Gerald Massey (1828 to 1907) was an English poet who never attended university and began factory work at age eight. Self-taught in Egyptian hieroglyphs during the decades after Champollion's decipherment first made the script legible to Europeans at all, he produced three huge comparative works, A Book of the Beginnings (1881), A Natural Genesis (1883) and Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (1907), arguing that Egyptian myth and language lie beneath Hebrew and Christian scripture.
His most consequential specific claim concerns Horus, the falcon god of Egyptian kingship. Massey read Horus's birth, his conflict with his uncle Set, and his eventual vindication as a hidden template for the Gospel narrative, and asserted point by point that Horus was born of a virgin, gathered twelve followers, was betrayed, and died and rose again, phrased to track the Gospels almost line for line.
No Egyptologist of his own generation accepted this reading, and none has since. Massey's method was etymological guesswork rather than the grammatical study of Middle Egyptian that was already professionalizing around him; he read resemblances between English and Egyptian sounds as proof of common origin in a way the discipline had already abandoned. His claims are recorded here as a real historical episode in the history of ideas, not as Egyptology, because they are the traceable origin point of a parallel list that a century later reached millions of people through a very different medium, the internet documentary Zeitgeist.