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To: Boogieman
Christianity isn’t an amalgam of anything. Paul used arguments designed to appeal to Gentiles, who wouldn’t have understood arguments based on Jewish Scriptures, but the ideas he taught didn’t come from the Greeks, he merely put the ideas in language they could relate to

There is a lot more to Christianity than Paul, although for most Protestants he is pretty much it. That's pretty lofty for a man Thomas Jefferson described as the "first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus" and a man who describes himself as "all things to all men."

Paul was not so much a Hellenizer as he was an antinomianist. The only thing Paul did as far as Greek paganism was concerned was to let them off the hook as regards circumcision (which the Greeks thought was silly), and dietary laws. He knew very well the Greeks would never buy into this resurrected Jesus story he was preaching if that included Jewish dietary laws, and Jewish mitzvot in general, including the circumcision.

But the Hellenization of the Jewish sect of Jesus followers comes with John at the end of the first century, when Judaism clearly rejected any and all Christian books and teachings and called Christians apostates and usurpers (minims). Until John there is not a trace of a Platonic Jesus as a Hellenic god; but therefater Palotnism rules.

As for the Zoroastrian angle, this is a pretty recent ploy by secularists to try to invalidate Christianity, but there’s really no evidence to support it.

Uh, I knew the secularist ploy card was going to come up sooner or later. Zoroastrianism actually influenced post-Babylonian Judaism (at least the apocalyptic types, such as Essenes, or Jesus himself), who believed in "resident evil" (otherwise unknown to Judaism until then), the rebellious devil, and what not. The Jewish Christians thus carried Zoroastrian beliefs to the Gentile converts and Gentile Christians merely inherited them from their Jewish counterparts.

Zoroastrian dualism creeping into Judaism has been known for a long, long time and is not a recent "secularist ploy" to discredit Christianity. Christianity can do that all by itself without anyone's help.

46 posted on 09/26/2010 8:13:58 PM PDT by kosta50 (God is tired of repenting -- Jeremiah 15:6, KJV)
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To: kosta50

Well, if you’re going to subscribe to the school that analyzes Scripture simply as literary works of men, you’re going be able to draw all sorts of fantastic conclusions. I can’t put any stock in those analyses myself.


47 posted on 09/26/2010 9:44:07 PM PDT by Boogieman
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