing but, instead, holding my hat over my chest as a salute.
And like Jaynes’s and von Däniken’s work, and especially like Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939), this book revolutionizes the past, in this case upending not only Jewish origin stories but Christian ones as well.
The sliver of plausibility for what Osman does lies in an interpretive difficulty: real history in the Bible before Ezra and Nehemiah is . . . problematic. Before the re-building of the Temple in Jerusalem the matching of story to archaeology proves iffy at best.
So one is tempted to dismiss much of the early Biblical “historical” matter as fiction, as myth, or as radically messed-up fact at the very least. The Jews, just back from Babylon — or while in it — constructed a mythology based on dim memory and oral tradition. And out of the need to tell good stories. The strange connection to Egypt sticks out in all this. Take, as just one oddity to be accounted for, the ancient Egyptian practice of circumcision — how did the Israelites’ adoption of it make them “separate”? Well, it made them different from the Mesopotamians. That it did.
Osman makes the connection with Egypt stronger than ever.
And what a whopper he expounds. In his first book, 1987’s Stranger in the Valley of Kings, he advanced the idea that Yuya, Master of the Horse under Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, was actually the Biblical Joseph. In subsequent books, especially this one, he reinterprets everything in terms of 18th and 19th Dynasty Pharaonic history.
Osman proposes that . . .
1. Thutmose III was the Biblical King David, ruler of lands between the Nile and Euphrates (which Thutmose was, but no Israelite ever was).
2. Abraham and Sarai went down to Egypt, with Abraham notoriously passing off his wife as his sister, allowing Thutmose (David) to take Sarai unto himself and sire a son, Isaac, whose birthright is as a prince in Egypt. But they are sent north by the disgusted pharaoh, because Abraham had lied to him.
3. Joseph, grandson of Isaac, is sold into slavery by his brothers and, in Egypt, rises from slavery to high position as Yuya, Father to Pharaohs, in the reign of Thutmose IV. He served on into the reign of the next pharaoh, Amenhotep III, “the Great,”
4. who is the Biblical Solomon. This long-lived ruler revives an ancient religion, an intellectual and spiritual worship of one deity, represented in the Sun Disk — Atenism.
5. His second son, Amenhotep IV, inherits the throne. He becomes a big believer and priest of Atenism, and redubs himself Akhenaten. And — get this — he is Moses!!!
6. Alhenaten/Moses is kicked out and flees with his most devoted followers to the Sinai. His son Tutankhaten becomes pharaoh at a young age. Tutankhaten is a peacelover and not as big of a fanatic as his father, and accepts Amenism back into the mainstream of Egyptian life, changes his name to Tutankhamen and then travels to Sinai to convince his father to come back to Egypt and accept his co-pharaonic position — all a big happy family — but is killed by an Atenist priest. This is the death on Sinai that Freud wrote about and attributed to the death of “the first Moses” — but it was young King Tut. Tut’s body was sent back to Egypt for a rather bizarre burial.
7. Now, Tut also believed in an afterlife, a resurrection. He was both Moses’ colleague Joshua and . . . drum roll . . . Jesus — of Christianity! This is the stone the builders rejected. The builders of Judaism. Amazing thesis.
8. He is buried and succeeded by his uncle, Pharaoh Ay, the son of Yuya/Joseph, the Biblical Ephraim, and the New Testament Joseph of Arimathea, all three!
9. The next pharaoh, Horemheb, is the persecutor of the Jews in Goshen.
10. After Horemheb croaks, back comes old Akhenaten/Moses, to reclaim the rest of his people. Though the 19th Dynasty pharaoh that Moses encounters does indeed recognize Akhenaten’s royal staff, he is none too impressed with Moses’ entreaties: conflict ensues, Moses sneaks his people out. etc., etc.
Now, that is a story.
The Essene connection is not clear to me (perhaps I read it too hastily, or too long ago, having stretched out my reading over too long a period) but then the Dead Sea Scrolls’ Teacher of Righteousness is himself pretty obscure. Osman identifies him with Jesus, and, as I said above, Tut. This stretching back of the messianic tradition is that notion taken to its extreme. In The First Messiah: Investigating the Savior Before Jesus (1999), Michael O. Wise only pushed it back a century or so, and, with scholarly caution, did not identify the first “Messiah” with Jesus of Nazareth.
