The Pagan Christ
ALSO BY TOM HARPUR
Harpur’s Heaven and Hell
For Christ’s Sake
Always on Sunday
Life After Death
God Help Us
The Uncommon Touch
Would You Believe?
Prayer: The Hidden Fire
Finding the Still Point
TOM HARPUR
THE
PAGAN
CHRIST
Is Blind Faith
Killing Christianity?
First published in Australia and New Zealand in 2005
Copyright © Tom Harpur 2004
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:
Harpur, Tom.
The pagan Christ: is blind faith killing Christianity?
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 1 74114 596 1.
1. Fundamentalism. 2. Christianity and other religions. 3.
Paganism. I. Title.
270.82
Printed by Griffin Press, South Australia
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To the memory of
Professor Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D. (1880–1963),
a man of immense learning and even greater courage
The very thing which is now called the Christian religion
existed among the ancients also, nor was it wanting from
the inception of the human race until the coming of Christ
in the flesh, at which point the true religion, which was
already in existence, began to be called Christian.
– ST. AUGUSTINE, Retractiones
But we have this treasure in earthen vessels.
– ST. PAUL, 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7
Do you not know that you are the temple of God,
and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?
– 1 CORINTHIANS 3:16
Though Christ a thousand times in Bethlehem be born,
But not within thyself, thy soul will be forlorn;
The cross on Golgotha thou lookest to in vain
Unless within thyself it be set up again.
– ANGELUS SILESIUS (1624–1677)
Contents
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
1 Discovery: A Bible Story I’d Never Heard Before
2 Setting the Stage: Myths Aren’t Fairy Tales
3 Christianity before Christianity: Where It All Began
4 The Greatest Cover-up of All Time: How a Spiritual
Christianity Became a Literalist Christianism
5 It Was All Written Before—in Egypt
Part I: Ancient Egyptian Religion
Part II: Horus and Jesus Are the Same
6 Convincing the Sceptics
7 The Bible—History or Myth?:
The End of Fundamentalism
8 Seeing the Gospels with New Eyes:
Sublime Myth Is Not Biography
9 Was There a Jesus of History?: Where It All Began
10 The Only Way Ahead: Cosmic Christianity
Epilogue
Appendix A: Background on Three Experts on
Mythology, Religion, and Ancient Egypt
Appendix B: More Similarities between the
Egyptian Christ, Horus, and Jesus
Appendix C: Two Strange Passages
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Author’s Note
Thousands of souls in the Pagan world were on fire with the pure flame
of 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 word—entirely the result of centuries of Christian prejudice and bias—is 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 blatantly—and 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 Aquinas—which is the foundation of Roman Catholic theology and is based upon the writings of Aristotle, including his whole theory of natural law—testifies to that.
Acknowledgments
To the Canada Council: my sincere appreciation for the award and its support in the research and writing of this work.
Authors are often asked how long it takes them to write their books. The honest answer, in most cases, is what I would certainly say with regard to this one: a lifetime. The Pagan Christ flows from all I have experienced and read over that lengthy span. Consequently, I owe a huge debt to past teachers, friends, my many book and column readers over the years, and a host of other writers and thinkers far too numerous to name. In particular, though, I wish to thank the Reverend Larry Marshall, who first introduced me to the writings of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn. When he originally sent me some samples of Kuhn’s writings, I did with them what I usually do with the avalanche of religious and spiritual material that would pour over the desk of anyone specializing in this field for a major world-class newspaper—I put them to one side. Thankfully, however, he remained persistent. He sent more manuscripts and kept asking how I liked what had already come. At last, like the wearied judge in the Gospel parable of the woman who wouldn’t take no for an answer in her quest for justice, I relented and undertook to read some of it as a way out. It was a startling revelation beyond anything I had imagined possible, a key turning point on my spiritual path. Reading at first in sheer disbelief, and then more and more seeing the radical truth of what was being so learnedly and powerfully set out before my eyes, I began to devour Kuhn’s writings and then those of his two major sources, especially the Egyptologist, poet, and social reformer Gerald Massey. Marshall was a constant resource, encourager, and friend throughout the research and writing of The Pagan Christ. He read the second rough draft and made many helpful suggestions. I cannot thank him enough. Thanks as well are owed to Bill Denyar for his reading and gentle criticism of the initial draft.
