Summer Reading Series I
The Pagan Christ: Recovering the lost Light, Tom Harpur, 2004, Thomas Allen Publisher, Toronto.
When Christianity is abandoned with disdain and the church desperate in juggling a place of relevance in the modern world, Tom Harpur chooses to shake it from the bottom and provide interpretations that may give religion in general a new lease of life.
Harpur comes from a deeply religious Judeo-Christian background, with ten years of Anglican priesthood training, and for about another ten years, teaching as a professor of the New Testament and Greek at the Toronto School of Theology's Wycliffe College.
Influenced by Northrop Frye, and drawing on findings and resources of Orientalists & Egyptologist Godfrey Higgins(1771-1834), Gerald Massey(1828-1908),and Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1880-1963), Harpur develops a profound new understanding of religion.
Sigmund Freud determined that the Bible was a total plagiarism of the Sumerian and Egyptian mythologies. Harpur concurs.
He recognizes “The Bible in general and the New Testament in particular actually copy or repeat motifs laid down many centuries, and in some cases many millennia before.”
In the early years, the Christians was a nimble yet petty religious sect dwelling on traditions of both Judaism and Pagan rituals. It was given a dynamic boost when its Roman master attested its seal of legitimacy in a time when conformity is wanting: in the 3rd century, the Roman Empire was fast aging into disintegration and needs a faith of unity.
Constantine the Great placed the motif of the cross on the standard of his legions after his famous victory at the Milvian Bridge in 340 B.C.E. The collusion of Power and Christian faith was formulated: anyone who opposed the cross was an enemy of the Empire.
The Christians claim exclusive innovation of the cross, yet about 300 years before the Milvian Bridge slaughter it had been a Greek monogram comprising the letters Chi and Rho (for Christ); in around 40 B.C.E. and before, it had been a symbol on the coins of Ptolemies and King Herod the Great.
Aiming to conveniently convert the popular mass which was generally illiterate, the Christian Church made fatal and fateful turns in taking a literalist, popularized, historical approach to ancient mythological teachings which had been preserved in the amber of allegory by misrepresenting it as “plodding fact”.
Harpur argues that “The earliest Church Fathers themselves admit that they took the gig, symbolic, esoteric wisdom that the Christian movement had inherited from Paganism [from Platonic philosophy and the Mystery Religion - and explained it, or rather downgraded it, by means of vulgar fables for the illiterate mob.”
Violence and hostility abound, the early Church expanded much energy in erasing any trace of the religion's Pagan past, the Gospels' source, origins of Church dogmas, & rites.
Encouraged and often led by Christian clergies, mobs ransacked Pagan places of worship and study, burned untold quantities of books, scrolls and other historical relics, hurled the charges of heresy, and put many to death,
In 389 a church mob destroyed the Gaulish city of Bibracte. This was where the sacred Druid college was founded. The college assembled 40,000 students, and offered courses in philosophy, literature, grammar, law, medicine, astrology, architecture, and esoteric religion. The unruly mobs also destroyed untold thousands of irreplaceable books & scrolls of the incredible library at Alexandria!!
The thread of prosecution and intimidation extended well beyond the Dark Age.
It was not until 1789 when ancient Egyptian myths were gradually salvaged from the ruins of persistent destruction upon the discovery of the Rosetta Stone on the western bank of the mouth of the Nile River. It was an accidental historical occurrence that befell the shoulders of the Napoleon officer, Colonel Broussard. Over time it made possible the deciphering of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writings, albeit hostility from ecclesiastical and other powers,vested Church interest and fanatic fundamentalists. Hence,the myths of the Bible began to unveil. To sample a few, the following is Harpur's original text:
-There was a Jesus in Egyptian lore many thousands of years ago. His name was Iusu, or Iusa, according to Gerald Massey, and that means” the coming divine Son who heals or saves.
-There was an Egyptian Christos, or Christ, named Horus. He and his mother Isis, were the forerunners of the Christian Madonna and Child, and together they constituted a leading image in Egyptian religion for millennia prior to Gospels.
-Martha & Mary mimic the Egyptian story about the raising from the dead of El-asar, or Lazarus, at an Egyptian Bethany about 4,000 year ago.
From Chapters 3-9 Harpur elaborates at length to show that:
Nothing the Jesus of the Gospel 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.
Egyptian myths contains ancient wisdom wrapped around allegoric story lines. Yet taken literally, it cannot withstand the unforgiving scrutiny of science and technology and all hells break loose – nothing is believable.
To put a final nail to the forgery and fraud that went to the writings of the faith of Hebrew origin, Harpur subscribes to the archaeological findings, or unfindings as disclosed by Daniel Lazare in a Mar 2002 Harper Magazine story named, 'False Testament”. Lazare states that archeology now refutes the Bible's claim to history: the existence of Abraham & other biblical patriarchs, Exodus from Egypt, the supposed glories of Kings David & Solomon, even the reputed conquest of the Promised Land(Canaan). Instead of a band of invaders who conquered Canaan, the Israelite are now thought to have been an indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200BCE .
Utter disappointment of the Church notwithstanding, Harpur believes “ in the presence of a divine power or cosmic mind behind and throughout the Universe, and in the survival of the soul after death.” And that all prevailing great religions point to the common ultimate esoteric truth!
(SYL: Jun 11, Van)
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