Pagan Christ or historical Jesus or both.

Catholic New Times, Sept 12, 2004 by Barry Blackburn

Tom Harpur's recent book, The Pagan Christ (Recovering The Lost Light), reminds me of the baby and the bath water.

For years, journalist and former Anglican priest Tom Harpur has been slaying the dragons of ignorance through his always insightful articles in The Toronto Star. He speaks for Christians who desire that the Scriptures and the church need to burst into fire again with a faith for the future. All of us need to recover the light of a renewed faith.

The title of his book, The Pagan Christ, is a key to understanding Harpur's thesis that the true interpretation of both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures must be seen as incarnational: God becoming human in all of us.

Harpur has discovered in the life's work of two great scholars Gerald Massey (1828-1907) and Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963) a marvelous key to unlocking the tree understanding of the Old and New Testaments through the study of ancient Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman myths and mystery cults.

Massey, Kuhn, and now Harpur firmly believe that all of the sacred texts of the Bible are these Egyptian myths, and others--brought forward and re-written in the guise of religious history--are wholly allegory and myth like their true source. These scholars strongly believe that to interpret any text of the Bible other than as myth and/or allegory is to trivialize the scripture into a false, even idolatrous, historicity.

The Pagan Christ asserts that none of the bible happened in history, yet all of it happened/happens within us. God, it says, becomes known not in the historicity of the events of Scripture but through our humanity in our encounter of God as Christ, spark of the divinity that is each of us. Christ, in each person, lives, is crucified and is resurrected. The Son of God is you and I.

Harpur carefully reviews the parallels between the Christ myth in the ancient Egyptian Mystery liturgies, especially in the Roman Mithras cult of the Persian God of Light and the story of Jesus in the Gospels. The parallels convince Harpur "beyond a shadow of a doubt" that he must stop understanding Jesus of Nazareth as a real historical human being.

Instead, his discoveries cry out to proclaim not Jesus but Christ, the suffering and risen God incarnate: the spiritual reality of every human soul who is destined for union with God. The Christ myth of the Gospels is our deepest human meaning and truth.

Is Harpur right in abandoning the Jesus of History for the Christ of Faith?

I believe Tom Harpur is completely correct in his understanding of allegory and myth as root inspiration for the artistry of the Bible, but to declare everything as a re-write of the ancient myths is unconvincing. I believe Harpur is correct to see God in Christ within each of us. He is wrong, I believe, to assume that allegory and myth as sole interpretations of the Bible will dispense with history as ground of Faith.

Harpur states in his book that the early church Fathers tried to destroy the Pagan sources and Gnostic texts common with other orthodox texts and sayings Gospels because the Fathers were appealing to the Common Man in the street, whereas the followers of the Mystery Cults believed in an esoteric (hidden) wisdom truth beyond the ken of the poor and uneducated masses, who would "misuse, desecrate or pervert" it. "Fraud, forgery, deceit, and violence," says Harpur "became the tools the orthodox used to crush the 'heretics.'" The truth of the universal sacred myths, Harpur calks, "pre-Christian Christianity" became in the New Testament's historicity "pious frauds" or in his new coined term "Christianism." He says the "rank-and -file majority who flocked to the new religion" (Christianism) were looking for an exoteric (literal) religion suited to the "lowest common denominator."

The Pagan Christ reads like a battle between the esoteric elites and the esoteric rabble. Each class jealously guards their truth. The few have their gnosis, inner wisdom, while the many have a more dumbed-down historical version. To the victor went the spoils: The Christ of Faith AND the Jesus of History. For Harpur this is a bad news Gospel because it presents a historical Christ as an idolatrous Jesus: ultimate, unique and perfect and thus forever unrelated to us. The Christ is not within history, it is within us!

As I understand Judaism and Christianity, their root origin is in human experience dressed in the language of myth and allegory. Tom Harpur would agree with us that all religion is rooted in this generally recognized fact (Evangelical Christianity notwithstanding). Why then are most Christians and Jews not ready to completely dispense with history to embrace the belief that all scripture is allegory and myth?

What is unique about Judaism and Christianity is the belief that God is transcendent AND a God of history. To encounter God is a flesh and blood (sacramental) experience of our deeds of Justice. For Judaism, the human experience of liberation created their national identity and understanding of God as a saving God of people. Jeremiah proclaimed that to know God is to do justice: "He judged a the cause of the poor and needy; then it was well. Is not this to know me says the Lord (Jer. 22:16).