Patrick Crean, the publisher at Thomas Allen, showed his warm enthusiasm for this project from the outset. A vote of thanks go to him for his courage and his overall wise counsel, especially in the final stages. To my editor, Jim Gifford, special gratitude is due for his thoroughness, his “tough love” approach to the text, and his quiet but steady pressure on me to make my own voice heard above the essential chorus of the major ancient and modern sources. Thanks too belong to Alyssa Stuart, the senior publicist at Thomas Allen, and to the rest of the support staff there.
Finally, my wife, Susan. There is no adequate way to express what she has meant to me in the creating and completing of The Pagan Christ. Her technical and editorial skills, honed by twenty-eight years of work at the Toronto Star, were an incredible and continuous asset to one who is quite honestly a technomoron, a word the novelist Robertson Davies once used to describe himself to me in an interview. Susan played a crucial role at every stage, but her contribution really goes far beyond that. I’ll say no more. She knows, and that’s enough for me.
—TWH
1
DISCOVERY
A Bible Story I’d Never Heard Before
My point, once again, is not that those ancient people
told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take
them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically
and 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 her—not without difficulty—that 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 farreaching 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 Ages—and so much more—were 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 Christianity—or 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, of course 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.
Just to anticipate a little, here’s why I can say that with conviction. You will find that the allegorical, spiritual, mythical approach to the Bible and to Christian faith—that is, the true, spiritual Christianity, before official Christianism took over—solves the enigmas of Scripture and the Christos story as nothing else can do. Bible stories come alive with amazing new freshness, believability, and power. Our own potential for Christhood, and for experiencing the indwelling spirit of God here and now, sounds forth in a clear and relevant message for everyone. Hope for a truly cosmic faith is kindled and fanned into full flame. There is a theological grounding given for our own instinctual yearning for a faith that resonates with our own “matter,” the natural world. Our fresh (yet ancient, more universal) understanding of the Jesus theme opens up doors to other faiths that orthodox Christianity as it is now can never hope to pass through. And that’s not all. Seen in their new light, the rituals of Easter and Christmas, along with Christian symbols such as the cross and the Eucharist, glow with renewed significance and depth.
In all honesty, however, this has not been a simple or easy journey for me. Having come from a Judeo-Christian background and commitment and dedicated my life to making known spiritual truth, I had never before encountered in depth the kind of challenges to my own faith I explore here. Certainly very little of what follows was ever presented to me by the institutional Church during my ten years of university training for the Anglican priesthood long ago. Nor was it ever once seriously discussed by any of my colleagues during the roughly ten years I spent as a professor of the New Testament and Greek at a prominent Canadian theological college. It was assumed by all throughout that traditional Christianity had always been more or less what it is today. Its superiority over other religions was seldom, if ever, seriously challenged.
Of course, I had read the great anthropologist Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough, written between 1890 and 1915, with its comparative religions findings; I had read Plato and Aristotle in Greek at the University of Toronto and again at Oxford, and I had studied both Orphism and the Mystery Religions. Yet few, if any, of the exact Egyptian parallels to the Gospel writings examined here ever came into my view. The similarities that existed between Christian beliefs and the earlier Pagan religions were always quickly passed over in seminary as “foreshadowings” of the Good News proclaimed by the New Testament. Like the various “prophecies” and prototypes in the Old Testament, similarities in previous religions were represented as having been wholly “fulfilled” in Jesus. Nobody even suggested that the opposite might be true, that the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular actually copy or repeat motifs laid down many centuries, and in some cases many millennia, before. I was aware of Sigmund Freud’s harsh-sounding dictum that the Bible was a “total plagiarism” of the Sumerian and Egyptian mythologies, but I had dismissed this as a gross distortion typical of the founder of modern psychiatry’s well-known bias against all religion. I had also once read Dr. Anna Bonus Kings-ford’s opinion that the “Hebrew sacred books” were all “Egyptian in origin,” but I had quite arbitrarily dismissed it as nonsense.
