"A religious mystery worthy of the Da Vinci Code." "Is it possible that Christianity evolved from an ancient Egyptian cult?" "In fact is it also possible that the historical Jesus didn't even exist?" "The tale of a controversial theory, and a fascinating journey into antiquity based on a best-selling book by an Anglican priest." "The Pagan Christ" "I'm Ann-Marie MacDonald." "This is Doc Zone." "Roughly one third of the planet shares the same belief:" "that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was born on Christmas Day, died on the Cross, and was resurrected by the power of God." ""..." "But the angel said to them, 'Do not be afraid." "I bring you good news of great joy...'"" "The story of Jesus Christ gives meaning to most Christians." "It is the very glue that binds their faith and guides their actions." ""...born to you; he is Christ the Lord." "This will be a sign to you:" "You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."" "But one man who has devoted his entire life to Christianity, has concluded that there is absolutely no evidence on historical Jesus ever lived." "Christianity made a rather faithful error in the early centuries of its life in which it took the message which it had and literalized it." "Where and how the whole thing actually crystallized and took shape into what we now know as Christianity, is still veiled in a mist." "A dark mystery locked away for millennia in the strange code of an ancient stone." "Its secrets contain the discovery of a new story of Jesus one written 3,000 years before his birth." "Ordinary people suspect that there a lot there to be told that they haven't been told." "And the truth is there was a cover-up." "A cover-up, Tom Harpur believes, was designed to protect the Christian Church, and to mask the true identity of Jesus." "In the town of Bethlehem, a narrow passage burrows deep into a wall of stone." "It leads to one of the most sacred places on Earth" "Christians come here as they have for centuries to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ." "It's a story now 2,000 years old." "A story that begins with the Virgin birth in this cave on December the 25th." "A divine birth, heralded by a star in the sky." "According to Christian tradition, this is the exact location where the Son of God was born." "And for Christians, the world over, it's also the place where their faith begins." "But it's also the center of an ongoing controversy." "A flashpoint for those who question the very earthly existence of Jesus." "It maybe have a history but is it "historical"?" "I never asked that question before." "Tom Harpur has been an ordained Anglican priest for more than 40 years." "He is also a professor of New Testament and Greek Studies, a Rhodes Scholar and the best-selling author." "All his life he's believed explicitly in the Christ of the Gospels." ""Yes, I didn't question the miracles very much." "I mean, the thought that there was never a historical Jesus never even rose to the surface of my mind." "You just simply assume it dropped from the heavens as it were and there was..." "But now Tom Harpur often finds himself at odds with other Christians in his approach to the faith." "It's amazing but at the heart of every religion this same truth seems to be hitting me:" "that the spark of the Divine is in everyone of us before we meet Jesus or before we meet the Buddha or anyone else." "It is implanted in the human consciousness and this means whereby we also ?" "no God and come to be like God." "But for most Christians, the connection to God is made directly through the historical figure of Jesus Christ." ""What happened here in Jerusalem that only happened once, and happened nowhere else on the face of the Earth?"" ""Yes, exactly Jesus was crucified, buried and resurrected here so that is the important thing." "However..."" "At the Holy Land experience, a Christian theme park, preachers use theater to teach those seeking more insight into the life of Jesus." ""So, it's just me and you.."" "One of those bringing the story of Jesus to life is Christian actor" "Les Cheveldayoff." ""Oh, yea, God..." "Get up!"" "People are hurting and I think a lot of people come here saying: "Maybe, just maybe" "I can catch a glimpse that God loves me"" "Because they have heard it, we've all heard it, but have we experienced it?" "So we can bring that here, we can provide the environment where we can freely say the word of God." ""Get up, get up." "What's the matter with you?"" "Every story brought to life at the holy land experience comes word for word from the pages of the four gospels that formed a New Testament." "The central character is Jesus Christ whose life on Earth is cut short by a brutal crucifixion." "Christ figure is the part the Messiah who came to die on a cross, rose from the dead and provide a way to heaven, that you don't have to do anything, other than accept.." "and people don't get