Untangling the Thread: How Christianity Obscured Its Own Origins
Religious traditions obscure their own origins for various reasons, and Christianity is no exception. Most Christians have no idea that their foundational texts were compiled in Egypt, that their prayers follow Egyptian and Jewish patterns, or that Jesus was part of a Jewish renewal movement focused on radical economic sharing and social justice rather than the imperial power structure Christianity became. The systematic erasure of these connections—along with the suppression of obvious realities like Jesus likely being married, as any Jewish teacher would be—serves institutional power by preventing the kind of investigation that would reveal fundamental contradictions. Constantine's conversion represents history's most successful hostile takeover: a movement that rejected earthly power became the official religion of empire, creating exactly the temple economy Jesus died opposing. While he himself continued to worship the sun and make SUN day the holiest day. When we strip away the institutional complications designed to hide rather than illuminate truth, we find something beautifully simple: love creates life—literally, sex creates life and needs both masculine and feminine, no single creator god. The ancient world understood this duality, but monotheism filtered through imperial power created the theological impossibility of a masculine-only divine hierarchy that contradicts basic biological reality. This exploration calls for empathy and understanding rather than condemnation, recognizing that most people in religious systems were well-meaning, while acknowledging that institutional complexity often serves to obscure our shared humanity and universal connection to the divine through cooperation rather than competition.
Religious traditions obscure their own origins for various reasons. We are trying to untangle that thread.
The Language of Power
Our words drip with meaning. Christians are gentle "gentiles," while ancient religions are dismissed as "cults." This linguistic sleight of hand isn't accidental—it's part of a systematic effort to present Christianity as uniquely civilized and legitimate while diminishing the very traditions it built upon.
Consider how Christianity presents itself as superseding Judaism rather than being what it actually was: a Jewish sect that got hijacked by gentile imperial interests. The "new covenant" language created a convenient justification for appropriating Jewish texts while rejecting Jewish people and their interpretations of their own scriptures.
The Egyptian Erasure
Most Christians have absolutely no idea that their foundational texts were compiled in Egypt, that early Christian theology was heavily shaped by Alexandrian scholars, or that Egyptian religious concepts permeate their practices. This isn't accidental—acknowledging these connections would undermine claims of unique revelation and divine authority.
Open any Bible, Old or New Testament, and count how many times Egypt is mentioned. In the Hebrew Bible, Egypt appears approximately 600-700 times. In the New Testament, around 25-30 times. Yet somehow, Egypt's profound influence on Christian thought has been systematically erased from popular understanding.
The holy family's flight to Egypt wasn't random—it followed well-established patterns of Jewish thought where Egypt represented refuge. The choice drew deliberate parallels between Jesus' story and Israel's foundational narrative, showing how early Christians understood his significance through existing Jewish frameworks.
Prayer, Devotion, and Hidden Connections
The connections between Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian practices run deeper than most realize. The Lord's Prayer, which countless children memorize without context, draws heavily from existing Jewish prayers, particularly the Kaddish and Amidah. The phrase "hallowed be thy name" reflects the Jewish concept of sanctifying God's name, while the petition for daily bread connects to extensive Jewish discussions about divine provision.
The Jewish Shema ("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one") follows a pattern found in Egyptian religious texts: an opening call to attention, identification of the divine, and a fundamental theological statement. Ancient Egyptians prayed at specific times tied to solar cycles—dawn, noon, and sunset. Jewish prayer times follow this same three-fold daily pattern, though reinterpreted through monotheistic theology.
Even Islamic prayer structure acknowledges these ancient connections while deliberately avoiding solar emphasis—the five daily prayers specifically avoid sunrise and sunset moments to prevent any association with sun worship, while still maintaining the principle of regular, timed devotion.
The Great Co-optation
Constantine's conversion represents one of history's most successful superficial takeovers. A movement that explicitly rejected earthly power, wealth accumulation, and military violence became the official religion of the empire that embodied all three. While he himself continued to worship the sun and make SUN day the holiest day.
