What I’m Blogging

It’s the birthday of author and communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada (1911). In his Understanding Media (1964), McLuhan wrote, long before the invention of the Internet, that electronic media was creating a global electronic village in which books would become obsolete.

For me the summer vacation is a time for reading and reflection. I absorb fiction and non-fiction. This week I’ve just finished off this work;

Harpur, Tom. 2005. The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. Walker & Company. ISBN 0676975739.

Right of the mark, if you happen to be a dyed in the wool ultraorthodox fundamentalist, you are going to hate this book. You are going to hate this book large. Harpur’s main thrust of argument, is that in the third and fourth centruies, Chrurch Fathers made a conscious decision to interpret the Christian message as a literal historical occurance rather than as a spiritual allegorical experience. They conducted a great suppression of information that would be contrary to their literalist ideal. Harpur sites the destruction of the Library of Alexandria by Christians, the elimination of “heretical” writings and their authors, as well as the purging and termination with extreme prejudice of any remaining pagan thinkers and institutions like the academies of philosophy in Athens. Granted, they were tough times for the nonbeliever.

Harpur’s more compelling arguments arise from information that historical research has brought to light through archaeology. While the Church Father’s were on the rampage of information censorship, they did not erase all conflicting evidence, and it is this evidence that Harpur brings for evaluation. Namely, how the story of the Christ and the Eygptian Horus, are nearly identical down to the virgin birth, the death and resurrection. How key passages in the New Testament bear no corroboration in non-christain sources of the same period despite being at a time when documentation of events was well established. How Church Fathers acknowledged in their own correspondence that they were playing fast and loose with the actual account, “What profit hath not this fable brought us?” How the archeological record simply does not support the story.

Harpur’s stated intent is not to destroy Christianity, but to take the path not travelled. He proposes that the literal historical view that holds sway today, be replaced by what he describes as the allegorical spiritual Christianity of the earlier Church as represented in the writings of St. Paul and others. He proposes that the discovery of the Christ in ourselves is the basis of a Christain renewal and hopes for the future.

Harpur’s book gives one a lot to think about, and the information he brings forward and the questions he raises certainly will poses some difficulties, but as the Pagan Socrates says, “the unexamined life is not worth living”, so too as the Christain Elton Trueblood tells us “the unexamined faith is not worth having.”