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MOST OF US, particularly when we have had some measure of success in life, are reluctant to reveal or discuss our weaknesses, failures or defeats. Certainly this is so for me. Yet as Jung and others have made clear, facing one’s shadow with all its latent strength as well as its more negative powers is essential to one’s individuation and growth towards greater maturity. As the great “doctor of the soul” points out in Modern Man in Search of a Soul, anything of substance must of necessity have or throw a shadow. Evil walks pari passu with the good.

There were a couple of major events that, if not necessarily failures, at any rate highlighted a need for a radical change of direction in my personal narrative. Some aspects of these are necessarily painful, but the ultimate meaning and outcome were enormously fruitful and liberating. There was no voice from above, no heavenly vision, no sudden inner light, but throughout even the most difficult, yes, even the darkest hours, the realization of a divine Presence close by me and within made it possible to carry on. And I discovered that coming to terms with one’s shadow, including the darkness of disappointment, depression or loneliness, can be the prelude to a release of fresh creativity and of deeper joy.

Each of the events about to be described is connected to the others by a common thread: a hitherto largely unconscious bondage and subservience to the parental matrix, with all its many-sided demands. In particular, in the early 1960s, when I was a married man with children of my own, the rector of a large and thriving parish, and a budding lecturer at Wycliffe College in the University of Toronto, I was still thoroughly in thrall to the authority of my father. Just as my parents had chosen a career as a minister for me from the moment of my conception, so too it was they who had first suggested that I apply for the post of rector at my first parish, St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines. As mentioned earlier, they had even picked out the evangelical Anglican church I would attend when I went to Oxford!

It was of course no accident that West Hill, where the church of St. Margaret’s was located, was only about a twenty-minute drive from my parents’ Scarborough home. They began to attend the services, even Bible study groups and other mid-week activities. Sometimes they would show up at the rectory early on Saturday morning and begin tidying up the garage or our other casual belongings in the vicinity in order to preserve the proper dignified image for any chance visitors or passersby. Worse, they interfered frequently with Mary’s routines and disciplines for our two children at that time, arriving without warning just when they were being put to bed or handing out candy even after hearing they were not to have any. As they say in England about such unwanted or misdirected activities, “they meant well.” That’s a warning, not a compliment. The truth is that I was not as outspoken or as direct as I ought to have been in warding off or stopping the interference.

In fact, in retrospect I see that I was not yet prepared to face what my unconscious was screaming in my dreams and in a general sense of inner tension and unease. Things in the parish were going very well, but I always felt under the strain of not doing enough. My father would ask from time to time, “How many conversions have there been?” And there were signs of trouble in the marriage as well. Mary had reasons enough, but my failure fully to understand what lay behind the many outbursts only made them worse. When there were the inevitable arguments and quarrels, I would piously blame myself for lack of grace and so resorted to prayer instead of looking deeper for the root causes.

Against this backdrop, as the struggle to build the congregation continued at the same time as the planning for the erection of a new church building was proceeding apace, my father had begun a fresh campaign to persuade me to return to academic life and obtain a Ph.D., or rather the Oxford D.Phil. I had already spent nine years at university preparing for my ministry, so the thought of at least two, possibly three more years of slogging completely left me cold. I had fear, not of being unable to do it, but of ending up in total poverty. My years of study even on scholarships had not been conducive to a bank balance worthy of the name, and while the Anglican Church may be generous with titles and other honours, it was not at that time very supportive where clergy salaries were concerned.

At the same time, I knew that my father’s vision for his firstborn was that one day I would teach as a professor at the bastion of Anglican evangelicalism in Canada, Wycliffe College. Though by that time I would have shied away from being labelled a fundamentalist, I still saw myself as very much a part of the conservative evangelical point of view, with its emphasis upon Scripture and upon the need for a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. My friends in the clergy of all denominations and my other personal contacts consisted chiefly of those with a similar outlook. Even though I did not share my father’s far-fetched dream that I would one day be the leader of a movement that would transform Canada into a national evangelical base for a worldwide mission, I was enjoying the part-time teaching I was already doing. I loved reading and research, and the prospect of being relieved of some of the more tedious aspects of parish ministry held some appeal. Also, I was concerned about the future of Christianity and convinced that the training of young people for ministry was absolutely critical for any hope of renewal.

So, about a year after fulfilling the eleventh commandment for young clergy in the late 1950s and early 1960s, “Thou shalt get thy church deeply in debt,” by building the new St. Margaret’s, I applied for acceptance as a doctoral candidate at Oxford. The choice of Oxford over an American or Canadian university seemed wisest because, as a graduate student there, I had already fulfilled the basic residence requirement. By returning to my old college, Oriel, for one year, I could then be approved and come home to write the thesis on my own turf. The bishop, Rt. Rev. George Snell, was not very happy about my decision when I announced it to him in a hastily called appointment in his Adelaide Street office. He grumbled about my leaving the parish so soon after the dedication of a new and costly building. But he was somewhat mollified when I said I would come back for at least a year after Oxford to “round things off” properly.

Unfortunately, the entire Oxford project was not planned or thought out as fully as it ought to have been. Wycliffe was pressuring me to rush ahead because the New Testament professor, Rev. Dr. Ronald Ward, had served notice he would be leaving his post in the spring of 1964. It was already about mid-March 1962. There was no scholarship money available and, since I had decided to take the family, there would be considerable expense involved: the boat passage there and back for two adults and two children, house rental, food and transportation for a year, plus the university fees and other sundry expenses.

In retrospect, one can see only too readily that it was one of those times and places where youthful exuberance combined with failure to consult one’s own inner wisdom rather than that of others. The result was undue haste and poor planning. In any case, I arranged for my father to sell our car, and having contracted for a retired American Episcopal (Anglican) priest to live with his wife in the rectory and administer the parish in our absence, we set sail for England in August 1962.

