Newton Joseph

From: Newton Joseph
Date: 06/13/04 08:57:58
Subject: Fw: Tom Harpur - A Pagan Christ



PAGAN CHRISTS


> New Message on A Room for Heresy>

> -----------------------------------------------------------
> From: .Zoraida.
> Message 8 in Discussion
>
>
> The greatest myth ever told
>
> Religion writer and former Anglican priest Tom Harpur admits he's
sticking
> his neck out for proffering that someone named Jesus never walked this
Earth
>
> It is disconcerting, to say the least, for Canada's best-known religion
> writer to decide that Jesus Christ did not exist.
> That is the contention of Tom Harpur's new book, The Pagan Christ. The
> former Anglican priest and Toronto Star religion editor for the past 35
> years, has come to believe that there was never a man named Jesus, and
that
> most of the miracles and wonders ascribed to him in the New Testament did
> not happen.
>
> Even more astonishing, he argues that most of the Christ story was
borrowed
> by the early church from ancient religions, which the church then
suppressed
> in "the greatest cover-up of all time."
>
> The chief religion to be ransacked was that of Egypt, already 3,000 years
> old when Christianity was founded. Egypt, he writes, supplied the "virgin
> birth, a star in the east, three wise men bearing gifts, the evil power
that
> tries to take a special child's life, and angelic messengers." The
Egyptian
> hieroglyph KRST, meaning the anointed one, was applied to the deity Horus,
> who was born of a mortal woman and later crucified between two thieves.
>
> And yet -- for all this -- Harpur is still a believing Christian. "I'm not
> interested in debunking," says the white-haired 70-plus Harpur, who has
> already been attacked by an assortment of prominent fundamentalists. "I
want
> to help see the church through this century. Right now it's in crisis. The
> book tries to provide a fresh vision."
>
> He considers the popularity of Mel Gibson's Passion movie a demonstration
of
> how unhealthily dependent people have become on a historic Jesus who never
> existed.
>
> In Harpur's view, the core message that Christianity shares with the other
> great religions of the Middle East is that God has given every human being
a
> spark of divinity, which can be realized through spiritual struggle. The
> Egyptians symbolized this in a deity they called "Iusa" (which possibly
> later became the name Jesus) and wove a mythology of stories about his
> painful transformation into a human being. But neither the Egyptians, nor
> the Persians who possessed a similar mythology, ever claimed that such a
> person really existed. "The truth was always esoteric," Harpur says. "It
was
> symbolized in the stories, but it wasn't history."
>
> There is evidence that the early church fathers shared the view that there
> was no historic Jesus. But some time in the third and fourth centuries,
> Harpur argues, it was decided that a historic Jesus would give the new
faith
> a distinctive quality not possessed by the powerful pagan faiths it was
> competing with. The many gospels and early writings that reflected the
old,
> symbolic view of Jesus were suppressed, and the few -- four, to be
exact --
> that claimed he had actually lived were retained.
>
> How did a man trained as a priest, who taught New Testament theology for
> many years, and defended it for decades in his newspaper column, come to
> such a drastic re-appraisal of his beliefs?
>
> Harpur says he had been troubled for many years by illogicalities in the
New
> Testament, such as the claim that Jesus was tried before three different
> courts during the single night of the Passion. He was also dismayed to
> discover while teaching theology at the University of Toronto that a
couple
> of buildings away the very devout scholar Northrop Frye was teaching his
> students that any accurate history found in the Bible was only there by
> accident.
>
> By 1990, when he wrote Finding the Still Point, Harpur had come to believe
> that the story of a Jesus who walked around Galilee performing magic had
> become an obstacle to people searching for the deep meaning of
Christianity.
> "It was a leading of the spirit. But I didn't know that a book like The
> Pagan Christ was down the road."
>
> The final blow to his old beliefs arrived in his mailbox a couple of years
> ago.
>
> "People have always sent me their manuscripts for one religious book or
> another, since I am a religion editor," he explains. "One day, about 2½
> years ago, I got a manuscript from a guy who wrote: 'You might be open to
> this.' It was about a writer named Alvin Boyd Kuhn, who I had never read."
>
> Kuhn was an American scholar of ancient Middle Eastern languages who died
in
