Customer Reviews

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

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

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 would also mention Riley's emphasis on the diversity of early Christianity (which was lost for the most part in the 4th Century when Constantine took over the church and imposed uniformity, and which was regained again in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century). What Riley might have ignored is the intense, often bloody rivalries between Christian sects, then and now. As Garry Wills mentions in "Papal Sin," there is evidence that Peter and Paul were fingered by a rival Christian group as instigators of the burning of Rome, resulting in their execution. Christians--and members of all religions--will find diversity and harmony difficult as long as they are committed to the idea of absolute truth.

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 appeal of Jesus is that the gift of eternal life--once reserved for semi-divine heroes and sage philosophers--is now offered to even the most lowly in society. This makes Jesus not only worthy of emulation--but worth dying for. This leads Riley into an in-depth analysis of the reasons for Rome's especially virulent persecution of the early church. I found this part of the book a bit tedious, but overall the book is highly accessible and provides welcome insight to any individual in the process of forming his or her own personal christology.

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", he makes it very plain that in Jesus of Nazareth we find a historical figure who commanded the respect, adoration, and the desire by many to emulate Jesus as a heroic figure and define their own understanding of true heroism in indvidual Christians. This desire has produced a living movement, the church, and its core beliefs, which have given deep meaning to the struggles of life, suffering, death, and life after death.

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 cultures where it is found and introduced, even the cultures of the 21st century. This book is easy and stimulating reading and a must for any religious scholar.

Professor Gregory Riley's "One Jesus, Many Christs" (2001, 228 paperback) attempts to presents a first century classical view of Jesus of Nazareth. The book's scholarship is apparent and well documented with the helpful in-the-text style referencing.

Riley basic premise is that the world of late antiquity (roughly Jesus' era) was replete with heroes and "Christs" ("Messiah's" for Jews). He presents a fascinating study of ancient world heroes.

He compares Jesus to Achilles, parallels Hesiod's narrative with the Nazarene's, equates Oedipus to Job, introduces Elysium (similar to the Testamental "Heaven") as the post life heroic abode, and compares Jesus' movement to the Greeks' adoration for the god Asclepius. In the end, the Jesus movement wins.

Hercules' and Hermes' origins in Grecian schools of thought are thoroughly explained. From this background Riley suggests Jesus as a "classical hero" with "cosmic destiny" (page 81). One wonders why the Hebrew concept of "Messiah" is not also considered?

Riley offers plenty of fuel for thought: God's destruction of Palestine (presumably by the Romans of AD 70) is the result of divine revenge for killing Jesus and the martyrs (page 86), Jesus' passion and trial show his character (page 87), and early Christianity's most radical, and unique, claim was the eternal promise for everyone, not just heroes (page 93).

Although Riley quotes the Bible extensively (with a 2-page "Biblical Citations" index) the book reads like an ancient Greek world primer. The book is interesting and helpful, but it fails to fulfill the expectation presented by its title. (A better title might be: "Jesus and the Greeks" or "Jesus as Olympian".) This text needs less Grecian recovery and more New Testament discovery.

This book is recommended to all students of ancient Greece, mythology buffs, classical scholars, and those already biblically well read.

This book provided me with a useful overview of some of the Graeco-Roman stories of heroes and gods, and how they compared with the story of Jesus. Riley argues that a large component of how early Christians understood Jesus was as a hero. They then followed Jesus by imitating him, themselves becoming heroes in a way.

He also outlines some doctrinal differences between early Christian sects that may have been due to different cultural understandings of Jesus. Included in this is how different sects considered Jesus to be mere man, semi-god, angel or an emanence of God. Towards the end of the book is some discussion of the persecution of the early church, and how the ideals of heroes, atheletes, gladiators and martyrs gave courage to the early Christians and led to the growth of Christianity. But this latter discussion seemed to me less useful than the first parts, perhaps because it covered some material I alread knew.

I was relatively unfamiliar with Graeco-Roman ideas of the gods and heroes when beginning this book, so I found it very interesting. This was the reason I purchased it. My only complaint is that some statements are not referenced, and he does cites only ancient sources.

On the whole, though, I found it thought provoking. It was a useful and insightful discussion of Greaco-Roman and Semetic concepts about the gods to aid in understanding the ideas expressed in the New Testament and by the early Christians. It is well worth a read if you wish to investigate this topic.

