Harpur's Sources

Horus, Jesus: see the resemblance?

More on Tom Harpur's book The Pagan Christ, denying the historicity of the Jesus story.

Harpur rarely gives any kind of citation for his claims. Without this, we have every right to ignore what he says, particularly since his claims do not mesh at all with what we know about Horus, or Mithras, or Origen, or St. Paul. Anyone can make any assertion.

When he is candid or careless enough that it is possible to trace his claims, they essentially always turn out to be false. For this, see http://www.tektonics.org/harpur01.html. I could add a few more to their examples, but what's the point? It is enough to realize that you cannot believe anything from Harpur without outside corroboration, and he offers no outside corroboration.

In addition to this, he repeatedly refers us to the “Mystery Religions” as the true source of the Jesus story:

p. 38: “Christianity and the Mystery Religions share virtually all the same beliefs, doctrines, rituals, and rites.”

p. 148: “It is highly significant that crucifixion was an integral component of many of the Mystery Religions.”

p. 148: … the candidate was “even in some rites, put into a hypnotic coma, to be wakened from ‘death’ after three days, on Easter morning.”

p. 159: “the body of material regularly used in the ceremonial dramas of the widespread early Mystery Religions around 1200 years BCE makes up in general the series of events narrated in the New Testament as if they were Jesus’s personal life story.”

So that's his claimed source for the Jesus stories, in a nutshell.

There were Greco-Roman mysteries of Dionysus, of Mithras, of Orpheus, and of Isis, presumably including her spouse Osiris and son Horus. Harpur even appeals to a supposed Jewish Kabbalistic Yeshua Jewish mystery religion predating Jesus (p. 164), even though Kabbalah is commonly believed to have developed in the 12th century AD.

There is a reason why they were called “Mystery Religions.” Can you guess why?

Because we know nothing about them.

Anyone introduced to their true beliefs, doctrines, rituals and rites was first sworn to secrecy. Any ultimate source claiming to know what they were, therefore, is either guessing, or is a perjurer. Either way, you can't believe a word of it.

Note that when Harpur does cite some authority, it is almost invariably quite an old one: Higgins, Massey, Kuhn, Budge, Gibbon, Frazer, Cumont. Nothing from later than the early 20th century. Even had he given proper citations so we could check his claims in their works, they are virtually worthless as sources. It might seem surprising, but we have actually learned a great deal about the ancient world over the last hundred years or so. When Higgins wrote, we could not yet read Egyptian writing; everything was guesswork. We can now read a great deal of ancient writing we could not then, and a great deal more has been translated into modern vernaculars. We have recovered a great many ancient manuscripts we did not have then. And many more Europeans have taken the time and trouble to learn non-European languages.

As a result, wild speculations that might have seemed at least possible a hundred or two hundred years ago, have now been pretty conclusively disproven. Once, the Egyptian temple paintings were like an inkblot test in which you could see just about anything you could imagine. Nobody now seriously doubts the historicity of Christ, and nobody now thinks Horus or Mithras is particularly similar to Jesus. No virgin birth, no incarnation, no crucifixion, no resurrection.