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WHAT HAS BEEN most remarkable about my particular journey to this moment is that the second half of my life has been much more productive and creative, more fulfilling in so many different ways, than the beginning. What came before certainly contained many wonderful moments and was a time of great activity also, but from this vantage point it all seems to have been preparation and prologue for what was to come. Central to this is the fact that somebody new came into my life. Susan, now my wife of thirty years, was working at the Star when in 1971 we had first met very fleetingly while I was submitting travelling expense reports from a trip. We remained polite, distant acquaintances until quite suddenly at the beginning of 1980 we were thrown together once more by circumstance and fell deeply in love. Some things are too profound and personal to be the subject of pedestrian description. But, like Robert Frost’s traveller in the woods who took “the road less travelled by,” I can truly say that knowing and being with Susan “has made all the difference” in my life. My life has been infinitely blessed by her love and companionship.

On Valentine’s Day 1981, Susan called to tell me she had just made an offer for us on a small cottage on Lake Wilcox, a kettle lake that was part of a chain of such waters sparkling in the midst of the suburban sprawl surrounding Richmond Hill, a town about twenty-five kilometres north of downtown Toronto. We were both very excited when we heard that the small lot was actually a waterfront property. We would be able to swim, canoe and fish in summer and then skate on it in winter. In fact in winter, once the snow came and the lake was frozen, I could actually ski at times from our front door, alongside a frozen creek bed, out to the highway to the post office for mail. It was like living in a cabin up north.

Wilcox Lake itself had a somewhat dubious reputation because of an earlier period when it was known for wild partying by motorcycle gangs and all the other disreputable activities generally associated with the poorly policed, more remote regions of any vast and growing modern city. Rumour had it that the infamous Boyd gang of bank robbers had once dumped a collection of revolvers and other guns out in the middle of the lake. Somebody from the “old days” later told me that the reason there was so little policing then was that “the cops were afraid to go in there.” But that was more or less apocryphal. The price was right, and with about nine hundred square feet of room, it was all we needed. It would remain our home for the next eighteen years. We could reach the Star building on Toronto’s waterfront at the foot of Yonge Street (“the longest street in the world”) either by car fairly quickly or, later, by GO train from the station in Richmond Hill.

We soon grew to love it by the lake. We could work in the city by day and then return to what was really a cottage retreat at night. There were rolling fields, woodlands and parks on every side of the community and always the presence of the changing waters. Wildlife of all sorts made it seem at times as though the city was many miles away instead of gradually reaching up to our front door. There were plenty of muskrats, the occasional beaver, great blue herons and many other species of waterfowl, especially during the migration seasons of spring and fall. You could sit at times on a bench by the lake and watch an osprey hover, dive and then emerge shaking the water from its wings as it took off with a fish in its talons. On our many walks there often were deer and coyotes in full view. The house was simplicity itself even after we eventually enlarged it somewhat, making a spacious study where I could write overlooking the view to the east, with its beach and conservation area. Over the years from 1981 to 1999 it was to be the place where several of my books were written. It gave one a real sense of perspective to know that this lake and others nearby had been here for over ten thousand years. They dated to the end of the last ice age, before any holy scriptures of any kind were written down. As the geologian the late Thomas Berry was fond of saying, “The very first holy book is the creation and the cosmos itself.” He also said he thought the Church should put the Bible on a shelf for a few years and read the “Book of Nature” for a while instead.

Having lived in the very heart of the city for so many years, I found it literally a breath of fresh air to be in the country. As soon as I did not have to travel to the Star every day, my normal working day began with a seven-kilometre walk, usually on country roads or trails in the “mink and manure” belt in King Township. I was sometimes asked if I found it boring, but I knew what a privilege it was. Most of my best ideas for both columns and books over this highly productive time were born of these walks; on most days I could scarcely wait to get home and start writing. I found the setting helped keep me connected with the deeper rhythms of life. Cows in the meadows stared at me as though I were the first human they’d ever seen; horses nickered softly as they grazed; everything was redolent of earthy, growing things. Yet in the very far distance I could at times see clearly the CN Tower, near to the Star building. On more than one occasion there were deer grazing in the immediate foreground with the tower as a distant, almost surreal backdrop.

As Easter 1981 approached, my editors began putting some pressure on me to come up with a special feature of some kind as I had done a few times before, including a visit to a Canadian-run project for orphans in Costa Rica. By coincidence, I had mentioned this in passing to my very good friend Father Tom McKillop, who was the director of youth work for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto. He was an important contact and had become a firm friend. It was because of him that I was able to meet and interview, among others, Victor Frankel, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a book of great significance in my own life and the lives of so many hundreds of thousands of people around the world. You knew in meeting Frankel that his message of our deep need to find meaning even through suffering was one he had authenticated in his own life.

A few days later McKillop called me and invited me to meet him for coffee to discuss an idea. When we met, he told me that in his regular visits to Catholic high schools over the past several months he had been struck by the amount of apprehension and concern there was among the students over the dangers and possibility of nuclear war. “There is a terrible weight of worry and fear out there just now because of some recent news stories and the general geopolitical tensions currently in the headlines,” he said. He went on, “Have you ever thought of going to Japan and writing about Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the bomb? Maybe there’s something really important there.”

I pondered his suggestion all afternoon. Later that night I decided to put the concept to the managing editor the next day. It turned out that Martin Goodman was away, and so I went to the next in command, Ray Timson, a long-time colleague and friend, and suggested that I go to Hiroshima and write a major feature on the 1945 dropping of the bomb, its horrors, its overall meaning for humanity and all the options still confronting us today in the wake of that awesome event. Timson, in his typical fashion, greeted the idea with real enthusiasm and told me to go ahead. He added that he would alert the publicity department and give the story major play.

