Harpur's The Pagan Christ: Some Notes on Details

A lot of hard work tracking down Harpur’s sources for The Pagan Christ has been done here. Unfortunately, he does not footnote.

Just want to chip in on a few where I may have something to add.

“Jesus becomes a magician or Superman figure, quite removed from the real universe in which we live.” (p. 20), Harpur complains. This statement requires the unstated assumption that Jesus was not God. Harpur does not say why he makes this assumption. Because that is, of course, what Christians believe. On that assumption, there is no objection to seeing Jesus as having powers greater than that of any ordinary man. Superman indeed.

Harpur writes (p. 28) that “Eusebius … says that the Gospels of the New Testament were really the old dramatic books of the Essenes, from pre-Christian days.” Happily, this is one of the few times he actually gives a reference. If you check it, you discover that what he says is false. Eusebius said that the texts used by the Therapeutae, a monastic group in Egypt during Christian times, were the Gospels, not something more ancient. Eusebius believed they were Christians, not Essenes.

On Buddhism, I have a wee bit of expertise. I was amazed by Harpur’s reference to the Buddha’s “transfiguration,” since this is unknown to the Buddhist scriptures. P. 32: “The Buddha had his transfiguration when he went up a Sri Lankan mountain called Pandava, or Yellow-white. ‘There the heavens opened and a great light came in full flood around him and the glory of his person shone forth with “double power.” He shone as the brightness of the Sun and the Moon.’” This, he notes, “exactly parallels the Gospel story of Jesus’s transfiguration on Mt. Tabor.”

This story of the Buddha being “transfigured” on some Mount Pandava appears nowhere in the Buddhist Canon. Nor is there even any tradition in the canon that the Buddha ever went near Sri Lanka. Note that this article in a Buddhist Sri Lankan newspaper is clearly unaware of such a tradition. If Harpur did not just make it up himself, heaven knows where it came from.

“The third commandment, according to the Buddha, is ‘commit no adultery; the law is broken by even looking at the wife of another man with lust in your mind.’” (p. 32) Third commandment? There are no “commandments” in Buddhism. Nor can this supposed quote from the Buddha be found. “Sexual immorality” is indeed, of course, prohibited, by the third article of “Right Action,” the fourth station on the Eightfold Path.

p. 33: “An encounter between the Saviour figure and the principle of evil is fully paralleled in Zoroastrian and Buddhist literature…” I’d say it is also fully paralleled in the life story of any good man. You don’t become a good man without confronting Satan.

p. 35-36, Harpur translates the Egyptian term “Amduat” as “The Book of What Is in the Duat” and claims it describes the incarnation of God as a man. Now, when he translates the rest of the title, why does he not translate the word “Duat”? Because it means “Afterlife.” And this makes his interpretation impossible.

p. 37: “The heretics were simply the losing side” (in the development of Christian doctrine.) (See also p. 172). Harpur fails to consider the most common reason why one side loses an argument: because its reasoning is shown to be wrong, or the evidence to be against it. Omit this possibility, and you are left with large-scale conspiracy theories. Kind of like saying the flat-earthers or the heliocentrists were simply “the losing side” in a scientific argument. Can’t you see how they’ve been suppressed?

p. 46: Harpur laments that “the centrality of the crucifix…had unconsciously fostered a belief that ‘suffering is good for you.’” Hardly unconsciously. This is very consciously the reason that the Trullian Council urged its use. The idea of redemptive suffering is at the very heart of Christianity: “Take up your cross and follow me.” Does Harpur think that, by stripping suffering of any meaning, he will reduce suffering?


P. 52: "One fifth-century pope even exulted. 'What profit hath not this fable brought us." Odd that a Fifth-century pope is quoted in Elizabethan English. Apparently there is a reason for this. Tektonics has tracked this one down; I can't bear not to mention it. It was said by a character in a 16th Century English anti-Catholic play.

P. 55: "Gibbon testifies ... to the 'vulgar forgery' of the deliberate insertion of two admittedly spurious passages regarding Jesus Christ into the text of the Jewish historian Josephus." Admittedly spurious? Most modern historians accept the passages as primarily genuine. Gibbon, an extremely anti-Christian writer, tried to clam Christianity was responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Not a very plausible thesis, since the Roman Empire existed for only a few years before Christianity appeared, and survived for over a thousand years with Christianity as the official state religion. We should all have such a decline and fall.

P. 59: quoting Higgins: "We know that later in one batch all the Fathers of the Church and all the Gospels were 'corrected,' that is, corrupted by the united exertions of the Roman See, Lanfranc, who became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, and the Benedictine monks of St. Maur." Another conspiracy theory, and an impossible one. We have editions of the Gospels and the Church Fathers from before 1070. And the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury would never have been able to corrupt the versions preserved in the Eastern and Coptic Churches, well outside their control.

P. 59: "in the year 506 at Constantinople, by order of the Emperor Anastasius, 'the holy Gospels, being written by illiterate Evangelists, were censured and corrected.'" Harpur fails to mention that this attempt to alter the Gospels failed. The fact that it failed illustrates the virtual impossibility of pulling such a thing off.

Harpur quotes, without further comment, Kuhn’s lament, “Priceless in value would be that same Gospel of the Egyptians if Christian fury had not destroyed it.” (p. 60) Good news. We have the Gospel of the Egyptians in our possession, and it can be read in English translation online. It was found at Nag Hammadi way back in 1945. Preserved there by Christian monks. Christian fury or not.

