I was not making an argument. I was briefly stating an opinion, giving my informed reaction to the video. There is a difference between the two. There is definitely something amiss if you think one cannot express an opinion without having to launch into a time-consuming, detailed discussion and analysis of the evidence. I have done that, in part, elsewhere. And my opinion, drawing on my knowledge of comparative religion and biblical studies, in no sense was an ad hominem. You do know what that is? An ad hominem attacks the person, such as calling someone an idiot, or makes irrelevant disparagements on someone's character. Nothing in my post concerns the creator of the Zeitgeist video. My comments pertained only the video itself and its claims.
And in regards to what you call the "scholarship of Part 1 of Zeitgeist", I would say again that the video is very embarrassing in its basic errors -- even setting aside the "Christ myth" issue. It tries to draw similarities between the words "sun" and "son", which are homophones only in English -- not in the languages of the Near East. It similarly tries to relate "Horus" to the English word "horizon" and "Seth" to the English word "sunset", without any recognition of the fact that these names and words are philologically unrelated. These are not the kind of errors you find in "scholarship". And what it says about Egyptian myths about Horus bears little or no resemblance with what you find in actual scholarship on Horus (such as John Griffiths' The Conflict of Horus and Seth From Egyptian and Classical Sources, Herman te Velde's Seth, God of Confusion: A Study of His Role in Egyptian Mythology and Religion, or Wallis Budge's The Gods of the Egyptians: Studies in Egyptian Mythology). Stuff like Horus being born with a star in the east, being a child teacher at age 12, being "baptized" by someone named Anup, being crucified and dead for three days, etc. That's just not in any academic treatise on Egyptian religion, and I don't see any evidence cited that goes back to ancient primary sources.
You cite antiquated books like Doane's Bible Myths and Their Origins in Other Religions (1882) and Massey's Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ (1900) as "primary resource documents". These are not primary sources like manuscripts and documents. These are secondary sources which weave together material often from other secondary sources. To best understand the possible influences on Christianity, you have to base your research as much as possible on evidence that goes back to the period in question. Otherwise you are basing your arguments and interpretations on earlier writers' citation and interpretation of the actual evidence. And that raises the possibility of error and distortion, whether intentional or not. Taking a look at Doane (which can easily be downloaded here), I can see that this problem is painfully obvious. The work is heavily footnoted, and the list of references in the preface looks impressive, but among the sources are theosophical publications which in no sense represent reliable sources of ancient mythologies; theosophy was a 19th-century syncretistic Spiritualist movement that innovatively mixed and matched different mythologies and religious philosophies in order to develop its spirituality. Such works were a witness to contemporary syncretism, not the kind of syncretism that existed in ancient times which may have influenced early Christianity. So alongside genuine primary sources, we find works like Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled listed in the references. And these works are cited in just the same way. For example, Zeitgeist rattles off a list of alleged titles of Horus, and Doane gives some of them as "Saviour", "Redeemer", and "the Only-Begotten" (p. 190). Well, that last one sure sounded distinctively Christian, even though it would not exactly fit since "only-begotten" in the NT is a mistranslation of the Greek. So I thought I'd check to see what the source of this is. Was there an ancient writing that actually called Horus "the Only-Begotten"? Doane gives a footnote:
8 See Mysteries of Adoni, p. 88.
That is a citation of Sod: The Mysteries of Adoni, written in 1861 by S. F. Dunlap. This is another theosophical book, among many others used by Doane as source material. On p. 88, Dunlap has this to say:
With Plutarch's account of Anubis (Mercury) as the companion of Isis in the search after Horus (the Only-begotten) and his (Mercury's) guarding the gods as the dogs guard men, compare the story of Io the beloved of Jupiter, turned into a Cow (Moon, Nature-goddess), and guarded by ARGUS whom Mercury slays. Io brings forth Epaphus (the Bull-god, the husband of Paphia; compare Pappas, Adonis, Abobas, Bacchus the bull-horned God) and marries Osiris and becomes an Egyptian goddess under the name of Isis. IEUo and Hewah (Adam and Eve) are Adonis and Venus, Bacchus and Ceres, Guas and Gua (Chuah), Osiris and Isis, Iao and Io (Iah and Ioh).-- Spirit-Hist., 148, 149.
