This time Tom Harpur may have gone too far for traditional mainline Christians. He might however just attract those in the secular world on the fringes of belief in Christ to take a second look at religion. Harpur’s Christ transcends the Christianity we know; in fact according to Harpur’s extensive research, the basic tenets adopted by the early Church had their roots in early Egyptian and other mythology.

Harpur bases most of his insights on the earlier research of others, especially by Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Kuhn’s major sources which include Egyptologist Gerald Massey; and the esteemed Dr. Northrup Frye, University of Toronto professor; as well as decades of personal study and research. In the late 60s when Harpur himself was teaching at the Toronto School of Theology he had difficulty with Frye’s assumption that the Bible “was not a document concerned with history but a vast collection of sublime myths and metaphors.”

The intellectual and visionary Frye was extremely popular among students to whom he preached that “every syllable of the Gospels was written in myth.” It was 15 years before Harpur began to understand what Frye was saying and even more recently in the months of research into this book that Harpur reached the dramatic conclusions in this book.

Harpur contends that early on, in the third and fourth centuries C.E. (Common Era), the Christian Church shifted from the spiritual wisdom it had previously inherited from ancient sources. A more popular recounting of “historical events” presented the historical Christ as one who was incarnated as the Son of God rather than the earlier accepted view of a Christ-like Saviour accepted by a pagan world as truth. This “Christ,” it was believed, dwelt in each individual.

Harpur defines pagan according to its interpretation by the emerging Church as denoting those who were not orthodox Christians. These “pagans” held views of the Christ within that the Church decried. “Myth,” Harpur explained in an interview after the book hit best-seller lists “is something that enshrines a truth that is essential to understanding the human condition.” As Joseph Campbell has said, “Myth is what never was, yet always is.”

What Harpur states is the truth that he has now come to accept includes believing that the miracles of Christ never actually occurred, nor did his birth, ministry and death happen as recounted in the New Testament. Everything from the star in the East to Jesus’ walking on water; everything Jesus said or did, originated thousands of years before.

Ultimately Harpur questions even the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, saying that if indeed such a man existed at that time, it was not the Christ we have been brought up to believe in – thus defeating any arguments supporting the work of historians like the Jewish Josephus or Roman Tacitus of the first and second centuries, to name only a couple. The Gospel life of Jesus, he says, had already been written in substance, at least 5,000 years before he came.

Harpur writes not in a vacuum of ignorance but out of a lifetime of study, research and questioning. An Anglican priest who was never content to remain complacent with what he had learned and preached, Harpur dismissed his own early questions as nonsense. He also dismissed other thinkers who spoke out including Sigmund Freud whose dictum was that the Bible was a “total plagiarism” of the Sumerian and Egyptian mythologies.

Harpur insists that his wrestling with newly discovered materials has only served to deepen his faith and spiritual life and to bring fresh, new meaning to Bible stories. For him there is a renewed significance in the rituals of Easter and Christmas and the Christian symbols of the cross and the Eucharist. He embraces the powerful meaning behind the expression “take up your cross” as accepting “the discipline and ambiguity and suffering involved in being a fully aware human being.”

Harpur examines exact parallels between Egyptian mythology and Gospel writings. Even the story of Lazarus is not truth he says but a recurring deeply archetypal and widely used symbol of God’s power to resurrect the dead. Harpur quotes the classic work Egyptian Religion of Sir Wallis Budge who said that no matter how far back researchers go, there is no time “that there did not exist a belief in the resurrection, for everywhere it is assumed that Osiris rose from the dead.” The Egyptians believed in the “anthropomorphic divinity, or Christ ideal,” of Osiris and his son Horus, neither of whom were ever considered historical.

Tom Harpur has always been as much of a journalist as a theologian and sees his vocation as making complex issues intelligible to the ordinary, intelligent layperson. If we believe that as Jesus said “the kingdom of God is within” we have a moral obligation to search for our own truth, or as Harpur puts it “the lost light.” An open mind is always at the root of Harpur’s writing and I believe we must keep our own hearts open to the word of God as it comes to each of us, not as a “fait accompli” but as something transforming and reforming. This is a must read for theologians and theological students as well as true seekers.