THE EGYPTIAN JESUS: AN INTERVIEW WITH PROF. JASON GILDOW

By Tim Hodler

Illustration By Patrick Hambrecht

“When Christ comes back in the end days, He has a double-edged sword of fire coming from His mouth. A very terrific, terrible image.

But so does Osiris in the end days. When he comes back, literally shooting forth flame from his mouth. A firebrand. And it’s a very specific wording that also comes through in the Greek, and that to me explains John’s admonition in the Apocalypse not to change the style of the letter, because a lot of the puns and the word games are actually Egyptian.” – Professor Jason Gildow

Things you will learn in this article:

1. The relationship between Jesus, the Book of Revelations and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
2. What “Abra-Cadabra” really means.

(FEEL FREE TO SKIP THIS INTRODUCTION AND THE FIRST PART OF THIS INTERVIEW.)

Tim Hodler’s Apologetic Introduction:

What do I know about ancient Egypt? Raiders of the Lost Ark; old mummy movies starring Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee; a few museum exhibits; that Dutch "scientist's" book proving the pyramids were built by aliens; and a dimly remembered, terrifying episode of Tales of the Gold Monkey, where a thief or somebody put on a jackal head mask to disguise himself as Anubis, god of death, I guess to scare off meddling do-gooders or something: that's what I know about one of the oldest, most important cultures in history, a society that endured for more than three thousand years, sixty times longer than the United States.

I'm not too embarrassed, though, because I suspect that most of you don't know much more. Even André Malraux (the novelist, adventurer, France's Minister of Culture under De Gaulle, and one of the greatest liars of the twentieth century, a man who never met a topic he didn't like to make things up about) admitted his ignorance on the subject: "The soul of a religion can be transmitted only through its survivors and the religions of the ancient East have been effaced by Islam. I am as profoundly ignorant of ancient Egypt as a man would be of love if he had not experienced it , however much he might have read; as profoundly as each of us is ignorant of death."

All the same, it's a fascinating, profoundly moving experience to see the ancient mummified corpses, the millennia-old statues of lions and falcon-headed gods. When God Magazine’s editor asked me to interview one Jason Gildow, of Lincoln, Nebraska who he said had stumbled upon a secret that would "change the field of Egyptology forever," it was impossible to pass it up. On the strictest orders from said editor, I abandoned journalistic instinct and refrained from doing any research prior to my interview with the mysterious Nebraskan grad student. I was not even aware of exactly what, if anything, Mr. Gildow had actually discovered. All I knew was that he was young, emphatically not an Egyptologist himself, and that he was supposed to be (according to Patrick) on the verge of revolutionizing our ideas about ancient history.

Young Gildow soon proved to be a rather strange young man, both passionate and unnerving. Not until nearly halfway through our discussion did I finally understand the gist of Gildow's accomplishment. Nonetheless, after contemplation, I have decided to leave the interview in its original, chronological order. The rather aimless early exchanges are revealing and interesting in their own right, and (meaninglessly) parallel historical Egyptology's meandering, not always fruitful scholastic quest.

The reader impatient for hard facts and substantive discussion may want to read the first couple of questions and answers and then skip ahead to the section headed by the words THE NITTY-GRITTY.

Those readers of a more leisurely bent, who take to heart the old banality that the journey is more important than the destination, may begin wherever they please.

PRELIMINARIES

(An interesting discussion on the history of Egyptology, which can be skipped if you’d just like to hear about Jason Gildow’s new research.)

Tim Hodler: So, I understand you’ve changed Egyptology forever. I should let you know that that is all I know about you, and that you may have to explain things to me more than once. I assume you were studying ancient Egypt …

Jason Gildow: No. Actually I was studying medieval English literature and I took Egyptian—first middle Egyptian and then Coptic—as a lark, just because I’d always been interested in it. And my instructors were really vital in the field and knew their stuff and really imparted a lot of things to me that hadn’t yet been published or made available to the public.

For instance, a book that really interested me recently is called The Greek Magical Papyri in Translation, this old book by a man named Betz. He had a committee of people looking at these documents of magical antiquity. This was the Hellenistic Age.

The Hellenistic age? When was that exactly?

Oh the Hellen— That’s a good question.

