One Jesus, Many Christs : How Jesus Inspired Not One True Christianity, but Many

By Jason Elias, Jason Elias, Shelagh Masline

Book Overview

In One Jesus, Many Christs Gregory Riley reveals that there was not just one true Christianity, but many different Christianities from the very beginning. United by passionate allegiance to Jesus as hero, these early, doctinally diverse Christianities have led to the development of many different kinds of Christian churches among us today. Riley shows that early Christianity harbored major doctrinal differences about all aspects of Jesus' life, death, resurrection and divinity. An expert on the historical context in which Christianity arose, Riley illuminates the Greco-Roman world of the early Christians, a world steeped in heroic ideals. Jesus was embraced as a new and compelling hero that one could follow into a whole new life of caring community and transcendant hope. Riley boldly asserts that it was only as Christianity became the religion of the empire that the myth of the Apostles' Creed was created, thereby promulgating the illusion that the Apostles had gathered together and agreed upon a core set of doctrines essential to the Christian faith. But the reality is that doctrinal orthodoxy was not an issue for the early Christians. Rather, they focused, in quite varied ways, on following Jesus as a model for living. This book not only provides a whole new understanding of the nature of earliest Christianity, but it also conveys a vital message for today about what Christian faith is really about. Riley reveals the authentic character of Christianity as inherently pluralistic and tolerant of diverse ideas while passionately centered in Jesus.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0517149338
• ISBN13: 9780517149331
• Release Date: June 1997
• Publisher: Gramercy Books
• Length: 292 Pages
• Weight: 0.93 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.8" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

An amazing book. With a rich telling of early and pre-church history.

This book helped tie up some loose ends I had in my own independent studies of the figure of Jesus. In many ways I wish I could have stumbled upon this book first when I began my studies of Christianity's famous founder. Riley details the classic history that surroned the time of Jesus and the people who would come to follow him afterwards,while adding his own commentaries on the social and spiritual world that was inhabited...

Strong argument for Christian diversity

The Kirkus review above gives a good description of the book. The author, Gregory Riley, is a professor at Claremont College in California. He provides a good history of Greek and Jewish legends, along with the details of how they could have affected early Christian writers. He also shows the development of dualistic and Hellenistic beliefs (body-soul and God-Satan) in the late Old Testament and New Testament writers. I...

Interesting Angle on the Jesus Debate

After a broad overview of the various views of Jesus in the early church, the majority of Riley's book is occupied with explaining Jesus' appeal to first and second century pagans. The life of Jesus follows the heroic pattern so familiar to them in the stories they had heard all their lives. Like Achilles and Heracles, Jesus learns through suffering, brings liberation to his people, and wins eternal life. But the real...

A broad comparison of Jesus Christ with Graeco-Roman heroes

Gregory Riley's contribution to the growing debate about one way to God or many ways to God demonstrates that the paradigms which the New Testament writers drew upon as they wrote about Jesus of Nazareth trace some of their origins to the heroes of the Graeco-Roman world. Though the overall approach of the book does not seem to me to describe "many Christs", "Christ" being the technical word for "anointed one" or "messiah",...

Riley opens the doors on new understandings of Christianity

With his classic classroom humor, Riley shows us that the origins of Christianity were a blend of ideas from a "primordial"soup of many ancient cultures. In order to describe who Jesus was, the writers of the Gospels used story lines and formulations that would best be understood by those who could read in the Greco-Roman world, the hero stories by Homer. Riley's ideas liberate Christianity to continue in relavance to the...