The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light, Thomas Allen Publishers 2004.

Tom Harpur, the author of the Pagan Christ, has undergone a spiritual re-awakening and believes that the information revealed within his book represent “one of the most far-reaching tragedies in history.” Harpur, (a columnist for the Toronto Star, a Rhodes scholar, and a former Anglican priest and professor of Greek and new Testament at the University of Toronto) suggests that during the third and fourth centuries C.E., the Christian Church, “either deliberately, in a competitive bid to win over the greatest numbers of the largely unlettered masses, or through willful ignorance” took a “literalist, popularized, historical approach to sublime truth.” Mythological stories that were originally supposed to be regarded as allegory and metaphor became mistakenly transformed into historical fact and the “Christ of the myth became a flesh and blood person identified with Jesus.” Central to the tragedy is the idea that Christ was originally supposed to come “in man,” and that “the Christ principle was potentially in every one of us,” instead, this idea was changed to reflect “the exclusivist teaching that the Christ had come as a man.”

If Harpur’s claims (based on the earlier work of Godfrey Higgins, Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn) are true, “much of the civilized West has been based upon a ‘history’ that never occurred,” and the Christian Church is “founded on a set of miracles that were never performed literally.” The Pagan Christ deals largely with the work of these three scholars, particularly Kuhn (1880-1963) and uses his texts as the basis of its analysis. For a world that reset its calendar to year zero at the supposed birth of Jesus Christ, the implications of Harpur’s revelations are truly immense.

According to Harpur, the term ‘pagan’ is “almost totally misunderstood today.” In fact, it was simply adopted by “emerging Church authorities to denote all who were not orthodox Christians.” Harpur claims that the pagans were “persecuted, decried, killed, and ultimately utterly vanquished by the Church,” because they “held views of ‘the Christ within’ that the Church was to plagiarize blatantly – and then cover up with book burnings, anathemas, and murder.” After detailing the harsh treatment of Pagans by the Christian Church, Harpur quotes Northrop Frye’s (1912-1991) chilling description of Christianity as “a ghost with the chains of a foul historical record of cruelty clanking behind it.”

Surprisingly, instead of diminishing the author’s faith, these revelations seem to have actually strengthened it. The author claims that “the allegorical, spiritual, mythical approach to the Bible and to Christian faith” solves the enigmas of Scripture and that Bible stories now “come alive with amazing new freshness, believability, and power.” The idea of “the Christ within,” like the other religious symbols Harpur describes are “Jungian-style” archetypes in our human psyche, “[i]mplanted deeply by the Creator” and belonging to us “uniquely as human beings, however they are named”.

Harpur notes that during ten years of university training for the Anglican priesthood, “the similarities that existed between Christian beliefs and the earlier Pagan religions were always quickly passed over in seminary as ‘forshadowings’ of the Good News proclaimed by the New Testament.” Furthermore, during roughly ten years as a professor of the New Testament and Greek at the University of Toronto, “few, if any of the exact Egyptian parallels to the Gospel writings” examined in the Pagan Christ “ever came into” his view. For Harpur, the supremacy of Christianity and “its superiority over other religions was seldom, if ever, seriously challenged.”

For Harpur, the translation of the Rosetta Stone by Champollion in 1822, and the resulting translation of texts such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, the Amduat, and the Book of Thoth, provide “irrefutable proof that not one single doctrine, rite, tenet, or usage in Christianity was in reality a fresh contribution to the world of religion.” For the author, all myths, including those associated with the Christ, are derived from an original archetype that came from ancient Egypt. The author notes that “there is nothing the Jesus of the Gospels either said or did—from the Sermon on the Mount to the miracles, from his flight as an infant from Herod to the Resurrection itself—that cannot be shown to have originated thousands of years before, in Egyptian Mystery rites and other sacred liturgies such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.”

Is there an ongoing Church conspiracy? According to Harpur, “Not only did the early Christians take over almost completely the myths of and teachings of their Egyptian masters, mediated in many cases by the Mystery Religions and by Judaism in its many forms, but they did everything in their power, through forgery and other fraud, book burning, character assassination, and murder itself, to destroy the crucial evidence of what had happened.”

Still, Harpur notes that a number of authors have written about the parallels between the Buddha and Jesus as well as Lord Krishna and Jesus, and also notes that “comparative religions studies reveal that almost every traditional faith the world over rests on a central story of the son of a heavenly king who goes down into a dark lower world, suffering, dying, and rising again, before returning to his native upper world.”

For Harpur, the only difference “between the Jesus story of the New Testament and the many ancient myths depicting what seems the identical combination of concepts and characteristics” was that “nobody among the ancients, prior to the full-fledged Christian movement, believed for one moment that any of the events in their dramas were in any way historical.” For Harpur, The Gospels (or the stories of the ‘life’ of Jesus) are “a somewhat garbled and fragmentary copy of an Egyptian prototype who was a purely dramatic figure portraying the divinity in man.”

In a world where the exclusive “with us or against us” mentality of so many of today’s political and religious leaders simply fosters more hatred between people and sows the seeds for even more wars, Harpur’s desire for the faithful to re-examine the archetypal myths of the “Christ within’ is refreshingly inclusive and, almost, hopeful.

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