The Pagan Christ (Book Review)

Tom Harpur The Pagan Christ (2004) One half of Harpur’s thesis is that around 300 to 400 CE the Church authorities deliberately suppressed and misrepresented as many traces of the pagan origin of the Christian doctrine as they could. He traces the Bible back to the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and claims that the Christ figure originates in Isis/Osiris. He bases his argument primarily on the researches of Alvin Boyd Kuhn, but also draws on Hindu, Greek, Gnostic, and many other sources.
     The other half of his thesis is that the Pagan Christ is the divine light that inheres in every human being. This insight, he claims, was conveyed by myth, which has been “literalised” by the Church, and so the true understanding of the Gospel has been distorted and kept from us. In addition, this insight would bring all religions in the world into one tent, if only the anti-mythological efforts of the Abrahamic organised religions weren’t so effective and divisive.
     Harpur is bit of a crank, I think, but his central message is true enough. The myths do all express the same truth, that we all partake of the divine light. That truth is itself a myth, that is, it is a story and concept that creates significance and meaning. And we do have a regrettable tendency to take stories literally, instead of grasping them as symbols of truths that cannot be expressed literally. Myths are on the one hand stories that justify and explain ritual, and on the other, apprehensions of the meanings expressed through those rituals. People of faith have always, I think, understood this. Superstition consists of taking myth as having the same operational truth as science and craft; in other words, superstition is myth turned into magic. One could go on about this opposition between faith and religion, but I’ll just give you two sentences that I think are true:
     – Faith is the ability to tolerate doubt.
     – God does not like religion.
     As scholarship, Harpur’s book is (based on my own limited reading) incomplete and simplistic. The development of the Bible is as far as I know a far more tangled skein of influences and sources than his account indicates. As testimony to how one man came to a deeper understanding of what his Christian heritage could mean, it’s honest and sincere. Many people will find his story helpful; and many others will feel threatened by it. Worth reading by anyone who needs to find at least a hint of an answer to the central question: Can we make meaning out of, or find meaning in, our lives? **½