Tom Harpur, The Pagan
Christ: Recovering the Lost Light (NY: Walker & Company, 2004)
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
Liberal
religion journalist and New Testament scholar (once a Professor of NT at
the University of Toronto, thus no slouch) has at last converted to the
newly reascendant Christ Myth theory. The present book seems to be as
much a report of his subjective reaction to the evidence as an
exposition of the evidence itself. One occasionally gets the feeling
that Harpur is offering his testimony, in the fashion of a revivalistic
convert, as evidence for his belief. There is also perhaps a bit too
much cataloguing of big names in support of the proposition that Jesus
didn’t exist. What did the trick for Tom Harpur was his very late in the
day reading of three scholars who are as far off the chart for most NT
scholars as a historical Jesus was for the apostle Paul: Geoffrey
Higgins, Gerald Massey, and Alvin Boyd Kuhn (though he also quite
properly draws attention to the erudite Earl Doherty). As a result, it
is the similarity between the Jesus story and a number of Osiris and
Horus mythemes that proves the mythic nature of Jesus for Harpur. But he
hardly stops there. Harpur argues that the gospel writers were not only
recycling already ancient myth-matter, but that they had no intention of
claiming what they set down was historical fact. It was only the
fascistic Church fathers of the third century who conspired to
literalize the myth. Until then, he says, everyone (at least elites and
initiates) understood the gospel story, like all other ancient
incarnation and redeemer myths, to be allegories for the divine spark in
every human breast and the resultant possibilities of human
transformation. What leaden, iron-fisted Catholicism did was to restrict
this divine humanity to Jesus alone, as if he were an actual living,
breathing concrete individual, a Superman possessing remarkable powers
that the mundane Jimmy Olsens and Lois Lanes around him lacked. But do
we have to wait for the third century for that? As Helmut Koester showed
long ago, one can already see Jesus sucking the spiritual air out of the
room in the Gospel of John, where only he, and no longer you,
is the light of the world.
Harpur blames the Church
for leaving Christians with a Christ they cannot hope to follow but are
commanded to follow, then condemned for not following. Psalm 22 plus
Catch 22. Oh that someone might break the chains of the spiritual
proletariat and give them some manner of religious experience! If only
they would get wise to the possibility made known through Egyptian
parallels to the Bible, namely “Christ in you,” a power source through
which the believer can do all things! But what a straw Christ this is!
Can it have escaped Harpur that all our Evangelicals, Pentecostals,
Fundamentalists, and Holy Rollers are already avidly pursuing spiritual
rebirth and moral transformation, and that they are doing it because
they believe the very Spirit of God is burning within them? I agree with
Harpur that these dear souls are pathetically superstitious in their
biblical literalism and their “butcher shop religion” (as Harry Emerson
Fosdick once called it). But to depict them, with all orthodox
Christians, as empty religious zombies is just absurd. I cannot see what
difference it is supposed to make whether one believes the
life-revolutionizing power entered him as of his born-again conversion
experience or, a la Oprah and New Thought, it was always there but
latent until one’s climactic realization that it was there. In
fact, what the heck’s the difference? In the final analysis, one wonders
whether Harpur’s gripe with these people is that they believe a bloody
atonement was necessary to make their conversions possible. So what?
Does our distaste for a particular doctrine matter so much that
the rest of us have to set these “ignoramuses” (uh, like Karl Barth?)
straight?
And if we could just reduce
Christianity to the mystical core it supposedly shares with all other
religions, there would be no more bloodshed, such as Christianity has
caused, like a roaring lion, throughout its sorry history, seeking whom
it may devour. Or would there be? I’m not sure the New Testament
promotes pantheism as Harpur supposes, but I’m pretty certain the
Bhagavad Gita does, and it makes a point of dashing and smashing
pacifist sensitivities. Precisely because humans are vastly greater than
their paltry flesh-bodies, it is no big deal to kill these latter on the
battlefield. Like changing a suit of clothes, Arjuna, m’boy! And Harpur
frets that Born-Again Christians staff the Pentagon! (Do they? Is there
some survey where he’s getting this?)
Harpur rightly excoriates
church propagandists for their history of pious frauds, though in the
same breath he admits there was no real standard of plagiarism or
authorial ownership in the ancient world. And while he scorns the works
of such lying churchocrats, he is pleased to admire the sainted Helena
Petrovna Blavatsky, who was such a crude hoaxer and confidence trickster
that she actually had confederates drop folded paper notes through the
air vents during séances and claimed they were messages from the
Ascended Masters! Well, I guess Blavatsky can be forgiven because,
unlike the Catholics, she’s “our son of a bitch.”