The Akhenaten-as-Moses theory is daring enough. But Osman’s no piker: he makes Christianity an underground movement in Judaism from the beginning.
Is this at all plausible? Well, I have long regarded Freud’s book as a “nut book,” more nutty than Velikovsky’s Oedipus and Akhenaten (1960). So how should I regard this?
Identifying the “historical Jesus” is an old game, for both scholars and nuts. Richard Carrier, in On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt (2014), does the best job advancing the thesis that there was no actual, historical Jesus. (Carrier cites Michael O. Wise, for example, but not Osman.) There is no good historical evidence for Jesus’s existence in Judea c. 30 A.D. — the gospels providing no evidence at all, really — so it is not nutty to say there was no such person. I know it sounds weirder than a walnut, but the literary nature of the gospels provides a huge hint: we are talking about religious fiction here, and there was a major strain of Christianity that did not assert the physical reality of the Messiah at all. I refer, of course, to Gnosticism. And Carrier rightly makes much of the “spiritual Jesus” tradition to be discerned in what remains of that bizarre non-canonical text, The Ascension of Isaiah.
But the real problem with the historical Jesus subject matter is not the paucity of candidates for the man, but the surfeit. Jesus is Yeshua is Joshua, and that was a common name among the Hebrews. Carrier wades into the most startling example, taking note of a “Jesus When” problem, discussing the Nazoreans’ messiah with that name, c. 100 B.C. (pp. 281-285). Indeed, this “Ben Stada” (son of the Unfaithful) or “Ben Pandera” (son of a man named Pandera who had sex with a woman named Mary) was the only executed Jesus the Babylonian Talmudic writers knew of.
That this tradition lived on in the propagandistic Toldoth Jesu is hard to miss. I had an argument with an incredibly smart Jew once about these stories. He refused to take this tradition seriously, though, even countenance it at all, apparently because he thought that it would raise the ire of today’s Christians, conjuring up Christian anti-semitism.
Today’s evangelical Christians (whom I know best) will not likely be budged, in no small part because they tend not to read the historical matter of the Nazoreans or Gnostics or much of anything else that might challenge their faith. They are told by Josh MacDowell and Bill O’Reilly that the evidence for the Son of God living and dying and resurrecting in Judea in the days of Herod and Pontius Pilate is clear. It is not. But that is OK. Harmless fictions? I hope so.
One problem Christians will not properly confront is the problem of pious fraud. Bart Ehrman’s Forged: Writing in the Name of God—Why The Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are (2011) makes the standard case clearly. But without getting into the thicket of the canon, note what we find in Josephus, a historian quite extra-canonical:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. [Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 3, § 3]
This is an obvious interpolation into the historian’s text. Almost all scholars are agreed upon this. It would be most out of character for the turncoat Jew to parade Christian piety in one passage and nowhere else. It makes no sense other than as a forgery.
But what follows is instructive. Well, what follows immediately are two brief tales of scandal, and then a new chapter, which begins like this:
But the nation of the Samaritans did not escape without tumults. The man who excited them to it was one who thought lying a thing of little consequence, and who contrived every thing so that the multitude might be pleased; so he bid them to get together upon Mount Gerizzim, which is by them looked upon as the most holy of all mountains, and assured them, that when they were come thither, he would show them those sacred vessels which were laid under that place, because Moses put them there. So they came thither armed, and thought the discourse of the man probable; and as they abode at a certain village, which was called Tirathaba, they got the rest together to them, and desired to go up the mountain in a great multitude together; but Pilate prevented their going up, by seizing upon file roads with a great band of horsemen and foot-men, who fell upon those that were gotten together in the village; and when it came to an action, some of them they slew, and others of them they put to flight, and took a great many alive, the principal of which, and also the most potent of those that fled away, Pilate ordered to be slain. [Antiquities of the Jews, Book 18, Chapter 4, § 1]
This rout of a peaceful Samaritan religious figure, we learn, so upset the Samaritans that they petitioned the emperor, who called back Pontius Pilate to Rome. Pilate was removed from “service” in the area because of his execution of Samaritan pilgrims. This is interesting because it links Pilate to a religious execution. Of an unnamed Samaritan.