it." ""My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"" "Jesus Christ has actually become an idol in the Christian religion." "He is the focus of everything." "We don't talk about God most the time solely about Jesus." "And, surprisingly, because if you read the Gospels, he didn't talk that much about himself." "He pointed people to God." "In his search for a better understanding of his faith, and the life of Jesus Christ, Tom Harpur closely studied the four stories of the Gospels." "But he found little evidence to support the existence of a man said to have walked the Earth some 2.000 years ago." "There was so little, I dare to say none, in the sense of biographical information in his so-called biographies." "They are contradictory, the nativity story in Matthew contradicts the nativity story in Luke." "But the contradictions are everywhere." "Tom Harpur is not alone." "Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy authors of six books on Christianity also challenged the idea of an historical Jesus." "The Gospels are faith documents." "They are not history documents." "And I think, in academic circles this has been established from very very long time." "They are faith documents." "So, put them on one side, you can't use them to ground the history of Jesus." "There are no divine interventions in history." "There is a common-sense approach to things and the traditional history is just inadequate," "I'm afraid!" "On the shores of the Sea of Galilee," "Christian tourists gather at the place reputed to be the house where Jesus Christ preached to his first four disciples." "Tour guide, David Redron, makes his living recounting the story of the historical Jesus Christ." "It was here along the shores of this lake, 2,000 years ago, a Galilean teacher called Joshua from a town called Nazareth, began its ministry and changed the world." "Yet no physical evidence has ever been found to support the existence of Joshua, or Jesus of Nazareth." "Nor is there any confirmed written evidence of the existence of Jesus Christ during that time." "We don't have, unfortunately, any stories of Jesus because we have no mention of a man called Joshua, written about and described while Jesus was alive." "The historical details we give from the Bible just by reading between the lines." "There are only 24 lines in the ancient text that come before the year 150 that refer to Jesus in any way." "Most of them are ambiguous." "Is this a basis on which to build a major world religion?" "With such scant evidence, a few lines of historical text," "Harpur began to question the very existence of Jesus Christ." "Then he came across three 19th - 20th century scholars whose writing suggest that Christ was not born in a manger in Bethlehem, but on the sands of ancient Egypt." "This mysterious and complex culture only began to reveal its secrets in modern times." "200 years ago, a soldier in Napoleon's army made a startling discovery when he unearthed the Rosetta stone, at an excavation site near the Nile river." "This discovery would shake the very bedrock of Christianity." "When they found the stone, they realized it was going to be of importance, very quickly because they saw it on the stone, there were 3 strips:" "Egyptian hieroglyphs on the top, another strip that they weren't too sure about, in the middle, and then Greek at the bottom." "This stone containing a decree written 3 times, in Greek, ancient Egyptian Demotic and hieroglyphs, provided the key to the mysterious markings that cover the statues, monuments and papyri of ancient Egypt." "And opened up 3000 years of that country's history and culture." "The stone was used to study the extensive Egyptian records housed at the British museum." "And it uncovered a fascinating and a familiar story:" "The story of Jesus." "The calming of the sea, the walking on the water, the making the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, the raising the dead, the judging of the dead, the decent into hell, it went on and on." "The basic archetype of the annunciation at the birth of Jesus, in the Nativity stories by the angel Gabriel," "you take a crucial verse like:" ""I am the way, the truth, and the life.."" "Suddenly I see these sayings and I'm told that they come from the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt.." "pretty pretty shocked!" "Yes!" "Harpur considered, was the story of Jesus Christ, in fact, based on that of a pagan god?" "Ancient Egypt, home to one of the world's oldest religions that parallels what Christians call paganism." "It was a faith that related to the cycles of nature, the essence of life: birth, death and resurrection, was often represented by the sun." "To worship the sun, the most powerful force of nature, meant to worship God." "The ancient pagan wasn't some sort of benighted savage place, it wasn't primitive, it was a very advanced culture which gave us philosophy, architecture, democracy, mathematics, science." "And