Constantine's "conversion" reveals the calculated nature of this takeover. He continued to worship the sun throughout his reign, made Sunday (Sun day) the holiest day of the week, and wouldn't actually become Christian until his deathbed. historical sources confirm he was baptized only on his deathbed by the Arian bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia in 337 AD. He minted coins depicted himself with the god Sol Invictus as sacred many years into his supposedly Christian reign. Constantine likely saw Christianity not as a personal spiritual calling, but as the ultimate tool to unite a fractured empire to a focus on a single god man and his wonderful mother.
The pattern of political mass baptisms continued well after Constantine. English kings regularly conducted mass baptisms when they married Christian women, particularly through the 800s AD. King Æthelbert of Kent, upon his own conversion around 601, led thousands of his subjects in mass baptism on Christmas Day 597. When King Edwin of Northumbria converted in 627 after marrying the Christian princess Æthelburh of Kent, he similarly brought many of his people to baptism. These conversions often coincided with Easter, when the symbolism of death and rebirth made the ceremony particularly powerful for pagan populations being introduced to Christian concepts.
The transformation was systematic: house churches became basilicas, communal meals became ritualized ceremonies, radical economic sharing became charitable donations that left power structures intact, and prophetic criticism of empire became support for imperial Christianity.
Jesus was killed for attacking the very system that Christianity became. When he cleared the temple, he wasn't just angry about commerce—he was attacking the entire system of religious mediation and economic exploitation. The temple economy that extracted wealth from the poor while claiming divine sanction became the exact model for institutional Christianity.
The Marriage Question and Manufactured Celibacy
As a Jew, Jesus would have been expected to marry. A 30-year-old unmarried Jewish teacher would have been highly unusual, almost scandalous. Jewish law wasn't just permissive about sexuality within marriage—it was prescriptive. The Talmud discusses marital obligations in detail, including frequency based on occupation.
The Gospels' silence on Jesus' marital status is deafening, especially given how much they detail about his family, disciples, and daily life. This systematic suppression served the church's later institutionalization of celibacy and control over sexuality—ideas that would have been religiously deficient in Jesus' actual cultural context.
The Literacy Factor
Christianity thrived in the Middle Ages when illiteracy dominated. Most people could not read or write, and most were terrified. This period gave us ideas that still terrify us today—of a devil and fiery hell—concepts that evolved from much older traditions where Satan was simply an obstacle, a sidekick of God who forces us to become our best selves.
An informed population would recognize these contradictions immediately. The focus on "faith" over knowledge, on obedience over inquiry, on salvation over justice—all of this serves to prevent exactly the kind of investigation that reveals institutional Christianity's fundamental departures from its origins.
The Fragmentation Problem
The splintering of Christianity into 45,000+ denominations often stems from later theological constructions—exactly what we'd expect from a made-up story. A lie is always more complicated than the truth. Egypt maintained religious unity for millennia, Judaism maintained relative coherence with a few major schools, Islam has its divisions but maintains more structural unity than Christianity's endless fragmentation.
This fragmentation reveals the artificial nature of many Christian doctrines. Early Christians were far more concerned with ethical living and community care than with complex doctrinal formulations that would later divide the church.
Stripping Away the Empire
If we removed post-Jesus institutional additions, we'd find a Jewish renewal movement focused on radical economic sharing, inclusion of outcasts, nonviolent resistance to oppression, and preparation for God's coming kingdom. The movement's concerns were primarily social justice and spiritual authenticity, not doctrinal purity or institutional authority.
The rest is empire. A man that Rome killed ended up being their mascot 300 years later, once their people were silenced, land and treasures stolen and renamed, hoping they would be too weak or ignorant to ever do anything about it.
The Insider's Awakening
Maybe it takes an insider—one who said her whole life she was Catholic—to become a mom and engineer and herbalist to find the contradictions. Being raised inside gives you knowledge of what the institution claims, while education and life experience provide tools to examine those claims critically.