So, on the Monday before Easter, I caught a plane to Vancouver, where there was an hour stopover before a non-stop flight to Tokyo. Because of my height, and because Star staff—except for upper management—always flew in economy class, I was stiff and sore after the four or five hours from Toronto to Vancouver. However, that was as nothing beside the nine-or ten-hour lap over the rim of the Pacific to Narita Airport. After what seemed a near eternity, including an almost hour-long taxi ride to my hotel in downtown Tokyo, I finally arrived, exhausted but also ravenously hungry. It was the Tokyo Hilton Hotel and I’m sure the meal was terrific, with a view out over the lovely gardens and pool, but it was wasted; I was just too tired. Once in my room, I fell into the luxurious bed and was almost instantly asleep.

Unfortunately, it was not to last. It seemed only minutes later, although it was in fact a couple of hours, when the phone beside the bed began ringing. I struggled to drag myself awake only to find a voice on the other end of the line saying he was the Star’s public relations manager and that they’d like to cut a commercial spot for radio to promo the weekend feature. He was calling from a studio in Yorkville, in the centre of Toronto, saying, “Whenever you’re ready, we’ll cue you up. Just say where you are, what you’re doing and why it all matters. You’ve got forty-five seconds.” I hardly knew where I was myself never mind being prepared to talk about a place I had yet to visit. I explained the situation, that I wouldn’t reach Hiroshima until the following day. He told me to take a few moments to “put myself into the scene” and then he’d roll tape. “This is the only opportunity we have,” he said. “Just ad lib.” I still feel some embarrassment over this incident even after all these years. My only excuse is that I couldn’t think of a quick alternative and I knew it was going to be the kind of story that merited the widest possible readership simply because of the issues involved. I took a few deep breaths, thought for a few moments and then did the best job I could. “That was great,” he said when I finished the terse message. “You really put a lot into that. It’s a go. You can go back to sleep.” When I said I didn’t feel very good about faking being in a place before I had set foot there, he said not to worry. “By the time this goes to air here in Toronto, you’ll have been all over Hiroshima and well on your way back home.” One thing I do remember about all of that was resolving it would never occur again.

There was one benefit to the way it all happened. Many people told me later that they really felt the deep emotion and even trauma the Hiroshima visit had brought to me—they could hear it in my voice. I didn’t want to tell them that perhaps what they were sensing was simply surprise and exhaustion. The truth is that after taking the bullet train to Hiroshima the next day, standing at ground zero, and visiting the hospital that still housed survivors who had been terribly burned in the August 6, 1945, holocaust, I was indeed profoundly moved. I will never forget getting up very early on the day following my arrival there and walking under cherry blossoms in the Peace Park, its skeletal dome the only vestige of buildings that had once stood there but which were all burned up in the Armageddon-like conflagration. There was a kind of simple shrine with an altar on one side of the park, and in the silence I noticed that early morning joggers would stop before it and, hands clasped in front in an attitude of prayer, stand for a period of meditation before continuing their run. Cherry blossoms fell softly in the glory of the morning sunshine and carpeted the ground. For a moment it seemed that the earth itself stood still to remember the awful cataclysm long ago in which the city was all but obliterated and 140,000 people perished. I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum, dedicated to making certain the world can never forget what happened there or the apocalyptic demons then unleashed and henceforth forever threatening to bring a final judgment on our planet and ourselves. I spoke to doctors and to clergy of various faiths.

Since I had already done some interviews with two or three key thinkers, including of course McKillop, in Toronto (at the Star you always had to keep in mind the maxim “What does it mean to Toronto?”), I had all the material I needed for the story as I retraced my steps. During the long hours of flight over the Pacific and then across Canada I wrote and then rewrote the story until it met my hopes and original intentions. When I saw the weekend edition on Easter Day, I was absolutely stunned. The largest headline I had ever seen in a Toronto paper since the famous editions announcing the end of the war with Japan stood out in huge type across the front page. It said CHOOSE LIFE! and had a photo of the Hiroshima dome in the Peace Park taken by the award-winning photographer Boris Spremo. The shot was even more powerful because the only person in it was a little girl in a pretty dress caught running below the ruin. Some editors I know were unhappy with the sheer in-your-face nature of the play given to the story, but it was widely discussed not just in journalism classes at various colleges but in schools, churches and many, many other venues across Metropolitan Toronto and far beyond. Gary Lautens, the former humour columnist who was then managing editor, sent me a special note of congratulation. It was to be my last major trip as a staff writer for the Star.

The issue of the bomb has faded somewhat from public consciousness just now, replaced by looming environmental and economic problems. However, in the light of present geopolitical tensions, I view the risks of either a terrorist act involving the bomb or a nuclear attack by a rogue state as of the most urgent concern. Nuclear disarmament must be at the top of the agenda for all nations.

In the spring of 1982, Richard Teleky, a Canadian novelist who was then the senior editor at Oxford University Press Canada, phoned me at the Star. He introduced himself and said he thought it would be a good idea for us to meet for lunch as soon as possible to discuss the possibility of a book. We met at a bistro in Don Mills and over a glass of Japanese beer he said it seemed obvious to him that I should be writing in a more permanent and extended form than the Star’s religion page and columns permitted. We discussed several possibilities and finally agreed on a book based largely upon my take on where the churches were at that time and the major problems they faced, together with a truly forthright airing of strong, controversial opinions I held on everything from the hormone issues of premarital sex and abortion to situation ethics (the so-called New Morality) in general. He said that since it would be about ultimate concerns, it should be titled Harpur’s Heaven and Hell. As with the radio show, the name only had to be heard once to stick permanently in the public mind, he assured me.

To the surprise both of Oxford University Press and of other Canadian publishing houses, the book—issued simultaneously in hardcover and paperback—took off immediately and was very soon a Canadian bestseller. I did what every successful author was expected to do at that time: I went on a gruelling cross-country tour, the first of well over a dozen I was to undertake down the years. The reception from radio hosts and interviewers as well as from those on television and in churches from coast to coast was little short of amazing. CBC’s Peter Gzowski did five sessions with me on Morningside dealing with a different topic each day. In the following week we did another show on responses he had received in the mail. I particularly remember speaking during the tour to a packed Christ Church Cathedral (Anglican) in the heart of downtown Vancouver. The crowd was mainly composed of young people, several of whom came up and hugged me afterwards. I also remember a slightly over-refreshed woman in the front row who approached to say she was my cousin from Ireland. It sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but I later discovered she really was a relative on my father’s side. She had married a prospector who spent all his time in northern B.C. Unfortunately, he never found the fortune he had in mind.