Dunlap here refers to Plutarch but gives no citation. The citation he should have given is Iside et Osiride, 14.356 F, which is where Plutarch referred to Anubis as a companion of Isis: "And when the child had been found, after great toil and trouble, with the help of dogs which led Isis to it, it was brought up and became her guardian and attendant, receiving the name of Anubis, and it is said to protect the gods just as dogs protect men". This has nothing to do with Horus, and nowhere does the term "the Only-begotten" occur. The other citation given, "Spirit-Hist", is to Dunlap's own book Vestiges of the Spirit History of Man (1858), and it relates only to the name "Iao". Not only is there no source for the glossing of Horus with "the Only-begotten", but it is clear that this is Dunlap's own doing...he uses the parentheses to indicate his own speculative syncretistic identifications between different mythologies and traditions. He identifies Anubis with Mercury, Epaphus with Adonis and Bacchus, "IEUo and Hewah" with Adam and Eve and, in turn, Adonis and Venus, and so forth. So the use of "the Only-begotten" as a name for Horus goes only as far back as Dunlap, the very source cited by Doane. It is a non-existent parallel. And this is by no means an isolated example; Doane's work is filled with citations to other secondary works that do not represent actual ancient traditions, but rather then-current 19th-century interpretations and creative uses of mythic and mystical material.
The parallels are sometimes real but simplified to better fit with the biblical or Christian analogue. A good example of this is the claim in Zeitgeist that Horus was born in December 25th. The Zeitgeist transcript gives two sources for this. One of these, Clerk de Septehenses' Religions of the Ancient Greeks (p. 214) is unlocateable. I searched this work in WorldCat under both the name and title and pulled up nothing, and all references on Google are to Zeitgeist. If this is a real source, Zeitgeist has not done a good job in citing it. The other source is Massey, pp. 39-40. There "the Winter solstice, December the 25th" is the date "assigned to the birth of the young sun-god Mithras and to Horus the child in Egypt". Massey then cites Plutarch (Iside et Osiride, 65.377 C) in support, who says that "in the time of the winter solstice she [Isis] gave birth to Harpocrates [Horus the Younger], imperfect and premature". In fact, Plutarch does not give the date "December 25th", he gives "the winter solstice", and there is a difference. The actual date of the winter solstice in the Julian calendar was December 22 or 23 (depending on leap year), but it was typically observed halfway between Saturnalia (December 17) and the Kalendae of January, i.e. on December 24-25. We do not know if the Egyptian tradition cited by Plutarch presumed the Julian calendar or whether it represented a tradition involving the actual date of the solstice. Of course, it doesn't matter that much, and the parallel is a real one (tho not with any early Christian traditions about the birth of Jesus but later ones in the third century AD), but it is worth noting that the parallel is improved upon by specifying "December 25". Moreover, there is another simplification in Zeitgeist in omitting the distiction between Horus the Younger and Horus the Elder. By far the dominant birthday tradition of Horus in Egypt pertained to Horus the Elder, and that places his birthday in the five epagomenal days at the end of the year, particularly, the second epagomenal day (cf. Harhotpe Documents from the Middle Kingdom, Wb. III p. 430.3, Amenhotep III Palace Jar Label 143A, Papyrus Leiden I 346, Cairo Calendar JdE 86637, Kom Ombo Festival Calendar, Esna Calendar, Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 12 355E-F). That would be a date sometime in the middle of July. No mention is made of the fact that Horus had two birthdays.
Another very misleading example is Isis. Zeitgeist claims that "Horus was born on December 25th of the virgin Isis-Meri". Who? Isis-Meri? You wouldn't find that name in any academic literature available via Google Scholar, whereas it appears only on Zeitgeist and lay websites devoted to the same Horus-Christ meme. I certainly have never seen it myself in any ancient sources or in academic papers, including those discussing parallels between Marian and Isis iconography (a rather strange omission, had such a name as Isis-Meri existed). Good thing that the Zeitgeist transcript cites its sources, huh? It lists three sources, Doane, p. 327-328, Massey, p. 40, and Manley Hall, pp. 53-56. If you search those citations, the name "Meri" or "Isis-Meri" nowhere occurs. Doane compares Isis to Mary, calls Isis a virgin, and gives a list of titles and names of Isis, but "Meri" isn't one of them. Manly Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages (1928), which is a philosophical treatise (somewhat similar to those of the theosophists) and not a work of historical scholarship, devotes a chapter to Isis, but again does not call her "Meri". Massey on p. 40 only refers to Isis as a "virgin mother".