When I started my ministry in a parish, and even when I was teaching at the seminary, I had absolutely no idea of many of the startling truths you are about to encounter. For example, I didn’t fully understand the nature and relevance of what I now call “a true myth” for early religious thinkers—that myth is more eternal in its meaning than history. It would have been news to me that Moses is an Egyptian name—as in Ramose or Thutmose—and even that there was a Jesus in Egyptian lore many thousands of years ago. His name was Iusu, or Iusa (both forms appear), and that means “the coming divine Son who heals or saves.”1 I knew nothing then of an Egyptian Christos, or Christ, named Horus. He and his mother, Isis, were the forerunners of the Christian Madonna and Child, and together they constituted a leading image in Egyptian religion for millennia prior to the Gospels. What a different kind of preaching and teaching I would have done had I realized that this mythical Horus anticipated by thousands of years most of the sayings and the miracles of Jesus Christ—that he too had a virgin birth, and that in one of his roles, he was “a fisher of men with twelve followers.” It would have made a profound difference to me to know that piercing the literal sense of the Bible to reveal its hidden, allegorical, and mystical inner core could free us up and offer new, transformative spiritual vistas and insights. For example, imagine my surprise at discovering, during the research for this book, that Martha and Mary figure in a story about the raising from the dead of El-Asar, or Lazarus, at an Egyptian Bethany about four thousand years ago. The “miracle” described in John’s Gospel was never a historic event; instead, it was a recurring, deeply archetypal, and widely used symbol of God’s power to resurrect the dead.
There is so much more to explore and share—how the letters KRST appear on Egyptian mummy coffins many centuries B.C.E., and how this word, when the vowels are filled in (they were frequently omitted in ancient languages) is really Karast or Krist, signifying Christ. Most potent of all has been the increasing knowledge I have gained of how the key early Christian doctrine, the incarnation of spirit in human flesh or matter in each of us, is in fact the oldest, most universal mythos known to religion. It was current in the Osirian religion in Egypt at least four thousand years B.C.E. But I anticipate.
In any event, I can promise the reader this: I have indeed found for myself, in the course of all the emotional and intellectual wrestling involved in coming to grips with this material, not just a deeper faith but a far more bracing, more intellectually honest, more tuned-into-the-universe-itself kind of belief system than I ever dreamed possible. I see my Christian faith with a transformed vision.
What I have written is not intended primarily for scholars, although I hope they will be deeply challenged and learn from it too. While I have the greatest respect for scholarship and will be drawing upon the work of experts in many fields—as well as my own training and experience—I have dedicated my entire professional career as a theologian and journalist to the attempt to make complex issues as simple as possible for ordinary, intelligent lay-people. The scholars have their libraries and their own hidden sources. Many of them, it seems, can communicate only with one another. Indeed, some of them may like it that way. But the result too often has been, and still is, that ordinary, traditional citizens, the majority of any society, have been ignored or left to pick up whatever crumbs drop from the academic table. This is never more true than related to matters of theology—to religious beliefs and doctrines.
Much, perhaps even most, of what is contained in this book has been known to some comparative religions scholars for years— ever since the 1799 discovery of the Rosetta Stone on the western bank of the mouth of the Nile River by Colonel Broussard, an officer in Napoleon’s army, an event that made possible the first deciphering of the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writings. But some combination of fear, vested Church interests, and the belief that some things should not be left to the hoi polloi to discuss at all convinced many of these experts over the years to keep virtual public silence. They know the potential for controversy and hostility from the ecclesiastical and other powers that be, as well as from those many rank-and-file Church members who fear change more than anything else. Whenever any of this material has been mooted seriously, others have rushed to crush it, dismissing it summarily or labelling it as rank heresy. They quote—usually out of context—whatever Bible verses seem to prop up their position. What the late comparative religions scholar and linguist Alvin Boyd Kuhn has called “the shadow of the third century” still makes its sinister presence felt.
