Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle. Tom Harpur

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      Soon, apart from writing the weekly column and taking our daily walk over the fields or on a part of the Bruce Trail that winds near our home, all my time was given over to reading more and more of Kuhn. That was accompanied by reading his major sources as well. In particular, I was riveted by the writings of Gerald Massey (1828–1911), an English scholar who in his early life had become acknowledged as a poet of some note. He had then spent many years in arduous study of Christian origins, focusing particularly on ancient Egypt. Working closely with noted Assyriologists and Egyptologists at the British Museum in London, he taught himself to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. He then was able to read ancient Egyptian versions of the Book of the Dead, in which he found dozens of exact parallels between the Egyptian Son of God, Horus, and the Jesus of the Gospels. In other words, Horus, a Christ-like prototype, was in the Egyptian mythology millennia before the events recorded in the New Testament. Massey’s books and Kuhn’s four chief works, particularly The Lost Light, held me spellbound because in all my reading and training over many years I had never come across anything that was so shocking on the one hand or so uplifting and inspiring on the other.

      As weeks turned into months, the more I read, the more I was convinced that what these men were saying had the ring of truth. What they had to say about the origins and nature of Christianity was not merely illuminating, it was radical to the point of explosive. Relying not only upon his own wide knowledge of Platonism, the Neoplatonists, other world religions and the Bible itself, but also on the earlier research and writings of Massey and others, Kuhn argued with passion that Christianity is indeed but a pale copy of an earlier narrative theme. The Jesus Story has been told before, most notably in the myths surrounding the Egyptian sun god Horus, the son of the god Osiris, and the goddess Isis (like Mary, called Queen of Heaven, and Theotokos, “Mother of God”). As I read on hour after hour, day after day, I was gradually transfixed by the dawning realization that if what was being said was indeed true, then my whole understanding of the faith in which I had been reared and to which I had dedicated my entire life was being called into question in a more radical way than ever before. At times it seemed as though the whole world was being turned upside down. I was semi-retired now, and so at first I would have liked to be able to deny the challenge, to refute the case being so credibly presented, to turn back the clock to before that first encounter with Kuhn’s ideas. But a determined willingness to follow the truth wherever it led left no alternative but to press ahead.

      I began to read more widely in this area, including, amongst many other writings, the work of the top contemporary Egyptologist Eric Hornung. Most of today’s Egyptologists are chiefly concerned with archaeological discoveries and specific artifacts, but Hornung has made a study of the more esoteric, religious aspects of his field. For example, in The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, he wrote: “Early Christianity was deeply indebted to ancient Egypt . . . There was a smooth transition from the image of the nursing Isis, Isis lactans, to that of Maria lactans. The miraculous birth of Jesus could be viewed as analogous to that of Horus . . .” I also discovered that the scholar Karl W. Luckert at the University of Chicago had written a book in 1991 about the huge debt that Christianity owes to Egyptian sources. It was called Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire. One of many well-known authorities in the area of mythology, Joseph Campbell, said in his highly popular PBS TV series of interviews with Bill Moyers, “When you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus blesses the world as its Emperor. That is precisely the image [Isis and Horus] that has come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early Fathers and the early artists took over these images intentionally.” In similar fashion, I noted that in his classic book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung, the renowned psychiatrist and expert on mythology, said, “The Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris–Horus myth.”

      The process of digesting all of this previously unknown material is given some space in chapter 1 of The Pagan Christ. I wrote there: “What if it is true? The implications were enormous. It meant . . . that much of the thinking of much of the civilized West has been based upon a ‘history’ that never occurred, and that the Christian Church had been founded on a set of miracles that were never performed literally . . . And that has made all the difference, a huge and immensely positive difference for my understanding of my faith and my own spiritual life. Simultaneously, it has transformed my view of the future of Christianity into one of hope.” Many things came together in a synchronism of influences, ripening ideas and insights that together gave me the courage and conviction necessary to write The Pagan Christ, to promote it through the media, and then to defend it against what I correctly foresaw would be a very formidable storm of criticism.

      Looking back at the 2004 publication of The Pagan Christ, followed in 2007 by its sequel, Water into Wine, I have a deep awareness now of how perfectly it flows from all that had gone before. One has only to look at the earlier books and columns to see how the realization was already there that the only way forward for any rationally based religion of the future was that of a cosmic-oriented faith. The realization that the old creeds were now defunct and that they presented rigid, irrelevant obstacles rather than means to wider understanding was there almost from the very beginning. So too was the birth (for me) of the perception that the Jesus Story was not only a very old story but an archetypal drama of the Self in every one of us. In fact, chapter 14 in Life After Death (which offended some theologians at the time) was actually titled “The Christ Myth as the Ultimate Myth of the Self.” It was written in 1990, fourteen years before The Pagan Christ.

      The part of The Pagan Christ that was the most striking and that stood the most apart from anything that had come before—also the part that I laboured over the hardest and that the media naturally exploited—was the chapter called “Was There a Jesus of History?” Other scholars as early as a hundred years ago had questioned the historicity of Jesus—and definitely the number of those doing so is growing today—but nobody mentioned them in divinity schools and certainly never from the pulpit. Indeed, if Christianity has been marked by any one single development beyond others in the past 150 years, it has been a paradoxical trend in North America particularly: on the one hand, an ever greater idolizing of a literal Jesus, who has usurped the place of God; and on the other hand, the work of critical scholars who have been busy removing the credibility of almost everything the historical Jesus is alleged to have said and done. The California-based Jesus Seminar’s twofold research projects—one into the words of Jesus, the other into his “acts”—eventually resulted in two books which between them said that less than 20 percent of either category had any claim to authenticity. Had the scores of participating scholars been less tightly connected with various Christian denominational schools and seminaries, there is no doubt in my mind that this figure would have been much smaller still.

      The truth is that when my research for The Pagan Christ first began, the last thing on my mind was the possibility that it would lead where eventually it did on this issue. Once I realized that it might, I redoubled my efforts to get at the truth at all costs. Using all that I had learned at the feet of Professor Peter Brunt, my old tutor in Greek and Roman history, I checked and rechecked the very few lines of testimony that come to us from the second century CE. There is no secular evidence whatsoever for Jesus from the first century unless one ignores the fact that what Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived and wrote at that time, seems to say has been judged from earliest times to have been an egregious forgery. As pointed out in The Pagan Christ, the Jesus Story itself has a history. Indeed, it is woven into the very fabric of Western culture, its art, music and literature. It has been repeated and read literally so many myriads of times that it is the supreme meme of all time. The virtually total absence of any truly reliable hard historical evidence for the story has seldom been noticed because that’s the very essence of a meme; it is simply a unit of information repeated and repeated over and over again without question, indeed without the beginning of any thought of a question. While I don’t agree with the position of atheist Richard Dawkins, he is certainly right about this phenomenon in our culture, as outlined in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. СКАЧАТЬ