I’m just trying to get a general idea. Was this B.C.?

This was even later, because they’ve got mentions of Christ. The beginning of the Hellenistic Age began after Alexander the Great died, after 323 B.C.

So like the first or second century?

Around the early part of the first century.

Okay.

Well, the Greeks sold this material as commerce. They just sold the spells as a way to sell off antiquity and Egypt, as it had always done, just allowed that. It always sells off its wares.

But no one really knew what these things were. They were written in magical script, kind of barbaric Greek, and not until recently has anyone been able to even translate this stuff for the most part—even though it’s widely reprinted, widely influential. For instance, it makes up the backbone of most of the Gould-Odons (sp?) authentic magical material from the Far East. It’s pretty much, you could say, Hellenistic magical papyri.

So they were about Greek gods, like Zeus and Athena?

No, the Hellenistic Greeks were infatuated with the Egyptian gods. They wanted something really authentic.

What they got was scrambled pieces of the Book of the Dead in Greek letters and sounds. Because the Greek scribes took down whatever they could from authentic Egyptian speakers and they just wrote it phonetically. It was just a sound Egyptian to evoke an effect on the listener.

Who was buying this? Were these priests, entertainers?

Uh, really it served a commercial gap, just to have raw real-life Egyptian spells floating around that people believed in. That they thought really would achieve an effect.

So it was sort of like the spells and candles you buy at New Age stores.

Yeah, and a lot of it is for securing a lover and aphrodisiacs and things like that, which is also built into the Book of the Dead mythology. It really kind of wraps together nicely because the real Book of the Dead was a more authentic thing to draw from than just pure gibberish. People would have been able to tell if it didn’t sound at least Egyptian.

What they accidentally did, though, was preserve a really good copy of a version of the Book of the Dead no one knew we had, and saved it for the modern day. Unfortunately, though people have constantly been looking at these documents, they still see the scrambled corruption of the scribes. So they cannot see it for the real document, even though it’s really right there. You have to see it as just phonetic markers that then you can turn back into language.

What is the Book of the Dead exactly? All I know about it is from this exhibit I went to recently, where they said it was a bunch of scrolls that described what happened to this person when he died, and how Osiris weighed his soul, or his heart, against the weight of a feather. Is that what it is?

Uh no, that’s a large part of it, but in a lot of ways, it’s to imitate the sound of magical ceremony.

The main ceremony is, of course, you’ve died and your soul is being weighed, but everything in life has some sort of ceremony—like being able to control a lover or being able to gain money without doing work. Those all had ceremonies and very specific literature devoted to them. So dying and going through the different heavens is just one part of the Book of the Dead corpus.

There are ceremonies for hundreds and hundreds of different real-life situations, and then the afterlife situations, and whatever’s going to occur in your life. It’s a real active book. You’re supposed to use it to control nature and to control the people around you.

The Book of the Dead was written in hieroglyphs?

Yeah.

Okay.

The way that it got preserved was you would buy it and have it written into your mummy and all of your mummified items. So that made sure that the book got sold and distributed on a regular basis, because people had to be buried in it and with it. So when you bought the Book of the Dead, you added yourself as the main character.

The main character is an Everyman, and you add your identity, so that all of the things the Everyman goes through—like Pilgrim’s Progress—you go through as well, by essentially purchasing the Book of the Dead and personalizing it. And then you’re buried in it, and it’s the most splendor anyone could have purchased in that age.

How much exactly would that cost?

Oh, there were so many different levels, because they would do something simple even for poor people, even for badly buried people, but it was a huge revolving scale. Basically there was an agreed upon sum that the nobles had to pay for the real Book of the Dead treatment and to be immortalized.

But what’s interesting is, I’ve seen Anni—the scribe of most of what’s called the Book of the Dead tradition—he’ll do immortalizations for, say, soldiers who were part of a winning battle. At least they get that to immortalize them. Just whatever in your life worked out. Anni immortalized himself as being the accountant of the granary, and that’s an immortal job because he likened that to Osiris keeping the accounts of the gods in heaven so even accountants could get some sort of immortality.

So it was kind of like those fill-in-the-blanks books you can buy, like The Book of You?

Very similar.

In Ancient Egypt, everyone’s job was VERY important.