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. Richard Holloway, former primus of the Scottish Episcopal Church, rightly notes that the religio-spiritual longing of modern men and women has never been stronger, but, he says, “The end of Christianity is coming because there is a system undergirding the traditional ‘economy of salvation’ which is more concerned with preserving its own power than exploring the truth.”2 My own thinking and experience confirm this. The answer to this crisis lies in a proper understanding of where and how everything began. However, engaging in this endeavour reveals some extremely disturbing facts.
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.
Certainly a full appreciation of the huge contribution such experts as Higgins, Massey, and especially Kuhn have made to finding a fresh understanding of religion in general and Christianity in particular is long overdue. These men and their scholarship challenge present Christianity to the core and yet, without question, offer a radically fresh and hope-filled way ahead. They were men far in advance of their time. Through it all, though, they believed firmly in the presence of a divine power or cosmic mind behind and throughout the universe, and in the survival of the soul after death. I personally owe them a lot more than I can ever say.
Godfrey Higgins will always have a firm place in comparative religions studies because of his massive, two-volume Anacalypsis: An Enquiry into the Origins of Languages, Nations, and Religions. It was to have a profoundly formative influence upon Alvin Boyd Kuhn many years later. It stands as one of the most learned and far-ranging studies of the origins of religion I have ever encountered. First published (in only two hundred copies) in 1833, it was the final product of many long years of study.
Gerald Massey was a man of vivid genius and poetic fire who distinguished himself as a social reformer, a poet, and especially an Egyptologist. His poetry won the admiration of both Tennyson and Ruskin. His fame, however, rests mainly on six monumental volumes that dealt at length with the mythology and religion of ancient Egypt. He studied the extensive Egyptian records housed in the British Museum and taught himself to decipher the hieroglyphics. Although he was a capable lecturer, his speeches and books were not widely circulated. The record shows that his controversial work was considered taboo in what were regarded in his day as respectable literary and religious circles. He was nevertheless light-years ahead of his time.
I have found the writings and research of Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn to be the most erudite, most eloquent, and most convincing— both intellectually and intuitively—of any modern writer on religion I have encountered in a lifetime dedicated to such matters. To meet him through his books and monographs is to be confronted by a towering polymath whom history has yet to recognize fully in all his brilliance.
Kuhn’s second book, The Lost Light, published in 1940,was a stunning, exhaustive exposition of the allegories, parables, and personages of biblical Christianity and of the basic foundations of all religion. It is unquestionably his single greatest contribution to a rational, convincing, highly illuminating understanding of what the ancient wisdom was really all about and where religion, especially Christianity, should be going today. I have a signed first edition of this book on my desk as I write this. Printed on the title page are the words “This book will be to religion what Darwin’s work has been to science,” a quotation from the president of the National Library Board of America. Kuhn’s books have never been given the wide recognition they so deeply deserve. He simply stepped too often and much too hard on too many powerful toes, particularly those of the vested religious institutions and their hierarchical keepers.3
Far from being an original contribution to the world of religious thought, as these scholars have convincingly shown, Christianity was turned in the early centuries into a literalist copy of a resplendent spiritual forerunner. I will clearly document that there is nothing the Jesus of the Gospels either said or did—from the Sermon on the Mount to the miracles, from his flight as an infant from Herod to the Resurrection itself—that cannot be shown to have originated thousands of years before, in Egyptian Mystery rites and other sacred liturgies such as the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
Everything—from the star in the east to Jesus’ walking on water, from the angel’s pronouncement to the slaughter of the innocents by Herod, from the temptation in the wilderness to the changing of water into wine—already existed in the Egyptian sources. Egypt and its peoples had knelt at the shrine of the Madonna and Child Isis and Horus for many long centuries before any allegedly historical Mary lifted a supposedly historical Jesus in her arms. But for all those centuries before the translation of the Rosetta Stone by Champollion in 1822, the ancient key to all this Egyptian material had been lost. Centuries of blissful ignorance went by. Now, since the translation of the books of old Egypt— the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Pyramid Texts, the Amduat, and the Book of Thoth, for example—there is irrefutable proof that not one single doctrine, rite, tenet, or usage in Christianity was in reality a fresh contribution to the world of religion. Kuhn puts it tersely when he says that the entire body of Christian doctrine is simply a revamped and mutilated Egyptianism. These may seem extremely blunt words, but a full reading of his works reveals the mountain of undeniable evidence he has to back them up.
