Note:  Muslims believe Jesus was one of the mightiest messengers of God, that he was born of an immaculate conception, and that he was the promised Messiah.  However, no Muslim believes that Jesus claimed to be God Almighty Himself, that he taught his followers the concept of Trinity, or that he died for the sins of mankind.

Where did Christianity really come from?

Such a question immediately strikes us as absurd, for we feel certain there is no question about the matter.  We have all grown up with the stories about a man named Jesus who lived in Israel, who was claimed to have been "the son of God", who taught great things, worked miracles, and who was murdered and "rose from the dead". We are told that it was this man, who, by telling his followers to worship him, founded Christianity in about 30 AD.  That is what the New Testament tells us about the origin of Jesus worship.  Even for those of us who do not believe the supernatural aspects of the gospel stories, this explanation of the origin of Christianity seems satisfactory enough.  Why should anyone feel the need to search any further for an answer?

There is, however, a problem with accepting this familiar explanation of Christian origins at face value.  The problem involves the fact that the stories we find in the New Testament are not the earliest stories about this legendary religious teacher named Jesus.  In fact, stories of a famous "Son of God," who was born when God impregnated a young virgin girl, who worked great miracles, and who was murdered and rose from the dead, appear prominently throughout Greek and Roman literature for at least seven hundred years before the first parts of the New Testament were written.  [Why don't you check up on this yourself?  Go to the library and see what you can find about Mythraism,  the pre-Christian belief of that priest whose name we have all heard, St. Augustine.]

This startling fact becomes all the more intriguing when you remember that, although the Jewish Old Testament does contain prophecies of a "Messiah" to come, the Messiah of Jewish religion was never predicted to be named "Jesus," nor was he prophesied to be born to a virgin, nor to be God himself, nor even to be "the Son of God" in any literal sense.  In Old Testament Jewish religious thought, the Messiah, though annointed or appointed by God, was always depicted as a mortal man, born in the ordinary way.  The Messiah of Old Testament Jewish religion and the "Son of God" described in the New Testament actually represent radically different theological concepts which are almost impossible to reconcile with each other--a fact which has much to do with why Jews have always proven stubbornly resistant to Christianization.

The Greeks of pre-Christian times had been spreading various versions of a religion centered around a miracle worker said to have been born when God impregnated a virgin.  They had been doing so throughout Europe and the Mediterranean region since before 800 BC.  In all of these pagan stories, the saviour is spoken of as someone who had already lived and died in very ancient times, around 1300 BC, rather than as someone who was yet to appear.  The legend of the pre-Christian saviour was very popular, and appears to have been heavily relied upon as source material by the creators of the Jesus stories we find in the New Testament.

A cluster of ideas about sex, forgiveness, resurrection and "civilized morality" remarkably similar to what we now think of as "Christianity" was, even in pre-Christian Europe, associated with this revered mystical teacher.

As this ancient pagan religion was spread to different countries, the details within the basic story were often modified somewhat to make the local target populations more receptive to it.  In mainland Greece, the legend of the "savior" was tailored to suit the sentiments of people living in mainland Greece.  In the pre-Christian version of the story circulated there before 800 BC, he was said to have been born in mainland Greece.  On the Greek island of Crete, however, the same story was also circulated during the same time, but modified slightly so that it would have a greater appeal to the local Cretan population:  this was done by having important details, such as his birth, happen on Crete instead of in mainland Greece.  On the Greek island of Samothiace, the local version of this same mythical son of God of course emphasized the importance of