Illustration by Patrick Hambrecht

The Greeks were enamored with Egyptian culture, and the Hellenistic period was really the high fever mark of that love affair. And they wanted to buy into Egyptian immortality as well, because the Greeks didn’t have the same system of aristocracy that the Egyptians did.

So they were able to buy into it, really because their empire had reached that stage. But what they got was very corrupt Egyptian. The Egyptians weren’t at all interested in really selling off the authentic stuff. Uh, but they gave them scraps and parts of the tradition so that the Greeks kept alive large parts of the Book of the Dead thinking that that would immortalize them.

So did these Egyptians who were selling these things, did they still believe in Osiris and the gods? Or had that already died off?

Um, I think that they were still very authentic about that. I know that because practicing Coptic writers still wrote about the gods in that period. They were still writing actively and religiously about the real classical Egyptian gods, because all of those names continue in the writing of that period. So they were still authentic about that.

It was much later—I think the coming of the Moors—that’s what finally ended all belief in the Egyptian gods. It was Islam I think that ended that forever.

Well, at some point didn’t one of the pharaohs make everyone turn monotheistic for a while, worshipping Ra or someone?

That’s Akhnaten, and Akhnaten wanted to change the local religion at Thebes.

A lot of people make a lot about Akhnaten, heresy, but it was very simple: all of the pharaohs, when they came to power, had to decide what local religions and cults in Egypt would be in favor still.

Each province of Egypt had its local religion, which was its local chief god and each city— but they express monotheism for the regional deities, they had monotheistic hymns and statements even in the Old Kingdom. They really pretty much believed in a central god, and all other gods were friends essentially, or compatriots, or enemies of that god. So really the piety about these other gods wasn’t so great as their political weight and symbol. The tradition was that each region did have a patron regional deity, but the rest of the pantheon had some subsidiary relationship to that , ie ISIS who was the matron goddess of Philae, became the wife of Osiris of Thebes, when he became the patron god of Thebes.

We can see a lot of neat examples—like what I’m working on, in a document I was looking at in the papyri of Anni.

Anni records a hymn to Apap the serpent. And Apap the serpent is always the enemy, just the great Satan in Egyptian mythology, because he brings about Armageddon. He destroys the world, he devours all human beings, and just their souls remain to be judged by the gods. So he’s a really terrible character. But he gets a reverent hymn in the papyri of Anni, which says that he has the head of wisdom and knowledge and he also has the head of Horus. So he’s taken to be a beautiful holy entity, even though in all other literature he’s a hideous being.

Well, it turns out that Apap was worshipped at one time, but long ago. And Anni recycled that hymn even though Apap had fallen out of favor. His people had fallen out of favor. And we can see the same thing with Set. Set used to be the god of shepherds and was an important local deity who represented pure divinity to that shepherd cult. In fact he was married to Nephthys, a character who rivaled Isis as the central female deity in the pantheon. But Set’s people fell out of favor with an incoming pharaoh, and Set became an enemy in the literature as well.

You can see real obvious contradictions in the myths, because at different times there were different allegiances among the gods.

So is this somehow related to the way you’re changing Egyptology forever?

Well, I guess my claim to changing Egyptology forever is not only changing people’s idea of the myth, because a lot of that was just because these things haven’t been read correctly, and it’s a confusing concept to understand—that some gods are sometimes good and in different historical periods they fall out of favor.

It’s the idea of downward mythic displacement and all pantheons and religions have gone through that at some time. Their gods become devils and demons to someone else.

Like how some people think the modern Satan is based on the Greek god Pan?

Well, or that Satan used to be the foremost agent of God.

For instance, in Job, Satan really appears to be God’s right hand, not His enemy. And Satan appears quite at home in heaven, and seems to be a divine character. So you can really look at almost any character.

Zeus is a perfect example, because he is a rebel who kills his father, and [yet] he puts Prometheus on the stone [to punish him] for trying to enlighten humanity. So Zeus is kind of the dictator fascist character he upset, but it’s very clear that he’s going to be upset by some new Jesus-type god and that’s inherent in all the mythology.

