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