The Pagan Christ

"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 on 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. 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."

-The Pagan Christ

To my mind, Harpur has drawn a line in the sand with this book, and Christians - particularly Gnostic Christians - are going to have to decide on which side of the line they sit. Either Jesus Christ was a man who lived 2,000 years ago, suffered under Pontius Pilate and died, or he was not. Alternatively he was, rather is a Mythic Hero, a godman indistinguishable from the timeless and universal Truth of Wasir/Heru (Osiris/Horus), Dionysis, and Mithras.

One can, I suppose, choose a middle road - once upon a time there was possibly a Rabbi, maybe an Essene, who said a lot things quoted/misquoted in the Gospels and ran afoul of the authorities in some fashion - a hybrid historical personage onto whom later was grafted the ideals of Hellenized Jews in Egypt, inheriting cultural strata from numerous mythic sources. This is the Jesus Seminar route - Jesus was an historical person, the Gospels are more or less accurate, but the specific sayings which can be accurately attributed comprise only about 15 percent of what is generally accepted. But they still attempt to put a real, breathing man on the scene.

Fair enough; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, you can't prove a negative, and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there's a Jesus-shaped hole in the evidence.

The precedence of Wesir/Heru (the Light of the World, the Slain and Risen) is astonishing in the details of its parallel, and well documented in the mean-spirited-but-factually-bang-on Jesus Never Existed.

This is of course a terrifying prospect to Nicene Christians, but we Gnostics should have no such fear in moving forward. So what are we left with, in this Christ-unlimeted-by-Jesus-narrative scenario. We find ourselves well-prepared, for the answer is the Logos, the Bridegroom of Sophia, the Living Water, and the Light of Gnosis. We remain unburdened by the non-existence of a first-century Nazareth, or the evidential vacuum of real Bible personages. We're left with (most of) Paul, minus the third century forgeries of the Pastorals and Literalist redactors. And we're left with an Universal and personal truth.

I cannot say with any certain what Christians (Gnostic or otherwise) will do with this opportunity, but I can say what it has done for me.

I for one feel enormously liberated, having spent my spiritual life outside Christianity, to now find a spark of communion with those who see themselves as Christians. We are all part of one Tradition, six or eight or even twenty thousand years old, the Western Religion. The immediate and realized lessons of the annointed spark of Divinity within each of us is the birthright of humanity, not just a few blessed by history or geography. In short it has made real for me the one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.