Tom Harpur 4-Book Bundle. Tom Harpur
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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