Abstract
A New Zealand historian and poet named Keith Sinclair, lamented the dismissal of Thomas Kandall, one of the first nineteenth century missionaries who tried to correlate Christianity and Maori belief, and wrote we “lost our birthright forever”. By birthright he meant the chance for Maori and Pakeha to learn from each other and to create a new and unique New Zealand culture.
James K. Baxter was conscious of this lost birthright and tried to redeem it through his life and work. He searched for “the undestroyed Fantastic Eden” through his life and eventually tried to create one as a commune at Jerusalem along the Wanganui River. This paper aims first to trace the development of his thoughts and how he put them into practice, and then to provide a new reading of ‘The Maori Jesus’.