they had a highly evolved spirituality, and at the center of that spirituality there were, what was known as, mystery cults." "At the heart of these cults were mysterious sun gods, half-god, half-manlike figures." "Stories about them were written in hieroglyphics on the walls of the Pharaohs' temples." "And at the center of mystery cults was a myth, and the myths were about a dying and a resurrecting God-man or son of god." "And if you look at the story, you see that this god-man is born of a virgin and God, sometimes on the 25th of December." "He changes water into wine at a wedding." "He performs other miracles." "He has 12 disciples." "He teaches a doctrine of love." "He upsets the sttus quo, the religious authorities." "He is put to death.." "at Easter, sometimes through crucifixion." "If you look at the cover of our book, there is a picture of a figure that looks like Jesus, but it's not." "It's this pagan dying and resurrecting God-man." "And, then of course, he comes back from the dead, and if you want to commune with a God-man you take bread and wine, symbolizing his body and blood." "But that is not Christianity, this is paganism, pre-Christian." "In the temple of Luxor, ancient hieroglyphs describe a mythical mystery tale about a divine conception, or what Tom Harpur claims to be a virgin birth, where a mother delivers a child in a cave, and three sages come to visit the infant deity." "It's remarkably similar to the story told at the Church of Nativity, except this one predates it by almost 2000 years." "Standing in one of the panels is the sun god, Horus." "In the texts associated with the image of Horus," "Harpur found reference to the good shepherd, the lamb of god and the son of man." "All, well-known biblical references to Jesus Christ." "He claims 180 similarities between Horus and Jesus Christ." "Horus is referred to as the Christus, or Iosa." "His virgin mother is the goddess Isis." "The images of Mary and the images of Isis with Horus on her knee more interchangeable, and at some churches today in Europe, they have a grotto in the bottom basement of the church, where you will find a black Madonna." "And the black Madonna is Isis and Horus." "Horus is just one of many such Gods." "Harpur found evidence of dozens of others." "Some of them can be found in the Christian shrine at the Coptic Museum, in Cairo." "And they all have similar careers, they all have supernatural birth, they all were persecuted." "That was an allegory or a symbol for the fact that each one of us, when we were born we have the spark, the gift, and it is threatened that it will be covered over by materialism, by animal passions," "by.. whatever." "Next-door to the Coptic museum, there is one of the oldest churches in Egypt:" "Saint Mark's." "This church commemorates the journey said to have been taken by the Holy Family:" "Jesus, Mary and Joseph when they fled persecution in Israel." "What you are relating to is God, or the universe, or the mystery of life via this particular figure." "It's about understanding the wisdom that the story embodies of death and spiritual resurrection and experiencing it for yourself, so that you discover the Christ within you." "Saint Mark's Church was built during the earliest days of Christianity." "It was a time when Christians were deeply divided in their beliefs." "One of the factions was a mystical sect known as the Gnostics." "And unlike other Christians who believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus Christ, the Gnostics believed Jesus or Joshua, as they knew him, was like a pagan mystical God." "You know, there was a major battle for the soul of Christianity in this period." "And the Gnostics lost and the Literalists won." "All through history, it has been the winners in any battle or any struggle that get to write the story, get to write how it happened." "Joshua, as it would have been Jesus, is just a Greek name the Joshua cult probably goes back 200 years at least before the time that we think of as Jesus being born." "And so to really understand the nature of Gnostic mythology you have to completely get away from the idea there is just the story we have in the New Testament." "The Gnostic gospels of which we now have a large number, said you have to write your own gospel, so you were initiated, so, you could imagine how many there must have been." "And so this is the whole cycle of myths." "We have Christian commentators saying all those stories of the pagan God and they're all admitting, you know, you have stories of the God-man riding a donkey.. you have stories of the God-man dying and resurrecting." "But used as stories.." "as really happened.." "Where and how the whole thing actually crystallized and took shape into what we now know as Christianity, is still veiled in a mist." "It's becoming clear." "And I think ordinary people suspect that there's a lot more there to be told that