Why the lack of a name? Well, Josephus does not name every last one the people he writes about. But Charles Kos, a YouTuber and historian, suggests another reason. The name was elided. Because the name was Jesus. This man, a proverbial Good Samaritan — and the Samaritans were, after all, a people practicing an alternate form of Judaism — was, Kos speculates, the Jesus who spurred the creation of crucial historical elements of the gospels. The Pilate story, for one.
It seems to me not at all implausible that this Samaritan’s passion tale was united with the Nazoreans’ account and the Gnostics’ mythos to create the gospels as we know them.
But Ahmed Osman goes much further. He brings King Tut into the mix, and creates a re-interpretation almost as radically implausible as the standard Christian theological account of the Word and the crucifixion and the bizarre, ghostly Resurrection.
Osman’s story is impressive, I will not deny it. But does it convince?
He had me at Yuya. The idea of Ahkenaten as Moses is not altogether too bizarre a leap. But Tut as Jesus?
I will let the question hang there. As if on an Ankh cross.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 28, 2021
As a clever thought exercise and a romp through Biblical archeology, this is a fun book. I'm not disputing its conclusions that King David is more of Arthurian legend than factual, or that some shit went down at Mount Sinai or that Zadok is weird. But what turned me off was the lack of purpose. Why does it matter that Jesus was an Egyptian King from the past? It's not racist--Osman goes to great lengths to show that it's Jewish ancestry that plays a part, so it's not white-washing. So, what is it? How does it relate to Jesus's teachings and the rise of Christianity? This book is devoid of soul and spirit, even though the author is clearly a vastly knowledgeable scholar. I'm not saying it's dry reading, it's just... empty.
Still, three stars for the excellent Appendices, including the mapping of Solomon to Egypt. That was the most interesting part, and there the author did go to the effort of relating Solomon's wisdom and meaning to the origin story. Thoughtful stuff.
The idea that Jesus was King Tut should be dismissed out of hand as someone's past lives astrology fantasy. I realize that Jesus and King Tut are both cool, but come on. This smacks of someone seeing the King Tut displays in the 80s and latching on a little too tightly.
Still, three stars for the excellent Appendices, including the mapping of Solomon to Egypt. That was the most interesting part, and there the author did go to the effort of relating Solomon's wisdom and meaning to the origin story. Thoughtful stuff.
The idea that Jesus was King Tut should be dismissed out of hand as someone's past lives astrology fantasy. I realize that Jesus and King Tut are both cool, but come on. This smacks of someone seeing the King Tut displays in the 80s and latching on a little too tightly.
May 3, 2018
I have been aware most of my adult life that the Old Testment books/stories were adaptations of other civilsations beliefs and that the new testament's stories are told/interpreted by what the teller wanted the reader to believe- open to disbelief and interpretation.
That Jesus has long been seen as a compliation of more than one person's life and his story skewed by early writers such as Paul and Peter who had there own adgenda for Christianity.
While Osman's book gives much food for thought I am not completely convinced of his argument that Tukenkamun is the biblical Jesus, maybe I could stretch belief to one interpretation of the man and his myth.
Still I am enjoying his arguments in this series. Sadly they are not all availiable as ebooks.
That Jesus has long been seen as a compliation of more than one person's life and his story skewed by early writers such as Paul and Peter who had there own adgenda for Christianity.
While Osman's book gives much food for thought I am not completely convinced of his argument that Tukenkamun is the biblical Jesus, maybe I could stretch belief to one interpretation of the man and his myth.
Still I am enjoying his arguments in this series. Sadly they are not all availiable as ebooks.
November 2, 2022
“In historical analysis, biblical criticism and comparative mythology/religion, parallelomania has been used to refer to a phenomenon (mania) where authors perceive apparent similarities and construct parallels and analogies without historical basis.