It proved to be one of the most conflicted years of my life in spite of some moments of great illumination as well. The house we rented on Aston Street, off the Iffley Road in east Oxford, was dark and dingy beyond belief, its walls and furnishings every possible shade of brown. The only heat, until purchase of a coal oil–fuelled space heater, was a small fireplace in the kitchen. Coal for it had to be purchased at an ironmonger’s shop, brought home in a bag on the handlebars of the “sit-up-and-beg” antique bicycle I used for transportation, and then hammered into usable pieces in a dark dungeon of a cellar. There was no refrigerator, just a “cold cupboard” near the rear wall of the kitchen that actually had mushroom-like fungi growing out of one or two shelves because of the dampness. We managed to make the kitchen and upstairs bathroom reasonably bright and cozy, but the whole experience had a lot of the features of a year-long camping trip.

The really important thing was getting on course for my research. Because of my own ongoing interest in and commitment to a practised faith, one that made sense not just intellectually but experientially too, I had decided to do my research on one of the greatest preachers of early Christianity, St. John Chrysostom. His very name in Greek means “golden-mouthed” or, in other words, superlatively eloquent. Chrysostom (c.347–407) was made the Patriarch of Constantinople in 398. The city had been inaugurated in 330 by Emperor Constantine as the capital city for the Eastern Roman Empire. I knew that all of Chrysostom’s hundreds of sermons and commentaries had been faithfully recorded in Greek (with a Latin translation added later), and it seemed logical to me that a faithful investigation of this huge store of wisdom could be worthwhile. What, I wanted to ask, did such a great expositor of the Bible and of earliest Christianity teach as the essence of a living faith in day-to-day experience? Eventually, I sharpened the focus: the work and experience of God’s Holy Spirit in the life of a believer, according to Chrysostom.

Two problems immediately presented themselves. In the first place, Oxford was at that time totally out of sync with graduate studies programs at American universities. There was a system in place in the sciences, but in the humanities it was a very mixed bag indeed. Very few of the college dons had doctoral degrees themselves, and not all professors had one either. The MA (Oxon.) in Greats that I had earned previously was considered equivalent to a doctorate and sufficient academic preparation provided the person concerned had gone on to make good use of the tools already given to him or her. More particularly, however, amazing as it seemed to me, there was nobody in the theology or other faculties of the numerous colleges who was judged, on inquiry, sufficiently well read in the work of the great “doctor of the Church” to become my supervisor. I spent several anxious weeks in September and October interviewing nearly a dozen of some of the best-known Biblical and patristic scholars at the university, including Henry Chadwick, George Caird, Samuel Greenslade and the Dean of Christ Church, Dr. F.L. Cross, who edited the first edition of the well-known Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. These were all noted scholars and acknowledged authorities on early Christianity; their collected published books would make a small library. But none of them saw Chrysostom as his “cup of tea,” as one of them put it. One or more of them nevertheless urged me to bring my knowledge of German up to speed, and so I added a German tutor to my schedule.

Finally it was decided that my best recourse would be to seek out the guidance of a non-university Anglican priest of immense learning who occasionally helped out with unusual situations such as mine. His was a small but very ancient parish deep in the countryside south of Oxford. It was arranged that I should go down by train to meet him, have lunch at the rectory, discuss my aims and return to Oxford the same afternoon. The Reverend Father Chitty was an energetic, wispy-haired man of advanced years whose agile quickness belied his age. His black outfit and white collar at once marked him out for me on the platform as the train pulled into the station, and I soon was having the ride of my life as we careened around narrow, winding lanes at breakneck speed in his beaten-up old Austin. As we lurched around one particularly sharp bend, the passenger door flew open, struck the stone wall and banged shut again. This happened twice more as he shouted out something about meaning to get “the blessed thing” fixed.

I counted us both lucky when we at last pulled up in a lane with a picturesque Norman-style church on one side and a three-storey eighteenth-century rectory on the other. It was a labyrinthine, drafty old place within, but we were soon in his study with its stacks of books not just on sagging shelves to the ceiling on all sides but piled high on every available inch of space on chairs and on the floor itself. In spite of a glowing coal fire, the air seemed damp and smelled of mildew.

We talked for a while about Chrysostom and he pulled out a couple of tomes and hunted for a particular passage he wanted to share. When he found it and urged me to take a look, I found the Greek text almost impossible to read because of something I had never come upon before: some of the characters were illegible because there were actual wormholes through the pages. One hears of bookworms, but apparently they’re very real. Their presence in his library didn’t affect his obvious enthusiasm, however, and the time passed very quickly.

My spirits had been sagging badly, but the possibility of being mentored by such a learned and lively character gave a glimmer of hope. Chitty had kindly invited me to stay for the noonday meal, and since the impression it left with me has lasted all down the years, a brief description should be forgiven. At the ringing of a bell, a most varied collection of people—relatives both distant and immediate, plus a couple of elderly parishioners—descended the stairs and gathered around a large oval table in the capacious dining room. Some wore several sweaters and scarves. A couple were wearing rather soiled neckcloths or bandages denoting, I supposed, some kind of throat ailment. One had a racking cough. As we assembled, I was rather wickedly thinking of the colourful verse in the Book of Revelation: “And the sea gave up its dead.” It certainly could have been a scene out of a Charles Dickens novel. The crockery was of noble vintage but cracked and worn. The soup and the other dishes were excellent, however, in spite of everything, and the conversation was highly entertaining. I had a lot to ponder on the train journey back to Oxford. I wondered more than once, though, just what I was doing and where the path would lead.

Study of Chrysostom’s voluminous sermons now consumed many hours each day. Sometimes I worked in the Oriel College library above the senior common room. At others, for a change of atmosphere, I toiled in the world-famous Bodleian Library or went over to Pusey House, several blocks west of Oriel and built on a much smaller, more intimate scale. The connecting thread of my growing notes was anything that threw light on the central theme of the life of faith as viewed through a towering early Christian understanding and perception. When I tired of the Greek, I read the Latin translation, and my facility in both languages steadily deepened and grew apace.

