PsiCop

My site goes far beyond positing pagan origins for Christianity. That is, as you say, old news. If that's all I had to say I wouldn't have bothered. My site does more than that ... it posits multiple points of origin for Christianity.

There are many people who acknowledge linkages with paganism but still posit that there was a Jesus person from whom Christianity sprang. It may not have been the canonical-gospel Jesus of current Christian legend, but it was a sole origin nonetheless. One example of this kind of thinking, that I could cite, is Dominic Crossan; his tome The Birth of Christianity outlines his scenario. Crossan shows that Jesus was a Hellenic sage of the Cynical school (tough of Jewish ethnicity).

Crossan is not the only one; many scholars have similar ideas -- Burton Mack, Marcus Borg, many more. They all freely admit the pagan/Hellenic content in Christianity, yet still posit a single source.

My view goes a step further, positing that even if there was a Jesus person at the heart of Christianity, he could have been only one of several sources. Over time, later Christians revised their own history so as to make it appear that he was the source of all Christianity; but this is not actually how it happened.

That is where I differ from many. That is why I took the time to develop my site.

john76

do you think there is one source that was the most influential for what happened later? - it is one thing to say there were multiple sources, but it would be something else to say that each source had equal weight regarding what happened later in history

PsiCop

That's a good question. I think the most "important" proto-Christian movement was probably that of the Cilician Christ-cult to which Paul belonged, mainly because it established a protocol bridging its Jewish and Gentile members, and set the precedent for Gentiles being an integral part of "the New Israel" (as many 1st-century Christians called themselves). All the other movements, by contrast, were made up primarily of ethnic Jews; while they all held Hellenic beliefs of one sort or another, they don't appear to have had much extra-Jewish appeal.

PsiCop

Yummy! It's been awhile since I've had decent mead!