The pope today has to say over and over again: "We do not WORSHIP Mary, we venerate her"—as if anyone really knows the difference. The "worship versus veneration" distinction is theological sophistication developed to manage the tension between monotheism and devotional practices that looked very much like worship to outside observers.
The Pattern of Reversal
Consider how dramatically interpretive frameworks can shift. In ancient Greece, it was illegal (and risked death) to say the sun was not a god. Now, one is reputationally crucified for suggesting the sun might have divine qualities. Any downstream interpretations of scripture that exclude women from power are just that—interpretations developed centuries after the foundational events, in no way inherent to the original religious experience.
Listening to Elders, Not Overlords
The "new is better" propaganda was revolutionary in the ancient world. Most religions acknowledged their debts to earlier traditions. But claiming to supersede rather than extend created convenient justification for appropriating while rejecting the wisdom of actual elders.
Sure, there is progress, but we need to also listen to our elders, not just the latest brutish overlords. The institutional church consistently ignored older, wiser traditions in favor of whatever served imperial power. Jewish wisdom about marriage, sexuality, economic justice, and spiritual practice was discarded in favor of Roman imperial structures.
A Call for Understanding, Not Condemnation
We can give the benefit of the doubt to most people of the church, growing up well-meaning and truly believing in its whole concept. But there is no doubt that few knew exactly what they were doing. This exploration is all about empathy—using an engineer's eye to see how it all happened, but with a mom's compassion, knowing each person was well-meaning, or acting out of survival.
This is a call to learn about ourselves, not to demonize. To dispel the power most give demons in the first place. To see the humanity and shared connections we all can feel with the divine—and can feel also with science and the basic principles of all life.
The Fundamental Truth: Love Creates Life
First and foremost: love creates life. Literally—sex creates life, and needs both masculine and feminine. No single creator god. It takes a duality of forces to create life. It is not all competition, but cooperation that has gotten us this far. The institutional obsession with hierarchy, control, and separation obscures this fundamental truth that both science and spirituality reveal.
The ancient world understood this. Egyptian religion honored both male and female principles in creation. Jewish tradition, despite later patriarchal overlays, originally included the feminine divine in concepts like the Shekhinah. Even early Christianity had the Holy Spirit often represented in feminine terms, and of course, the profound veneration of Mary.
But monotheism as interpreted through imperial power structures erased this fundamental duality, creating the theological impossibility of a single, masculine creator—something that contradicts the basic biological reality that surrounds us every day.
When we strip away the institutional complications, we find something beautifully simple: human beings have always sensed the divine, have always sought connection, have always known that love and cooperation create more life than fear and competition.
Conclusion: The Thread Unraveled
The designed ignorance isn't accidental oversight—it's systematic institutional design. But understanding this doesn't require us to judge harshly those who participated in or perpetuated these systems. Most were doing their best with the information they had, operating within structures they inherited, trying to find meaning and connection in the ways available to them.
Teaching people about Egyptian connections, Jewish origins, and early Christian egalitarianism would immediately raise questions about why intermediaries are necessary, why ancient wisdom was abandoned, why the institution looks nothing like the movement it claims to represent.
The real elders—Jewish teachers, Egyptian wisdom keepers, early Christian communities focused on justice—were systematically silenced so that Roman power structures could wear religious clothing. But their wisdom wasn't destroyed, just obscured. To know ourselves, we have some digging to do. The thread, once pulled, unravels the entire tapestry of institutional deception—not to destroy, but to reveal the beautiful, simple truths that were always there.
Institutional complexity often serves to hide rather than illuminate truth. When we clear away the complications, we find our shared humanity, our common longing for connection, our universal experience of the sacred. We find that love creates life, that cooperation builds more than competition destroys, that the divine doesn't need intermediaries to reach us.
The truth is always simpler than the lie. Maybe it's time we stopped accepting the complications and started embracing our shared humanity.