they haven't been told." "And the truth is, that that's right, that there was cover-up, there was persecution of those who disagree." "According to Tom Harpur, the Church would preside over the largest and bloodiest cover-up in history." "Via Sacra, the sacred road, is the main street of ancient Rome, and leads to some of its most important pagan holy sites." "And at the beginning of the 4th century, under the newly-crowned Emperor Constantine, it was a place of great chaos." "The entire western Roman empire was in a state of collapse." "Constantine had to battle five other emperors from the various parts of the empire, who were all trying to make a play for the throne." "So the idea of, you know, let's all sing from the same hymn sheet became a really important and urgent matter for people." "The Roman empire was disintegrating." "The Barbarians were on the borders." "In trying to unify his empire, Constantine was plagued by the fact that there were virtually dozens of religious cults to choose from." "Christianity was against the law, and anyone practicing it was persecuted and killed." "The most celebrated reminder of this persecution is the Roman Colosseum." "But Tom Harpur began to see a different side to this persecution." "The Christians were persecuted somewhere at first, not as much as they have claimed by the way, but they were persecuted, but after the persecution phase was over, they became the persecutors." "And they became very vicious, and their persecution of roasting anything that smacked of other than Christian." "The shift in attitude towards Christianity was a direct response to" "Constantine's need to assert order in his empire." "Following his victory at The Milvian Bridge, he had a vision of the sign of the Cross and converted from paganism to Christianity, to become the first Christian emperor and supreme pontiff." "What he wanted was one God, one Emperor." "Let's just have one Jesus please, and let's stick to the story." "In 325 AD, Constantine called together his bishops of the Roman Empire, to form the Council of Nicaea." "Their goal was to reach consensus." "And they voted in that Jesus was equal to God, and that where you got the beginning of what we call today" ""the Nicene Creed"." ""We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and Earth,"" ""and of all things visible and invisible."" ""And in one Lord Jesus Christ"." "What he wanted was unity and they got unity when the majority agreed that the Father and the Son were coequal." "Once that happened then they said anything else is heretical." ""..and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the Virgin Mary, and was made man.."" "If you don't agree with it, you will be banished, in the Roman world that meant death." "Your exile is beyond the borders of the empire, and that was it." "You know, the trail of deceit, deception, destruction of the evidence" "was actually quite a biased thing they were trying to do, they were trying to hold the whole thing together around one particular story." ""And we believe one holy catholic and apostolic Church."" ""We acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins."" ""And we look for the resurrection of the dead,"" ""and the life of the world to come." "Amen."" "To maintain absolute order, any traces of mystical pagan ties to Christianity were destroyed." "The pagan world was regarded as such a threat because everybody knew that this was the same." "We have paid-in commentators saying:" ""Hang on, this story that you are peddling as your Jesus Christ, Son of God,"" ""these are the Dionysus mysteries."" "All of those people were put to death, they were exiled, books were burnt, temples were torn down, crosses over everything." "They tore down the ancient world." "In this ancient pagan temple, the Serapeum, in Alexandria, Egypt, members of a Sarapis cult were forced to secretly worship statues of their Gods and Goddesses in dark tunnels, deep beneath the Earth." "On the shelves of these caves laid religious texts, scrolls and papyri of their cult hidden away for safe keeping." "The Christians allegedly burned the books which have been moved out of the library in the Serapeum, the sanctuary." "They burned all the books there." "You know, that was the greatest collection of human wisdom on the planet at the time." "And the entire thing was put to the torch because it was considered heresy." "An "encyclio" went out from Rome, saying that all of these texts must be destroyed." "The Gnostic gospels were only going to have these four:" "Matthew, Mark, Luke and John." "All the rest are heretical." "By 476 AD, the Roman empire had fallen." "But orthodox Christianity flourished." "Constantine's insistence on the literary Jesus Christ was the law." "Some suspect that it was done deliberately as a kind of a trick." "Others believe it just happened because it was easier." "That the ordinary people were able to accept a literal