Every month I sent a newsletter back to West Hill to be read aloud at a Sunday service in order to keep my congregation up to date with our activities and our impressions of life in a thriving though ancient university city overseas. On one occasion I even gave a sermon by telephone link-up that was broadcast from the pulpit in St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines at a regular eleven a.m. service. The late Aubrey Wice, religion reporter for the Toronto Telegram, did a special feature article on it in a Saturday edition.

Few places I have known can be more depressing, in spite of all its beauty, than Oxford in the autumn when the fog rises up from the Isis and from the Cherwell River, blotting out the landscape and colleges alike. One rather dismal, foggy afternoon near the end of October, I was walking past Christ Church College garden when I had a most significant encounter. Walking towards me in the semigloom was my old Greek and Roman history professor, Peter Brunt. He carried a cane, as was his habit when he took his obligatory exercise break each day, and his hair was as tousled as I remembered it being when last I saw him nearly a decade earlier, in 1954. He always ran his hands through it as he listened to one’s essay or strove to make a point in his critique of the same.

Brunt, who was to go on to hold the prestigious chair in Ancient History not long afterwards, told me that he had heard I had come back. Pointing his cane at me, he then demanded, “What are you doing here?” I explained that I had returned to do a Doctor of Philosophy degree (D.Phil.) in order to teach at my old theological college. He almost snorted with surprise and not a little indignation. He said, “What kind of American nonsense is that? You have an excellent MA in Greats from here that is certainly the equivalent of any doctoral degree elsewhere. You have the brains and have gained the tools for research to add to the overall sum of knowledge. I should have thought you would have been better to stay at home to get on with it!” I was left practically speechless by this, and after promising I would bring Mrs. Harpur and the two girls to tea at the college the following week, I mumbled a hasty farewell and walked on into the gathering night.

Brunt’s words came as a numbing shock. I thought about them over and over as I walked around Christ Church Meadow and listened as the melancholy bells of the college clocks and the churches, more per acre than in any other city on earth, counted out the passing time.

During the weeks that followed, the research went on as before, punctuated by breaks when I attended specific lectures to broaden my knowledge of the state of Biblical studies and of the latest thinking about the origins and nature of early Christianity. But the words of my former tutor kept sounding in my mind. As I thought about returning to the rush and pressure of a busy, growing parish, teaching one day a week at Wycliffe, and at the same time trying to pull my research together and begin to write the thesis, it began to sink in that I had really taken on a vastly tougher assignment than I had originally bargained for.

A letter soon afterwards from Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt, Wycliffe’s principal, informed me that I had been appointed in absentia as Associate Professor of New Testament and Greek. I was to assume part-time duties in the fall of 1964, one year after my return from fulfilling the residence requirement in Oxford. My duties—and, not insignificantly, my salary—would be part-time to permit me to complete the D.Phil. It was expected I would augment my wage with an honorary appointment as assistant on weekends in one of the more well-to-do suburban parishes. Lodging for me and the family would be a large, drafty apartment in the college itself overlooking Hart House. The previous New Testament professor, Dr. Ward, had also lived there for some years during his tenure.

The prospect of the next few years—seemingly endless studies, insufficient funds with more debts already beginning to accrue, a family to provide for and, at the height of my vigour and ability, having to be in effect a sort of second-grade professor alongside the rest of a faculty who were all full professors—began to depress me. I seemed engaged in one of the world’s most solitary tasks, sitting for hours by myself in a chilly library surrounded by voices from the past. Oxford in the deep mid-winter is not, as already hinted, the most jocund spot on earth. The depression grew darker and I began to find it hard to concentrate. Sleep was difficult and troubled. Praying seemed to be in vain. In one way, it was a dark night of the soul. I became aware of a growing, pent-up anger. It was rage, but with an unknown cause or object. I began to blame myself for a lack of faith. But more prayers and attempts at piety—Bible reading and churchgoing—only seemed to make things worse.

Then one Sunday evening I went to a lecture called “A Christian Psychologist Speaks Out” at an Anglican church in the city centre. The speaker was Frank Lake, MD, a former counsellor to Christian missionaries in India (whoever would have thought that missionaries needed clinical counselling?). He impressed me so much and I was feeling caught in such a quandary that I went up to him afterwards and asked if it might be possible to see him sometime about my problem. We agreed on a time and place for a week later, and it proved to be one of the wisest steps I had taken in a very long time.

We met for two very lengthy conversations overall. Gently, but at the same time firmly, he helped me to bring to consciousness my undue anxiety to please my parents, especially my father. He helped me to see the sources of my anger, so long and so carefully concealed under a “nice guy” persona. He helped me to unpack all of my reasons for being back at Oxford and showed how some were noble, some were much less so, and how one stood out above all: “because my father said I should go.” Most helpfully, he said there is a place for right-directed rage. “You will be depressed because you are holding down so much anger,” he said. “That takes great energy. Get out in the country alone somewhere and shout it out. Allow yourself to be angry with God, too. He can take it!” He added that whatever I decided to do about my future, it was very clear that I had some big decisions to make.

I have necessarily condensed this episode, but it was a turning point in my life in so many ways. I felt gradually a great sense of release and of returning energies. It was as though I had been standing with a foot on the hose while at the same time hoping for water. I wrote home to my parents to say that I was going to accept the post at Wycliffe, after fulfilling my promise to the bishop of a full year back in the parish, but that I was reconsidering whether or not to pursue a D.Phil. My father’s dream had been of my being a staff member, a professor, at a leading evangelical place of higher learning. Well, he would have his dream, but no longer on his terms.

Experience has shown me that once you make the right decision, events have a way of coming together so as to confirm it, sometimes again and again. I was about to receive a couple of very clear signs of my need to change tack.

