The Pagan Christ: an opportunity missed?

I have been reading "The Pagan Christ" by Tom Harpur, a Canadian journalist, Rhodes Scholar and former Anglican priest and professor of Greek and New Testament at the University of Toronto.

I first came across Harpur when he made a guest apperance on the endlessly fascinating Jesus Mysteries discussion list, a forum which manages to achieve consistently high standards of both scholarship and respectful debate. He was treated with something approaching reverence by some participants there, so I had high hopes of the book, especially as Harpur is, like myself, a member of that very rare breed, a Christian who doesn't believe in a historical Jesus.

Harpur's argument, based on those of the earlier scholars Alvin Boyd Kuhn and Gerald Massey, is that the gospels essentially consist of Egyptian myths associated with Horus and Osiris, transplanted to a fictional figure in first-century Palestine. They were never intended by their authors to be taken literally, and it is a major tragedy that by doing so, the church lost sight of the inner truth that they contain.

So far, I'm with him, at least regarding the tragedy part. I don't know nearly enough about Egyptian religion to assess the connections, but I regard his thesis as at least a priori plausible.

Sadly, though, he hasn't impressed me so far with his style of argument. Here's an example, from page 52:

"The earliest Church Fathers themselves admit that they took the high, symbolic, esoteric (or secret) wisdom that the Christian movement had inherited from Paganism -- from Platonic philosophy and the Mystery Religions -- and explained it, or rather downgraded it, by means of vulgar fables for the illiterate mob."

How is anyone supposed to evaluate such a claim? Which church fathers? And what did they actually say? Surely not a straight "we admit it, we have gone and downgraded Pagan esoteric wisdom to hoodwink all you illiterates"! Harpur must be putting his own spin on some original source or sources, but he doesn't tell us which ones, so we have no way of knowing whether his paraphrase is fair or not.

And then on page 93 we read, "Jesus, all four gospels declare, was baptized in the river Jordan by his cousin John". I don't think so. Only Luke states that the two were even related (the Greek word is less specific than "cousin"). And more seriously, while three of the gospels indeed do say that John baptized Jesus, John's account (1:29-34) carefully avoids saying so, despite having the two meet while John is baptizing; John the gospel writer's christology is simply too high to allow Jesus to be baptized like any other sinner. This howler is all the more embarrassing given Harpur's statement a few pages later (p101) that he has "studied John's Gospel for years and taught it to seminary students."

Both of these examples display, I think, a journalistic rather than a scholarly attitude to the original texts which makes me hesitate to trust Harpur's claims about the connections of the Jesus story with Egyptian traditions, about which I know very little. This is such a shame, as I suspect that in spite of all the above, Harpur (and Kuhn and Massey) could well be right in their main thesis, which is a fascinating and inspiring one. I will continue to read, and will at least credit Harpur with making me want to remedy my current ignorance of the Egyptian dimension.