Mediterranean Influences on Christianity

Christians believe that the life of Christ as told in the Bible is, without question, unique. And because of that, they think that the foundation and principles of Christianity came to exist within their faith for the first time in the history of civilization. But research by scholars show that long before Jesus Christ lived, the Egyptians and other Mediterranean civilizations had already created myths that contained all the main aspects of the life story of Christ; the coming of a messiah and his death and resurrection, for example.

When you look outside of the Gospels, at the first century epistles, we find a huge gap. There isn’t a single reference to Pontius Pilate, Jesus' executioner. The earliest reference to Jesus as any kind of a teacher shows up in 1 Clement, just before the writings of St. Ignatius, and Ignatius himself doesn’t seem to know of any of Jesus' teachings. For the first indication of Jesus as a miracle worker, you have to look beyond Ignatius to the Epistle of Barnabas. Other important parts of the Gospel story are just as hard to find.

This lack of any mention of the Gospel Jesus that you see in almost one hundred years of Christian correspondence has no explanation. It is just dismissed by New Testament scholars as unimportant, or they say that early Christian writers "show no interest" in the earthly life of Jesus. But something is going on there. Paul and every other Christian writer of the first century seem to be a part of this.

But some religious writers think there are a lot of reasons for believing that Paul knew about the historical Jesus. One reason is that since Paul was a committed Jew, he was probably in Jerusalem at the time of Passover, just when Jesus was there. So there seems a good possibility that Jesus and Paul were both in Jerusalem at the same time, and that Paul also heard Jesus teach. The second thing is that Acts reported that Paul heard the testimony of Stephen about Jesus, right before Stephen was martyred. And most likely other people would have shared information about the historical Jesus with Paul.

But these points are challenged by other scholars. They say that Paul doesn't believe that Jesus was ever a human being. That Paul is not even aware of the idea. This is based on the fact that in all of the writings of Paul, in Paul's own words, we see no statement or implication that Paul thinks of Jesus as someone who was a human being that recently lived on earth. So this is a conclusion, accurate or not, that comes first-hand from the basic evidence itself, which is Paul’s writings. These scholars who challenge the idea that Paul knew Jesus was a real historical person criticize the response to their argument, because there is, of course, no statement anywhere that Paul was in Jerusalem at the time of Passover and might have bumped into Jesus.

It is also counter-argued that Paul would have known that Jesus was a real historical figure because certain people would have shared information about the historical Jesus with Paul. But this is also an assumption, based on no evidence. But the statement is based on direct evidence, which is Paul's own words and his silence in the epistles, because no one records, including Paul himself, that he was told by anyone about an historical Jesus.

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