See, Jesus Himself, when He came across to Egyptian followers who started the Coptic church. In the gospel of Thomas and in the Coptic writings about Jesus, Jesus really speaks in the Book of the Dead tradition. He uses a lot of the old metaphors and uses that old book. He doesn’t come across as a messiah, because the Egyptians would have no interest in Judaism and its messiah, right? But they had a lot of interest in Jesus as a mystical teacher in this tradition.

Well, that was probably because those documents were written by people who wanted to proselytize to non-Jews, don’t you think?

I think the Jewish connection with Christ definitely was a PR movement to attempt to a demographic. They wanted to get a lot of the Jewish young people and middle-aged people into a new movement that wasn’t controlled by the old rabbinical law and would be self-controlled. Keep the best parts of Judaism and direct it toward a new religion.

But the connection between Christ and the Old Testament is very spurious, I think. I think he was really interested in the religions of the time and he got roped into them.

Are you saying that you don’t think Jesus was Jewish?

No, he was probably Jewish, but I think His influence to a lot of other nations is that they thought He was also what they were.

He must have had an amazing charisma to come across as a local boy to every part of the Middle East and be able to do that.

Well, Jesus probably didn’t go there, did he? My impression is that it was mostly Christian missionaries who traveled around.

No, people came to Him! Yeah! People came from all over the world and when they went back, specifically to Egypt, they started a church that He never would have gone to, that He never saw.

The Coptic church is very much a strange paradox, because it is one of the first churches, has some of the most amazing writing, and is from the very early days of Christianity. But in the modern day, people like to overlook that, because it seems to have a bizarre slant on Jesus that may seem heretical.

Well, but isn’t that also because that gospel was considered apocryphal, and never put into the canon or the Bible?

The gospel of Thomas is very interesting, because it has all of the sayings from Christ and all of the gospels except they’re way, way longer than they appear in the gospels. It’s called a logion, which just means the sayings.

Everything that Jesus said that anyone could remember got written down in the gospel of Thomas, and what’s funny is, for decades people thought that there probably was a book of all of Christ’s sayings that the Gospels were based upon. And the gospel of Thomas came out of a clay jar in 1946 in the middle of the desert, so it really kind of answered people’s theories about where this came from. It’s very authentic, almost too authentic for a lot of people I think.

Uh-huh. [I really should have asked him what he meant by this, but I was getting more and more confused as to what exactly we were discussing.]

But the gospel of Thomas Coptic: very, very similar to the Book of the Dead Coptic that I’m doing. That’s what I translated actually last year, I translated the gospel of Thomas into Coptic, and that gave me the skills to do what I’m doing.

THE NITTY-GRITTY

I want to back up a bit, because I feel like I’m really just missing something. So I’m wondering if you can explain to me exactly what it is you’ve done that’s going to change the field of Egyptology forever.

Okay. Well, I think this is the best way to describe that: the changes in the way that we can [now] read Egyptian are so profound that none of the middle Egyptian Book of the Dead material that’s been published or sold up to the present day is at all accurate; it’s so far distant from these most recent breakthroughs in the language.

None of that material is even readable, and everyone has always known that because Egyptian is only about half known. It’s maybe forty percent understood. When you read Budge’s work—and Budge is really the name in Book of the Dead translation—he is really unreadable. You can’t read that document at all.

So the Book of the Dead has been brought to us, we have access to it, but it’s totally unreadable. And you can’t get any purpose out of it. The narrative’s not there at all. So a major translation of it had to be done to make it at all readable.

But the tools haven’t been there. We haven’t been able to do that. Because between Budge’s day, the nineteenth century, and today, not a whole lot of headway has been made. Because it’s too immense.

Well, if I didn’t find an accidental authentic version of the Book of the Dead, we might not ever have gotten an accurate version. So my translation clarifies what Budge couldn’t translate, and it gives us a real authentic perfect copy of what this should be. No one has an accurate copy of the Book of the Dead right now. This will be the first time.

This will be the very, very first time that any of this has been read or brought forward, or that the voice of the Book of the Dead can at all be heard.

Oh! I understand now! So because you found out that the Greek magical papyri were a complete version of the Book of the Dead in Coptic, one that we never knew about before …

Well, see, Coptic is much closer to English. Coptic is written in Greek characters for the most part, so we’ve got it figured out.