> 1963. While studying the vast body of Egyptian writings, Kuhn had been
> perturbed by occasional, oddly familiar passages. A poem in honour of
Horus,
> for example, would begin with the words, "He was despised and shunned by
> men, a man of pain who knew what sickness was."
>
> Kuhn recorded these similarities to New Testament language, and soon had a
> list of many hundreds of passages.
>
> He was not, of course, the first to notice these oddities. Almost from the
> time it was possible to decipher the hieroglyphs, in the early 1800s,
> scholars were aware of them. Religious authorities decided that they
merely
> "foreshadowed" the truth of Christianity, and few experts dared to
disagree.
> Even Wallis Budge, the British Museum's Egyptian authority in the early
20th
> century, amassed volumes of research showing that pretty much the whole
New
> Testament was in the hieroglyphs. But he dutifully concluded that it was
> just "foreshadowing."
>
> Only a few scholars have come out and said flatly that Christianity is an
> evolution of the old "pagan" religions: Godfrey Higgins and Gerald Massey
in
> the 19th century, and Alvin Kuhn in the 20th.
>
> Reading Kuhn's books finally persuaded Harpur to set aside the historic
> Jesus. But it was a lengthy and painful process of wrestling both with
> Kuhn's evidence and with his own past. "I was raised with the idea of
being
> saved 'in Jesus's arms,' " says Harpur, whose own parents were
> fundamentalist Christians. "So I know the Scriptures the way the
> fundamentalists know them."
>
> Is he afraid of being shunned by believers, especially his fellow
Anglicans?
>
> "Well, you need a community. And it will be very painful, there will be
> grief for people who are seized by the cogency of my case but are wedded
to
> the comfort of traditional faith. There's a personal grieving process if
> you're going to do this. But I am committed to doing as the Spirit leads
> me."
>
> Kuhn, after a lifetime of writing and arguing and giving speeches in
support
> of his ideas, was studiously ignored by Christian scholars and his books
> were forgotten the day that he died. Does Harpur fear the same might
happen
> to him?
>
> "I don't think so. We're living in a different time now. Ideas are
> disseminated on the Internet, and the control of the mainstream religions
> over the public conversation is much weaker than it was only 40 years
ago."
>
> He also believes that the millions of people who have abandoned mainstream
> religion in recent decades did so partly because it has become hard to
> believe in a magical god/man who changes water to wine and brings the dead
> back to life. "The things I'm saying don't downgrade the Jesus story.
> Instead, they save us from this plodding tale of a magic wonder worker,
> which is so hard for modern people to believe."
>
> Of course, even as millions have left the churches, millions more have
> declared themselves believers in a fiercely and literally historic Jesus.
> These are the fundamentalists who watch religious television, such as 100
> Huntley Street. That show has already invited a Christian expert on air to
> savage Harpur's book. "It was a guy I've never met who kept repeating, 'I
> love you, Tom Harpur.' Of course, they didn't invite me on the program."
>
> Not to mention the millions who are flocking to see the violently literal
> rendition of Christ's passion in Mel Gibson's movie. "It is simply
> grotesque, that movie," says Harpur, although he acknowledges that the
> publishers of The Pagan Christ moved up the publication date in order to
> take advantage of the oceans of media attention generated by the film.
>
> "The rise of fundamentalism is because we live in scary times," Harpur
says.
> "The appeal of the absolute is very great. The idea that we are the
winning
> side. The kind of language [President] Bush is using to justify killing
> Iraqis."
>
> In Harpur's view, the insistence on Jesus's literal existence is the main
> obstacle to reconciliation between Christianity and the other great
> religions, none of which relies on a literal god-man as a founder. "How
will
> we ever escape the impasse of a billion and a half people who say that
they
> possess the exclusive truth. [Theologian] Hans Kung has said we can never
> have world peace until that is resolved."
>
> But what exactly will be left of Christianity if it loses the figure of
> Jesus Christ?
>
> "It will be a more mystical religion," Harpur says. "But not less
practical.
> After all, this business of letting Jesus do it for you doesn't look so
good
> after what we've seen in the past 2,000 years."
>
>[email protected]
www.atheistfellowship.com
> -----------------------------------------------------------
>
>