Response to The Pagan Christ

The Pagan Christ was not written to stir controversy, nor was the documentary  produced with that in mind. Our purpose throughout, both in TPC and in its sequel, Water Into Wine, has been to show there is another, hopefully better, more universal, way to understand the Jesus Story and its meaning for our lives than the dead literalism that abounds today.

The CBC documentary was first shown in December, 2007 and the response was phenomenal. The TV audience of close to two-thirds of a million made it one of the top-rated CBC documentaries of 2007. The phone lines and the discussion board on the “net” at CBC.ca. hot docs were jammed immediately afterwards and for some time beyond that. While most such documentaries on CBC garner “about 1000 views on average” on the website, TPC received over 18,000. There was a torrent of e-mails on the Tom Harpur website, some angry, one or two even very nasty but the great majority, roughly 90%, very positive indeed.

(At Easter 2009 an attempt to answer The Pagan Christ documentary was shown under the name Unmasking The Pagan Christ, however, it remains to be seen what if any impact that show will have.)

Answering the critics

In the show, the main critique seemed to focus on the Egyptian material in TPC. Those who have gone on to read the 2007 sequel to TPC, Water Into Wine (2007), have seen the appendix there with its considerable contemporary scholarly witness to the dependence of the Jesus Story on ancient Egyptian theology. A reading of Siegfried Morenz’s book Egyptian Religion (Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1973 - see especially the footnotes on Horus, etc.) and a reading of Erik Hornung’s  The Secret Lore of Egypt and its Impact on the West, will help cure any vagueness on this subject.  Hornung, who is without question one of the leading Egyptologists of our time, says pointedly on page 73: 

“Notwithstanding its superficial rejection of everything pagan, early Christianity was deeply indebted to ancient Egypt. In particular, the lively picture of the Egyptian afterlife left traces in Christian texts;  thus among the Coptic [Christians] … we encounter a fiery hell quite like that of the Egyptians. The descensus [descent into hell] of Jesus, which played no role in the early church, was adopted into the official Creed after 359, thanks to apocryphal legends that again involved Egypt. Christ became the sun in the realm of the dead, for this descent into the netherworld had its ultimate precursor in the nightly journey of the ancient Egyptian sun God Re…”  

He goes on with many other parallels including:

“the Christian slayer of the dragon [St.George] had its model in the triumph of Horus over Seth and there was a smooth transition from the image of the nursing Isis—Isis lactans—to that of Maria [Mary] lactans. The miraculous birth of Jesus could be viewed as analogous to that of Horus, who Isis conceived posthumously from Osiris, and Mary was closely connected with Isis by many other shared characteristics.” (See especially p.75.)

One of the critics in the documentary, Ward Gasque, is a professor of Church History. But his remarks confined themselves almost entirely to an expression of  comments on the alleged validity of the New Testament Gospels as evidence for an historical Jesus. This was unfortunate. Any first year seminary student [except perhaps at the most extreme conservative Bible Colleges in the country] knows that the four Gospels are decidedly NOT “four independent witnesses” of the supposed historical Christ. For example, Matthew and Luke plagiarize Mark, the earliest Gospel, to the extent of reproducing between them roughly 75% of Mark’s material, often verse for verse. The last 200 years of biblical criticism has shown beyond any shadow of doubt that the Gospels are faith documents, benign propaganda, if you like. But they are NOT history or even biography. If indeed there is, as Gasque has said, “incontrovertible evidence” of Jesus’ historicity why hasn’t someone produced a shred of it? The scholarly world itself is waiting.

From time to time some of you have written out of concern over attacks on The Pagan Christ by an American named James Patrick Holding, who runs an online "apologetics ministry" - www.tektonics.org.  On this site he bitterly assails any and all scholars who don’t follow his literalist, fundamentalist line. He solicits and gains funds from those of his same mind-set in the USA and Canada. Readers should be aware that Holding is a pseudonym. His real name is Robert Turkel and anyone who checks him out will quickly realize why I have never attempted to respond to his particular brand of criticism. For a polite, well-reasoned but devastating critique of Turkel's online book about the faith see the website of New Testament professor Robert Price of Florida. He is the author of the stunning book, Deconstructing Jesus.

For more detailed response to The Pagan Christ, please see appendix D in the trade paperback version of the book.

Tom Harpur