The inverse phenomenon, which occurs when suggested similarities, for example between the Bible and Ancient Near East cultures, are dismissed out of hand, is called parallelophobia.” -Wikipedia
You will see a fine example of how the former is done in Osman’s presentations in this book. It is only valuable in the sense of impression upon general readers: you will pick up some facts about the undeniable parallels and plausible connections between ancient Egypt and the Hebraic religious beliefs. However, direct dependency and inheritance of one upon another is much harder to establish. For example, how can the Theban wind god “Amun” be the source or inspiration for the second temple liturgical use of “Amen”, when the former most likely means “the invisible” and the later has a group of derivatives suggesting a root meaning of “support, rock solid foundation, certainty”? Ancient Semitic languages don’t create derivative words based on deity proper names, instead deity proper names are typically joined by conceptual words to form personal/geographical proper names.
Osman as an Egyptologist is notorious in his blatant disregard for matters of rigor for the service of sensationalism. It is the simultaneity of his relative erudition in the archeological evidence and their freewheeling use to create fantasy theories that characterizes his unique scholarship.
The inverse phenomenon, which occurs when suggested similarities, for example between the Bible and Ancient Near East cultures, are dismissed out of hand, is called parallelophobia.” -Wikipedia
You will see a fine example of how the former is done in Osman’s presentations in this book. It is only valuable in the sense of impression upon general readers: you will pick up some facts about the undeniable parallels and plausible connections between ancient Egypt and the Hebraic religious beliefs. However, direct dependency and inheritance of one upon another is much harder to establish. For example, how can the Theban wind god “Amun” be the source or inspiration for the second temple liturgical use of “Amen”, when the former most likely means “the invisible” and the later has a group of derivatives suggesting a root meaning of “support, rock solid foundation, certainty”? Ancient Semitic languages don’t create derivative words based on deity proper names, instead deity proper names are typically joined by conceptual words to form personal/geographical proper names.
Osman as an Egyptologist is notorious in his blatant disregard for matters of rigor for the service of sensationalism. It is the simultaneity of his relative erudition in the archeological evidence and their freewheeling use to create fantasy theories that characterizes his unique scholarship.
April 10, 2019
Aunque le haya puesto tres estrellas a esta investigación, no quiere decir que se trate de un libro sensato. El autor Ahmed Osman, nos propone una nueva teoría respecto a la existencia del Jesús histórico, bastante descabellada. Comienza diciendo que, en vista de que Jesús no es mencionado por los tres historiadores judíos más famosos en la época de Herodes, tenemos que ubicarlo mucho tiempo antes, en la época del Éxodo. Siguiendo al libro del mismo nombre contenido en la Biblia, por supuesto la judía, dice que el único imperio que conquistó y mantuvo su poder sobre la región, desde el Éufrates, Palestina y Siria, fue Egipto. Y, siendo Akenatón el primero que adoró a un solo dios, el Atón o sol naciente, queriendo borrar de la religión egipcia al dios Amón y Compañía, siendo rechazado por el pueblo, se vio obligado a salir del país con todos sus seguidores. Nos dice Osman, que en realidad Akenatón es Moises, aquel que vagó por cuarenta años en el desierto, que Joshua (Jesús) es Tutankamón, mismo que fue masacrado por un tal Phineas al pie de la montaña, en donde Moises obtuvo las tablas de la Ley. Para probar su hipótesis, el autor hace coincidir la historia bíblica con los descubrimientos arqueológicos más recientemente publicados, (los descubrimientos e inclusive su traducción se hicieron hace mucho tiempo, y obvio es que me refiero a los Rollos del Mar Muerto y los de Nag Hammadi). Pues si alguien quiere divertirse un poco y sorprenderse de la gran imaginación de este autor, lean este estudio.
March 11, 2022
Extremely thought provoking and controversial. It will definitely challenge the religious beliefs of some, and will require putting ideas predicated on Sunday school training to one side. If you cannot do that then this is definitely not the book for you. I already have read several of Ahmed Osman's books and he does make a good case for the idea of stories in the Old Testament being based on actual historical events and persons but written as allegorical texts in the Bible to preserve them or hide the truth. I have suspected there is more to the story of the 18th dynasty Pharoah Tutankhamun, but not sure about his place in this story. Was he really Akhenaten's son or his brother?
The language of the book was difficult to follow since the narrative deviated between the Biblical narrative (which was allegorical) and the historical narrative in Egypt which was factual e.g. the story of the warrior Pharoah, Tuthmoses III and the fictional character of David the Israelite King who may have been a local war lord in the Judean desert. At times some of the story was repetitive. Not a bad book though. I will have to read again to take in more of the theories proposed.
