Harpur's Pagan Christ

A skeptical brother of mine, who shall remain nameless, has urged me to read Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ. I have not yet--he is mailing it to me. But the beginning of the intro is available for free online at Amazon. Harpur's premise seems to be that the Jesus story is not historical, but based on ancient Egyptian religion.

 It's a bit unfair to react at so little, without giving the man his chance to make his case. Still, I can't resist. I note a few things.

Quote from Harpur:

“The blunt truth is that seismic research by a few specifically neutral scholars, most notably Orientalists and Egyptologists, has been deliberately ignored by churchly authorities for many decades. Scholars such as Godfrey Higgins (1771—1834), author of the monumental tome Anacalypsis, the British Egyptologist Gerald Massey (1828-1908), and more recently, and most important, the already cited American specialist in ancient sacred literature Alvin Boyd Kuhn (1881 —1963) have made it clear in voluminous, eminently learned works that the Jewish and Christian religions do indeed owe most of their origins to Egyptian roots.”

End Quote.

It is not just churchly authorities who ignore Harpur's cited authorities. So do Egyptologists in general, and they have no special connection to any church. Harpur's sources are generally considered cranks. Of course, the consensus of experts may be wrong; but we are not really qualified to challenge their evaluation that Harpur's sources are not to be taken seriously. We'd really have to go back to the original sources otherwise, and that would require a reading knowledge of ancient Egyptian. Some things are available in English translation.

Harpur's three sources do not appear to be “neutral scholars,” either. Kuhn appears to have been a Theosophist; Higgins was “Chief” of the “Order of Druids”; Massey was a “Christian Socialist.” 

Quote from Harpur:

[When teaching at the seminary] “It would have been news to me that Moses is an Egyptian name." 

End quote. 

If he is telling the truth, this is an astonishing admission of ignorance. Especially since he claims to have read Freud, who points this out. Of course Moses is an Egyptian name. In the Bible, Moses was raised by an Egyptian family, and named by them. 

Horus slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.

Quote from Harpur

“I knew nothing then of an Egyptian Christos, or Christ, named Horus.”

Again, a startling confession of ignorance for a college teacher specializing in religion. Horus is one of the best-known of the Egyptian gods. This is especially surprising since Harpur claims he had already read The Golden Bough, which has a lot on Horus and the motif of resurrection. At this point, I really have to suspect Harpur of lying.

Quote from Harpur:

"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."

End quote.

There may have been a “Iusu” in Egyptian lore, or there may not have been, but “Jesus,” which sounds at least a little like “Iusu,” was not the name of the Christian Messiah. That is just the Latinization of the Hebrew Yeheshua, aka the Old Testament's “Joshua.” We know from inscriptions that this was quite a common name in Palestine at the time. It has well-known roots and ancestry within the Hebrew tradition. It means, in Hebrew, “God is Salvation.”

Quote from Harpur:

“The Church today stands at a crossroads. Many of its best thinkers are warning that it may have only one more generation before extinction because of its failure to communicate meaningfully with a postmodern age.”

This is very much a mainstream Protestant view; they all think Christianity is dying. But it is a blinkered view; it is only their version of the faith that is dying. Mainstream Protestantism is indeed dying; Christianity is not. It is growing in adherents, largely through conversion, and faster than the rate of increase in the human population.

Quote from Harpur:

The cross, as we shall see, was a feature of ancient religion for a vast span of time prior to the Christian era. But imagine my surprise when I discovered that something universally believed to have been a purely Christian innovation—the Greek monogram comprising the first two letters of the word for Christ (chi and rho), letters often superimposed on each other in church ornamentation— was also pre-existent to Christianity. It appears on the coins of the Ptolemies and even those of King Herod the Great almost forty years B.C.E.

End quote.

Nothing surprising here. Of course the cross or X, being a simple and obvious symbol, long predates Christianity—as, for example, a letter in the Greek or Phoenician alphabet. It is also the ancient symbol for “city.” It naturally suggests the union of two principles. As for Chi-Rho preexisting Christianity, again, a simple two-letter monogram is bound to show up in other contexts. For a precisely parallel example, Google “CR,” the closest English equivalent. I know it immediately as the Filipino euphemism for a toilet. However, it also apparently refers to Creative Review, a magazine; it is the stock market abbreviation for Crane Company stock; it stands for the Central Railway in India; it is the chemical symbol for Chromium; it refers to the magazine Consumer Reports; it is a type of gas; it is the short form of College of the Redwoods; on coinage, it would be the standard abbreviation in Latin for “Carolus Rex,” i.e., King Charles or King Carlos or King Karl; and so on and on.

You get the picture, surely? It's a tremendous leap to assume that every instance of Chi-Rho or of a cross or X refers to Jesus of Nazareth.

But let's concede that it's all true—that the monograms and the crosses really do refer to Jesus, that some ancient Egyptian hero had a name that was related to his, that the Horus myths have many points of similarity. Does that suggest that Jesus was not historical? Not at all; this sort of thinking is the double bind that sunk the attempts by Barth, the Jesus Seminar and others to “demythologize” (their term) the story of Jesus. The problem is that, on the fundamental premise that Jesus was God, normal probabilities no longer apply. All such examples may indeed be, as they are traditionally understood to be, “foreshadowings,” and can also be cited by Christians as evidence that Jesus truly was the Christ. Harpur mentions this, but simply does not address it, in the intro.



Christians of the time of Jesus and just after would of course have been entirely familiar with any parallels with Horus—not to mention the dying-and-rising Adonis, who was a God of Palestine and Phoenicia. There were temples to Isis in Rome at the same time Peter set up shop there. Christians have always pointed to striking parallels between the Old Testament and the New as well: Jonah in the whale presages Christ; the wandering of the Hebrews in the desert for forty years presages Jesus wandering in the desert for forty days; John the Baptist is a second Elijah; Jesus, Mary, and Joseph's flight into Egypt re-enacts the flight of the Hebrews into Egypt under Joseph in the Old Testament; and on and on. To Christians, these have never suggested that Jesus was ahistorical; they suggest instead that he really is the Son of God.

Does it matter whether Jesus was historical? Harpur, I gather, says it does not. But it does, according to the Bible itself.

In First Corinthians 15, St. Paul writes: 

“14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised.16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.” (NIV)

There you go—no fudge factor, and no change of heart sometime in the 4th century. Christianity has always taught, and the earliest Christians already absolutely believed, that the essential features of the Jesus story were historical. Either that, or the physical world itself is not real; a Gnostic position that is opposed by Christianity.

The historical record on its own, on the other hand, is not strong evidence two thousand years later. We probably have more evidence of Jesus and his life than of any other individual in the ancient world; but that is not saying much. I doubt that anyone's faith in Jesus or in Christianity is founded on the historical record or on the miracles recorded in it. I doubt that anyone reads the Bible for the first time and concludes “this person must have been the son of God and I must believe what he says because this book says he rose from the dead.” People come to believe, I think, by three routes; maybe more. First, logical deduction from first principles, like Descartes. One arrives at the necessary conclusion that God MUST have done something like this, then searches the historical record for when it happened. Second, personal experience: direct and immediate experience of God, like St. Paul himself. Third, the moral force of Jesus's teaching as recorded in the Bible—whoever said this of course existed, and the teaching rings so true it must be the words of God. Reason, evidence, and emotional appeal.