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. Herod was made king of the Jews by the Romans in 40 B.C.E., and he reigned until 4 B.C.E. The Emperor Constantine the Great put this monogram on the labarum, or standard, of his legions after his famous victory at the Milvian Bridge three hundred years later. Thus he linked the Church to his political and military power, and all who rebelled against the new Catholic or universal orthodoxy were labelled heretics.
In his introduction to Who Is This King of Glory?, one of his deliberately neglected and yet most learned exposés, Kuhn says that the entire Christian Bible, Creation legend, the descent into and exodus from Egypt, ark and flood allegory, Israelite “history,” Hebrew prophecy and poetry, and the imagery of the Gospels, the Epistles, and Revelation are now proven to have been transmitted from ancient Egypt’s scrolls and papyri into the hands of later generations who didn’t know their true origin or their fathomless meanings. He asserts that: “long after Egypt’s voice, expressed through the inscribed hieroglyphics, was hushed in silence, the perpetuated relics of Hamitic (Egyptian) wisdom, with their cryptic message utterly lost, were brought forth to the world by parties of ignorant zealots as a new body of truth.” Only by fully acknowledging and regaining its parenthood in that sublime Pagan source will Christianity rise at last to its intended true nobility and splendour, he argues.
As we shall shortly see, the Church of the third and fourth centuries, when challenged by its Pagan critics as to the real sources of its gospels, dogmas, and rites, reacted with fierce hostility, systematically hunting down and eliminating all traces of its Pagan past. It hounded anyone, whether Christian or not, who bore witness to the old truths. It closed down the traditional, “Pagan” philosophical schools, persecuted those involved in the various popular Greco-Roman Mystery Religions, burned hundreds of thousands of books, and hurled the charge of heresy—with its penalty of excommunication—at any who threatened to question the orthodox party line. Many were put to death. The Pagan inheritance was everywhere hotly denied. This was the beginning of a violent process that was to recur over the centuries and eventuate in a Christianity that Frye once bluntly described as “a ghost with the chains of a foul historical record of cruelty clanking behind it.”4 Studying this attempt to squelch the truth in detail for the first time was a profound shock for me.
Today there is no longer any excuse for any hierarchy to ignore the truth of what has actually transpired. The record is now plain for all to see. Not only did the early Christians take over almost completely the myths and teachings of their Egyptian masters, mediated in many cases by the Mystery Religions and by Judaism in its many forms, but they did everything in their power, through forgery and other fraud, book burning, character assassination, and murder itself, to destroy the crucial evidence of what had happened. In the process, the Christian story itself, which most likely began as a kind of spiritual drama, together with a “sayings” source based upon the Egyptian material, was turned into a form of history in which the Christ of the myth became a flesh-and-blood person identified with Jesus (Yeshua or Joshua) of Nazareth. 5 The power of the millennia-old Christ mythos to transform the whole of humanity was all but destroyed in the literalist adulation of “a presumptive Galilean paragon.” Centuries of darkness were to follow.