So what is the basis of "Isis-Meri"? Zeitgeist gives another quote, without a page number (so I cannot verify it), wherein Massey says that it is Nut who is the prototype of Mary and who is the mother of Osiris who is also "the child-Horus". Not here, nor elsewhere in his two books, can I find Massey refer to "Isis-Meri," although he refers to "Hathor-Meri" and "Nut-Meri", and these Massey identifies with Isis as well. But what is the source of Massey's "Meri"? This is a good instance of where Massey is exceedingly difficult. His book does not have a bibliography and his citations are very clipped. So in Ancient Egypt: Light of the World, Vol. 2, p. 846, he says "In another text the hair is assigned to Hathor -- one of whose names is Meri (ch. 35, 1)". You have to hunt around to discover what this is a chapter of. It turns out to be Rit., ch. 35. Well, what is Rit.? You have to hunt around again in his book to discover that this is something called Ritual. What is Ritual? You then have to hunt around again to find his description of this to discover that he is talking about the Turin Papyrus of the Book of the Dead. But then if you actually examine this source, you still won't find a "Meri" as a name of Hathor. There were two English translations of the Book of the Dead from that time (along with the original hierglyphic text published by Budge), Budge's The Book of the Dead: English Translation of the Chapters (1898) and The Egyptian Book of the Dead: Translation and Commentary by Peter Le Page Renouf and Edouard Naville (1904). The text of both these books is searchable and the name "Meri" nowhere exists in these translations. Looking at specifically ch. 35, we see a reference to Hathor but nothing at all about "Meri". This text pertains to Osiris protecting the soul of the dead person in the netherworld from being eaten by the serpent Seksek:
Budge's translation: "Hail, thou god Shu! Behold Tattu! Behold Shu! Hail Tattu! Shu hath the head-dress of the goddess Hathor. They [i.e. Shu and Tattu] nurse Osiris. Behold the two-fold being who is about to eat me! Alighting from the boat I depart, and the serpent-fiend Seksek passeth me by. Behold sam and aaqet flowers are kept under guard. This being is Osiris, and he maketh entreaty for his tomb. The eyes of the divine prince are dropped, and he performeth the reparation which is to be done for thee; [he] giveth [unto thee thy] portion of right and truth according to the decision concerning the states and conditions [of men]" (pp. 85-86).
Renouf and Naville's translation: "Oh Shu, here is Tattu, and conversely, under the wig of Hathor. They scent Osiris. Here is the one who is to devour me. They wait apart. The serpent Seksek passeth over me. Here are wormwood bruised and reeds. Osiris is he who prayeth that he may be buried. The eyes of the Great One are bent down, and he both for thee the work of cleaning; marking out what is conformable to law and balancing the issues" (p. 83).
The reference to the wig of Hathor is what Massey's reference pertains to, as Massey refers to hair being assigned to Hathor, but the text does not refer to Hathor as "Meri". The use of "Meri" as a name for Hathor, Nut, and Isis appears to have been a product of Massey's mind, as there is no trace of it in any other literature. If you search in Google Scholar, it is not exist in any academic work. All references on the web are from books (such as Arachya S.'s The Christ Conspiracy, a probable influence on Zeitgeist) and websites that are dependent on Massey. My suspicion is that this came into existence from Massey misreading the hierglyphics, which were published by Budge. In Egyptian mry means "beloved of", i.e. mry-M;t "Beloved of Maat", mry-Imn "Beloved of Amun," mry-Pth "Beloved of Ptah", etc. Notice that these regularly have mry come before the name, not after it, and neither is it a name. My guess is that "Isis-Meri" is a misunderstanding of a pair of epithets pertaining to Horus, e.g. Hr s; Ist mry-Imn "Horus, son of Isis, beloved of Amun" (attested as a throne name of Horsiese I), which has the sequence Ist mry (= Isis mry), but mry pertains to Horus not Isis tho it follows the name "Isis". However I have not found any instance in the Book of the Dead at least in the two translations of "beloved" being used with Hathor or Nut. In any case, it is pretty clear that this is an error of Massey's making that then got picked up by other writers and now is spread all over the internet and in Zeitgeist as a "fact" about Horus and Isis.