I had been attracted to Chrysostom in the first place because of my deep interest in a theology not of the academy but of the heart. He had the reputation of being the most eloquent preacher ever to grace a pulpit and of garnering packed crowds whenever he spoke. I wanted to discover and lay out for myself and others his power to connect. My thinking had been particularly influenced by a passage from Carl Jung that I had read while in the parish some months earlier. In his marvellous little book of essays already cited, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung speaks of the many hundreds of people from every race whom he had treated over the years. He writes: “Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over age thirty-five, there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life . . . Every one of them fell ill because he had lost that which the living religions of every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.” My interest was in finding ways of expressing such a “religious outlook” in terms people today could readily understand, in the same way that Chrysostom had touched the people of his own time. The year back at Oxford had helped to deepen my awareness that merely repeating the old evangelical dogmas was not the path to such an end.

Keeping all of this in mind, the reader can imagine my shock and sense of dismay at gradually discovering two things that somehow had been either wholly forgotten or not sufficiently well grasped by the various scholars whom I had consulted both before and after my return to Oxford. The first unpleasant surprise came one day while I was reading more of Chrysostom. I happened across his Discourses Against the Jews. They were given in 386 and 387 during his preaching days in Antioch, capital of Syria and one of the leading centres of Christian learning and teaching in the fourth century and beyond. There are eight sermons, and while much of the anti-Semitism in them is directed against Christians who were observing certain Jewish rituals and festivals, the racism against Jews and their religion is absolutely virulent and shameful. (Note that the term “anti-Semitism” only appeared in 1879, and so is a modern idea; but anti-Judaism and antipathy to Jews as a race predates Christianity itself.) To my shock and dismay, Jews are called pigs by Chrysostom and accused of drunkenness. All Jews are “Cains,” that is, murderers. He denounces Jews as lecherous, rapacious, “perfidious murderers of Christ.” God, he rants, “always hated the Jews. It is essential that all Christians hate them.” In another passage Chrysostom, the leading light of the emerging faith that was to conquer what was left of the Roman Empire and spread around the globe, declares: “The other disease which my tongue is called to cure is the most difficult . . . and what is the disease? The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews which are soon approaching.”

There is more, much more, some of it much worse than this. One is reminded of the disgraceful vituperation against Jews by the renowned Protestant reformer Martin Luther, in his Table Talk. Anyone interested in learning more about all of this can research it on the Internet, looking especially at “The Surprise of Finding Anti-Semitism in the Heart of the Early Church Fathers.”

My mind was reeling from the impact of my discovery. The next day I forsook the libraries and my customary work of translating Chrysostom in search of nuggets of wisdom and instead spent a day walking for miles out along the towpath by the Isis, north of the city. I paid scant heed to the horses and cattle grazing in the vast expanse of Port Meadow or to the occasional college “eight” that rowed past with a repetitive crunch of oars hitting the water as a single stroke. I was too deep in thought to be distracted by any of that. I realized there was no way I could devote any further time, let alone the next couple of years, to, as they say, “learning more and more about less and less,” in trying to distill a thesis from the life and work of such a remarkable bigot. I am aware of the numerous attempts since then to whitewash this aspect of Chrysostom’s preaching—to “see it in context” or allow for this or that allegedly ameliorating factor. But the unvarnished truth is that he preached hatred against Jews on theologically based grounds, and it remains what it always was—a scandal.

The second, and by then unnecessary, confirmation of my decision to surrender the whole plan of doctoral studies on Chrysostom also came from my ever-deeper immersion in his thinking. In the kind of ironic twist that life at times confronts us with, it was gradually dawning upon me that Chrysostom’s approach to the Bible was in essence diametrically opposed not just to some of the Fathers whom I most admired in earliest Christianity (most notably Clement of Alexandria, followed by the great Origen, c.185–c.254 CE) but to my own deepest instincts. I was learning day by day that the greatest preacher of the early centuries was himself a rigid literalist as he expounded Holy Scripture. In fact, he was the key advocate for the entire Antiochene school of Bible exegesis based upon wholly literalist principles. In short, he was a fundamentalist roughly 1,500 years before the term was even coined! The more I was learning about theology in general, the less appeal this entire approach had for either my heart or my brain.

That Easter I attended a two-week special seminar in Switzerland held by the World Council of Churches. It was designed to immerse budding theologians of different denominations in the world of Eastern Orthodoxy, both the theology and the worship. The first week was spent hearing lectures and participating in discussion groups at Château de Bossy, the WCC’s unique conference centre by the lake, about fifteen miles from Geneva. From there we travelled by bus through glorious scenery to a Russian Orthodox monastery in the nineteenth arrondissement of Paris for Holy Week and Easter Day. Since I knew very little about the Orthodox churches, it was a mind-expanding experience of the first order. The choir of the monastery was made up of a group of Serbian men, and listening to them brought back memories of hearing the Don Cossacks singers at Massey Hall years before. The unaccompanied singing was powerful, haunting and beautiful at the same time.

The balance of my year of graduate studies at Oxford was spent in attending the odd lecture in the general field of New Testament and in pounding the books in the libraries to get up to speed on the latest scholarship with a view to eventually taking on the job of teaching at Wycliffe College.

On our return to Toronto, I still had to fulfill my commitment to pick up my ministry at St. Margaret’s-in-the-Pines for an additional year, as promised to Bishop Snell. At the college, the New Testament chair or professorship was now vacant and the principal, Rev. Dr. Leslie Hunt, was anxious to have me give at least one two-hour class a week while the rest of the faculty filled in the gaps as best they could. Since there were plenty of loose ends to be picked up in the parish due to my absence, and inasmuch as the teaching, with preparation and travel time included, meant a whole day at least downtown, I had a busy schedule indeed. As well, there seemed to be more demand for baptisms, weddings and funerals than ever before. And in the spring, our third child, Mary Catharine, was born and our family was complete.

In the late summer of 1964, the men of the parish helped us to move into our new quarters at the college with the aid of a large rented truck. Our lodging was to be an ancient, rambling two-storey apartment above some lecture rooms in the college itself. The living and dining rooms looked out upon the athletic wing of Hart House to the south and Queen’s Park, behind the Ontario Parliament buildings, to the east. The children loved the storybook nature of the place, with its high ceilings, numerous staircases and even a quaint former coal fireplace. Being in the heart of downtown Toronto and yet in the midst of such a park-like setting, with the university campus all around, was a major change from the rapidly expanding suburb of West Hill we had just left. They enjoyed it all to the hilt.

In many ways academic life suited my particular personality and training. I had always had a love of learning and an interest in communicating ideas to others. So I threw myself into the ongoing task of thoroughly updating my awareness of where Biblical studies were going and where they had been in the past. There were fresh lectures to prepare and graduate seminars as well. What interests me most looking back is the way in which my entire approach to the Bible in general and the New Testament in particular was changing as my knowledge increased. Serious questions, some of which have not yet been answered to my satisfaction, others of which came to fruition in the research leading up to The Pagan Christ, began to occupy more and more of my study time. To understand what was going on, one has to realize that the average person in the pew, never mind the average person in the street, hasn’t much more than a faint clue, if that, of just how incredibly complex the task of interpreting the Bible has become in the light of all that is now known. Take for example the Gospels. At first sight they seem to be simple, straightforward narratives. In its outline, the Jesus Story that they all tell is quite transparently set forth. But whole libraries could be composed of commentaries and a host of other books and dictionaries struggling to explicate their true nature and meaning.

The Gospels may appear to be biographies of a historical person who was also the “Son of God.” But looked at with discernment and in the clear light of day, it soon becomes very apparent that they are not like any other biographies ever written. In fact, they are not biographies at all; they are best described as a benign form of Christian propaganda. In other words, their aim is to convert others to the Christian faith. They have little or no concern for the five Ws of any normal historical narrative: who, why, what, where, when. None of the authors (or editors) of the Gospels is known for certain. Nor are their precise dates or places of origin. The earliest of the four, generally agreed to be Mark, has no birth story or reference to anything in Jesus’s life until John the Baptist comes out of the desert preaching and he is baptized by him. We know nothing about Jesus’s appearance, whether he was bearded or clean-shaven, short or tall, slim or chubby, with long or short hair, blue-eyed or brown. Absolutely nothing. To add to the confusion, the Gospels frequently contradict one another. For example, Matthew and Luke disagree over Jesus’s place of birth, and the Resurrection accounts differ markedly, as I have shown in Water into Wine.

I found it difficult at times, since the students were almost uniformly conservative in outlook—that’s why they came to Wycliffe in the first place—to raise these kinds of issues with them. For certain, the question of whether or not Jesus was a truly historical person was a cloud “no larger than a man’s hand” on my horizon at the time, so it was never mentioned at all. Some of the largest and growing questions in my mind were accordingly kept in pectore, as is said when the Pope wishes to keep secret the names of certain cardinals whom he has elevated until it is politically safe to reveal them. Nevertheless, the Form Critics (scholars who study the literary form of Scripture material) had to be dealt with. They had given evidence that many if not most of the Gospel stories had had a lengthy history outside the New Testament before being included, and that they conformed to certain recognized literary formulae, whether they were stories of miracles or brief anecdotes ending in a pithy saying. And there was much, much more. While expounding familiar texts in the classroom, I was privately busy with some more acute academic puzzles and difficulties of my own. They would be many years in the background of my thinking and research.

In the sixties, when I did most of my seminary teaching—apart from the lectures given on the theology and practice of mass media in the first half of the eighties at the Toronto School of Theology—one of the foremost themes in New Testament scholarship was the increasing interest in the alleged Jewishness of Jesus. I duly relayed this to the students in class, but at the same time there was a dimension of this development that it seemed nobody was addressing. I had no immediate answer myself, but the question niggled away on the fringes of my consciousness all the same. The problem was this: The scholars were (and today still are) convinced that if there was a historical Jesus in first-century Judea, he undoubtedly spoke Aramaic, a Semitic dialect, as his native tongue. It makes perfect sense that his words and deeds would later be translated and put forth into the wider Mediterranean world in Hellenistic Greek, the lingua franca of that world ever since Alexander the Great’s conquests in the fourth century BCE. But where are the supposed Aramaic originals of the Gospels to be found? Since obviously the redactors or editors of the four Gospels, whoever they actually were, purported to believe that the acts and sayings of Jesus were those of the divine Son of God, why were these not held worthy of being preserved in their pristine, original form? True, there are one or two Aramaic words preserved in the Gospel records, but their amazing paucity merely serves to highlight this lacuna in the “birthing” materials all the more. Let it be stressed that this is no minor matter for scholarly quibbling; it is an omission of huge proportions to be faced by traditionalist thinking. Yet for the most part it is—like many such issues—simply glossed over or ignored completely.

While it was clear to me that the New Testament documents, at least in the form they have come down to us, were chiefly the work of Jewish hands and minds, certain other aspects of this situation troubled me as well. There were two specifics in particular that raised for the first time in my mind the possibility that perhaps the Jesus Story might be the telling of an older, more universal tale in a carefully Judaized dress or terminology. Accepting for a moment the Jewish matrix for the story, that of a Saviour figure for the world, how can one explain the wholly remarkable fact that the central sacred, ritual meal—the chief sacrament—laid down for all times in these texts, sets forth and celebrates the eating and drinking of the body and blood of the God himself? Anyone who has ever read Leviticus or who knows anything whatsoever about Judaism then or today, anyone who understands even one iota of the beliefs about the kosher killing of animals and kosher food in general, knows how utterly abominable all of this sounds in Jewish ears. Abominable and blasphemous too. Indeed, it was commonplace in the various Mystery Religions and other circles in the ancient world, but we are talking about one of the most un-Jewish of all conceivable ideas. Even if, as surely most reasonable people do, one understands the terminology to be symbolic or metaphorical in nature, the problem for Jews remains simply enormous.

The second problematic “specific” in relation to the growing emphasis upon the Jewishness of Jesus—and let it be said that in general I believed this to be an overdue and hence welcome correction of a previous tendency to overlook the Jewish content of the New Testament almost entirely—has to do with the very nature of the Jesus Story itself. As said above, it is the narrative of a Saviour man-God come for the deliverance of all mankind. But as the earliest critics of Christianity in its infancy were quick to point out, this dying/rising God soteriology (to use the technical term for a theory of salvation) was already well known in the other religions of Mediterranean and other Middle Eastern antiquity. Even the very first Christian apologists, Justin Martyr and Irenaeus for example, were profoundly embarrassed by the obvious parallels with the Mystery Religions and came up with far-fetched and even contradictory explanations. I was to become more aware much later in my career of the extent to which this was a thorny obstacle to the traditional telling of the Christian story, but it troubled me then also from time to time.

Unfortunately, I had more than enough on my plate in meeting the demands of a fairly heavy lecture load, plus doing Sunday duty to supplement Wycliffe’s less than bountiful salary schedule, to be able to devote the kind of time it required to further research just at that moment. But the question was there to be pondered at odd breaks in the college rhythms, even at times in chapel when thoughts should have been elsewhere. It returned again repeatedly throughout all the following years. Here is the question starkly put: “How do those who deny that there is direct input to Christianity from Pagan religions account for the glaring fact that there is no basis or pattern in ancient Judaism for a dying/rising-again Saviour motif?” Yes, there is the Suffering Servant of Deutero-Isaiah—who seems to represent or personify the Nation of Israel as a whole—but no suffering-dying-rising God. From today’s vantage point I realize that I was far from ready for the answer. The stakes at a very deep level were much too high.

Early on in the course of preparing a series of lectures on the Sermon on the Mount one summer, I realized that the latest commentaries and Bible dictionaries were now emphasizing the to me radically disturbing truth that, as hinted at already, virtually none of the material was original. The “Sermon” pronouncements—Matthew chapters 5 to 7—are now recognized as a collection of logia, or sayings, rather than as one continuous discourse. Interestingly, the mountain on which the Sermon is supposed to have taken place remains unnamed and its situation vague. (In Luke a shorter version of the same “Sermon” is said to have taken place, not on a mountain, but on an equally vague plain.) I discovered, I must say with a certain sense of shock, that most of the key sayings could also be found in the Talmud and Mishnah, and even at times in earlier Pagan authors. For example, the saying of Matthew “Many are called but few are chosen” and the logion or saying that it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven are both found virtually verbatim in the writings of Plato, roughly four hundred years earlier.

The motto of Wycliffe College, Verbum Domini Manet, “the Word of the Lord Abides” (or stands firm), now had to be viewed from a different perspective. That, together with my growing recognition that the Greek text of the New Testament had at least 150,000 variant readings in the different manuscripts (many of them minor, but some very serious and important for the overall meaning), combined to force me to review and correct my view of Holy Scripture. In this latter connection it is worthwhile to look at the work of Christian Lindtner, Ph.D., author of The Secret of Jesus. Lindtner, a Sanskrit scholar, believes he has proven that much of the Gospel material is anticipated in earlier Buddhist scriptures. There are other noted scholars who agree. It was becoming very clear that, rather than being the product of pure visionary revelation or sudden inspiration from Above, all sacred scriptures were the product of composite human effort, from varying sources, in some cases over a long span of years. In other words, God does not write books—human beings do. I was of course aware that this was a stage in my own inner development that could well be pregnant with significance for the future.

As I look back at over a decade of training clergy and Christian educators—including the years of lecturing both before and after my seven years as a full professor of New Testament and Greek—I see that I remained fairly conservative in outlook. For example, Wycliffe College in particular, and Christianity at large, held as a central doctrine the teaching that God sent his only begotten Son into the world to “save sinners”—that is, all of humanity—by dying on a cross at a specific time and place under a specific Roman official in the Roman province of Judea. In other words, certain events rooted firmly in history were at the core of this theological schema or plan. Quite apart from the huge question of what happened to the millions of humans who lived before this salvific action came into effect, not to mention those since then who never even heard the Gospel story, there was another increasingly nagging dilemma with which I had also begun to struggle. The whole story of salvation climaxes, it seems, in the “historical” events just noted. But the cause of the entire problem being dealt with at the Cross, the primal “Fall,” or the sin of Adam and Eve, is, and always has been, presented in purely mythical terms. Nobody today except the most fundamental of fundamentalists believes in a literal Adam and Eve, in talking serpents or the like. So we are asked to accept that a historical solution is in some utterly inexplicable way required for what is clearly a problem presented by means of mythology. The great “sin” of Adam’s disobedience never happened in time or space, anywhere on earth; it is purely mythological. Thus, when Paul says, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ will all be made to live,” he balances the equation. Just as Adam is mythic, so too is the risen Christ. The full truth one day struck me like a bolt of lightning: just as the story of the Fall is mythical, so too is the story of its undoing, or Redemption! None of this, however, changes the inner truth of what is being said in any way whatsoever. It simply means that one more of the five “fundamental truths” of fundamentalism cannot stand.

Over the years at the college, these and other issues began increasingly to trouble me. But it would be some years yet before I was able to see my way clearly out of this maze.

Canada celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 1967, and I spent the summer driving with my family to the Yukon Territory. The Bishop of the Yukon, Henry Marsh, had invited me to take over two churches for a couple of months and to hold some seminars for the handful of clergy in his vast diocese. That was a camping trip to remember, especially travelling up the as-yet-unpaved Alaska Highway. The rough terrain tore the little tires on the tent trailer to ribbons every few hundred kilometres. Taking one of these tires to a garage—they were very few and far between—I realized it looked as though a grizzly bear had slashed it. I asked the lone mechanic-cum-gas attendant, “Do you sell many of these?” and he replied, “We sell them like doughnuts.” But memorable as the Yukon was, the truly important step for me in 1967 was making my first foray into a world that was to change my life and my approach to spirituality forever.