The language of the book was difficult to follow since the narrative deviated between the Biblical narrative (which was allegorical) and the historical narrative in Egypt which was factual e.g. the story of the warrior Pharoah, Tuthmoses III and the fictional character of David the Israelite King who may have been a local war lord in the Judean desert. At times some of the story was repetitive. Not a bad book though. I will have to read again to take in more of the theories proposed.
April 28, 2023
This book is something of a tiresome read due to the author's tendency to digress into rather dull, uninteresting and pedantic tangents that are very tenuously related to the main subject matter of the book.
So three stars out of five for writing style.
However, I was very impressed with the author´s main thesis and argument, namely that the true historical Christ was none other than the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who lived and died fourteen centuries before the Christ of the Gospels was supposedly born.
It of course sounds like an utter crackpot theory to people who have never investigated the matter, but if you do take the time and effort to investigate it you will be met with many very surprising and even shocking facts along the way, such as the revelation that Jesus Christ of Nazareth never existed except in the minds and imaginations of the Gospel authors. In the light of that stupendous realization the idea that Jesus Christ was in fact an Egyptian Pharaoh becomes much easier to swallow.
One might of course (and no doubt many people will) advance the notion that Christ is and has never been anything else than a purely spiritual entity, one that has never deigned to assume human form and actually walk the earth.
Be that as it may, it is not the aim of this book´s author to espouse any views as to the theological status of Christ, and he says as much in the book. His objective is simply to identify the main historical inspiration behind the figure of Jesus Christ and his teachings as presented in the Gospels.
His conclusion is (as mentioned above) that the character, biographical events and sayings of the Jesus in the Gospels are in their bare essentials to be traced to the life and death of the mysterious Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who was brutally murdered when he was only 19 years of age (that horrible demise being the inspiration for the crucifixion narratives in the Gospels).
And suffice it to say that the arguments which the author puts forward to support this radical conclusion seem to me to be quite sound. I can´t fault them really.
So five stars for logic and argumentation.
That balances out to four stars.
Have a nice day everyone! :)
So three stars out of five for writing style.
However, I was very impressed with the author´s main thesis and argument, namely that the true historical Christ was none other than the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who lived and died fourteen centuries before the Christ of the Gospels was supposedly born.
It of course sounds like an utter crackpot theory to people who have never investigated the matter, but if you do take the time and effort to investigate it you will be met with many very surprising and even shocking facts along the way, such as the revelation that Jesus Christ of Nazareth never existed except in the minds and imaginations of the Gospel authors. In the light of that stupendous realization the idea that Jesus Christ was in fact an Egyptian Pharaoh becomes much easier to swallow.
One might of course (and no doubt many people will) advance the notion that Christ is and has never been anything else than a purely spiritual entity, one that has never deigned to assume human form and actually walk the earth.
Be that as it may, it is not the aim of this book´s author to espouse any views as to the theological status of Christ, and he says as much in the book. His objective is simply to identify the main historical inspiration behind the figure of Jesus Christ and his teachings as presented in the Gospels.
His conclusion is (as mentioned above) that the character, biographical events and sayings of the Jesus in the Gospels are in their bare essentials to be traced to the life and death of the mysterious Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamen, who was brutally murdered when he was only 19 years of age (that horrible demise being the inspiration for the crucifixion narratives in the Gospels).
And suffice it to say that the arguments which the author puts forward to support this radical conclusion seem to me to be quite sound. I can´t fault them really.
So five stars for logic and argumentation.
That balances out to four stars.
Have a nice day everyone! :)
October 28, 2019
Religious Historical Truths
Osman, an articulate and skilled researcher provides compelling evidence pointing to the true identity of Biblical figures. A highly recommended read for anyone wanting clarification regarding our collective history.
Osman, an articulate and skilled researcher provides compelling evidence pointing to the true identity of Biblical figures. A highly recommended read for anyone wanting clarification regarding our collective history.
March 28, 2021
Facts Verses Fiction
In a constant search for the one true religion, I find this book to be very compelling.
Historical fact verses fiction, who wins?
In a constant search for the one true religion, I find this book to be very compelling.
Historical fact verses fiction, who wins?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews