Sharing The Faith by discussing Tom Harpur's "The Pagan Christ"

Recently I have been accosted at several functions such as the remembrance-day services, senior’s dinners and receptions by some very eager people. Armed with what they felt were iron-clad arguments from recent books such as The Pagan Christ or The DaVinci Code, they want to know why the church has not radically changed it’s beliefs in the light of such compelling scholarship. One would think that in a church where most priests and church leaders are well educated, they would be open to, and changed by, fact and reason. Personally, I have found these to be great opportunities to debunk common misconceptions about the church and to share the message of Jesus with these curious and conscientious seekers. To explain why such books have failed to compel the church, and to start a discussion about Jesus, I share something like the following.

When I recently borrowed The Pagan Christ I expected it to be a stimulating read. However, as many others have discovered, it turned out to be what has, sadly, become the standard assertion of shaky speculations sensationalized and sold as undisputable reality. Harper makes a great many leaps such as that Jesus never existed, and that his story is nothing more than a ‘myth’ brought in from Egyptian pagan belief. How do we recognize this as 'shaky'? Basically, Harper makes the same mistakes that have earned many a university student a ‘D’ on term papers. That is, glossing over of facts and the use of simply outdated sources.

First, and foremost, Harper does nothing to address the fact that if Egyptian myth had such a heavy impact on Israel in the first century, there would be evidence on burial sites. In other words, if the people of that time took their belief in life-after-death from the Egyptians, there would be a great many graves containing Egyptian symbols or hieroglyphs. As scholar N.T. Wright points out, there are no such graves in existence.

In addition, the logic of Harpur’s major assertions is both full of holes and extremely outdated. As W. Ward Gasque, the co-founder of Regent College and a historian of early Christianity, comments (www.canadianchristianity.com), other than quotes from books published in the 17 and 1800’s, and heavy doses of a sensationalist American journalist, Harpur leans on the work of Alvin Boyd Kuhn another author from the 1800’s. Harpur says of Kuhn that he was “A religious scholar and thinker”, who was a “towering polymath whom history has yet to recognize fully in all his brilliance.” Why hasn’t he been noticed? Harpur goes on, “He is simply stepped too often and much too hard on too many powerful toes, particularly those of the vested religious institutions”. However, his assertion notwithstanding, Egyptology is a secular subject; the ‘evil religious institution’ has about as much power over it as it does the outcome of the World Series. Simply put, Harpur ‘blows smoke’ because he is unable to find any immanent works that take Kuhn seriously other then a few unexceptional writers from the 1800’s.

The truth about Kuhn? A high school teacher from the 1800’s who earned a PhD from Columbia University by writing a dissertation on Theosophy (not Egyptology), he had difficulty finding a publisher for his works and most of them were self-published. His only link with an institution of higher learning was a short stint as the secretary to the president of a small college. In fact, in a recent poll by Gasque of 20 leading world Egyptologists, only one of the ten experts who responded ever heard of Kuhn, or of the other two of Harpur’s main sources Higgins or Massey. All the responding scholars were unanimous in dismissing the suggested Egyptian etymologies (were the words came from) for ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. As well the main arguments for Iusa, the virgin birth of Horus, or that he was a fisher of men, the dating of the religion of Osirus, the dating of the earliest writings from Egypt, and the redefinition of ‘incarnation’ are all rejected by the contemporary Egyptologists.

To say the least, it takes much more than a book of this pedigree to take the Church into radical heresy. The Pagan Christ along with most of the other “Christian” books published and mass-marketed through Chapters and Idigo are simply peddling pop-culture syncretism; the kind that makes for a great Hollywood-type conspiracy, but a very poor foundation for Christian faith. This is why the church is neither impressed, nor intimidated by them. They do serve, however, as very good starting points to a deep discussion about our Lord a Saviour Jesus Christ with those curious enough pay for and read a book about Him. An opportunity every believer should relish and prepare for! For further reading on dealing with these and similar questions regarding contemporary pop-scholarship, I highly recommend Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus, or anything by NT Wright, the Bishop of Durham. The better educated we become, the better prepared we will be to meet seeking people where they are with the message of salvation.