And was Isis really a "virgin" goddess, or specifically, a virgin when she gave birth to Horus? This claim (which seems to go back at least to Madam Blavatsky, cf. her book Isis Unveiled, 1877, p. 10, and which is repeated by Doane, who uses Blavatsky as a source, and Alvin Kuhn, a twentieth-century follower of Blavatsky's Theosophy) also seems to be false. Isis was a fertility and divine mother goddess, particularly after her assimilation to Hathor, depicted as the mother of Horus and giver of milk. It is generally accepted that Marian iconography, especially in Egypt, was influenced by the Isis cult. But I have not seen any original source that construes Isis, like Mary, as a virgin when she became pregnant with Horus. The actual myth, attested by Plutarch, was that Isis reassembled Osiris' body, brought him back to life, and then had sex with him before he died again, whereby she became pregnant and gave birth to Harpocrates. In no sense is this a "virgin birth". And Ward Gasque at least claims that when asked about Isis as a virgin mother, ten leading Egyptologists stated that no evidence exists to this effect.
As one last example, I had to check out the bizarre claim of Zeitgeist that Horus was "crucified". The two sources given are Albert Churchward's The Origin and Evolution of Religion (1921), p. 135, and James Bonwick's Egyptian Belief and Modern Thought (1878), p. 157. Once again, Zeitgeist does not depend on primary sources, nor even secondary sources from actual scholars. Albert Churchward was a Masonic and occult author, brother of James Churchward who espoused similar views (including the pseudohistorical idea of a sunken lost continent of Mu in the Pacific), and it turns out that freemasonry and Churchward's own crank theory -- not actual ancient sources -- is the basis of Churchward's reference to a crucified Horus. This is what Churchward wrote:
"The various representations of the Egyptian Horus as the God of the Axe, God of the Double Horizon, and so on, found in various parts of America, and notiably his representation as the crucified victim found at the ruins of Copan, Guatemala, Central America, show that the origin of all the religious cults found in America are traceable back to the Egyptians" (p. 135).
This "evidence" does not consist of depictions and references of Horus per se but certain Mayan images in the New World that Churchward believed depicted Horus! This depends, in turn, on Churchward's belief that Egyptians came to Central America before Columbus and originated the Mayan civilization (based on Freemason philosopher Karl C. F. Krause's theory that the ancestors of all Native Americans excepting the Eskimo migrated from Egypt, an idea that contemporary anthropologists and Mayan scholars roundly reject). Hence this is not valid evidence at all. Moreover, Churchward gives a footnote giving his source: "For illustrations, see 'The Arcana of Freemasonry' ", an earlier book of his published in 1915. No page number is given, but the image in question is found on p. 40-41 (with no indication whatsoever of the original source), and I have to conclude that Churchward's belief that this represents "Horus crucified" is again the product of a fertile imagination. As for Bonwick, he was a popular writer from Australia (who ended up being an archivist for New South Wales) and was not a trained Egyptologist or philologist. His book (which became quite popular in Theosophical circles and was used by both Blavatsky and Doane) was dependent on secondary sources and the passage in question includes no references or citations of evidence:
"He [Osiris] is born into the world. He came as a benefactor, to relieve man of trouble... In his efforts to do good he encounters evil. In struggling with that, he is killed. The story, entered into in the account of the Osiris myth, is a circumstantial one. Osiris is buried. His tomb was the object of pilgrimage for thousands of years. But he did not rest in his grave. At the end of three days, or forty, he rose again and ascended to Heaven. This is the story of his Humanity" (p. 155).
This overgeneralized, simplified description of the Osiris myth -- with some unusual features that assimilate it to the story of Jesus (such as the idea that Osiris was buried for three days and ascended to heaven) -- lacks any reference to primary sources. Neither does it mention a crucified Horus.
These examples (which can be multiplied many, many times over) show the folly of lazily repeating and regurgitating what is presented in secondary sources without bothering to check with original primary sources. This is why, when I post on biblical or mythological subjects, I try as much as possible to give references to all my sources and to base my claims on primary sources. And that is what you find in sound scholarship. Instead, what you find in Zeitgeist is an uncritical acceptance of claims, speculations, and errors by those who were not competent Egyptologists -- and many of these writers were themselves dependent on non-scholarly sources. If you look at what is in Zeitgeist's list of sources, you see very little reference to the voluminous work of scholars like Budge, Breasted, Griffiths, Petrie, Pinch, Bilolo, etc. Instead it is filled with the literature of Theosophists (and those who use Theosophy literature as source material), Freemasons, mystics, and popular non-academic writers. Now, I am not saying that there is anything wrong with Theosophy or Freemasonry and their free use of mythological material to construct new ideas and beliefs. That's the very stuff of religion. I am just saying that it is not historical scholarship.