I have laboured to present this work as clearly as possible, yet in places some hard work will be required, and readers must be prepared to think on their own and to be open to fresh ideas. It might well be a good idea to keep a Bible at hand, in case you want to check a reference for yourself, but this isn’t essential. Keep in mind throughout that however negative—even shocking—the evidence may seem at times, a vast hope shines through it all. The overwhelmingly positive conclusions finally reached point toward an exhilarating new approach to faith and to a sorely needed, truly spiritual Christianity in this still very new millennium. My goal throughout is not to summarily dismiss the deep beliefs held by many millions in North America, Europe, and increasingly now in the Southern Hemisphere, where the vast majority of today’s Christians live. But I do want these people to think deeply about their faith anew. Once the “surgery” is over, you will see, with me, how the Bible is wonderfully illumined afresh, how a rational, cosmic faith not only is possible but indeed is the only thing that makes sense in our fast-changing, pluralistic world. You will learn how any future faith must and can be fully grounded in nature and its cycles. The Jesus story will come alive and strike your heart and intellect as never before. Traditional rituals such as Holy Communion, baptism, and the Church’s key festivals of Christmas and Easter will have new power once we understand their true meaning in the light of the ancient wisdom. The near-universal belief in a glorious destiny beyond the grave will be grounded once and for all in something more solid than a merely pious or emotion-based faith. Belief in the Christ within will be established as the key to personal and communal transformation. Our journey begins.
2
SETTING THE STAGE
Myths Aren’t Fairy Tales
On the intellectual side of religion and spirituality we are
still dwelling in the lingering shadows of medieval night,
hypnotized and victimized by superstition of the weirdest types
flaunted from pulpit and seminary. This beclouded day of
gloom will continue as long as we have not the acumen
to dissociate sublime myth, allegory, drama and
symbol from the dregs of history.
– ALVIN BOYD KUHN, Who Is This King of Glory?
Those who lack discrimination may quote the letter of the
Scripture, but they are really denying its inner truth.
– THE BHAGAVAD-GITA
THE DISCOVERIES AND REVELATIONS in this book have had a profound effect upon my own personal spiritual journey. It is hard for me even now to believe that throughout all my previous training in and inquiry into the spiritual and religious dimensions of life, I could have missed something so important. Indeed, the uncovering of these truths has been unquestionably the most transformative experience of my life. My hope is that my excitement and inspiration will be passed on to you. We begin by taking a closer look at myth.
The Power of Myth
One would easily suppose that with the enormous popularity of the widely broadcast six-part television series The Power of Myth, featuring the late Joseph Campbell in conversation with Bill Moy-ers, and with the extensive writings on this topic by Campbell, there would be a general public awareness of the centrality and importance of mythology for human culture and progress. The series, which has often been repeated and reposes on the video shelves of many thousands of people the world over, made plain, in the simplest of terms, the essential ability of myths to change states of consciousness and to impart sublime truths accessible in no other way. It showed, among other things, how each one of us is affected by the myths not only of the past but of the culture around us today.
Nevertheless, it is safe to say that there are, at this moment, few words in our language less comprehended, or for that matter valued, than the word “myth.” Mention “myth” or “mythology” to the average person, and he or she will assume that you are speaking of remote, insubstantial, irrelevant matters. In our culture, the word is synonymous with, at best, fairy tales and, at worst, outright lies and deception. If you pay attention, you’ll be amazed at how often you’ll read or hear someone say, “It’s only a myth.”
Since this book will frequently deal with myth, it is of paramount importance that this disastrous distortion and misunderstanding be met head on. Inasmuch as the arguments advanced will lead inexorably to the conclusion that the entire Gospel story of Jesus—not to mention about 95 percent of the rest of the Bible—is a myth or a collection of the same, it is imperative that the true meaning of myth receive detailed attention.
Here are three brief quotes from Kuhn to underline this salient point in my argument:
• “What was known of old . . . is that the myth as employed by ancient illuminati in Biblical scripture is not fiction, but the truest of all history!”
• “The myth is the only true narrative of the reality of human experience. It is the only ultimately true history ever written . . . as it is the actual experience of life in its evolution. Real as history is, it is finally less true than the myth. The myth is always and forever true; actual history is never more than an approximation of the truth of life.”
• “Myth was the favourite and universal method of teaching in archaic times.”