This shows how weak Harpur's research is, and how obsolete Harpur’s sources are.


p. 63: "Apparently, you can be a good theologian while acting out the worst kind of violence." You can also be a good man. Harpur is expressing the contemporary superstition against "violence." Also responsible for "the worst kind of violence": Churchill, Lincoln, Washington, and Joan of Arc.

P. 64: "The Church's initial attempts to blame obvious similarities between Christian doctrines and the Pagan originals on the work of the devil struck me at first as too outlandish to be believed." Leaving aside whether the Church ever did this, or whether there are such similarities, Harpur reveals here that he does not believe in the devil, a priori, as an article of faith--it is "too outlandish to be believed." Yet the existence of the devil is a part of Christian dogma, and is clearly the teaching of the Gospels.

p. 92: Harpur sees significance in the ox and the ass both being at Jesus’s birth, because “both these animals are in a way asexual, or crossovers, which suggests that ultimately the Christ in us is a melding of the male and female principles.” Irrelevant for two reasons. First, the Bible says nothing about an ox and an ass being present at Bethlehem. Second, while an ox is a castrated bull, there is nothing asexual about an ass. Instead, the ass was proverbial in the ancient world for sexual randiness. Perhaps Harpur is thinking of a mule.

p. 107: Harpur speaks of his symbolic interpretation as “in stark contrast to millions of ultra-conservative Christians, who seem so often to view reason as ‘a tool of the devil’ and pride themselves on acting on ‘faith alone.’” This is a straw man, in that the great majority of Christians do not believe this. One gets pretty sick of seeing it used, erroneously, as a criticism of Christianity. Whether fair or not, this is a criticism of Martin Luther, not Christianity. Here is the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “human reason is, strictly speaking, truly capable by its own natural power and light of attaining to a true and certain knowledge of the one personal God” (para 37).

Tissot, The Magnificat.

p. 125: Harpur argues that Mary could not possibly have composed the Magnificat, as the Bible claims she did, because she was an “untutored girl.” Anyone familiar with the Arab tradition of extemporaneous poetry might doubt that, but why does Harpur assume Mary was “untutored”? There is nothing in the Bible to say so. Perhaps he is confusing her with Shakespeare?

p. 131 – Harpur argues that the gospels contradict one another, because some say the Sanhedrin turned against Jesus because he cleared the Temple, while John says they turned against Jesus because he raised Lazarus from the dead.

By this argument, the Second World War did not really happen. Because some histories say Hitler invaded Poland because he wanted land, while others say he invaded Poland because he wanted slave labour.

Either case, reading minds is an iffy business.

The raising of Lazarus. Greek.

p. 132: Harpur argues that the story of Lazarus cannot be true because it is mentioned in only one Gospel. How, he argues, could anything so “spectacular” be “thoroughly overlooked” by the other three evangelists? Yet the other gospels also attest to Jesus raising people from the dead; the Book of Acts attests to Peter doing the same. Harpur’s only point seems to be that they do not refer to Lazarus specifically. John says Jesus performed so many miracles it is impossible to list them all.

p. 132: Harpur argues that the events claimed in the Gospels to have taken place on the night Jesus died cannot have been historical, because they were spectacular, yet are not reported by other ancient chroniclers. “The graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared to many.” He makes the same point on page 149.

But then, how many is “many”? What number would be necessary to force a mention in all ancient chroniclers?

Consider, for comparison, these two much more recent tidbits of news.

Did you know that at least 30,000 people witnessed the sun dancing in the sky, changing colours, and moving in zigzags in Fatima, Portugal, in 1917? You’d think 30,000 witnessing a miracle would be “many,” wouldn’t you? That’s probably more than even lived in Jerusalem in the First Century AD. Yet is it in the history books you read at school? Check out the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_of_the_Sun.

Onlookers watching the sun dance at Fatima.

How about the image of a radiant woman on top of a church, seen by an estimated 250,000 people in Zeitoun Egypt over a period of years, in the 60's? You’d think 250,000 witnesses was “many,” wouldn’t you? Probably more than the population of all Palestine in the First Century AD. But I bet you never heard about it, did you? Check out the Wikipedia entry here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Zeitoun

Photograph of Zeitoun apparition.

People tend to overlook and screen out experiences and reports that do not conform to their expectations or to the narrative of the world they are used to. To cite an obvious example of the same effect, we tend to screen out and dismiss our dreams, so that we soon forget all about them. They do not fit in our waking experiences, our waking narrative.

P. 159: Harpur cites such other “world saviours” as “Yehoshua ben Pandera.” Which is, in fact, another name for Jesus. Can he not be aware of this? But he tops this with his citation of “Beddru of Japan,” a name unpronounceable in Japanese, and “Deva Tat of Thailand,” actually a local name for the Buddha. So much for scholarship.

p. 178: Harpur laments “The Church’s deplorable record of persecutions, wars, and other atrocities,” which, he says on p. 186, “culminated in the Holocaust.” This is darkly ironic, since the real culprit was his own preferred faith, the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. Hitler was a Social Darwinist, and killed the Jews for this reason. On the very same page, Harpur offers the section header “Our Responsibility for our Own Evolution.” Indeed. This, precisely, was Hitler’s agenda in Mein Kampf.

Peter walks on water, following Jesus.

p. 182: Harpur singles out Jesus’s feat of walking on water as impossible to read literally because it is “wholly beyond our emulation.” This too is ironic, since Peter immediately emulates it in the Gospel account.

See http://www.tektonics.org/harpur01.html for much more. I think it is fair to say that Harpur is wrong in almost every detail of his claims.