At about this time, I was invited to attend a showing of Ingmar Bergman’s haunting classic film The Seventh Seal at University College, my old alma mater at the University of Toronto. The event was being sponsored by the Varsity Student Christian Movement (SCM). A lecturer from the philosophy department who was an agnostic had been asked to join me in leading a discussion when the screening was over. A good crowd turned out and things went well for a time. But somehow, in the midst of the toing and froing between the agnostic, the students and myself, I began listening to myself as I had never done before.

It was a chilling experience. It wasn’t that I wasn’t holding my own, but quite suddenly some of my words and arguments began coming back to me with a strangely hollow sound and feel. It happened while I was setting forth my reasons for being a Christian, and particularly when it came to defending the claim that Jesus was the unique Son of God. What I was proclaiming was what I had thought I thought for many years—ever since childhood, in fact. It was what I had signed on to at my ordination. It had been at the heart of many of my sermons as a parish priest. Even when looked at from a much more historical-critical point of view, as a professor of New Testament, it was what I had taught during my years of lecturing at the Toronto School of Theology. Ever since my Oxford days and membership in the Socratic Club chaired by C.S. Lewis, I had accepted his oft-repeated dictum that Jesus Christ was “either mad, bad, or God.” But after the SCM meeting dispersed and the hall emptied, I left the building feeling quite disturbed, with a hundred questions whirling in my head. I walked for a couple of hours around the soccer fields between University College and Convocation Hall, struggling to clarify what was troubling me and what I truly believed. My belief and trust in God were rock-solid. I saw agnosticism as a form of “polite atheism.” My real difficulty focused upon Jesus.

The total inadequacy of Lewis’s glib formulation suddenly leaped out at me. What if none of his alternatives was correct? Why should there be only three of them? Once I looked at it in this light, it was obvious immediately that Jesus could have been mad, bad, the Son of God, or else completely misunderstood! What evidence was there that he ever actually claimed in any absolute sense to be divine? Didn’t he once tell the rich young ruler that “there is none good, only God”? How could we be certain that the New Testament texts themselves were truly reliable documents? I had long been aware of the many contradictions within the Gospels. Why did it take Church councils almost five centuries to formulate a satisfactory (to the theologians of the day) definition of the Trinity and of Jesus’s coequal status in it? How could the sacrificial death or martyrdom of one person, however exalted and holy, wipe out the “sins of the whole world”? And so on and so on.

Finally, I got in my car and drove home. As I did, the questions only multiplied. This had been nagging at me for some time now and it seemed I was facing another crisis. But before long, once the furor over Harpur’s Heaven and Hell had quieted down, I realized that one way of dealing with this serious problem would be to research and write a book on the subject. Obviously my dilemma was far from unique to me, and this is what all my previous experience and training was really about: communicating a faith that makes sense to modern men and women. It was time for further exploration.

So, with Teleky’s keen support, I plunged eagerly into the task and began preparing for what was eventually to be the slim paperback For Christ’s Sake, published in the spring of 1986, again by Oxford University Press. I set out to examine the Gospels carefully to see for myself what they actually said rather than what the Church has traditionally claimed they convey. The book was met with a storm of controversy right from the start. Some former mentors wrote to tell of their dismay at my describing the virgin birth as a sacred myth and my doubts over the doctrine of the Atonement—salvation through the “blood” of Christ—and much, much more besides. Pastors denounced the book from their pulpits and in some cases even took out ads in local papers announcing upcoming sermons exposing For Christ’s Sake’s “heresies.” Ironically, some of these same critics were to reappear later, in 2004, quoting parts of this book in an attempt to refute claims made in The Pagan Christ ! The central position reached in For Christ’s Sake was that Jesus may have been the greatest person ever to have lived on planet earth but “he is also the most misunderstood.” Using the New Testament itself as the key witness, I was convinced I had shown how the Church had mistakenly taken Jesus the messenger—or in McLuhan’s terms, Jesus the medium of the message—for the message itself.

What is most surprising to me today, as I glance through For Christ’s Sake once more, is how much further, on the one hand, my thinking has developed and matured since that turbulent time and, on the other, how clearly the themes to be explored and elaborated almost twenty years later in The Pagan Christ were already there. For example, in the final chapter titled “Jesus From Now On,” I quote the verse from the Prologue of John’s Gospel that speaks of the Logos as being “the true light which lighteth every person who comes into the world.” This is followed by: “What is being so sublimely stated is that all of us . . . have within us a spark or seed (to use the Stoic concept) of divine light that is none other than God . . . Our true humanity lies, paradoxically, in our divinity.” That’s really what The Pagan Christ and its sequel, Water into Wine, are all about. Nothing could have been much further from the fundamentalist beliefs of my youth. But the final revelation was not the result of some sudden change of consciousness, but the product of a process begun long ago and simmering within for many years.

Writing and promoting Harpur’s Heaven and Hell had given me for the first time a truly liberating opportunity to express freely in a more permanent form my own opinions, research and analysis of religious/spiritual matters. It made me realize that the time had come to free myself entirely from the responsibility of only reporting what other theologians, religious leaders and experts in the field had to say. I decided to launch out into the deep, so to speak, as a freelance writer and broadcaster. The job of working for the Toronto Star had been quite remarkable. It was an adventure that took me many places I would perhaps never have seen and into close company with scores of leading personalities in religion whom I would otherwise possibly never have met. But a different challenge now was calling. In the fall of 1983, with some genuine feeling of regret, I handed in my resignation as religion editor. A few months later, early in 1984, publisher Beland Honderich wrote to suggest that I consider returning as a regular freelance columnist for the Sunday paper. I was more than happy to get the invitation. As it happened, I was to continue the column “Always on Sunday”—to use the title of a later collection—for over twenty years.

