According to Tom Harpur's latest book <The Pagan Christ>  modern
Christianity or, better, Christianism is based
on a literal understanding of our 4 canonical gospels.   A literal
MISunderstanding imposed upon the Mediterranean world
in the 3rd - 5th centuries by high church authority backed by the
power, influence and military might of the Roman
emperor.  

     <The Pagan Christ> surely undermines the any Christian thinking
that is blinkered enough to base itself on
Jesus'  Virgin Birth,  raising of Lazarus, feeding 5000 with bread
miraculously,  having 12 disciples,  walking on water..
rising in a physical resusitated way..  jetting off into the heavens
(Ascension).  These "historical happenings" literally understood
are light years from Reality.  And are not useful for
connection/communion with God (or the cosmos) in the 21st century.
Passe and past.  Over.  Done,  dead.

    And Harpur rightly gives a lot of credit in TPC to Alfred Boyd
Kuhn.  Mainly, because Kuhn makes it clear the New Testament writers
actually presented the historical Jesus in terms of myth.  Yes, Jesus
Christ is a mythic savior prefigured clearly, obviously in the
religious myths of ancient Egypt.   Thus,  the priests of ancient
Egypt  had taught most, if not all,  the stories we know of the
"historical Jesus".  And taught those stories  thousands of years B.C.
  Yes, there may not have been any historical Jesus - born in neither
Bethlehem nor Nazareth.  Not born of a Virgin, not walking on water,
not changing water to wine,   not myteriously expanding a few loafs of
bread to feed 5000 (talk bout Wonder Bread) and not resusitated
physically back to our time and space to shortly rocket up into space
.
Our Christ indeed looks like a myth, a mental construct/projection.
One based ultimately on the long ago sacred stories of Ancient Egypt.
Thus, the Christ  repeats almost ad naueum the exploits of the
Egypt's own son of God, Horus.  That's the new gospel according to
Harpur (also according to the historians  Freke and Gandy  <The Jesus
Mysteries>.

     Harpur's TPC  gives great credit to Alfred Boyd Kuhn.  For both
Kuhn's knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, his insights
into the way religious truth is expressed as myth, and the connection
between the four canonical gospels and how they
leaned on (friendly plagiarism) ancient Egyptian religious writings
and concepts.

    So, to give you an example of the  main sources underlyng Tom
Harpur's latest foray into serious theological controversy
and expose you to central Kuhn wisdom  I offer the following:

 Beginning of quote

Our concern is definitely with symbolism. While the rehabilitation of
this primary science is still in its infancy, there are cheering signs
that it is on the way to be given more adequate recognition of its
pivotal importance. It is one of the indices of the waking of the
modern mind out of the still-lingering obfuscations of Medievalism
that a new science of "semantics" is well started toward a central
place in mental procedure. Yet it is evident that current
understanding has far to go before it will have regained the ancient
insight that discerned in symbolism the prime methodology by which the
mind can be given any substantial degree of realistic grasp of the
realities of higher worlds. Nationalistic languages, with their fixed
signs and coins of mental imagery, are local and temporary. They come
and go, and serve a partial segment of humanity, locking each unit off
in cultural isolation. Symbolism is the one universal and omnipresent
language, significant and meaningful everywhere. For its alphabet is
the world of ubiquitous nature. The tree, the seed, the leaf, the
serpent, the beetle, the cow, the fish, water, earth, fire, the
flower, the sun, the star and the dragon-fly deliver the same oration
to penetrating perception in any land. "Nature never did betray the
heart that loved her," sings Wordsworth. And again he adjures us: "Let
nature by your teacher." She can not misteach, for she can not tell
two varying stories of truth. She may indeed have a wide variety of
ways of telling her story, but they all converge eventually upon the
one monogram of truth. Life, or God, has but one law, as ancient
sapiency affirms. But it deploys its manifestations out to concretion
in a practically limitless play of variation or differentiation in the
worlds of form. If there is unity, it is a unity behind or beneath an
endless variety. No single expression violates the canons of true
meaning. All things in their several ways illustrate and exemplify the
universal, the eternal. Truth in the absolute may be one. As such it
has little serviceableness for man, who is no dweller in the absolute,
but is still a citizen of the relative. Truth, in manifestation, is
many-sided, has many facets, comes to an epiphany or showing forth at
many levels. Strictly, man's concern is not directly with truth. His
prerogative is to deal with the many truths that confront him, doing
his best to rationalize them into an organic structure that
approximates a vision of truth from his level.
end of quote.

The Kuhn quote is found at

http://aloofhosting.com/tomrue/health/symbol.htm