Jesus Christ - Jesus in the house of the pharaohs : the Essene revelations on the historical Jesus

AHMED OSMAN

Bear & Company

Rochester, Vermont

To Nagla, my wife

Then Pilate entered into the judgment hall again, and called Jesus, and said unto him, Art thou the King of the Jews?

Jesus answered him, Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or did others tell it thee of me?

Pilate answered, Am I a Jew? Thine own nation and the chief priests have delivered thee unto me: what hast thou done?

Jesus answered, My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight, that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now is my kingdom not from hence.

Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, thou sayest that I am a king. To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice.

Pilate saith unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and saith unto them, I find in him no fault at all.

(John 18:3338)

The location of Mount Sinai

The Empire of Tuthmosis III (David) between the Nile and the Euphrates during the fifteenth century B.C.

The land of Canaan at the time of the Israelites entry into the Holy Land, c. 12001000 B.C.

Views about the Bible fall into three basic categoriesthat, despite its many contradictions, every word it contains is to be taken literally; that it is basically a historical work that became distorted as a result of its initial long oral tradition and also to some extent at the hands of the biblical editors who eventually set it down in writing; and that it is simply a collection of fanciful fairy tales couched in extravagant language.

My own viewthat it is fundamentally a historical workbrought me to London from my native Egypt more than a quarter of a century ago. The choice of London was dictated by the superior research facilities to be found there. These would, I hoped, enable me to succeed in a task that had baffled scholars since the eighteenth centurythat of identifying a major figure in Egyptian history as a major figure in the Bible.

These efforts, it became clear, had failed for two reasons. In the first place, the main thrust of research had been to try to fit Egyptian history into the Bible rather than, as common sense would suggest, fit the Bible into Egyptian history; second, of the two dates given in the Old Testament for the length of the Israelite Sojourn in Egyptfour generations or four hundred yearsacceptance of the incorrect figure of four centuries meant that scholars had been seeking their evidence at the wrong time and in the wrong place.

After twenty-five years of study and research, I cannot claim to have made a great deal of progress myself until what, in retrospect, seems like a moment of inspiration. It came one night when, unable to sleep, I made a pot of tea and sat down to read again in the Book of Genesis the story of Joseph the Patriarch, the favorite son of Jacob, who was sold into slavery in Egypt by his jealous half brothers and was appointed the virtual ruler of the country under the unnamed Pharaoh after, according to the Bible, foretelling the seven lean years that would follow seven good years. I was suddenly struck by a phrase in the account of how Joseph revealed his identity to his half brothers when they made the second of two visits to Egypt from Canaan at a time of famine. He told them that they should not reproach themselves for what they had done for it was not you that sent me hither, but God: and he hath made me a father to Pharaoh, and lord of all his house, and a ruler throughout all the land of Egyptand he obtained Pharaohs permission for his father, half brothers, and the tribe of Israel to join him in Egypt.

A father to Pharaoh. I thought at onceand could not fathom why I had not made the connection beforeof Yuya, a minister of the Pharaohs Tuthmosis IV (c. 14131405 B.C.) and his son Amenhotep III (c. 14051367 B.C.). Although he was not apparently of royal blood, the tomb of Yuya was found in the Valley of the Kings in 1905 and, more significantly, he is the only person we know of in Egyptian history to have the title it ntr n nb tawi, holy father of the Lord of the Two Lands (Pharaohs formal title). It occurs once on one of his ushabti (royal funeral statuette No. 51028 in the Cairo Museum catalog) and more than twenty times on his funerary papyrus. Could Joseph and Yuya be the same person?

The case for this is argued in my book, The Hebrew Pharaohs of Egypt. This argument received support with the discovery late in 1989 of the tomb, almost intact, of Aper-el, the hitherto unknown vizier of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, the son of Amenhotep III. The name Aper-el provides a semantic link between the Israelites and the Amarna regime, of which Akhenaten was the first of four rulers. Similar names are known to have existed in Egypt at this time, but never in the case of high officials. The name Aper corresponds to the Egyptian word for Hebrew, which meant to ancient Egyptians a nomad, and the final el is the short form of Elohim, one of the words used in the Bible as the name of the Lord.

The fact that Akhenatens vizier was a Hebrew worshipper of El confirms the link between the king and Israelites living in Egypt at the time. Furthermore, the fact that Queen Tiye, the mother of Akhenaten, was associated with her husband, Amenhotep III, in donating a box to the funerary furniture of Aper-el indicates the possibility that the vizier was a relation of the queens, most probably through her Israelite father, Yuya (Joseph).

Once Yuya was identified as Joseph, a number of other aspects of the Israelite story fell into placethat the arrival of the Israelites in Egypt occurred more than two centuries later than had been thought; that their Sojourn lasted for four generations, not four centuries; and that the four Amarna kingsAkhenaten, Semenkhkare, Tutankhamun, and Ayewho ruled during the tumultuous period in Egyptian history when an attempt was made to replace the countrys multitude of ancient gods with a monotheistic God, were all descendants of Joseph the Patriarch.

The prime mover in this religious upheaval was Akhenaten in the years (c. 13671361 B.C.) when, following a period as co-regent, he became sole ruler upon the death of his father, Amenhotep III. In a second book, Moses and Akhenaten, I argued that Akhenaten was to be identified as the biblical Moses. The purpose of this present volume is to identify David, from whose House the promised Messiah would come, and to establish the historical figure of Jesus, who lived, suffered, and died many centuries earlier than is conventionally thought.