We can read Coptic, but we cannot read middle Egyptian with any ease or certainty. Because we don’t have a proof copy. If we knew what it said, we would be able to translate it, and basically that’s how Coptic got figured out. Because we have the Bible in Coptic, and we could just look at every other copy of the Bible in other languages, and we knew what it was supposed to say. If you don’t know what it’s supposed to say, the translation is going to be really vague and you’ll never know if it’s right.

Well, finally we have an authentic voice to tell us it outright. Not only that, but really in a musical way. The sounds of the language come across, and it perfects the language, and it shows us a lot of things we didn’t know previously.

One thing we didn’t know previously was Egyptians had no verbs of aspect, meaning that they don’t have a past or a present tense in their verbs like all other languages.

So it’s all in the future tense?

No, everything’s in an uncertain now. Everything’s right now. You have to use prepositions to say something would have happened last week or will happen in the future, but they have to use euphemisms to get those ideas across.

They must have had an entirely different concept of history then.

Oh, exactly! In fact, the attitude of the Book of the Dead is that history isn’t myth, that change will not happen. Everything is right now, and everything is perfect. Don’t change anything. That is a huge statement of the entirety of the Book of the Dead.

So it’s all in a static present tense. Unchanging. And even when they talk about mythical events that happened long in the past, they happen right now. In an accurate tense, they’re already happening and they’re continuing to happen. In fact, the writing of it makes it continue to happen.

Their idea of past and present is really not what ours is. So that’s how I’ve translated it actually. In my English, I translate the literal voice. I think it’s an interesting change, because it captures the poetry of Egypt, I think, in a lot of ways.

Well, if I’m understanding you correctly, the implications of this are enormous, to have a complete copy of this book that describes almost all the aspects of ancient Egyptian culture, that previously only existed in a language we only knew with 40% accuracy…

Right. I think that this will make Egyptian more of a living language, and I think we can finally figure out their poetic voice.

To me, the biggest breakthrough is that now I know in no uncertain terms how Egyptian poetry works. For instance, how they address the gods. There’s a very specific order of words to talk to a god, and a scribe had to know that perfectly. If you were going to call up a wish to offer a god, that’s a very specific verbal thing, and finally we can figure out exactly how their magic worked and how their ceremonies worked. We can reenact their ceremonies. All the instructions are now available.

Everything about their culture—how they mummified their bodies and their recipes for mummification fluids—are contained in these documents. We really have access to this people that we’ve never had before.

And everyone loves Egypt! Everyone’s fascinated by it. But most people have not known anything about it. Most Westerners are so removed from the past, our understanding has been cut so entirely, that we have to start over at the basics.

So now I think this will have a very accurate version of what they had to say, and we’ll be able to hear their voice and finally say accurate things about what they truly believed and what they did.

Well, how exactly did you discover this?

It’s really random coincidence. I went home last summer to visit my parents in the middle of the summer, and my car broke down on the way. I had to have a lot of work done on my car when I finally made it to my parents’, so I had to stay a lot longer than I thought.

The only books I had with me from the previous semester were a version of Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead in hieroglyphs, and my Coptic dictionary, and Betz’s Greek Magical Papyri in Translation. And those three books just magically came together when I was killing time during the summer doing reading, and I started to translate the hieroglyphs into Coptic just for fun. I did that just to see if I could, because I’d taken a Coptic class the semester before. And I found my translation in Betz’s book!

So out of the three books that I chose to take with me on this vacation, that were randomly chosen, they all turned out to be the same document. So it was really an amazing coincidence, and I felt when I saw that, if that hadn’t have happened that never would have been seen. And it answered the question that my professor asked to me. He said, “How has this not been seen yet?” And also that’s a question he asked himself, because he’s seen this document a hundred thousand times, and he teaches a class in Coptic, but if you’re not looking for it sideways and if you don’t stumble upon it, you just can’t see it. It’s a bizarre thing, because it’s corrupt Coptic written in Greek, so it’s an anomaly for both Coptic and Greek speakers.

What did you do when you figured this out? Did you realize what you’d done? Did you tell anyone?

Well, I wanted to show my teachers, but then I thought I’d be giving it away. Because I thought when they saw this simple thing, then all the rest would just fall into place. And then I wouldn’t be necessary.