Now I was able finally to distill the lessons and experience of all the preceding years and to concentrate on the kinds of issues that truly interested me and on which I believed the churches’ message had been woefully unconvincing and garbled at best. There was much talk on all sides in Christian circles about “the Gospel” and the “Good News” supposedly available on Sundays from the pulpit and in the bosom of the “assembly of faith”—as indeed there always had been. But just what this alleged Good News was and how it was either “good” or “news” for modern men and women was anything but clear.

Already in the 1980s there was a falling away of those once assumed to have been stalwart in their commitment to church membership and attendance. In the 1990s and the following decade, the trickle running from the churches was to become a flood. Not surprisingly, the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era has been accompanied by dire warnings of the likely total disappearance of some of the former major denominations in the Western world before this first century is over. Anglicanism, even though it may continue growing in the Third World, chiefly Africa, is the most obvious case in point. In Canada, for example, church pollsters have varied in their suggested timings, but all are agreed that unless current trends are reversed, the “last Anglican” will close the door and turn out the lights some Sunday well before 2100. Some experts predict it will come about much sooner.

Accordingly, it seemed important to focus on some of the key areas where “the faith once delivered to the saints” had formerly imparted a timely, relevant message. In the process of investigating and attempting to put the results in a communicable form, I had a further, perhaps even ulterior motivation as well: I wanted to clarify for myself what I actually still believed about each question. The journey of my writing from the very beginning has been an extremely personal affair. It became an unwritten principle: “Don’t try to take people where one has never been oneself.” That’s why even before the furor created by For Christ’s Sake had begun to settle down I had already conducted interviews in England (at Oxford) and elsewhere on the central question of “eternal life” or, as the resulting 1991 book was titled, Life After Death.

No subject is more basic to the Christian faith. It was part of the apostolic kerygma, or preaching, from the very beginning, and was one of the many reasons for the rapid growth of the Christian movement from the start. In its negative aspect, the development of the teaching that the Church alone held the keys to a pleasant afterlife, as well as the power to condemn one to everlasting fires of hell for heresy and a whole range of other lesser offences, gave this religion as it quickly expanded an incredibly potent hold on the human souls within its vast reach. Millions of people today are still in great mental and spiritual bondage to guilt and dread because of this unseemly grab for power and control. The major theme of the many hundreds of grateful letters received in response to The Pagan Christ has been the great sense of liberation from fear and guilt on the part of former fundamentalists, including pastors.

It is not my intention to expatiate further here upon the message of the earlier book, Life After Death; it speaks for itself. (A highly revised edition in light of the latest thinking on the subject and of changes in my own views entitled There Is Life After Death is being published simultaneously with this book.) But it is, I think, relevant to say that my exploration confirmed for me beyond a shadow of a doubt that not only the Church’s interpretation of what its original documents set forth but its further explication of them in its preaching and teaching down the centuries are at times virtual caricatures of what was meant to be communicated at the outset. Just one small example will suffice. It shouldn’t be surprising that the concept of eternal life has little or no appeal once you take the trouble to really think about it. It’s actually a frightening thought: life going on forever, and ever, and ever . . . But in the Greek words of the New Testament that are regularly translated as “eternal life,” a quite different meaning is contained. Zoe aionios, the Greek says. That means “the life of the age to come.” In other words, eternal life is not about a never-ending, virtually inconceivable length of time. It’s not a temporal matter at all. It’s a qualitative idea. What is being announced is a life that is qualitatively different, a kind only possible in another dimension of being altogether, where time itself is no more. This is much closer to the Eastern concept of nirvana than to the phrase “eternal life.”

The book Life After Death concludes, therefore, among many other things, that the Church has failed miserably to speak meaningfully today to its followers and outsiders alike about what is believed to happen when we die. No question could be more urgent, more universally relevant, more existential than this. Yet preachers and priests continue to mumble ancient shibboleths at funerals and elsewhere. Where, for example, has the Church made plain its response to or understanding of the now universally known near-death experience? The NDE is today familiar to everyone. Scientists debate its significance. TV programs herald its pros and cons. But from religion itself comes a deafening silence. The result is that a leading opportunity to speak to people where they are in terms they can understand is still being wholly missed. I would like to be wrong on this, but my suspicion is that churchly authorities realize that if the NDE is a real glimpse of a life beyond the grave, then there goes all that centuries-long power to say who goes where and when at the last call. Think of it: a future life may be infinitely more democratic than we supposed.

Life After Death was made into a twelve-part documentary for VisionTV and was later adapted for the Learning Channel in the U.S.A. Overall the book met with such success that the editors at McClelland & Stewart were quite keen to follow it with another similar exploration. I at once proposed a volume exploring the theme of spiritual healing in particular and alternative medicine in general. While continuing to write weekly columns (McClelland & Stewart published a collection of them under the title God Help Us in 1992) I travelled to Britain and the U.S. as well as other major centres in Canada to interview researchers and healers of all kinds and practices. I was committed to the belief that if religion has any part to play in contemporary life, it must become what it was originally intended to be—a source of healing of the whole person and of society itself. The language of healing was there—salvation means “being made whole”—but the reality too often was not. It was a fascinating task for the nearly three years it took to investigate and then write. The result was The Uncommon Touch: An Investigation of Spiritual Healing (1994). It too became a ten-part VisionTV series of the same name. Interestingly, in the same week of 2010 that this last sentence was written, the Toronto Star ran a review of a new book by an American sociologist, William Bengston, Ph.D., called Chasing the Cure. The book describes Bengston’s own career as a hands-on healer. His many lab experiments with mice, the results of which were published in peer-reviewed journals, together with documentation of positive results with human ailments ranging from several forms of cancer to diabetes, are cited as reasons to undertake wider scientific studies to examine the whole phenomenon of “energy healing.” Therapeutic Touch is now widely practised as an adjunct to regular medicine.

