Review
THE PAGAN CHRIST: RECOVERING THE LOST LIGHT
by Tom Harpur
Thomas Allen, 220 pp.
I was a bit disappointed to find Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ already in bookstores. It was originally supposed to be released on April 10 and there was something apropos about launching this potentially controversial book on the Easter weekend. This is a work that will ruffle feathers among many people of the Christian faith – particularly fundamentalists, biblical literalists and the Church hierarchy, not to mention those fans of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. There was a time when Harpur would likely have been excommunicated or even burned at the stake as a heretic for making the claims that he does in this book.
The most contentious and problematic claim made by the former Anglican priest and University of Toronto professor is that Christ was never an actual historical figure. Like many theologians and critics before him, including Northrop Frye and especially Alvin Boyd Kuhn (to whom he dedicates the book), Harpur makes the argument that the Christ story and the Bible in general are meant to be read as allegorical and mythological texts and not literal histories.
Through an examination of pre-Christian and pagan faiths, Harpur shows that the Christ figure and, indeed, all tenets of the Christian religion have corresponding antecedents in Egyptian, Sumerian and other ancient faiths. He stops short of calling Christianity, as Freud did, a mere plagiarism, suggesting instead that Christianity is rooted in the same distilled universal myths as other ancient religions. He claims the turning point came in the third century when, in order to make Christianity more understandable – and thus more appealing – to the uneducated commoner, the Church fathers made a conscious decision to reinterpret the scriptures to depict Christ as a living historical person. This focus on historicity would lead not only to the forceful suppression of dissenting liberal viewpoints within the Roman Catholic Church and the subsequent dominance of the ultra-conservative wing, but also to the commission of all sorts of atrocities in the name of Christianity and the development of a schism between Christianity and other religions that exists to this day. It would also result in a severe crisis of faith among devotees when it became apparent that the Bible could not be trusted as a historical record.
How, Harpur asks, when proto-Christ figures exist; when all the miracles and stories in Christian theology can be shown to have come from other sources; when there are no historical records of Christ, and when such records that are extant suggest he did not exist and that the events told of did not happen, can we believe in Christ as a man? The point is that we can’t. History can’t be used to prove a myth, Harpur argues, it can only disprove it. This is where the Christian fathers made their big mistake. "Lose the mystery and you lose everything," says Harpur.
The notion that Christ was not an actual historical figure does not prove a problem for Harpur. Instead, it presents an opportunity to reclaim the religion from the literalists and restore the mystery to it. Accepting the Christ(os) myth as an allegory for human life and experience provides an opportunity, in Harpur’s opinion, to accept responsibility for our own moral and spiritual development. By making such a choice, Christ will once again assume a relevance to humanity that he can’t have as a disputed historical figure. The message of The Pagan Christ, if we choose to hear it, is ultimately one of hope and liberation.
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