Author, columnist, and ex-Anglican priest Tom Harpur has long positioned himself as the champion of a personal and deeply psychological brand of spirituality that stands in direct opposition to the narrow, literalist teachings of mainstream Christian churches. His latest book introduces readers to the works of a number of scholars who have, according to Harpur, proven beyond a doubt that the historical figure and life events of Jesus Christ are actually an amalgam of ancient sacred myths, mostly Egyptian in origin. Harpur argues that the stories contained in the Gospels, like the Egyptian source texts and rituals upon which they are based, were not meant to be understood literally, but rather as allegorical truths about the divine spark of God manifested in human form. The Church’s insistence on Jesus as a historical figure has robbed traditional Christianity of the true message of the Gospels.

If Harpur had written The Pagan Christ as an introduction to these ideas, the book might have made for an interesting, if somewhat derivative, read. Instead, he attacks the reader with the hectoring emotional enthusiasm of the new convert, repeating his rhetorical points ad nauseam. Similarities between stories and rituals contained in the Bible and those from older religions or traditions, he insists, “establish beyond doubt” and with “utmost certainty” that understanding Jesus as a historical man is a “colossal blunder.”

Harpur is on steadier ground when he documents the historical persecution of heretics and competing schools of philosophy in the first five centuries of the Church. However, his insistence that the Church has been united in its suppression of any allegorical or symbolic readings of the Bible in favour of historical literalism is ridiculous. The Philokalia, a collection of often highly allegorical theological writings spanning almost two millennia, is still revered in all of the Eastern Orthodox churches and quoted by many Catholic and Protestant commentators. Harpur also ignores the more nuanced and symbolic readings of sacred texts by countless Christian saints and theologians.

The Pagan Christ eventually degenerates into a new form of fundamentalist scriptural interpretation more to Harpur’s taste, going so far as to say that “the entire course of Western history over the past eighteen hundred years would have been far different if a more spiritual understanding of the Christ and Christianity had prevailed at the outset.”
There is some truth in Harpur’s assertion, but he doesn’t explain why, in the centuries before the message of the older religions got co-opted by Christianity, the world was still beset by warfare, social inequity, slavery, and the kind of brute religious literalism that made most Egyptians believe in the divine kingship of the Pharoah.