Other books followed quickly, as somehow the creative juices were truly flowing. There was Would You Believe? Finding God Without Losing Your Mind (1996), which aimed to set forth a reasonable framework for believing in God in an often chaotic world. Then came Prayer: The Hidden Fire in 1998, in which I explored among other things my own scary encounter with heart disease and the amazing self-healing powers of the body in creating a non-surgical bypass for a totally blocked main coronary artery. Thankfully, with appropriate medical care, the “miracle” has been fully sustained.

In 1998, having become keenly aware that the city was increasingly invading our semi-rural retreat at Wilcox Lake, we decided to make a move to the “real” country. Before long we had moved to a stone cottage–type farmhouse overlooking the sparkling waters of Georgian Bay. I continued writing the column, keeping up with major trends in religion and working on another book with Susan’s help—she has excellent editorial skills and an amazing ability to organize, which I never possessed—while together we gardened our vegetables and roses, gently updated our home and settled into a slightly quieter style of living. Bluebirds make their home around our apple trees and split-rail fencing, and the wrens in the birdhouses near our windows sing their morning matins and evening vespers. John Muir, the famous American environmentalist, once spent a year in the region near our forty-odd acres, and in a letter now in the Meaford museum he pronounced it one of the loveliest parts of North America he had visited during a lifetime of travel. We loved the peace and the feeling of freedom flowing from the wide vistas on every side. This tranquility contributed a great deal to my 2000 book, Finding the Still Point: A Spiritual Response to Stress, but it was about to be disturbed suddenly and on a major scale.

The whole thing began with the arrival one day of a letter from a Toronto clergyman in which the Reverend Larry Marshall introduced himself as a faithful reader with something he felt an urgent need to share. He wrote that during a recent long, serious illness which involved a lengthy confinement he had been surfing the Internet when one day he stumbled across the extensive work of an American author and lecturer named Alvin Boyd Kuhn. He said that from following the development of my thinking through my books and columns over the years, he felt “led” to bring Kuhn’s work to my attention. Would I mind very much, he inquired, if he were to forward copies of a few of Kuhn’s monographs on a variety of themes to me for “a quick scan”? Since one thing is certain when you are writing regularly in a newspaper—that everybody with a question, a suggestion or a criticism on your topic of choice will one day or another write to you—I was naturally somewhat cautious. I sent a note saying I was inundated with similar requests weekly, if not daily. But he didn’t let it go and so one day the inevitable brown envelope arrived with Rev. L. Marshall on the return address. It was thrown on top of a heap of mail of a similarly unwanted kind on a shelf in the study and lay there for some time.

One day, however, while tidying up, I took it down and began to glance at the contents. There were three or four papers by Alvin Boyd Kuhn, Ph.D., including one on ancient sun gods. The subject was new to me and I began to read the article with growing fascination. If what Kuhn was saying was true, the parallels and affinities between the Jesus Story and the accounts of the sun deities of the ancient Middle East and of the Vedic lore of India were not only numerous but extremely close as well. I was both surprised and intrigued. Marshall and I began an email correspondence and before long more monographs arrived. Meanwhile, Google provided some necessary background information.

Soon, apart from writing the weekly column and taking our daily walk over the fields or on a part of the Bruce Trail that winds near our home, all my time was given over to reading more and more of Kuhn. That was accompanied by reading his major sources as well. In particular, I was riveted by the writings of Gerald Massey (1828–1911), an English scholar who in his early life had become acknowledged as a poet of some note. He had then spent many years in arduous study of Christian origins, focusing particularly on ancient Egypt. Working closely with noted Assyriologists and Egyptologists at the British Museum in London, he taught himself to read Egyptian hieroglyphics. He then was able to read ancient Egyptian versions of the Book of the Dead, in which he found dozens of exact parallels between the Egyptian Son of God, Horus, and the Jesus of the Gospels. In other words, Horus, a Christ-like prototype, was in the Egyptian mythology millennia before the events recorded in the New Testament. Massey’s books and Kuhn’s four chief works, particularly The Lost Light, held me spellbound because in all my reading and training over many years I had never come across anything that was so shocking on the one hand or so uplifting and inspiring on the other.

As weeks turned into months, the more I read, the more I was convinced that what these men were saying had the ring of truth. What they had to say about the origins and nature of Christianity was not merely illuminating, it was radical to the point of explosive. Relying not only upon his own wide knowledge of Platonism, the Neoplatonists, other world religions and the Bible itself, but also on the earlier research and writings of Massey and others, Kuhn argued with passion that Christianity is indeed but a pale copy of an earlier narrative theme. The Jesus Story has been told before, most notably in the myths surrounding the Egyptian sun god Horus, the son of the god Osiris, and the goddess Isis (like Mary, called Queen of Heaven, and Theotokos, “Mother of God”). As I read on hour after hour, day after day, I was gradually transfixed by the dawning realization that if what was being said was indeed true, then my whole understanding of the faith in which I had been reared and to which I had dedicated my entire life was being called into question in a more radical way than ever before. At times it seemed as though the whole world was being turned upside down. I was semi-retired now, and so at first I would have liked to be able to deny the challenge, to refute the case being so credibly presented, to turn back the clock to before that first encounter with Kuhn’s ideas. But a determined willingness to follow the truth wherever it led left no alternative but to press ahead.

I began to read more widely in this area, including, amongst many other writings, the work of the top contemporary Egyptologist Eric Hornung. Most of today’s Egyptologists are chiefly concerned with archaeological discoveries and specific artifacts, but Hornung has made a study of the more esoteric, religious aspects of his field. For example, in The Secret Lore of Egypt: Its Impact on the West, he wrote: “Early Christianity was deeply indebted to ancient Egypt . . . There was a smooth transition from the image of the nursing Isis, Isis lactans, to that of Maria lactans. The miraculous birth of Jesus could be viewed as analogous to that of Horus . . .” I also discovered that the scholar Karl W. Luckert at the University of Chicago had written a book in 1991 about the huge debt that Christianity owes to Egyptian sources. It was called Egyptian Light and Hebrew Fire. One of many well-known authorities in the area of mythology, Joseph Campbell, said in his highly popular PBS TV series of interviews with Bill Moyers, “When you stand before the cathedral of Chartres, you will see over one of the portals of the western front an image of the Madonna as the throne upon which the child Jesus blesses the world as its Emperor. That is precisely the image [Isis and Horus] that has come down to us from most ancient Egypt. The early Fathers and the early artists took over these images intentionally.” In similar fashion, I noted that in his classic book Man and His Symbols, Carl Jung, the renowned psychiatrist and expert on mythology, said, “The Christian era itself owes its name and significance to the antique mystery of the god-man, which has its roots in the archetypal Osiris–Horus myth.”