Harpur quite rightly (to my
way of thinking) protests that we must not demythologize the gospels, as
if that were to subtract the myths, but rather we ought to interpret
them. Needless to say, that is exactly the point of
demythologizing: to interpret, not to eliminate in the manner of
“scientific,” “rationalist” liberal theology. Bultmann, Gogarten, and
Tillich were not some sort of tin-eared Unitarians. But what does
Harpur’s allegory yield? He thinks Philo and Origen had the correct and
original understanding. But Origen was much more like Catholic
supernaturalists than Harpur wants to think. As I read him, Origen’s
allegorical method was mainly a hermeneutical license to kill every text
that didn’t fit into his version of Christian theology. The Old
Testament was a ventriloquist dummy for the New. What we call Origen’s
“allegory” was more often simply an allusive citation of scripture to
invoke the language of this passage to exposit the teaching of that one.
And as for Philo, he labors mountainously to bring forth the merest
mouse: like his heirs, Swedenborg and Charles Filmore, Philo makes every
passage mean, in the last analysis, the same thing. Every sentence of
scripture is a redundant, alternative way of describing the faculty and
role of reason and/or the rudiments of psychology and cosmology, ideas
derived from philosophy and only being read back into the Bible. Albert
Schweitzer somewhere complains about reductionistic gospel exegesis as a
systematic attempt to defuse bombs and club baby seals. I don’t know if
the gospels are so interesting if all they are about is to tell me that
because I have a spark of the divine I can be more optimistic, as if a
“divine” pedigree means I can do better on my diet today than I did
yesterday. Is that it? When he is done, I suspect it is Tom
Harpur who has effectively subtracted the myth and let the air out of
the tire. For hallowed esotericism and the mysteries of the ages, it
doesn’t sound so profound to me.
Though eventually Harpur
grants that the gospel mythemes descend only indirectly from Egyptian
prototypes, through the channels of Greco-Roman Mystery cults and even
the Old Testament, most of the time his citation of Egyptian stories and
iconography, a la Massey, et. al., implies a direct borrowing from
Egypt, as when he suggests that “Matthew” may be derived from Ma’at, or
that Herod takes the place of the Egyptian Herut—even though there
actually were men named Herod. I am friendly to this position up to a
point. It seems to me that much of the Jesus and Lazarus myths do
reflect those of Osiris and Horus pretty directly. And the eucharist,
with its mystery of flesh-eating and blood-drinking, cannot have
originated as a sectarian Jewish reinterpretation of Passover but simply
must be derived from Osiris and Dionysus. The mourning of the women
seeking Jesus’ body surely comes from the same source as Isis and
Nephthys (not to mention Cybele and Anat and Ishtar and Aphrodite).
These points are enough to grant Harpur the game. But he appeals to
many, many more bits of Egyptian myth and liturgy, and most of these do
not strike me with anywhere near the force that they did Harpur.
For one thing, all the
mythemes and I-sayings and promises of salvation are just too generic.
If his point is to prove that little of the gospel soteriology and
Christology is new or unique, fine. (And, of course, that is blasphemous
enough to some ears.) But is there direct dependence between this saying
of Jesus and that one ascribed to Horus about being the path to
salvation? Again, one wonders if these bare quotations of
gospel-sounding stories, tips of icebergs as they are, are not
misleading quoted out of context like this. (One keeps flipping over to
the endnotes hoping for longer source passages, discussions by other
scholars on the same point, something to substantiate the author’s
claims, but, as with many biblical commentaries, it is the juiciest
parts on which no further light is shed.) It was the duty of Anubis to
“make straight the paths to the upper realms of heaven” (not in quotes
in the text, so how close was the original?), while John the
Baptist (herald for Jesus as Anubis was for Horus) was to “prepare the
way of the Lord” and to “make his paths straight.” But is Harpur leaping
to conclusions when he implies John was simply a renamed Anubis? Such a
“tit-for-Tut” approach makes nonsense of the gospel evidence that
implies the herald position of John evolved as a product of propaganda
between rival sects, as well as the fact that John’s “making straight
his paths” comes from an Isaiah passage that meant something else in a
different context. You can’t just play “connect the dots” diachronically
when there are so many synchronic connections crying out to be made.
