Tom Harpur - The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?

Thousands of souls in the Pagan world were onjire with the pure flameof divine passion of the Christly love centuries before Jesus ever lived.

ALVIN BOYD KUHN, A Rebirth for Christianity

Before we begin, there is something you must know about the title of this book: the word "Pagan" is almost totally misunderstood today. The deeply pejorative sense of the wordentirely the result of centuries of Christian prejudice and biasis illustrated at once by the Concise Oxford Dictionary's almost brusque definition: "heathen, unenlightened or irreligious (person)." But the citation goes on to admit that in its origin, the word was totally neutral. It comes from the Latin pagus, a country district. A Pagan, a paganus, initially was a peasant. The term was soon adopted by emerging Church authorities to denote all who were not orthodox Christians. As we shall see, the "Pagans," who were persecuted, decried, killed, and ultimately utterly vanquished by the Church, held views of "the Christ within" that the Church was to plagiarize blatantlyand then cover up with book burnings, anathemas, and murder. Ironically, centuries later the Church was finally forced to turn to the "Pagan" Aristotle and his teacher, Plato, to save its theological bacon. The monumental work of St. Thomas Aquinaswhich is the foundation of Roman Catholic theology and is based upon the writings of Aristotle, including his whole theory of natural lawtestifies to that.

My point, once again, is not that those ancient peopletold literal stories and we are now smart enough to takethem symbolically, but that they told them symbolicallyand we are now dumb enough to take them literally.

JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN, Who Is Jesus?

One day, in the late sixties, while I was teaching at the Toronto School of Theology's Wycliffe College, a very bright English student at Victoria College, in the University of Toronto, came to my study with an urgent matter to discuss. She was the daughter of a friend of mine and was enrolled in an undergraduate course taught by Northrop Frye, a course for which he was justly renowned. Her problem was that her rather conservative evangelical faith was being deeply challenged. The towering scholar, later to become internationally known in particular for his classic books on the Bible, was telling his classes with all his usual wit and verve that the Bible was not a document concerned with history but a vast collection of sublime myths and metaphors. Though I was far from following any form of fundamentalism, I remember trying to reassure hernot without difficultythat there was indeed a profoundly historical core to it all. That had been my background, and it suited the college's ethos as well. At that time, I knew very little of Frye's actual thinking, apart from her report. Fifteen years passed before I read the newly published Great Code and then its sequel, Words with Power, and came to a much fuller understanding of what Frye truly had to say and what Bible language really was all about. That experience and his words were in the back of my mind all through the months of research that went into the writing of this book. I found myself in particular recalling Johan L. Aitken's lines in his introduction to Frye's last work, The Double Vision. "In a legendary undergraduate course," Aitken wrote, "Frye reminded his students that when the Bible is historically accurate, it is only accidentally so: reporting was not of the slightest interest to its writers. They had a story to tell which could only be told by myth and metaphor: what they wrote became a source of vision rather than doctrine." In all my reading ever since, I have found that observation to be wise beyond any view of Scripture I had ever read before. It's an understanding that is vital to this exploration.

Let me say that I write here, as in all my work, as a journalist with special training in theology and religion. I have the great responsibility of sharing the "story" that follows with as wide an audience as possible, because what I describe and document in the following pages is one of the most far-reaching tragedies in history. It is the premise of this entire account that very early on, in the third and fourth centuries C.E., the Christian Church made a fatal and fateful error. Either deliberately, in a competitive bid to win over the greatest numbers of the largely unlettered masses, or through wilful ignorance of the true, inner sense of the profound spiritual wisdom it had inherited from so many ancient sources, the Church took a literalist, popularized, historical approach to sublime truth. What was preserved in the amber of allegory, it misrepresented as plodding fact. The transcendent meaning of glorious myths and symbols was reduced to a farrago of miraculous or irrelevant, or quite unbelievable, "events." The great truth that the Christ was to come in man, that the Christ principle was potentially in every one of us, was changed to the exclusivist teaching that the Christ had come as a man. No other could match him, or even come close. The Dark Agesand so much morewere the eventual result.

While most of what is laid out in this book will possibly surprise and stir both faithful and outsider alike, that is not my primary intention. This book is not about seeking controversy or headlines; it is a sincere and earnest search for spiritual truth. Certainly it is in no way meant as an attack upon Christianityor any other religion, for that matter. Quite the opposite, in fact. In the end, it is about the realization of a richer, more spiritual faith than I ever knew before.

I want to affirm with the utmost emphasis and sincerity from the very outset that the evidence investigated here, the discoveries I have made, and the inner struggles and deep insights that have flowed from them have made a joyous and life-changing imprint upon me. When I first began my investigation, I thought to myself, Can any of this be true? Several months later, I found myself asking instead, What if it is true? The implications were enormous. It meant, you see, 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 has been founded on a set of miracles that were never performed literally. Finally, though, I said to myself, because of the sheer weight of the evidence before me, Yes, I believe it's true. 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.