The process of digesting all of this previously unknown material is given some space in chapter 1 of The Pagan Christ. I wrote there: “What if it is true? The implications were enormous. It meant . . . that much of the thinking of much of the civilized West has been based upon a ‘history’ that never occurred, and that the Christian Church had been founded on a set of miracles that were never performed literally . . . And that has made all the difference, a huge and immensely positive difference for my understanding of my faith and my own spiritual life. Simultaneously, it has transformed my view of the future of Christianity into one of hope.” Many things came together in a synchronism of influences, ripening ideas and insights that together gave me the courage and conviction necessary to write The Pagan Christ, to promote it through the media, and then to defend it against what I correctly foresaw would be a very formidable storm of criticism.

Looking back at the 2004 publication of The Pagan Christ, followed in 2007 by its sequel, Water into Wine, I have a deep awareness now of how perfectly it flows from all that had gone before. One has only to look at the earlier books and columns to see how the realization was already there that the only way forward for any rationally based religion of the future was that of a cosmic-oriented faith. The realization that the old creeds were now defunct and that they presented rigid, irrelevant obstacles rather than means to wider understanding was there almost from the very beginning. So too was the birth (for me) of the perception that the Jesus Story was not only a very old story but an archetypal drama of the Self in every one of us. In fact, chapter 14 in Life After Death (which offended some theologians at the time) was actually titled “The Christ Myth as the Ultimate Myth of the Self.” It was written in 1990, fourteen years before The Pagan Christ.

The part of The Pagan Christ that was the most striking and that stood the most apart from anything that had come before—also the part that I laboured over the hardest and that the media naturally exploited—was the chapter called “Was There a Jesus of History?” Other scholars as early as a hundred years ago had questioned the historicity of Jesus—and definitely the number of those doing so is growing today—but nobody mentioned them in divinity schools and certainly never from the pulpit. Indeed, if Christianity has been marked by any one single development beyond others in the past 150 years, it has been a paradoxical trend in North America particularly: on the one hand, an ever greater idolizing of a literal Jesus, who has usurped the place of God; and on the other hand, the work of critical scholars who have been busy removing the credibility of almost everything the historical Jesus is alleged to have said and done. The California-based Jesus Seminar’s twofold research projects—one into the words of Jesus, the other into his “acts”—eventually resulted in two books which between them said that less than 20 percent of either category had any claim to authenticity. Had the scores of participating scholars been less tightly connected with various Christian denominational schools and seminaries, there is no doubt in my mind that this figure would have been much smaller still.

The truth is that when my research for The Pagan Christ first began, the last thing on my mind was the possibility that it would lead where eventually it did on this issue. Once I realized that it might, I redoubled my efforts to get at the truth at all costs. Using all that I had learned at the feet of Professor Peter Brunt, my old tutor in Greek and Roman history, I checked and rechecked the very few lines of testimony that come to us from the second century CE. There is no secular evidence whatsoever for Jesus from the first century unless one ignores the fact that what Josephus, a Jewish historian who lived and wrote at that time, seems to say has been judged from earliest times to have been an egregious forgery. As pointed out in The Pagan Christ, the Jesus Story itself has a history. Indeed, it is woven into the very fabric of Western culture, its art, music and literature. It has been repeated and read literally so many myriads of times that it is the supreme meme of all time. The virtually total absence of any truly reliable hard historical evidence for the story has seldom been noticed because that’s the very essence of a meme; it is simply a unit of information repeated and repeated over and over again without question, indeed without the beginning of any thought of a question. While I don’t agree with the position of atheist Richard Dawkins, he is certainly right about this phenomenon in our culture, as outlined in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene. One of the most interesting aspects of the response to The Pagan Christ (which is continuing as I write) is that to date none of the critics who unanimously affirm Jesus’s historicity has come up with a single bit of solid evidence to support their position. Yet clearly theirs is the burden of proof. It rests upon their shoulders to establish their case. They have not done so.

What is truly significant, considering the important ramifications of this vital question, is that in the United States, in the fall of 2009, it was announced by the Scientific Committee for the Examination of Religion that the Jesus Project has been established. Noting that previous inquiries—most recently the Jesus Seminar—had not directly addressed the central issue of the historicity of Jesus and also that such undertakings in the past have always been largely directed by those with some professional ties to churches and various hierarchies, the founders of the project stated that they planned to bring together some fifty scholars from different but closely related fields over a five-year period. They have promised that the research will be done with no a priori assumptions one way or another. The total commitment is to objectivity and truth. The prevailing standards for all peer-reviewed historical investigation will be scrupulously followed and upheld. The simple question will be: “Did Jesus exist?”

While obviously it is too early to guess what the project’s findings will be, the fact that, after nearly two thousand years, such an endeavour is deemed by a scholarly body to be reasonable, academically legitimate and of some urgency says a very great deal. Clearly the matter is anything but the firm, settled and obvious “gospel truth” that a popular majority would have it believed to be.

