Measuring the stick

I read with both interest and concern the two letters in the July/August Record written in response to the review of Tom Harpur's The Pagan Christ.
Mr. Neal's letter begins by suggesting that, while some people believe too much, others believe too little. What he fails to do is provide us with any suggestion as to how much we really ought to believe. Unfortunately, most of us assume that people ought to believe about as much as we do. Those who believe more than we do we see as fundamentalists; those who believe less, as liberals. We set ourselves up as the canon or measuring stick for how much faith is enough. That's why we, as a denomination, continue to place the measuring stick in Scripture.
Mr. Sutherland's letter indicates that Harpur's book and others like it promise to be "a primary influence for the future of Christianity." He also indicates his acceptance of the thesis that Jesus himself never lived and that the truth of early Christianity has been distorted over the years (presumably by those who turned Jesus into a real person).
I won't take the time to refute Harpur's so-called scholarship when that has been done so capably by others.  What I would like to do is share some thoughts on Harpur's major thesis — that biblical Christianity is shown to be a hoax by the parallels that exist in other religions. The thoughts, interestingly, come from works written 60 years ago by one who knew how to argue for Mere Christianity.
"Those who do not know that this great myth became Fact when the Virgin conceived are, indeed, to be pitied. We must not be nervous about 'parallels' and 'Pagan Christs': they ought to be there — it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. On the contrary, I could not believe Christianity if I were forced to say that there were a thousand religions in the world of which 999 were pure nonsense and the thousandth (fortunately) true. My conversion, very largely, depended on recognizing Christianity as the completion, the actualization, the entelechy, of something that had never been wholly absent from the mind of man. And I still think that the agnostic argument from similarities between Christianity and paganism works only if you know the answer. If you start by knowing on other grounds that Christianity is false, then the pagan stories may be another nail in the coffin…  But if the truth or falsehood of Christianity is the very question you are discussing, then the argument from anthropology is surely a petitio." (C.S. Lewis)