Charges that early Christianity was influenced

CHARGES THAT EARLY CHRISTIANITY WAS INFLUENCED BY PAGANISM MADE BY UNINFORMED

Turning now to the question of whether first century Christianity was influenced by paganism, we face the raw fact that such charges are dead issues among contemporary scholars in the fields of classics and Biblical studies.

Seeing parallels between the ideas of (say) Gnosticism or Mithraism and Christianity were common in the period from about 1890 to 1940, but are rarely circulated today except by the uninformed.

Hence, when H.G. Wells saw parallels between the language used by Paul about the crucifixion and Mithraism in his history of the world, The Outline of History, that book, which was first published just after WWI, reflected its day and age.

IGNORING CHRONOLOGY IN ORDER TO SAY PAGANISM INFLUENCED EARLY CHRISTIANITY

In order to press the charge first century Christianity was influenced by ancient pagan religions, normally chronology gets ignored. Mithraism, for example, had very little presence within the Roman Empire in the first century, and so for that reason alone simply could not have been a major influence on early Christianity's development.

Scholar M.J. Vermaseren has stated: "No Mithraic monument can be dated earlier than the end of the first century A.D." No images of this god were found in Pompeii--buried by Vesuvius in 79 A.D.

A standard technique of sceptics is to read back from something done by a pagan religion in a later century to the first century and say it influenced the first century church, such as saying communion (the Passover ceremony) was similar to Mithraism's ceremonial meals.

They will take an inscription dated from 376 A.D. that said, in Latin, "reborn for eternity in the taurobolium and criobolium," and say these two pagan ceremonies that sacrificed bulls and sheep influenced first century Christianity's idea of spiritual begettal. Easily, by then, the pagans could have gotten this idea from Christianity instead!