To tell the full story of the response to The Pagan Christ would take a book of its own. There has been an incredible outpouring of letters to this day witnessing to the joy and sense of relief experienced by people from Canada and around the world, from priests and nuns to evangelical pastors, lifelong fundamentalists, writers and artists, students, agnostics and a host of others. At the same time, it must be said, an immediate torrent of negative criticism also was unleashed in the spring of 2004. It came chiefly from conservative Roman Catholics and ultra-conservative Protestant evangelicals, but there were some loud liberal voices as well. Some of the hostile email was abusive and insulting; some of it was simply vindictive; a few letters threatened reprisal, but mostly in terms that were too vague to be actionable. As expected, there were attacks upon my scholarship, attacks upon my major sources, especially upon Kuhn and Massey, attacks upon the Egyptian origins thesis, and general scorn for my even daring to suggest that the historical foundations of the Christian Story were scanty to the point of total absence. Kuhn was born in 1880 and died in 1963. The latter date is important because it is the same year in which C.S. Lewis and J.F. Kennedy died. It’s interesting that neither of these two men is dismissed on the grounds that he is from another era, but critics, desperate to find any point from which to attack Kuhn’s radical message, would try to suggest that because his work was done in that same era, it was of no importance. In the United States there was a concerted effort by some fundamentalists to savage the book and prevent its being picked up by major media. Some of them still feel so threatened that they continue to snipe away in blogs and other forms of networking.

After a long career of writing and broadcasting on the highly controversial themes of religion and ethics, I have learned that it is futile to attempt a rational debate on every issue raised by fundamentalists from any camp. But a small number of matters deserve a brief discussion here. Contrary to what one or two leading critics have maintained, the major thesis that Christianity is in large measure dependent upon ancient Egypt for its message and content—a Hebraized version of ancient Egyptian myth—is by no means an isolated or idiosyncratic view of a couple of scholarly oddities from another era. Several top scholars, including the orientalist Jacob Alexander in his recent book Atman, have acknowledged the central importance of this clear dependency of the one narrative upon earlier myths of antiquity.

Nor is the scholarship of Massey and Kuhn in any legitimate doubt. Gerald Massey, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, was chiefly known for his work as an “Egyptologist” at the time of his death. The truth is that he spent many, many years of study in the Egyptian and Assyrian wing of the British Museum at the very time that the Temple of Horus at Edfu was being excavated. He worked closely with several successive curators of this department of the museum, including Dr. Samuel Birch, the most famous Egyptologist of that day. Massey checked his facts with Birch whenever in doubt. Some commentators have even tried to undermine his authority on the ancient texts by arguing that he was an “autodidact”; in other words, he was self-taught. But this has been true of many of the world’s greatest thinkers and investigators. It certainly was true of most of the authors of the books of the Bible itself. Socrates held no university degrees; he was an autodidact. Take John Muir, the famous environmentalist already cited. He taught himself geology by hiking and investigating almost inch by inch the terrain of the Sierras and many of the sites in the United States destined to become national parks. He once had a spirited and ongoing debate with the chief geologist of the State of California over the origins of the large bowl-shaped valley that fronts the most salient rocks and cliffs of Yosemite National Park. The geologist Josiah J. Whitney, who had a doctoral degree from Harvard in his field, maintained that the apparently sunken expanse was the result of past seismic activity. Whitney ridiculed Muir as an “ignorant sheepherder.” Muir argued that it was the product of millennia of glacial and other forms of water erosion. Having traced the courses of ancient streams and rivers on foot over many years, he had learned how to tell the true history of the place. In any case, subsequent follow-up investigations by today’s geologists have proven Muir to have been right. Every scientist in this field now accepts his explanation as correct.* Frank Lloyd Wright, the leading American architect in the modern era, who died in 1959, author of twenty books, never completed a university degree of any kind either.

When you realize not only that Massey had the courage to confront the powerful Christian establishment of his day with the wholly mythical nature of their religion’s “founder” but that he dared to challenge the vaunted superiority of the white race—and most particularly that of its ruling elite in the British Empire, the English themselves—with the thesis that their religion was based upon an African original, you appreciate the amazing courage of the man. It is small wonder that only a few hundred copies of each of his important books were ever published or that there was such a strong effort made to suppress those that were. But we do well to recall that there were fewer than two thousand copies in the first printing of Charles Darwin’s epochal book On the Origin of Species.

When critics of The Pagan Christ found that I had made substantial use of the books of Alvin Boyd Kuhn, they could not accuse him of being an autodidact since he had earned his doctorate at Columbia University. Accordingly, they tried to build a case upon the fact that he had never been a professor at a university and that his thesis subject had been theosophy. In fact, Kuhn was the first scholar to examine this key subject in a fully objective, academic way. They neglected the fact that in his career as a visiting freelance lecturer on philosophy and the earliest origins of Christianity he had given over two thousand lectures to packed halls in the U.S.A. and Canada and had written six books and scores of learned monographs. While he had once been an active member of the Theosophical Society, so too had many leading thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Theosophy (literally, wisdom about or of God) helped many Western thinkers to understand for the first time the religions of the East, especially the ancient writings of the Vedic tradition in India. In the broadest sense theosophy includes all systems of intuitive knowledge of the Divine. Kuhn differed at times with its leading figures on several issues, including the importance of the natural world in any “canon of knowledge,” and upon the centrality of philosophy and mythology in all attempts to come to grips with the wisdom of the past. The point is that Kuhn was an extraordinarily well-educated man as a result both of a top-notch formal education and of his own diligent years of private study and research. He was a most able teacher in the field of comparative religion, and his late-life book A Rebirth for Christianity remains as relevant as ever. At this point I can say I found reading him to be one of the most intellectually bracing and enlightening experiences of my own lengthy career. The truth has to be squarely faced: his critics dislike him and try to savage him because they dislike what he has to say. Its truth or untruth ultimately seems the least of their concerns.

What I find of special interest is that at the very time when the towering scholar Northrop Frye was telling his students that if there was any history in the Bible, it was there by accident—history is not what the Bible is about—Kuhn was writing his brilliant monograph Science and Religion. In it he wrote: “The only hope of lifting religion out from under the pall of hypnotic superstition is to effect the disenchantment of the Western mind of its obsession that the Old Testament is Hebrew history . . . As history it is next to valueless; as allegory and drama of the interplay of God and man’s linked potencies in the human organism, it holds immeasurable enlightenment for all humanity.” Both men were struggling to end the world’s obsession with religious literalism knowing that, as St. Paul said, the letter kills, while it is the Spirit that gives life.

