Оглавление
Tom Harpur. Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle
1. SURPRISED. BY GOD
2. BIRTHMARKS. ARE FOREVER
3. FROM HOMER. AND PLATO TO. THEOLOGY
4 “THE LORD IS MY. LIGHT”: MOTTO OF. OXFORD UNIVERSITY
5. THE CURE. OF SOULS
6. LIVING MY. FATHER’S DREAM
7 “ST. PAUL, HAD HE LIVED TODAY, WOULD HAVE BEEN. A JOURNALIST”
8. THE FORK. IN THE TRAIL
9. LIVING MY. OWN DREAM
10. CAN. CHRISTIANITY BE. BORN AGAIN?
EPILOGUE
Timeline
Introduction to the Paperback Edition
1
2
3
4
5
Part II:Horus and Jesus Are the Same
6
7
8
9
10
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C
APPENDIX D
GLOSSARY
Notes
Bibliography
PART 1
INTRODUCTION
1
2
3
4
5
6
PART 2
7
8
9
10
Notes
1. OUR JOURNEY. BEGINS
2. THE MYTH AND YOU
3. THE VIRGIN BIRTH. AND JESUS’ CHILDHOOD
4. TRANSFORMATIVE. STAGES IN THE. JESUS STORY
5. MIRACLES OF. WHOLENESS
6. NATURE MIRACLES
7. THE SERMON. ON THE MOUNT
8. THE PARABLES
9. PALM SUNDAY
10. THE PASSION
11. ENTERING. INTO GLORY
12. REACHING FOR. TRANSCENDENCE
APPENDIX A
APPENDIX B
APPENDIX C
GLOSSARY
Notes
Bibliography
Copyright
Отрывок из книги
MANY READERS of this book will be aware that in the spring of 2004, just before Easter and within days of my seventy-fifth birthday, my world was rocked by the publication of The Pagan Christ. I was thrown suddenly into the centre of a whirling vortex of controversy, praise, criticism and media attention such as I had never experienced before. Already a bestseller even before its official “pub date,” the book remained at the top of several Canadian bestseller lists for many months, and the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail later judged it to be the number-one bestseller of the year. The book and its author were attacked with vitriol by conservative critics in all camps, while emails of gratitude and congratulation began to flow in by the hundreds from an ever-widening circle of avid readers whose primary emotions seemed those of joy at release from old, religion-induced fears and of renewed spiritual energy at now being freed to get on with a rational trust in God. My publisher and chief editor, forty-year publishing veteran Patrick Crean at Thomas Allen Publishers, said publicly that The Pagan Christ “is the most radical and important book I have ever worked on.” We could scarcely keep up with media requests for interviews, while simultaneously several TV producers were vying for the film rights. Eventually, CBC and an independent producer, David Brady Productions, won out. There was also a behind-the-scenes tug-of-war for foreign rights. The book went on to sell in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and in translation in France, Holland, Germany, Japan and Brazil.
Put in its simplest form, the message of The Pagan Christ is that the Christian story, taken literally as it has been for centuries, is a misunderstanding of astounding proportions. Sublime myth has been wrongly understood as history, and centuries of book burnings, persecutions and other horrors too great to be numbered were the result. The light crying out to be rediscovered is that every human being born into the world has the seed or spark of the Divine within; it’s what we do with that reality that matters. Building upon the work of earlier scholars, I set out my reasons for being unable to accept the flimsy putative “evidence” for Jesus’s historicity. In its stead I made the case for the Isis–Osiris–Horus myth of ancient Egypt as the prototype of a much later Jewish version of the same narrative. The media jumped on that as their leading theme. The message of my follow-up book Water into Wine leads on from there. Its thesis is that the “old old story” is indeed the oldest story in human history, and it focuses upon us. The story of the Christ is the story of every man, woman and child on the face of the earth. The miracles, rather than being snipped out of the text with scissors à la Thomas Jefferson (who did it to solve the problem of their otherwise seeming to contradict the very laws of physics said to be God’s own creation), are shown to be allegories of the power of the divine within us all. Read as historical, they border on the ludicrous. Read as allegory and metaphor, they shine with contemporary potency for one’s daily life.
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A week later, while I was in the midst of teaching, I heard the familiar whisper going around the room: “Pimosayawin.” Plane! Since it was impossible to keep them settled while a plane was arriving, not to mention my own curiosity, I dismissed the class and we joined the usual stampede. When the aircraft finally tied up, to my astonishment all of the people I had previously sent out disembarked. There had been a mix-up in the X-ray plates, it seemed, and those with the dreaded disease were still on the island. I was told there was nothing to be done but wait until the next checkup— a full year away. It is a fact that some members of that particular treaty party were drinking almost continuously during the Big Trout Lake X-ray examinations, so the mix-up was not the result of ordinary human error. I was only twenty at the time and politically very naïve. I now realize I should have gone to the media immediately upon returning to Sioux Lookout that fall. I did make a written protest to the Department of Indian Affairs, but nothing ever came of it as far as I know.
After school hours I tried my best to work with the boys in particular, doing what used to be called manual training, and teaching sports. I have to confess that the results were very meagre in both cases. Our first crafts project was a howling failure. I had noticed that there seemed to be a streak of cruelty shown towards animals and birds among my male students. (This has to be seen against a setting where their whole lives depended upon hunting and fishing.) For example, they used to catch field mice, put them in the lake while still alive, and then try to pick them off with catapults while the mice frantically swam for shore.
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