So I did most of the work until I knew I had it. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even show it to my instructors. And until I had one of my instructors [UNL Professor Thomas Rinkevich] offer me a book deal, then I let him have it, so that he was part of the project and is now defending this intellectual property as well. He’s my editor and is helping me get this published.

But before I did that, I was really, really secretive, because I knew that it was something nice enough to steal and that it was worthwhile. And before that I didn’t know. I honestly didn’t, because you don’t automatically think that you have something previously unknown. You hope for that, but it’s so unlikely. I mean it’s just not something you stumble upon.

That’s really amazing!

Yeah, and it’s not really my field! That’s the bizarre part, but in a way that worked to my benefit because I had to learn all of this from the ground up, and this made me learn things that had been missed.

So I guess when Patrick [Hambrecht] said this is going to change Egyptology, that might be true because some of the purely linguistic things I’ve found out do change the textbooks. You know, I learned from the best textbooks, from the leading lights of Egyptology, and they still haven’t finished the work.

They’ve kind of misstated large parts of Egyptian grammar, and now we can clarify what they’ve been working on for so long, but I think when they see it—if they don’t resist it just because it’s new—they’ll understand that it completes their work. That this is really in keeping with what they’re doing, and it’ll help them a lot.

Has there been any reaction from Egyptologists about this?

Well, now I’m slowly leaking it out, because I really have a large part of this translation finished and enough of it that I’m going to publish very soon that I can just send it out now. It’s my intellectual property.

But, for instance, my Coptic instructor: when he saw the Coptic, I think he was really sold. Because I think his test was, it would have to beautiful literature. It would have to be an overpoweringly inspirational religious document, or it would be bunk. And I think he was sold. I think he really understood that this is accurate and really authentic, and it’s what it should be. So to prove it to these guys and to get them involved as my allies wholeheartedly really shows me that it’s going in the right direction. And they know the rest of the leading lights of Egyptology, and soon they’ll see this too.

Unfortunately, right now I have to defend all this and have everything scholarly accurate. And the proofreading job I’m doing is just Herculean. There’s an amazing amount — more material here than I can get to myself. So I’m rushing this into print but it’s an enormous thing, almost too much to get out at once.

So is all of this material going to make it into the book?

I hope so. I’m going to put all of the best of what I have at the moment into a document and give that to people.

What I do have at the moment— I have nearly the whole book of initiation from the Book of the Dead and the reason this is so important is because in Betz’s work, this is where all the gold mine material is.

The greatest hits of the papyri is definitely what’s called Chapter Seventeen, the book of initiation, and this is all the cool stuff that you alluded to—weighing of the heart, Armageddon, the destruction of all life on the planet, the creation of the universe. All of the great stuff in mythology, the war of Horus and Set, all of it is in one great chapter—and that is what people always wanted. If you knew anything from the Book of the Dead, you knew Chapter Seventeen. And we don’t even know who wrote it. It’s very ancient, it’s just the best of the best in Egyptology, and that is what gets really cut up, and that’s what I was able to always find as a lodestone in the Greek Magical Papyri, because it always sticks out. The voice and the words are so prevalent and so well known that it’s easy to find.

So I decided to start there and I have that chapter word for word, restored in Coptic, for roughly forty-five pages of just raw Coptic. And I’ve also corrected— Then I have the translation of that in middle Egyptian that I’m going to print with it back-to-back, and the English to that for the first time, my own translation.

All of that I have right now, but the hardest part is doing all the academic work to show where all this has come from, to isolate every single word, to make a codex and index list of all these words, where they came from, how they’re translated. That’s just an enormous job.

So you’re publishing this soon? Do you know when it’s coming out yet? Later this year? 2003?

Yeah, this is really going to come out. The book is called “The Coptic Book of the Dead,” and my publisher is NONCE Books.

I am finishing up my doctoral program right now, and I’ve decided that I want this finished almost immediately, and I’m going to put out what I have, warts and all. Just to get it out.

Because first of all, I think I need to scoop anyone else who might have heard about this down the line, now that I’m babbling about it at all. I want to publish this immediately, even though I know there’s going to be mistakes the first time through. It’s unavoidable. Even with my best intentions, there are going to just be clerical errors, things that are going to make me blush down the line. But I’m going to have to bear that.

