From here:

This month, the final Harry Potter film had the most successful opening weekend of any movie ever. Among the fans who lined up for the opening midnight showing were Christians, many of whom see striking similarities between the story of Jesus — with its sacrificial death, burial and resurrection — and the story of Harry Potter.

But at least one atheist has also noticed these similarities, and he’s written a book about it. In the newly-released (and blasphemously-titled) Jesus Potter Harry Christ, Derek Murphy makes the case that J. K. Rowling — the author of the Harry Potter series — achieved her success by tapping into some of the deepest and most ancient longings of the human heart. These same longings, Murphy argues, compelled first-century pagans to construct what he calls “the Jesus myth.”

Surprising: Jesus Potter, Harry Christ but no Jesus Murphy.

As Chuck Colson notes, both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien recognised that the truth of Jesus’ atoning sacrifice on the cross and subsequent resurrection is so powerful that it permeates the entire universe and ends up finding expression in unexpected places – like Harry Potter:

Well, Murphy is certainly right in recognizing a common thread through pagan religious beliefs. As C. S. Lewis writes in Mere Christianity, the heathen religions are full of “…those queer stories…about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men.”

But what Murphy misses — and Lewis got — is the fact that the human longings for sacrifice, resurrection and redemption are stamped on our hearts for a reason: They point us straight to the God who stepped into history to fulfill them!

In a letter to a friend, Lewis recounts a conversation he had with J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings — and a close colleague of Lewis.

“The story of Christ,” said Tolkien, “is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened…The Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things.’”