For thousands of years, people thought you couldn't turn normal writing into holy books. That sounded like a crazy conspiracy theory. But new research, plus Artificial Intelligence (AI), shows it is possible. And it's actually pretty simple. What took teams of ancient Greeks years to do, you can now do with one click on a computer.
The ancient Greeks had a trick called steganography. That's a big word that just means "covered writing" or "hidden writing."
Researcher Legesse Allyn found that this trick was really about changing the meaning of words on purpose. It's like taking someone else's essay and changing a few words so it tells a completely different story.
For example, Legesse studied the first chapters of the Bible, Genesis 1–4. He found that those stories started out as something very different: they were ancient Egyptian farm reports. They were notes about crops, grain, and farming around the Dead Sea. That area was once a big farm for Lower Egypt.
To do this trick, the ancient Greeks needed three things:
In his 2024 book, The Ancient Egyptian Roots of Mythical Ancient Greek Women, Legesse explains the four tools the Greeks used to turn farm reports into religious myths:
This is changing words based on how they sound. For example, the Egyptian word fetere means "create." The Greeks changed it to sound like pater, which means "father" in Greek. Another word, nTS'I, meant "detached ancestor," but they turned it into meter, which means "mother." By changing just a few sounds, they changed who got the credit for creating and ruling — from women to men.
This is when you pretend a made-up story is real history. Legesse shows this in his "Gospel of the Cat." In that story he writes: "That which the children called The Cat of the Lord was in truth no beast, but a man, Katsus by name." So a real cat becomes a holy teacher named Katsus.
This is when you take an everyday object and say it is sacred. In the "Gospel of the Cat," Legesse writes that household objects like a fish, a cup, a ball, and a book were actually "wisdom, sustenance, journey, nourishment, and the breath of spirit." Suddenly, a cup isn't just a cup. It's a holy symbol.
This is when you decide everything stands for something else. For example: "The book means the Word of God, and the cup means a promise, and the ball he stands on is the world." When you read everything as a symbol, you can make any story sound religious.
Long ago, women owned and ran the land, farms, and markets. They sold their own goods and were in charge.
Then, from about 1250 to 850 BC, there was a 400-year famine in ancient Greece. There was not enough food. After this hard time, Greek men took the land, farms, and markets away from women.
To justify taking them, they used hidden writing to make women look bad in stories. They created myths like Pandora, who opened a box and let evil into the world, and Eris, who was called the mother of famine and fighting. These stories helped them create new religions that said men should be in charge. First it happened in Greece, then it spread around the world, the ancient Greek men inventing religions to plunder women's farms across the ancient world.
Legesse estimates it would have taken about 70 people working for two full years to change all the Egyptian farm reports into what we now call the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
This was not an accident. It was a big, planned project to reuse old writing for a new purpose.
Today, you don't need 70 people and two years. AI can do it in seconds.
You just need to give AI this prompt:
Then you attach or paste in any text you want — any text, story, lyrics, or SMS conversation.
Legesse has made example pages that show how it works:
Legesse made a free online tool called ReligionMaker. You can find it here: https://jallynconsulting.com/ReligionMaker/
With one click, it can turn these things into holy-sounding verses:
Most readers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between what the tool makes and real scripture from a Bible.
This is important. If Genesis really started as Egyptian grain-trade notes, then the line between "sacred" and "normal" writing is not a solid wall. It's more like a thin curtain. And with AI and ReligionMaker, anyone can pull that curtain aside.
Legesse's work is both a demonstration and a warning.
By showing the ease of the tricks from ancient days, and by letting anyone try them, he shows us that today's holy texts might not be what they seem. The same tricks that made the Bible could make a holy book out of your text messages, Reddit posts, or your favorite lyrics.
The question is not CAN normal text be turned into religious text. We know it can.
The real questions are:
"The book signifieth the Logos, and the cup signifieth the covenant" — but sometimes, a book is just a book, and a cup is just a cup. The holy meaning was added later. It wasn't there from the start. — Gospel of the Cat
And now, with AI, anyone can be the one who adds that meaning.
Legesse Allyn is an independent researcher, author, and a native speaker of Amarigna and Tigrigna. He has written 27 books. He has retranslated the Rosetta Stone, the Papyrus of Ani, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Hesiod Theogony, the Rig Veda, and more.
His work shows that the language of the hieroglyphs is still alive today, supporting ancient Greek historian Diodorus, who wrote that ancient Egypt was founded by Ethiopian queens and that hieroglyphs are Ethiopian letters [download], that women were the founders of civilization and writing [download], that names such as Rameses are actually female titles [download], and that ancient Greek men began the process of inventing religions 2,750 years ago to take power away from women [download]. His 27 books, including his translations of the Rosetta Stone [download], Genesis 1-2 [download], Genesis 3-4 [download], and Papyrus of Ani/Book of the Dead [download] are available online, in bookstores, on Amazon, in school libraries, and public libraries.
His books are also available worldwide in major university libraries, including: