“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” —John 3:16-17.
There should not be any question about the story of Jesus Christ. After all, it was in the Bible, the most sacred text of Christianity. But then, we are a questioning creature, always in doubt about the certainty of truths. Due to skepticism, however, we progress. We conquer a lot of the unknowns for our betterment.
Off the bat is how Jesus is conceived. Joseph, I think, will never believe that Mary gets pregnant through an immaculate conception. It is either they have sex and Joseph is the father or it is somebody else. That’s the only way human beings are made— no miracle, no divine conception. Remember, this is the time when a child outside of wedlock is mightily scorned. The storyteller finds it problematic, too, so an angel comes into the picture and convinces Joseph that his son is God made flesh here to atone for humankind’s sinfulness. Joseph conveniently believes and agrees with the arrangement.
Three wise men saw a bright, shining star in the East. They travel far and wide to know the meaning of it all, for it is guiding them all the way where they come from without losing its brightness and in the same direction. They finally reach their destination and see a worn-looking and poor couple with a child born in a manger. Their eyes must be deceiving them, for they are seeing a future king instead. They kneel down before a mighty child and offer him their respective gifts. They are never heard from again until Christmas is celebrated every year around the world.
Jesus sees Peter. He calls upon him and tells him he will be the fisher of humankind. Peter accepts his new title, leaving behind his family, livelihood, possessions, and way of life without hesitation. Peter follows Jesus everywhere. But when Peter is confronted three times with the accusation of being a member of a questionable religious group, Peter denies he knows Jesus. Still, Peter is rewarded to become the foundation head of what is known as the Catholic Church with an awe-striking structure in the heart of Rome called The Vatican. The Pope has replaced Peter. And when the Pope dies, another Pope will be selected. The Pope is the infallible spokesperson of God here on earth.
After Jesus Christ is executed, His disciples are scared and hiding from authorities. Their group is about to break up, but then a story of resurrection has given them enough courage to continue their spirituality. They spread the “Good News” even when they are being mocked and executed. But they are not very convincing until a man named Paul, or Saul of Tarsus, who doesn’t know Jesus and has never met him, comes along and makes better and convincing arguments. Paul has “resurrected” Christianity, as it is now called.
When I came to Canada, I did not carry with me the baggage of a skeptic. I truly believed, went to church regularly every Sunday, listened to the sermons, prayed for God’s protection, joined a prayer group, and feared the eternal flame of hell. Slowly, though, I was feeling something was not right in the story of Jesus Christ.
Guess what, I was not alone. Through the pages of the Toronto Star, I discovered the columns of Tom Harpur, who joined the Star as a religion editor in 1971. I read his writing with pure delight than listening to the weekly sermons of the priests. He died on January 2, 2017 at age eighty-seven. But in 2004, he published a book entitled The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light. What did he have to say?
Harpur was an ordained Anglican priest and a theology professor at the University of Toronto. One day, a student came to see him about the lecture of Northrop Frye, who was also an English professor at the University of Toronto. Frye said that the Bible should not be considered as a history book of true events and real characters; rather, a voluminous compilation of myths and metaphors. Frye laid it all out in his book, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. In this Introduction, Frye wrote: “Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.”
Harpur told the student not to believe in Frye, although Frye was a highly-acclaimed intellectual. After all, Harpur was himself a scholar, specially trained in religion and theology.
In so many years that Harpur was teaching and writing about religion, he discovered, in his researches, the writings of other scholars who were famously known as Orientalists and Egyptologists. There was Godfrey Higgins, an English magistrate interested in ancient myths. He wrote the book Anacalypsis, where he argued that there’s commonality among all religious myths. Gerald Massey, an English poet, who wrote extensively about ancient Egypt and spiritualism. He argued that Darwin’s theory of evolution was incomplete because it only explained the physical origins of Man. He said that the “Divine descent has also been going on—man being spiritually an incarnation from the Divine…” And lastly, Alvin Boyd Kuhn, an American Theosophist, who was a strong advocate in the view that the story of Jesus was just a myth.
Harpur was now ascribing to Frye’s perspective after being dismissive at first. He wrote: “In all honesty, however, this has not been a simple or easy journey for me. Having come from a Judeo-Christian background and commitment and dedicated my life to making known spiritual truth, I had never before encountered in depth the kind of challenges to my own faith I explore here. Certainly very little of what follows was ever presented to me by the institutional Church during my ten years of university training for the Anglican priesthood long ago. Nor was it ever once seriously discussed by any of my colleagues during the roughly ten years I spent as a professor of the New Testament and Greek at a prominent Canadian theological college. It was assumed by all throughout the traditional Christianity had always been more or less what it is today. Its superiority over other religions was seldom, if ever, seriously challenged.”
But now he was calling the Christian Church to admit its “fatal and fateful error”. He wrote: “Either deliberately, in a competitive bid to win over the greatest numbers of the largely unlettered masses, or through wilful ignorance of the true, inner sense of the profound spiritual wisdom it had inherited from so many ancient sources, the Church took a literalist, popularized, historical approach to sublime truth. What was preserved in the amber of allegory, it misrepresented as plodding fact. The transcendent meaning of glorious myths and symbols was reduced to a farrago of miraculous or irrelevant, or quite unbelievable ‘events.’ The great truth that Christ was to come in man, that the Christ principle was potentially in every one of us, was changed to the exclusivist teaching that the Christ had come as a man. No other could match him, or even come close. The Dark Ages—and so much more—were the eventual result.”
In concluding his book, Harpur wrote: “It is my firm conclusion, at the end of this study, that Christianity did indeed take a tragically wrong turn at the end of the third century and the beginning of the fourth. It is high time to reverse that. A better story has taken its place! May the Christ in each of us give us the courage to see and live the truth.”
There is only one way to our redemption and resurrection and that is through Christ. This centuries-long belief will be difficult to be uprooted. No matter how beautifully argued that there is a divine spark in all of us— sowed from the wisdom of ancient time— rather than a historical Jesus, it will not hold water to the millions of Christ believers. Such as Harpur was dismissive of Frye, the Christian historians, intellectuals, scholars, and authorities will do the same.
Harpur realized the difficulty of his radical thinking. He anticipated it and remained hopeful. He wrote: “My goal throughout is not to summarily dismiss the deep beliefs held by many millions in North America, Europe, and increasingly now in the Southern Hemisphere… But I do want these people to think deeply about their faith anew…Belief in the Christ within will be established as the key to personal and communal transformation.”
But Harpur forgot the most important symbol in his “radical thinking”. Jesus is Christmas—a ritual that is so powerful and spells infinity as long as humankind exists. Jesus is a success story for commercial and religious interests. No business people or religious authorities will take such a universal and popular product off the market. Jesus is the divine hope of millions rather than the divine spark within our individualistic and selfish self.
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE
6 December 2025