view of stories that were very familiar." "But even as late as the 5th century," "Christians had to be told by the Pope to stop the practice of worshipping the sun on the front step of St. Peter's in Rome." "Christ leaders was not something that just dawned in the year 1 of the coming era." "Beneath the epicenter of Christianity, the Vatican, under St. Peter's Basilica is a ceiling mosaic dating back to the 3rd or 4th century, but some believe, clearly demonstrates the merging of pagan and the Christian beliefs." "There is a picture of Christ sitting in a chariot," "Sun-God, with wings and everything, underneath St. Peter's Basilica itself." "In fact, in the catacombs of Rome, there are many wrapped figures of mummies which they can't tell, I suppose, to be baby Jesus or baby Horus." "And in many cases they have a sun disc right on them." "But the idea that Christianity took its stories from Egyptian mythology is too far-fetched for most mainstream Christian scholars." "The fact that the existence of Jesus is one of the surest historical facts of anything in antiquity." "The notion of Jesus Christ stemming from paganism is absurd according to leading Christian theologians." "They claim Harpur is misreading Egyptian mythology and ignoring the evidence." "Tom Harpur is convinced of a link between the Egyptian pagan God Horus and Jesus Christ." "His is not a literal view of Jesus but a metaphorical one." "I think he's made a mistake of buying in to views that really no historians that I'm aware of would accept as really credible." "Tom's book calls for a total re-examination of how Christianity got started." "So I read it and said "Does he make some good points?"" "And I decided he didn't." "Well, Tom Harpur is not alone in his beliefs." "Some of the world's most respected religious scholars feel that his theory on the origins of Christianity is deeply flawed." "They claim that no logical link can be made between ancient Egyptian beliefs and Christianity." "There are a few Gods that died and came back to life in some ancient religions, but there isn't anything like that in Egyptian religion at all." "A lot of the stuff is just absolutely made up or the historical images really have no connection." "The answer of general parallels.." "they are specific kinds of parallels because they sound somewhat similar, they must be similar and therefore Christianity derives from this." "Well, the argument just simply.. isn't there." "It's not necessarily a coherent view of what Egyptian religion was." "It's very complex, extends over thousands of years, and there isn't a sort of way to find an actual summary of it." "Within the walls of the old city of Jerusalem, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built by emperor Constantine over the site of a pagan temple." "In 326AD, he decreed that this was the exact location where Jesus Christ died and was later resurrected." "Millions of Christian pilgrims accept his words as absolute fact." "Christianity is hinged on real Jesus Christ dying and being resurrected." "And I think the evidence is very very clear." "That's exactly what happened." "Known as the holiest Christian site in the world, visitors mourn his death at the very spot they believe his body was washed by his disciples." "For the millions who visit each year, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is absolute proof of the existence of Jesus Christ." "The evidence is incontrovertible that Jesus existed historically." "Jesus of Nazareth was a person who lived and walked the dusty roads of Palestine and was crucified by Pontius Pilate." "The rock formation beneath the Church closely matches the description of the resurrection site in the New Testament." "It is this kind of evidence, that for some, confirms the existence of Jesus Christ." "You've got 4 gospels at their independent witnesses." "All of them are written before the end of the 1st century." "That's not really debated by scholars." "Noone really knows who wrote the gospels, although they were attributed to disciples Mathew, Mark, Luke and John." "But they remained the heart of Christian theology." "We have different gospel accounts, but they agree on the core of human being, Jesus Christ." "And then there is external evidence in for example, Roman historians and other places that cite an accept that there was this figure." "External evidence in the form of several passages of ancient historical texts that refer to a Christ-like figure, but others aren't so sure and believe many of these texts are ambiguous or outright forgeries." "The greatest suspicion is cast on the work of Flavius Josephus, a respected first-century historian whose writings contain references to Jesus." "The one passage in Josephus, which, on the face of it, really does say a lot of very strong piece of evidence for the existence of this man, because here's a Jewish historian who gives us some real interesting insights" "into