Got this off another posting board I frequent, thought I would share!
Diana
Parts of a story in the Globe and Mail, by writer RAY CONLOGUE
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Toronto based religion writer and former Anglican priest Tom Harpur
admits he's sticking his neck out for proffering that someone named
Jesus never walked this Earth, It is disconcerting, to say the least,
for Canada's best-known religion writer to decide that Jesus Christ
did not exist.
That is the contention of Tom Harpur's new book, The Pagan Christ.
The former Anglican priest and Toronto Star religion editor for the
past 35 years, has come to believe that there was never a man named
Jesus, and that most of the miracles and wonders ascribed to him in
the New Testament did not happen.
Even more astonishing, he argues that most of the Christ story was
borrowed by the early church from ancient religions, which the church
then suppressed in "the greatest cover-up of all time."
The chief religion to be ransacked was that of Egypt, already 3,000
years old when Christianity was founded. Egypt, he writes, supplied
the "virgin birth, a star in the east, three wise men bearing gifts,
the evil power that tries to take a special child's life, and angelic
messengers." The Egyptian hieroglyph KRST, meaning the anointed one,
was applied to the deity Horus, who was born of a mortal woman and
later crucified between two thieves
The Egyptians symbolized this in a deity they called "Iusa" (which
possibly later became the name Jesus) and wove a mythology of stories
about his painful transformation into a human being. But neither the
Egyptians, nor the Persians who possessed a similar mythology, ever
claimed that such a person really existed. "The truth was always
esoteric," Harpur says. "It was symbolized in the stories, but it
wasn't history."
There is evidence that the early church fathers shared the view that
there was no historic Jesus. But some time in the third and fourth
centuries, Harpur argues, it was decided that a historic Jesus would
give the new faith a distinctive quality not possessed by the
powerful pagan faiths it was competing with. The many gospels and
early writings that reflected the old, symbolic view of Jesus were
suppressed, and the few -- four, to be exact -- that claimed he had
actually lived were retained.
Kuhn was an American scholar of ancient Middle Eastern languages who
died in 1963. While studying the vast body of Egyptian writings, Kuhn
had been perturbed by occasional, oddly familiar passages. A poem in
honour of Horus, for example, would begin with the words, "He was
despised and shunned by men, a man of pain who knew what sickness
was. Kuhn recorded these similarities to New Testament language, and
soon had a list of many hundreds of passages.
He was not, of course, the first to notice these oddities. Almost
from the time it was possible to decipher the hieroglyphs, in the
early 1800s, scholars were aware of them. Religious authorities
decided that they merely "foreshadowed" the truth of Christianity,
and few experts dared to disagree. Even Wallis Budge, the British
Museum's Egyptian authority in the early 20th century, amassed
volumes of research showing that pretty much the whole New Testament
was in the hieroglyphs. But he dutifully concluded that it was
just "foreshadowing."
http://www.globeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040408.wxharpur08/BN
Story/Entertainment/