The Pagan Christ controversy continues

Catholic New Times, Sept 12, 2004

Scott M. Lewis, S.J. got one thing right in his review of my book The Pagan Christ. It is indeed a call for "nothing less than the radical transformation of Christianity as we know it." Unfortunately, since Lewis is a deeply embedded participant in upholding the present institution and its understanding of the Gospel--and thus biased from the start--he follows the self-preservation instinct of the "guild" of ecclesiastical academics who circle the wagons whenever such a transformation is mooted. Having spent their whole life supporting the status quo, traditional ecclesiastics naturally feel threatened by the radically new. They always have.

Lewis forgets that the success of The Pagan Christ is due to the fact that it is written with intelligent, ordinary people in mind. It is not a Ph.D. thesis and so is not bogged down by the kind of footnotes scholars revel in and with which I could easily have weighted every paragraph. The truth is that the evidence for the astounding revelations the book contains is all duly referenced by the modest notes and a more than adequate bibliography.

Incidentally, the remark that the book fails to anchor its claims in "sound historical research"--based upon my statement there was a Jesus in Egyptian lore as early as 18,000 BCE--is typical of Lewis' nit-picking technique. In his Histories, Herodotus, the "father of history," (book 2:43:iv) explicitly says that the priests at Thebes told him (in the fifth century BCE) that the great gods of Egypt existed over 17,000 years earlier in the oral history. These deities included Iu-em-hetep, the coming bringer of peace. The name Iu is basic to the later name Yeshua/Jesus, as well as to Isaac, Isaiah, and many others.

What I find most astonishing, however, is that none of the scholars who have criticized my work, including Lewis, shows the slightest sign of having read any of the chief authors on which the Study was based. The 180 similarities which the scholar Gerald Massey found between the Egyptian Christ, Horus, and the Jesus of the Gospels, are there for all to read in Massey's two-volume shocker, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World and in his The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ. Kuhn's works, now being freshly published by Kessinger Press, contain more than enough scholarly erudition to satisfy all but the most pedantic. My goal was to make the complex simple and the long hidden revealed. The amazingly positive response the book has had from everyone from clergy, former nuns and religion specialists to sophisticated but spiritually hungry ordinary lay people of all religions and of none suggests that readers of The Catholic New Times might do well to judge it for themselves instead of accepting carte blanche the review's sad jeremiad.