The Pagan Roots of Christ

Just when I thought I was done discussing the pagan roots of Christmas I stumbled across this really interesting documentary, The Pagan Christ, on the CBC last night. The film dealt mainly with the issues raised by Tom Harpur’s book The Pagan Christ: Recovering The Lost Light. The book examines the strange correlations between the Gospels of the New Testament and the ancient Egyptian myth of Horus. Apparently, according to all these ancient rolls of papyrus decoded using the Rosetta Stone, there are about 180 elements of Horus’ story that end up in the New Testament, including divine conception, being born in a hovel, the visit of the 3 mystic sages, the gathering of 12 disciples, rubbing the authorities the wrong way, being crucified (evidently not a Roman invention), and the resurrection. Apparently his birth was also celebrated around December 25th, and even terms such as the “son of man” and the “lamb of God” have their roots in the Horus myth. I thought it a strange coincidence that when I start coming to terms with the fact that the biggest Christian holiday is really borrowed from the ancient celebrations of pagan sun gods (most notably Mithra & Saturn) I find out that Christ himself might simply be an embellishment of another ancient sun god. Evidentally, even names like Christ and Mary have roots in ancient Egyptian.

During the course of the documentary, there was also talk of how the first Christian Emperor of Rome, Constantine I, really shaped the church in his own image. He had struggled with many warring factions to eventually become the undisputed leader of Rome, and then, after converting, he held the First Council of Nicaea to get universal agreement on what the heck this Jesus fellow was all about anyway. What were originally dozens of Gospels were whittled down to the four we know today, the ones that agreed most with what Constantine wanted his new God to be all about. Oddly enough, when he couldn’t get universal agreement upon what Christianity should be all about, he used his power to clean things up. Apparently, it made the old Roman practice of feeding Christians to the lions seem trivial in comparison. People who preached a different interpretation of Christ suddenly lost their heads (quite literally, I’m afraid), and whole libraries were burned if they were found to house documents that offered an alternate interpretation of Jesus’ story. Who knows what wisdom and information was lost in the process?

There was also a theory put forth that one of Constantine’s bishops had a few extra-curricular activities of which he was quite boastful, which included altering respected histories of Josephus, a first century Jewish scholar “who survived and recorded the Destruction of Jerusalem in 70.” Apparently there’s quite a bit of controversy as to whether or not Josephus’ references to Jesus are genuinely his. And the real kicker is that Josephus’ writings about Christ seem to be the most solid evidence that that Jesus of Nazareth even existed.

It just makes me wonder sometimes. I make no bones about the fact that I refuse to subscribe to any organized view of religion because the dogma imposed by the less-than-perfect humans that end up organizing religions instantly remove them from whatever spark of divinity gave them fuel in the first place. And what with the founder of Catholicism looking about enlightened as his modern day self-proclaimed “good Christian” world leader equivalents (I’m looking at you, Dubya), it’s doubtful that he did a very faithful job interpreting the supposed will of God. I mean, he used the story of a homeless wandering ascetic to found a ministry enshrined in palatial opulence, almost as if Jesus’ “teachings” didn’t teach him anything.

Whether or not there’s any truth to Harpur’s claims remains to be seen, but I guess the same could easily be said of Constantine’s interpretation of the divine, as well as all the traditions (such as the various schisms, splinter groups, Protestants, etc.) that sprang from it. History always seems to be written by the victors, while alternative points of view tend to get left in the dust. So, if you’re looking for “the truth,” keep looking.