Gerald Massey (1828–1907) was an English poet, spiritualist, and self-taught Egyptologist who built one of the most ambitious theories in biblical studies: that the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament are not records of history but re-worked Egyptian mythology. His four-volume Ancient Egypt, the Light of the World remains the founding text of the modern mythicist school.

Who was Gerald Massey?

Born into poverty in Hertfordshire, Massey rose as a working-class poet before devoting decades to Egyptology. He learned to read hieroglyphics in the British Museum and produced exhaustive parallel tables matching biblical characters and events to Egyptian originals — Adam to Atum, Noah to Nu, Moses to the mythic child in the bulrushes, Jesus to Horus.

What is the Massey Method?

The “Massey Method” treats biblical narrative as a coded astronomical and solar mythology: the twelve tribes as the zodiac, the virgin birth as the winter solstice, the resurrection as the return of the sun. Where mainstream scholarship sees later mythologizing of a real man, Massey saw a myth that was ancient before the Bible existed.

Massey’s critics

Massey was dismissed by Victorian academia and is still attacked by historicist scholars today. The MythWisdom Podcast puts the Method to the test against its sharpest opponents — Bart Ehrman, Robert Price, and the academic mainstream — and lets the primary sources decide.