A provision I made with my editor is that I’m going to have the opportunity to correct this and make new editions at any point, to pull old editions if I find an error, and constantly rework this to a state of near-perfection.

I want to start that process almost immediately, so when I have my manuscript finished in the next month or so, we’re going to start publishing small, white label, promos of this book to the Egyptologists of the world, and then to see about distributing.

Are you worried at all about what Egyptologists are going to think about this, considering that they have spent their entire lives working on this?

Yeah, I do wonder how it will look to other people, because I’m really going to have to fight an image of being an outsider coming in and just stumbling upon something. If a discovery is made, it really should be made by someone looking for it night and day, rather than by just someone who just stumbles upon it.

But that, to me, makes it, that makes a story. To me it makes sense. If that was going to happen in my life, that’s the way it would happen. I wouldn’t find it by aggressively poring though books looking for something. If it fell into my lap and it turned out to be enormously valuable, to me that would be much more right.

Is this what you’re going to do with your life now? Egyptology, I mean?

Right now, I see this as the way my life is going to go, because right now I can’t see how I would ever have a vacation from this material. I think I’ll have to constantly defend it and constantly bring it to people and explain it to people for the rest of my days.

I think it’s great that I would have found this at the early part of my life, rather than near the end, because I really was worried about running out of time. Just not being able to pull this together, not physically having the time or energy in my life to do what needs to be done.

That happened to a lot of scholars. A lot of Egyptologists who really paved the way didn’t finish their work in their lifetimes, and their students really were in a quandary over what they intended on all sorts of different theories. That’s why things have been so theoretical. Because the leading lights— Generally, one mind would come along and make a quantum leap, but in many cases that hasn’t been communicated to other people.

That’s why it’s so rare, and really Coptic is incredibly rare. Probably only a half dozen people in the world seriously could claim any sort of fluency in Coptic.

Are you one of those half-dozen?

I’ve had to learn Coptic in a very intensive way, and I think I know it like very few people do. It’s not something that is natively spoken now. But definitely, clerical Coptic I’ve had to learn inside and out and learn every nuance of, and if I didn’t know it inside and out, people would find fault in my work and I couldn’t defend what I’m doing.

That was actually the hardest part of what I’ve done; just the raw learning of this language is intense. Egyptian is one of the hardest languages for a Latinate speaker to learn. Because it defies the laws of our language. It’s all non-verbal. It really defies our idea of a verb, because really most deeds that are recorded in Egyptian are just nouns. They’re just the ideas of an action. So the voice is very strange, it’s very alien to us.

In a way, I think that’s what captured me the most, because it’s the closest thing to the most ancient mother tongue. It’s really the furthest out that we could go, and it’s still a very high pinnacle that we haven’t reached. This still doesn’t close the book on Egyptian. I just hope that someone is going to go further than me.

Well, it should lead to an amazing amount of new information …

I think a lot of people will scratch their heads and find uses for what I’m doing that I never would think of. I’m hoping that that happens, because I can’t make all these connections. But I think I’m going to make connections for a lot of people and they’re going to make discoveries that they would have made a long time ago. But this is really neat.

It’s neat that a lot of people will get a lot of value out of my book because they’ll be able to use this Egyptian in whatever they’re doing in whatever translation they’re working at, Coptic, middle Egyptian, this is really going to open a lot of doors.

Because still, a lot of great spiritual Coptic writing from this period and later is still a mystery to us and Coptic is pretty amazing. The language really has always been connected to mystical writing. So it’s very natural that middle Egyptian would fade into Coptic and keep the major themes, for instances, of creation, the Armageddon, as the Judaic-Christian tradition learned them.

Pretty much the Apocalypse of St. John is in Chapter Seventeen.

Revelations is from the Book of the Dead?

Oh, without a doubt! Without a doubt, it’s a direct connection. The writer of the Apocalypse in Greek knew this book inside and out.

Do you think he expected people to recognize the connection?

Without a doubt. He expected his readership to immediately make the connection.