Much as I enjoyed teaching at the college, the questions and friendship of students and staff, I was becoming more and more dissatisfied. The theological college atmosphere, far from being a fellowship of eager, kindred minds engaged in the quest for truth and a better understanding of how to engage and change for the better the world outside our doors, was in reality stifling and incredibly inward-looking. New thinking of any kind was discouraged. The daily morning and evening services in chapel struck me as increasingly boring, cold, and out of touch with the aspirations and needs of ordinary people. I have elsewhere described seminary life as “the Church busy talking to itself.” In all too many well-known schools of theology today, the same description still applies. Outside in the larger world at the time, major events were shaking the very foundations of our society. Inside, it was the old refrain: “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, Amen.”

In theology, the “God is dead” ferment of the early 1960s had been followed by the Anglican Bishop of Woolich’s 1963 paperback shocker Honest to God. Everywhere in the Church and beyond, it was causing a furor. The bishop, John Robinson, whom I was later to come to know well, spending time with him not only in my home near the University of Toronto but also in Canterbury, where he was born and raised, focused on serious issues revolving around the New Morality and the need to change the traditional thinking about God. In Canada not long afterwards, broadcaster-author Pierre Berton wrote his soon-to-be-famous indictment of a sleeping Anglicanism, The Comfortable Pew. Readers’ opinion pages in traditional Church publications frothed with outrage for months. Internationally, the United States, torn by years of the civil rights uproar, the Kennedy assassinations and a host of other problems, was slowly but inevitably being drawn into the war in Vietnam.

In 1966 the college sent me to some scholarly meetings in New York, held at the stunningly opulent Riverside Church. Sitting for hours listening to deeply learned lectures on Biblical themes and then travelling back to my hotel on the graffiti-covered subway trains late each afternoon, the question I had been asking myself in Toronto grew to a roar in my ears: “What on earth has any of this to do with any of that [the secular world beyond]?” I realized that for me it was time for a truly seismic shift. The longing filled me to find a way or means to move beyond the world of purely academic pursuits to communicate spiritual truths in terms any modern layperson could readily understand. I felt drawn to mass media. The problem was where or how to begin.

One day after my return from New York, between classes, I was in my study praying about this dilemma (this was before my thinking about prayer had been transformed) when there came a knock at the door. It was an Armenian friend, a keen but unconventional, evangelical layman who fashioned fine jewellery for a living. He said that God seemed to be telling him to come and talk to me about a need for me to be somehow involved in media. He cited a series of brief meditations I had done at one time on CBC Radio. It was a nod by the corporation to the churches called Plain Talk and was something I had enjoyed.

I could scarcely believe his words because of their apparent synchronicity. I told him of my deep sense of being “called” to find a voice in the public forum and shared my growing bafflement over how to break in. He bluntly asked: “What are you doing about it?” I told him of my prayers and was priggishly surprised when he retorted: “Well, it’s time to stop praying right now. How many radio or television station managers or newspaper editors have you talked to or taken to lunch? You teach New Testament. You know how the story of the raising of Lazarus begins with a command to move the stone. That’s what you need to do. Move the stone, i.e., do for yourself what you’re busy pestering God to do!” It was clear that he had a valid point.

I knew of only one person who might be a possible contact, an Anglican layman and lawyer named John Graham whom I had once met when he was a delegate to synod meetings at the Adelaide Street head office. He was, I had been told, co-owner of a small radio station called CFGM in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. I called him that afternoon and asked if I could see him about doing some sort of program on his station. To my complete surprise he said at once, “Let’s meet in your study tomorrow.” So we did. On arrival, he came right to the point: “Would you be interested in doing an open-line show one night a week, and if so, when would you like to begin?” I replied that I’d be keen to do so and that since it was then around the end of April, the fall sounded good to me. He said: “I was thinking about next week. How about next Thursday?” That was shock enough, but he followed up that with his idea for a title for the hour: “How about Harpur’s Heaven and Hell?” A vision of the bishop, Right Reverend Frederick Wilkinson, flashed through my mind as I blurted out: “The Bishop will be mortified. We can’t go with that.” But Graham was not a man to be easily put off once he knew what he wanted. And a prophecy he made at that moment eventually came true. He told me: “Some people, especially your colleagues and other prissy Anglicans, may not like the name, but I guarantee you that once heard, it will never be forgotten.” I little expected then that my first book in 1984 would go on to be a bestseller under that name, and that an hour-long interview series I hosted and that ran nationally for three years on VisionTV would bear the same title.

Daily radio had never really been on my radar screen—apart from CBC News occasionally and the programs featuring classical music. Life had simply been too full. But I immediately began tuning in CFGM to discover what it was like. To my initial dismay, I found it was a country and western music station with such theologically insightful songs as “Drop Kick Me Jesus through the Goalposts of Life” and “When It’s Round-up Time in Heaven.” A genuine feeling of alarm befell me when I heard the first promo for my maiden show. The promo itself was fine, but the disc jockey followed it immediately by announcing the next record: “I Won’t Go Huntin’ with You Jake (But I’ll Go Chasin’ Women).”

The principal of my college and I had not been on the very best of terms before this, but there was a further coolness suddenly emerging that was to mark our relationship from then until I left my post to become the religion editor of the Toronto Star in 1971. The news that I would be hosting a radio show was definitely not appreciated.

The program itself had a slow beginning. A country and western audience didn’t have a lot of use for professors of Greek and New Testament, especially one who knew next to nothing about them, their interests or their heroes, musical or otherwise. For some weeks I had to get family members and friends—even the Old Testament professor, my esteemed colleague, the late Reverend Dr. R.K. Harrison, a close friend who sounded a little like my mother on the phone—to call in and voice opinions or simply argue with me. Afraid to face an entire hour void of commercials on my own, I routinely had a guest to talk to when there was nothing but terrifyingly empty air.