Harpur’s discussion
contains many dubious fact claims. Is there really evidence that
Christians torched the library of Alexandria? As I understand it, this
cavil goes no further back than the Christianity-hating Edward Gibbon.
Is Matthew the only gospel to declare (like one Egyptian source) that
God numbers the very hairs of one’s head? What about Luke 12:7? Did John
really say that Jesus shares the very nature of the Father? If he had,
that would have saved a lot of fourth-century travel expenses. Did
Papias and Irenaeus believe Jesus died peacefully in bed as an old man?
I think not. Irenaeus did believe Jesus was 50 when he was crucified,
but that’s a bit different. Was Celsus’ The True Logos utterly
destroyed by the Church, so that we can only wish to know what he said?
Was there an alpha-privative in Hebrew, or in Egyptian hieroglyphics?
I’m no linguist, but I’d be surprised. Nor do you really need to try to
make “Abraham” come out to “a-Brahman” (as if a Hindu demigod) if you’ve
already dispensed with the patriarch, a la Ignaz Goldziher, as a
personification of the moon (which I think is correct)?
Tom Harpur seems to me to
commit the fallacy of hermeneutical ventriloquism, as if to say: the
biblical writers were surely as smart as me. Now, if I decide the
gospels, which are grossly legendary, make much better sense as
allegories, then the gospel writers must have thought the same thing.
(John Dominic Crossan, whom Harpur quotes in this connection, also takes
this approach.) Harpur admits Luke started the insidious process of
petrifying allegory into pseudo-history, but the other evangelists he
seems to exempt, laying the blame on later churchmen, villains right out
of Dostoyevski. But can you really get Mark off the hook when he seems
to want to gull the reader into accepting the (new) empty tomb episode
with the excuse that the women told no one about it? Sure, he was
concocting fiction, and he knew it, but did he want you to know
it?
To widen the angle a bit,
this is another way of saying that, for Harpur, the vast majority of the
biblical text (whether edifying or vexing) goes into the meat grinder to
produce a synthetic potted spam called mysticism. “Once you understand
that all the myths, legends, stories, ‘histories,’ allegories, parables,
and symbols are a kaleidoscope of variations on this one central theme,
the Bible comes alive in a wholly new way, I have found” (p. 181). It’s
like one of those “metaphysical Bible dictionaries.” Whatever you look
up, from “Hezekiah” to “cubit,” it always says “a symbol for the divine
force in the human heart.” For Harpur, as for his inspirations Higgins,
Massey, and Kuhn, it all equals one thing: pantheism and the challenge
of inner transformation. Well, I’m sorry, but there’s just no way you
can make the Deuteronomic History or the Priestly Code or the Davidic
Succession Narrative or discussions of eating meat offered to idols boil
down to that. It is just as spurious as when Orthodox Christianity tries
to tell us that the Old Testament is somehow about the Christian gospel.
Nonsense.
In all such cases, all the
“interpreter” is doing is cashing in a closetful of stuff he doesn’t
like for a handful of stuff he likes better. Consider Harpur’s grossly
over-simplistic account of how the biblical books were produced: “From
the beginning, they were preserved in memory only. They made up the body
of what is known as the great oral tradition, a set of ritual formulas,
ceremonial rites, allegorical depictions of truth, myths, number graphs
[!], and pictorial symbols of the realities and the phenomena of human
spiritual history that had been handed down from generation to
generation in unwritten form. Only here and there, chiefly to avoid
their being lost, forgotten, or too badly corrupted by change, they were
set down in writing and so, at last, came to later ages as books,
presumably ‘written’ or edited and revised by somebody” (ibid.). If this
were true, one would never find, e.g., the vast and intricate patterns
of redaction and theological embellishment one can trace from Samuel to
Chronicles, from Mark to Luke, etc. It just wouldn’t be there. The
biblical books would be chaotic repositories of bits and pieces like the
Upanishads or the Koran. But such textual intricacies have by no means
vanished; Harpur simply has lost interest in them and so they have
dropped beneath his notice. He is engaged in the strategy Derrida called
“the dangerous supplement.” He thinks he is adding on to an entity
something to modify or finish it, when in reality he is supplanting it
with some new, rival entity which he implausibly claims to be the same
as the original.
It seems to me that Harpur
is doing what all allegorists have always done, treating the ancient
author as Eric Idle does Terry Jones in the old Monty Python
skit, saying “Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more, eh?” while Jones
looks back at him in utter puzzlement.