And that brings me to my last point. Anyone who has paid attention to my posts knows that I am interested in the mythological and traditional origins of biblical concepts, and the Jesus story is no exception. I have drawn parallels between Jesus and traditional Canaanite beliefs about Baal, and have speculated in the past on the relationship between Hellenistic mystery cults and the burgeoning Christian movement. So my comments are not motivated by an "apologetic" concern (as you claimed in a previous post). It is rather a matter of being accurate, of using reliable and representative sources, and about being intellectually honest. That is why, in my original post, I encouraged viewers to try "researching with sound scholarly resources the mythology of Horus in Egyptian religion. Try to see even if it faintly resembles what is described here". Don't take my word for it, check it out for yourself. Most of the sources of Zeitgeist are right there on the internet, just as many original scholarly works are as well. See how much of what is claimed actually goes back to the primary sources. What you will find is that in example after example, the claims only go back to a 19th-century writing that originates them through the author's own interpretation of texts or imagery, theories that read the author's own concepts into the interpretation, or syncretistic mixing and identification of mythological concepts. Zeitgeist and Doane present the story of Horus as practically identical to that of Jesus -- born on December 25 in a cave by a virgin mother "Meri", accompanied by shepherds and a star in the east, who grows up to be baptized and becomes a great teacher who then is crucified and who rises after three days and ascends to heaven. What an incredible resemblance! But such a striking story is nowhere found in the reconstructed narrative(s) of Horus found in textbooks and monographs devoted to the mythology of Horus by actual scholars. It is, as I've said before, a cariacture of the actual Horus cycle of myths. Of course there are similarities, some of them indeed very striking, but in no sense would you ever encounter a narrative like the one Zeitgeist spells out.
The central problem is this: the main literary sources for Zeitgeist, Acharya S., and others of their ilk (e.g. Blavatsky, Dunlap, Doane, Massey, etc.) artificially blended together selected, cherry-picked ideas from a myriad of mythologies and used them freely to construct new syncretistic syntheses, without any careful methodology of comparative religion. So Zeitgeist and its main source material assume a total merger between Isis, Hathor, and Nut on the one hand, and Osiris and Horus on the other, and they take any element from the entire literature on these deities that could be vaguely construed as to fit with the "savior" narrative (including spurious details, such as Horus being crucified) and they reassemble them together into a novel ways that do not represent any particular system that actually existed in the past. The reality is this: Egyptian civilization existed for thousands of years and had a tremendous number of cults and competing mythologies and these underwent change and transformation, especially as gods gradually merged and underwent syncreticism with Greek and other mythologies in the Hellenistic period. That yields a lot of material for someone to construct their own system out of. But the kind of systems that, say, Blavatsky and Dunlap created in the 19th century are their own creations alone, and do not represent what systems prevailed in the actual mystery cults of the first century BC -- the specific systems that Zeitgeist claim were the main influence on Christianity. We actually have rather scanty evidence of what people actually believed at the time. But what we find in Massey for instance is a mixing together of material with no sense of the diachronic development in religion (such that the late Isis-Osiris myth of Plutarch, the Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, etc. all form one single system), and of course he generates his own original material via his idiosyncratic astrotheology. So an artificial, unitary "myth of Horus" is constructed which is then compared to an artificial, unitary harmonization of different Christian gospel traditions about Jesus, which certainly did not exist at the time when the Christian movement first arose. As Narkissos once pointed out, Zeitgeist completely misses the true parallel between the development of gospel traditions and mystery religions. A new mystery religion did not simply borrow another pre-existent cult and replace the names of the gods. That's not how it worked. The borrowing was at a deeper level. Each mystery religion reworked its own native mythological traditions on common themes. That is precisely what happened with Christianity. Much of the stuff in the gospels that Zeitgeist claims was borrowed from a non-existent Horus mythology (e.g. being born of a virgin with a star in the east, riding on a donkey, etc. etc.) represent exegetical reworkings of traditional material found in the OT. And the appearance of narrative themes in Christianity that parallel those in mystery religions (such as the dying-rising motif, or the Father-Son dynamic) may also represent a resurgence of traditional Hebrew/Israelite/Canaanite myths that have left their mark on the OT.