Graham kept encouraging me to “lose the guests” and launch out unaccompanied into the deep. Gradually, I began to do this and surprisingly it worked—much better than I had hoped. I still had guests from time to time, including John Diefenbaker, our former prime minister, a stripper who had “found God,” and eventually the famous Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono, by a direct line (for an hour) into their room in the Montreal hotel where they were holding their 1968 Bed-In for Peace. John spoke eloquently about his front-page comments on how the Beatles were “better known and communicated with modern young people better than Jesus Christ.” Unfortunately, though the station supplied me with a recording of that encounter, the tape of it was lost in a move long ago.

A number of things began to happen as a result of the radio involvement. I discovered that I was communicating better with my students. I was using fewer technical, learned-sounding ecclesiastical terms (such as eschatology, epistemology, pneumatology, ecclesiology) and more contemporary illustrations. A recent study of seminary students in Britain had shown, according to a news story I kept pinned up at my desk in my office, that the men and women who were to be future clergy were far better able to communicate effectively with their fellow human beings before entering theological college than upon graduation! I was afraid of that happening at Wycliffe. The radio experience helped me to determine that this would no longer occur, at least on my watch, if I could help it.

At the same time, the other media began to notice. Allan Spraggett, then the Toronto Star’s religion editor, came to the college to do a major feature for his popular Saturday page. He said his readers would be intrigued to learn more about an Anglican cleric and professor who spent time on that kind of station instead of in a pulpit. More importantly, he issued an invitation for me to write occasional opinion pieces for the weekend paper’s religion page, and I was soon turning out articles with headlines such as THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JAMES BOND and BISHOPS—WHO NEEDS THEM? Would You Believe, a regular CBCTV Sunday morning religion show of that day, began using me as a member of their panel discussions, and Man Alive producers started calling upon me to write scripts for the prestigious TV religion program hosted every Monday night by broadcaster Roy Bonisteel.

One morning I woke up with the realization that what had begun as a very timid, tiny adventure had become my passion. When, in the early weeks of 1971, I learned that Spraggett would soon be quitting his post as religion editor of the Toronto Star to focus on writing a book, I immediately called him and we met for a long talk about the full nature of the job and what he thought I might bring to it if I applied.

After prayer and much thought, I knew it was time to make a move. I was going to be forty-two that April. There would be sacrifices to make. I had full tenure then as a professor at the college, with a residence in the college itself, over four months for reading, writing and vacation each summer, and, in spite of a typically Anglican low salary, many other perks besides. Working with the students had provided innumerable highs (along with some inevitable lows). Some things would be missed very much.

Among these was an important development that was ripe with promise for the future. Discussions had been going on for some time among the key institutions devoted to theological training in the Greater Toronto Area about the possibility of creating an ecumenical federation. In 1970, in a historic move, the Anglican colleges (Wycliffe and Trinity) joined with the Roman Catholics (St. Augustine’s, St. Basil’s and Regis), the Presbyterians (Knox College) and the United Church (Emmanuel) to form the Toronto School of Theology (TST). It was the first such school in Canada and remains the largest, although other centres have followed suit. Lutherans, Baptists, Mennonites and Christian Reformed now also have affiliated status in TST. What matters most about this change is that, for the first time, future clergy and other Christian educators are now sharing classes. What’s more, it means that Anglicans can learn about Catholics from Catholic professors. Catholics can grapple with Reformation theology under the leadership of Presbyterian or United Church professors and lecturers. Speaking personally, as one of the founding faculty members responsible for the setting up of TST, I found great pleasure in teaching students of other denominations. This was particularly the case with the Regis College participants. As Jesuits in training, they were characteristically very bright and, above all, eager to come to grips with my subject, the New Testament. The reforms of Vatican II (1962–65) had opened a fresh window on Biblical studies for the Church of Rome.

Nevertheless, overall, nothing essential had really changed at Wycliffe. I had a deep awareness that for me theological education itself had become a dead end. I used to think it was the place to begin to make a difference—to renew the Church. I had come to realize it was really a big part of the problem and not about to change much any time soon. From my sources I am aware that today’s theological students are, if anything, more conservative than when I was teaching almost forty years ago.

During my years as a journalist I had the privilege upon several occasions of interviewing in some depth Robertson Davies, the noted novelist and for many years Master of Massey College at the University of Toronto. One of these encounters was an hour-long conversation for the VisionTV series already mentioned above, Harpur’s Heaven and Hell, in the late 1980s. I remember at one point we were discussing the crucial turning points in his career, and particularly his decision to leave the newspaper business that he had inherited from his father to take up writing full-time. It was a huge decision, one with great significance not just for his own career but also for the future of Canadian literature as a whole. He said he had observed that very often in life the death of one’s father signalled the release of hitherto untapped creative powers. Since this intriguing insight gave rise to a strong sense of affirmation within me as he spoke, I pressed him to elaborate. He made it clear that he wasn’t speaking of instances where there had been a lack of filial love, respect or admiration for the departed parent. Simply put, the death of one’s father, he thought, very often left a son, however grieving, feeling a sense of much greater freedom to be true to his own inner allurement or genuine bent. In his own case, he said, it had led to whatever success he was enjoying in the world of fiction and beyond.

I was keenly interested in this observation. Without comparing callings or achievements, it was becoming increasingly clear to me that certain of my decisions, such as leaving academia to write first as a journalist and then as a columnist and author of books on ethical and spiritual themes, would not likely have been possible for me while my father was still living. His vision for me was as a bishop of the Church. It turned out it wasn’t mine. Whatever the reasons, my creative juices began to flow much more freely some time after my father made the transition in late 1968 to what I believe is a new and fuller state of being. Living my own life thus began for me, in a very real way, with the approach of what used to be called pejoratively middle age. A much larger world beckoned, and so I made the best decision of my life to that date.