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.

Read the rest of this entry »