this figure Jesus, until you critically analyze it, and very quickly realize that it turns out to be a very very crude forgery." "Many scholars claim that in the 4th century, on orders from Constantine, the work of Josephus was reinterpreted to include those references to Jesus Christ." "The man assumed to have altered the texts was Bishop Eusebius, a powerful figure in Constantine's court." "It was just a time of great fraud." "All the history of that first important naissance of the Church is formed by the pet theologian of Constantine, Eusebius." "And Eusebius makes no bones about the fact that he has made everything right for the Church." "I think that, that really cares things a little bit far to say that that's a whole complete fabrication because there's no real need for it." "But even in the testimony about Jesus, scholars have taken away what they think may have been later Christian interpolation and the part they come up with is still a part that is substantial and substantial enough to include a historical reference to Jesus." "Constantine's conversion and what that did for Christianity has been hugely important in the history and development of Christianity." "But it certainly didn't do the kinds of things that some people have thought in terms of "inventing" things out of whole cloth." "Christianity has been served the "institutional religion"" "in much of the western world for a long time for good or for bad, and there have been good things about that and there have been bad things about that." "But it does set itself up then for being seen to be a player in a conspiracy theory, right?" "They are the people who control everything," "They have been suppressing everything." "If we only knew, we would be free to liberate in some way." "I'm not saying they necessarily schemed in an evil way, but they succumbed to the temptation that was inevitable, once people to have life and commune in their masses and depend on you for giving salvation." ""I am the way, the truth, and the life.."" "Can 2 billion Christians in the world be wrong?" "Certainly, that is true, I think of this and I have to ask myself the question." "Christianity does not encourage you to be credulous but just believe what you've been taught." "People should think critically about the faith." ""Whoever lives and believes in me shall never die.."" "Do you.. believe this?" "You know, you see them came in the park like this, because we see them during the day, and then they are like this.." "and then they are like this.." "They watch two different shows." "At the Holy Land Experience, the highlight of the day's visit is the staging of the resurrection of Jesus Christ." "For many Christians, this miracle establishes their faith in everlasting life." "I love it when people get those moments, you can see their eyes, they are like: "I got it!"" "And that to me is a miracle, you can't explain it, but there is faith in receiving, there's faith in believing." "But for Tom Harpur, that faith has been challenged." "Is it possible then to remain a Christian?" "On the banks of the Jordan River a tour group from Romania has come to be baptized as Christians." "But the priest who will lead them in the ritual, doesn't place much faith in these sacred waters alone." "You won't find Jesus here at these holy places, if you didn't find him before in your heart." "It's hard to express this.. you must feel." "It's the essence of the faith after all." "For Tom Harpur, this too is true that Jesus Christ is within." "That this Christian wisdom is no different than that of the pagans, centuries earlier." "They had a saying in the ancients:" ""As above, so below."" "Whatever was in the heavens, was within us." "Tom Harpur's conclusions shook the very foundations of his faith." "But his acceptance of a pagan Christ has renewed his belief in the principles of Christianity." "The gospels are really allegories of the struggle of the soul of every man, every woman." "The Jesus figure stands for the higher self." ""..and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified."" "In fact, the gospels, seen in a new light, have brought him closer to his faith, and given him a deeper understanding of their meaning." "There is a mystery at the heart of Christianity and that echoes the mystery religions which were all around and it shows a kinship between Christianity and them." "What was the mystery?" "The mystery is this:" "Not that you have to fall down on your knees, and beat your breast and say what a terrible rabid sinner you have been and plead for mercy at the mercy gate, which is the literalist point of view." "But that within every one of us is the spark of the divine." "Within every one of us are the seeds of our own salvation." "We all share in this gift." "You have to awaken." "You have to have your virgin birth." "You had the virgin birth is what happens inside you and you'll realize who you really are."