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 by the Greeks.
Riley shows us that what helped rise Christianity to the place it's at today is the fact that while the mystery cults eluded to ancient hero's of a distant past that give us a guide map to salvation Jesus was contemperary and one only needed to believe in his cause to be given eternal life. Something that until then was reserved for the higher caste of society.

If you want to further,or begin your research on Jesus I would suggest this book as a great reference no matter were you're at in your studies.

While I find Riley's thesis interesting and relatively entertaining, I am not impressed with his scholarship. He makes statements that do not withstand scrutiny, for example he writes: Jesus was opposed to many Jewish traditions.
Actually Jesus affirms that he has not come to change the Law but to fulfill it, where he does go beyond Mosaic Law it is in employing that old rabbinical device of 'building a fence round the Torah'. By exceeding the demands of the Law he ensures that the circumstances where the Law is broken can never arise.

Riley also misquotes, for example in Chapter 4 - The Story of Jesus, the section titled 'The Genetics of the Hero and the virgin birth' he quotes Isaiah 7:14 RSV as:
Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
when it actually reads:
Behold, a young woman shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

A very critical difference that has kept theologians in gainful employment for centuries. (But the passage Riley ascribes to Isaiah comes from Matthew)

I can't judge whether this is sloppy or deliberate but it undermines the authority with which he writes.

Actually has some useful material,though nothing you won't see in other books.Good in the readable sense,but seems to pander to political correctness more than history.Does get a few things right though. One would be far better off reading Historical Jesus material by NT Wright,EP Sanders,or Gregory Boyd.

First of all, I can see that Mr. Riley has done his share of studying religion. I guess he considers himself the type of "scholar" he defined on the first page, that is, one that concentrates on coming up with their own "human view" of religion and Jesus. For me, I would define myself as what he calls a "partisan" on the first page, one that finds the need to study the Bible from a theological viewpoint. I support the Bible from the beginning to the end (Genesis to Revelation) and all the chapters in between that show God's plan for man.

Second, I would add that he misses the mark of what I would call a scholar of the Bible. In my opinion, a scholar should have a sound idea of what they are writing about, and they should be very careful about including all of the facts. It seems like he has created his own reality of Jesus (or attempted to expand upon someone else's false view of who Jesus was). It also seems like he has been a true skeptic and a critic of the true authenticity of the Bible for so long that he actually believes what he is writing about, that is he believes that Jesus was not the Son of God. (For a true introduction to finding out who Jesus was (and is), try reading Lee Strobel's "Case for Christ" available at AMAZON, and then move on to some of the other sources quoted in his book, depending on your interests or further questions.)

Third, his "arguments" take his readers on tangents that omit many of the strongholds of the true Christian faith. It sure is convenient for his book that he flies over the facts that would cause people to wonder if what he is talking about is accurate. He never mentioned the real evidence behind the uniqueness of Jesus' virgin birth, or the real history of the thousands of martyrs in history. He also skipped over the plentiful manuscript evidence, archeological evidence, prophesy evidence, and statistical evidence of the Bible that would lead one to believe that Jesus Christ was who he claimed to be, the Son of the Living God. (For a true study of the truth of the Bible, try reading Josh McDowell's "Evidence that Demands a Verdict" or Philip E. Johnson's "Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds" both available at AMAZON.

Finally, in my humble opinion, his book is just another example of how today, people are trading the Truth (the real story of the Bible) for a lie (books like his). Sadly enough, there are many hungry for a book like this one. Our culture today is looking for any type of teaching that will tell them what their itching ears want to hear. That way, the people who find what their itching ears want to hear, have open season on living their life any way they want to.

I have spent a good deal of time reading this book. I have a book that offers me forgiveness of sins, eternal life, hope, and much more. That book is the Bible. The Bible has more proof behind it than any historical book of it's time. And when you read it with the respect it deserves, you come up with a Jesus very different from the one that Mr. Riley describes. I sincerely hope that whoever reads this review will give some thought to looking at the side of the real Truth, that Jesus Christ was who he claimed to be, the Son of the Living God. When you read other books on this subject, you start to realize that our "purely human" thoughts of defining our own reality of Jesus is wrong. You learn that our human thoughts are not God's thoughts, and that our ways are not God's ways, that Truth will set you free.

Thanks for reading my review.