Publisher's Synopsis
This study is basically a historical, social, and religious analysis. This process analyzes, as a literary creation, the theological framework of Paul's religion, his letters, which incorporated Platonic categories and Midrashic themes, and the early Christian mythothemes that became re-flected through the later fabricated "life of Jesus" narrative in the Gospels. It uses a symbolic hermeneutic (a particularized theological interpretation) to disclose the so-called historical Jesus. The Christian Faith that emerged out of this religious mythology had developed piecemeal, in tension with past traditional understandings, within an existing socio-religious world structure, even as it struggled to gain a hearing among the current voices of ancient world religiosities. This historic process, which gave birth to the latter orthodox, Christian Church was only accomplished after several hundred years of cultural adaptation, absorption, acculturation, and amelioration with other esoteric, cultural and mystery religiosities, philosophies, and specific mythologies of the Greco-Roman world.
