Discussion Forums

/continued from Part 1

In this Review I will conclude by retelling the central “Christ Myth” - the ancient story behind the New Testament themes - all of which are borrowings of the ancient myths previously played out by the “Sun Gods” Osiris and Horus in Egypt or Hercules in Greece. These myths were there to symbolise the point that, “the prime datum is man (humanity) himself, a spark of the divine fire ... and buried in the flesh of body to support its existence with an unquenchable radiant energy.” The ideal person - Adonis, Mithras, Khrishna, Christ, symbolised the divine spark in every human being. Similar myths were universal across other cultures.

The conclusion is that the “myth” of God incarnate is an (almost) human universal - but for the west after Constantine, Christianity forgot its origins and imposed credal belief on the masses, who then burned all the ancient books of wisdom, and set back civiliation by hundreds of years. What Paul and the early Christians knew was a very different faith - in which:

Christ is the name given to the presence of God within - “Christ in you, the hope of glory”.
The Christos is known by many names, present in all humanity.
Everyone will come to realise his or her spiritual power (as did Jesus at his baptism and Paul on the Damascus road).
Doctrines, creeds, dogma and institutional religion has masked the inner light.
The gospels are a drama about the Christos - with Jesus a symbolic personification.
Jesus’ birth, death and resurrection are events happening within us.
We must release the divine within to spiritualise our nature - as fragments of God with divine potential.
Religions and spiritual paths free us to commit to the eternal Christ experience.

Much more can be said, but to me this way of looking at the basis of Christain faith is truly liberating. It frees us from the literal, to experience afresh the power of story, of universal myth, and the life changing realisation that we are blessed as a spark of God’s light, called to live in enlightenment, now and beyond our earthly lives.

John Hetherington - 11th March 2010
[This summary and reflection fully acknowledges the copyright subsisting in, “The Pagan Christ” by Tom Harpur- Walker and Company New York, 2004.]

I too wrote a review of tom Harpur’s book, rapidly the first time in response to a friend’s initial excitement about it and then, after a second more thorough reading, more carefully - and more critically. He is inclined to sweep his readers away with his own enthusiasm and conviction that by the theories he espouses “the enigma of the Bible has been largely solved” and if we are of a liberal/radical frame of mind he of course carries us with him in his unconcealed anger about what he calls “the Greatest Coverup of all time"- the book burning, suppression and violence that accompanied the establishment of ‘orthodoxy’.
the sensational journalistic style, however, should warn us of some possible deficiencies in his scholarship and I find it annoying to be forced by his sweeping generalisations and triumphalism to respond to the book with a good deal of caution when there is much in it that is on my ‘wave-length’ and it offers much to enhance our spiritual undertanding.
I have no problem with his understanding of ‘myth’, (frequently well expounded by Karen Armstrong) or with his emphasis on ‘our potential for Christhood’but I do find it difficult to go along with the statement that “there is no iota of history in the entire Bible and his focus on the more mythological stories of the patriarchs to prove his point.the prophets and the historical context s they were addressing are not even mentioned and the ‘Kingdom’ teaching of the New Testament also disappears and with it much of the ethical and political relevance of the Christian faith.Everything is reduced to the inner spiritual experience of the individual.
Linked with this individual focus is a degree of elitism and scorn for ‘the common people’whose clamour he quotes Kuhn as saying led to the replacement of a purely spiritual Christ with the idea of a personal Messiah."Christianity only gained favour and held the allegiance of the masses of the populations of the West for centuries because it succeeded in accommodating its message to the prevalent levels of general unintelligence.”
this dismissal of the social and political significance of the gospel leads him to dismiss the historical crucifixion as a “gruesome reality” best forgotten.Although I am among those who question traditional Atonement theories and deplore any unhealthy dwelling upon physical suffering, I cannot escape the reality that whether Jesus wa sor was not a real historical person who suffered crucifixion there were certainly
many people who did suffer that fate at the hads of the Romans and millions of others who have and still do suffer torture and death at the hands of later cruel regimes. there is a harsh reality that love that crosses boundaries and love that embraces ‘the enemy’ or even ‘the other’ or ‘the different’ has also to accept the price. For most this happens at the quieter level of ordinary relationships but there are those who are caught up in the wider world who suffer the same kind of treatment as Jesus in today’s world. For anyone who lives as Jesus is said to have lived the crucifixion was inevitable and it is this kind of love that is central to the Christian faith.
My more academic criticism is of a failing that I find not only in Harpur but also in other radical and more ‘main-stream’ thinkers and that is in their use of the word ‘literal’ to imply ‘historically true’.
I think that it is a mistake not to distinguish between the naive acceptance of narrative of earlier times that was often also interpreted allegorically and the kind of ‘history’ that is subject to the disciplines of research that developed following the ‘Enlightenment’ to which modern ‘literalism’ was a reaction.