Mystery religions

SOME STANDARD DIFFERENCES BETWEEN MOST MYSTERY RELIGIONS AND CHRISTIANITY

Furthermore, a number of differences existed between the mystery religions and Christianity. The mystery religions as well as gnosticism attempted to have special secret, special knowledge known only to a few initiates to the "truth."

In contrast, Christianity sought to publicly proclaim "Christ, and Him crucified" (I Cor. 2:2) and His message to the world to everyone, whether they believed or not. Christianity maintained there was only one way to salvation (Acts 4:12; John 14:6), and so believed in exclusivity.

Believers in pagan religions did not care how many gods they or others worshiped besides the one they may have emphasised. Most of these religions (Mithraism being the exception) had notions of "resurrections" that were tied to a cyclical view of nature and of history, of the birth, death, and rebirth of vegetation from spring to winter and back again.

By contrast, Christianity emphatically believed in a linear view of time and history, because God created the world at a specific time in the past, and because Jesus died "once for all."

Christianity also had a much stronger ethical, moral, and intellectual aspect than most mystery religions (with the partial exception of

Mithraism), especially early on, which emphasised emotion and ritual, not moral transformation. Who can deny the demanding and majestic sweep of Christian ethics as proclaimed in the Sermon on the Mount, the Letter of James, the "Love Chapter" of I Cor. 13:1?

The idea of salvation in paganism did not involve a moral change or moral duties or deliverance from sin, while Christianity's idea of it involved all three.

For reasons such as these, as against the charge Paul created a mystery religion on a Jewish base, that historian of philosophy Gordon Clark said: "Such surmises are not so much bad scholarship as prejudiced irresponsibility."