Missing What’s Really Going On
A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what’s going on. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius gives us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself. As Campbell repeatedly made clear in his many books and in the interviews with Moyers, the deepest truths about life, the soul, personal meaning, our place in the universe, our struggle to evolve to higher levels of insight and understanding, and particularly the mystery we call God can be described only by means of a story (mythos) or a ritual drama. The myth itself is fictional, but the timeless truth it expresses is not. As Campbell puts it, “Myth is what never was, yet always is.” It’s a means of expressing the inner structure or meaning of all history. It has the incredible power to fire the imagination and the spirit in such a way as to lift our consciousness ever upward to higher states of evolution. If you examine the best-known Greek myths, for example, you will see that each one has within it a deep truth about the human condition that remains timeless even though the event never happened. There are the simple examples of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection, and Icarus, who through hubris and carelessness flew on his artificial waxen wings too close to the sun. We all know what insights Freud garnered from the Oedipus saga. Whether it’s the prodigal son or the good Samaritan in the New Testament, the truth and relevance of these tales have nothing whatever to do with their having been actual happenings in history. This is why, in Kuhn’s view, “Mythology is the repository of man’s most ancient science.”
This will be extremely difficult for some to grasp just at first. It was for me as well. But anyone who wants to understand religion, religious ideas, and religious documents—that is, scriptures of any kind—must realize that the divine, the mysterious, the ineffable, the workings of the spirit in the human heart or in the cosmos at large cannot be adequately expressed other than by myth, allegory, imagery, parable, and metaphor. Literal, descriptive narrative inevitably leads to either idolatry or utter nonsense. Thus myths are not some fictional embroidery or dispensable addition to the major faiths; they are their very essence. Strip them away and there is little that is precious left. Christianity does not need to “demythologize” its story; it needs to “remythologize” it, as we shall see.
Concealing Sacred Truth from Those Who Would Abuse It
There was another reason for the use of myths by ancient sages and scribes: they were a device for concealing sacred, precious wisdom from profanation by the vulgar or the malicious. There was a determination in the earliest circles of the very wise to prevent the special spiritual knowledge, or gnosis, from falling into unworthy hands, those who would misuse, desecrate, or pervert it in any way. By not being what they seemed on the surface— historical narratives or descriptions—and by ample use of symbolism and other devices, the myths kept the traditions alive for those who were truly seeking spiritual enlightenment, those who meant business. Sallustius, a fourth-century philosopher, in his treatise On the Myths, says that “to conceal the truth by myths prevents contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy.” It was not in any way a class issue or a case of discrimination, except that it did demand a minimum level of intellectual acumen and education from a sincere seeker. The principal determinant of those admitted to the meaning of the myths or initiated into the widely popular Mystery Religions, where they were dramatized and experienced, was genuine zeal for the divine. Commenting on this esoteric approach, the great second-century theologian Origen said that ordinary people see only the exterior symbol: “It’s allowed by all who have any knowledge of the scriptures that everything there is conveyed enigmatically, i.e., esoterically.” Once the early Church turned to literalism and an exoteric, bottom-line rendering of the faith, Origen was condemned as a heretic and his books were banned.1 To read them was to risk instant excommunication. The Church forgot or ignored the fact that St. Paul himself used the esoteric, allegorical approach.2
Ancient peoples did not believe their myths. They believed in them, in the sense that they believed in the truth beneath the stories. As Professor Kuhn notes, “Never did intelligent people believe them; they believed what they represented, symbolized, adumbrated.” This distinction is tremendously important because, as we shall soon see, it was the total misreading of the myth, of the allegories and the drama, that resulted in Jesus’ being made into a historical God-Man—an event that distorted Christianity from earliest times and effectively aborted the real power of the myth to transform the life of every individual. Once one man became the total embodiment of God-made-flesh, the rest of humanity were left looking beyond themselves to a matchless paragon of virtue instead of realizing their own Christ-power within. The impetus for moral and spiritual transformation thus was virtually nullified. This eventually led to the colossal blunder, perpetuated from the third century onward, of mistaking myth, drama, ritual, allegory, and other forms of symbolic representation for objective history, and following this by turning the body of myths into alleged, literal occurrences.
In Shadow of the Third CenturyMiraclesLuniolatryclothed in an historical dress