Elsewhere I have written that whether or not the Jesus Story is historical is not in the end of the greatest importance. After all, one can never prove a negative, and so even though no evidence may be found, it will never be possible to prove conclusively that Jesus never existed. And that has certainly never been a goal of my studies. My sole aim and hope is to have shown that it is the Story itself that bears the meaning and significance of this “Hero’s tale.” However, I wish to return here to a most important strand in the overall narrative for which none of the critics whom I have read or met appears to have an answer or a solution. I am thinking specifically of the quite astounding silence of the earliest witness in the New Testament, indeed of the one who is responsible himself for a large portion of that entire document, namely St. Paul. I raised this crucial issue in the chapter of The Pagan Christ entitled “Was There a Jesus of History?” but it merits further expansion here because in so many ways Paul is the real founder of Christianity. Without him it would have remained a small and soon-expiring Jewish sect.

It must be kept in mind that all of the authentic letters of Paul belong to the period from about 55 to 60 CE. His opus does not include several of the letters attributed to him in the King James Version of the Bible, for example, the Epistle to the Hebrews, II Thessalonians and the pastoral epistles—I and II Timothy and Titus. This finding is based upon significant differences of language, style and theological point of view. In addition, most critical scholars today regard the authorship of Colossians and Ephesians (traditionally also attributed to Paul) as highly debatable as well. They are most probably best described as deutero-Pauline, that is to say, highly influenced by Pauline motifs but plainly later in date.

The problem is not that Paul never mentions Jesus Christ. He does so frequently, although curiously enough he never once speaks of him as “Jesus of Nazareth.” Nazareth makes no appearance whatever. What is puzzling is that Paul makes no firm biographical references to Jesus. The bulk of what is said about Jesus in the four Gospels has to do with two categories of activity: his miracles and his teachings. But with a silence that scholars such as G. Bornkamm have described as “astonishing,” Paul makes no direct references to either of these. Miracles were widely regarded in the Judaism of that time as expected accompaniments of any would-be valid claim to Messianic authenticity. Jesus purportedly performed dozens of them, but Paul says not a word in this regard. The silence over Jesus’s teachings is perhaps even more surprising since Paul’s letters are filled with moral admonitions, often upon subjects where Jesus reportedly had much to say himself. Surely Paul’s arguments would have been enormously strengthened if he had been able to quote from the Master. But, quite surprisingly, he does not.

One instance of this discrepancy has always leaped out at me as particularly glaring, and I have yet to read a persuasive conservative response to the dilemma it poses. What I have in mind is a very moving passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. It is in chapter 8, one of my favourite chapters in this, his most famous letter. Speaking of prayer, the Apostle makes the quite startling statement in verse 26: “For we know not what we should pray for as we ought . . .” Here, if anywhere, if it really was an accepted tradition based on historical fact and he knew about it, is the place one would expect him to quote or in some way refer to the Lord’s Prayer. After all, remember that in the Gospels Jesus is said in Matthew 6:9 to have introduced the prayer with the words: “Pray then like this . . .” He is responding to a direct request from his disciples: “Lord, teach us how to pray.” But Paul nowhere cites this prayer in whole or in part! This is little short of astounding.

The British scholar George A. Wells, who has written seven books on the mythical nature of the New Testament’s portrayal of Jesus, sifts the relevant Pauline materials extremely finely. He finds it particularly revealing that when it comes to the Crucifixion—which is so basic to Paul’s thinking about Jesus—there is no mention of significant historical details of any kind. In Did Jesus Exist? Wells states: “Even when he [Paul] writes of Jesus’s death in I Corinthians 2:8 he says nothing of Pilate, or of Jerusalem, but declares Jesus was crucified at the instigation of wicked angels—‘the rulers of this age.’” The truth is that when it comes to when Jesus is supposed to have died on the Cross, or indeed when he was supposed to have entered upon his human phase of existence in the first place, Paul is incredibly vague to the point of hopelessness. The distinguished New Testament scholar Ernst Kasemann finds that this scantiness of witness concerning concrete circumstances of the Crucifixion, where Paul’s theology “is so deeply engaged, is positively shocking.” Of course, like Horus of Egypt and all the other man-gods of antiquity, Jesus is said to have been “born of a woman.” Because he was allegedly fulfilling Jewish prophecies, Paul also can say he was “born of the seed of David” and “born under the law,” but this is not historical evidence at all. There were many centuries between David’s time and Jesus’s, but Paul tells us nothing that indicates in which one of them Jesus’s life was believed to have taken place. What is more, Paul never mentions the virgin birth or empty tomb! In short, Paul’s Christ was a spiritual or mystical Christ, not a man of flesh and blood at all.

There is so much that could be added, but that would take yet another volume. Let me conclude by saying that for me the most powerful argument of all against the view that Jesus was a historical person—and not what literary critic Harold Bloom has named “a theological God” specifically constructed by the early Church—is this: the amazingly varied theologies (Christologies) of Jesus Christ in the pages of the New Testament itself. There are at least six or seven opposing pictures of who he was assumed to be. To quote Kasemann once more, if he had truly lived, early Christian literature would not “show nearly everywhere churchly and theological conflicts and fierce quarrels between opponents” who disagreed “radically” as to “what kind of person he was.”

Having read the attempted explanations of the critics, I want to stress two things:

1. The position on the non-historicity of Jesus taken in The Pagan Christ and now held by an increasing number of scholars has never been given credible rebuttal; and

2. It is impossible to convince those who have already decided never to alter their opinions come what may. With the great majority of rank-and-file Christians, as well as most of their clergy, this seems to be the case. Some of the latter, including those who really should know better, have told me frankly that they have not read The Pagan Christ for fear of “upsetting my beliefs.” So much for the promise that the Holy Spirit will guide us “into all truth.”

* The Wilderness World of John Muir by Edwin Teale, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1976, p. xix.