“O Divine Justice, how blasphemed has been thy name! Unfortunately for all such speculations, belief in the propitiatory efficacy of blood can be traced to the oldest rites. Hardly a nation remained ignorant of it. Every people offered animal and even human sacrifices to the gods, in the hope of averting thereby public calamity, by pacifying the wrath of some avenging deity. There are instances of Greek and Roman generals offering their lives simply for the success of their army. Caesar complains of it, and calls it a superstition of the Gauls. “They devote themselves to death… believing that unless life is rendered for life the immortal gods cannot be appeased”, he writes.
“If any evil is about to befall either those who now sacrifice, or Egypt, may it be averted on this head”, was pronounced by the Egyptian priests when sacrificing one of their sacred animals. And imprecations were uttered over the head of the expiatory victim, around whose horns a piece of byblus was rolled. The animal was generally led to some barren region, sacred to Typhon, in those primitive ages when this fatal deity was yet held in a certain consideration by the Egyptians. It is in this custom that lies the origin of the “scapegoat” of the Jews, who, when the rufous ass-god was rejected by the Egyptians, began sacrificing to another deity, the “red heifer”.
“Let all sins that have been committed in this world fall on me that the world may be delivered”, exclaimed Gautama, the Hindu Saviour, centuries before our era. No one will pretend to assert in our own age that it was the Egyptians who borrowed anything from the Israelites, as they now accuse the Hindus of doing. Bunsen, Lepsius, Champollion, have long since established the precedence of Egypt over the Israelites in age as well as in all the religious rites that we now recognize among the “chosen people”.
Even the New Testament teems with quotations and repetitions from the Book of the Dead, and Jesus, if everything attributed to him by his four biographers is true – must have been acquainted with the Egyptian Funereal Hymns. In the Gospel according to Matthew, we find whole sentences from the ancient and sacred Ritual which preceded our era by more than 4,000 years. We will again compare.”
H. P. Blavatsky
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 