Unfortunately, we can’t make that connection. We lost that connection, but now it becomes patently obvious. Even the language—

What’s really, I think, most gorgeous about this, the Greek, for instance, when Christ comes back in the end days, He has a double-edged sword of fire coming from His mouth. A very terrific, terrible image. But so does Osiris in the end days. When he comes back, literally shooting forth flame from his mouth. A firebrand. And it’s a very specific wording that also comes through in the Greek, and that to me explains John’s admonition in the Apocalypse not to change the style of the letter, because a lot of the puns and the word games are actually Egyptian.

Osiris

For instance, the “wild beast,” that’s a very good translation of either the Coptic or the middle Egyptian, probably both. But the woman with stars around her head, the woman wreathed in stars, that icon shows up again. And it’s very carefully controlled language, so you can see it when it becomes duplicated in another context.

So I think that’s definitely going to interest people, that has obviously never been seen before. No one has noticed that. When Budge translated Chapter Seventeen, I’m sure he was completely unaware that the Armageddon section was actually the end of the world.

MORE Q&A WITH JASON, ABOUT JASON

How old are you?

I’m 28.

Have you studied any other languages?

Spanish back in my high school days, but most recently I did classical Latin and Greek. And that was actually really helpful as well. So I do have the linguistic background necessary. I was trained in Coptic and middle Egyptian

And you have studied solely at the University of Nebraska?

My classics education has all been at the University of Nebraska.

It’s also a very funny coincidence that a hieroglyphic specialist and a Coptic specialist would just be sitting around in the middle of Nebraska to parlay this language, and that I would come across both of them and make these connections.

What are some of your other interests?

I studied fine arts for a bit, I was really into that in high school. I’ve painted since I was a kid, loved painting.

The arts of the classical world always drew me in. I’m fascinated by classical painting and styles of painting, and just ancient art in general, and that’s always been a love of mine since I was a kid. I studied that when I first came to the university, and started out just totally on a different path than I am now.

Then I got into creative writing, and when I started writing poetry, I wanted to write an epic poem. I loved long epics. I loved Homer. And I was really smitten by that when I was a young man. And I wanted to write authentic epic poetry in iambic pentameter, and I learned all the meters and all that, and actually did write an enormously long epic. But that taught me what poetry’s made out of, in all languages, which is just common beats, you know. And that got me thinking about tribal poetry and really ancient poetry, like Gilgamesh and that.

You wrote an epic? What was it about?

It’s about— It’s kind of funny. Aeneas was the last Trojan warrior who flees Troy when it’s burnt by the Greeks, and he founds Rome. Well, he has a son in bizarre medieval English chronicles that I studied in my literature days. In fact, I still study this, I’m finishing my Ph.D. in medieval poetry.

But in medieval poetry, Aeneas has a son named Brutus who has to flee Rome and he founds Britain, but Britain is full of a bunch of monsters who are Titans left over from the war with Zeus. And their leader is Gog McGog, and Brutus fights Gog McGog and the Gog clan. And that floored me when I read that, it floored me, I was enamored with that.

Gog & Magog Statue by Dominic Reid,

From LordMayorshow.org

I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I wrote an enormous epic about Brutus and his war against the Gogs. And how he made Stonehenge during the war and things like that. It really struck me. I loved the voice it was written in. I was just enamored with it.

Did you like The Lord of the Rings movie?

I really liked The Lord of the Rings movie! Where they keep to the book, the visuals were fantastic, phenomenal. I was really blown away by the visuals. They did that right, I think.

Even the slow pacing of it fit, like they captured the moodiness of the book, rather than making it a little kids’ story. And also it’s very grisly. I mean the Balrog, the magic and, you know, and Sauron himself.

It’s funny when you mention your ambitions to write an epic, because you’ve sort of discovered a new one.

Yeah, in a way, I am a co-writer with this epic as well. That is incredibly rewarding to me.

Sometimes I almost take credit for this poetry, but I didn’t write it, you know. I wish I had. Actually, I’m really jealous of some of this work. It’s, I think, some of the best stuff I’ve ever heard. But it’ll be great to be associated with that until the end of my days. If there’s anything you want to be tied to for a long period of time, make sure it’s worthwhile.

In fact, I’m really relieved, because I’d much rather do this than English literature, as much as I love it. And I know that’s blasphemous, but it’s just not as attractive, and it’s not as influential. And it’s not going to change the world.