A book about Jesus
When I first picked this book up from the second-hand bookshop I thought it was going to be about Paul the Apostle. The reason I thought that was because there is this belief drifting around these days that Jesus never actually existed (and even if he did he did not necessary found a religion) and that the person that actually created Christianity was Paul the Apostle. The other theory is that the true creators of Christianity were Constantine and Eusebius, around three hundred years after the events outlined in the Bible.
Dodd in his book takes the traditional belief that Jesus was the founder of Christianity, though I tend to hold the line that Constantine and his cronies were the true founders of the religion that we know of today. The reason that I say this is because Jesus never set out to found a new religion, and he never indicated that this would be some form of cult. What Jesus did was throw open the ability to have a relationship with God to everybody in the world without the need of performing endless rituals, or communing through a priest.
What Jesus did was to challenge the prevailing thoughts of his day. It is true that he only ever left his homeland for short periods of time (though there was a three to four year period in which he was a refugee in Egypt) and that he spent most of his time among what he termed as 'the lost sheep of Israel'. The main reason for this was because his appearance was the fulfilment of hundreds of prophesies that had come about beforehand, and the people that he spent the most time around were the people who would have been more familiar with these prophesies.
It is not that he was not prophesied outside of the Jewish religion, it is just the prophecies that appeared in the mystery cults were very eclectic at best and did not form the solid foundations that the Jewish prophecies did. However the pagans of the Roman world would have been familiar with the concept of the dying and resurrecting God king, and would have also been knowledgeable of the concept of the God-man. However Jesus took that idea beyond what the pagans, and the Jews, understood at the time.
As for Paul being the founder of the religion of Christianity, I would dispute that as well namely because Paul never added anything new to what had already been established. Further, Paul was not some wonderful preacher that everybody loved. In fact, from Paul's lips himself, he tells us about many of his sufferings as he travels the Roman world as the missionary to the Gentiles. Paul did not create a religion, he only took the original message, as came from the lips of Christ, to the world at large. Further, there were many that had also travelled out into the Roman world that were able to corroborate what Paul was saying. As Paul points out in the book of Corinthians, Christianity is not defined by the preacher, but is defined by Christ alone.
The reason I fall into the category of Constantine and his cronies being the flounders of Christianity is that they were the ones that established the church as we know it today. Under Constantine's rule, Christianity was legitimised, and in turn, made the state religion of the Roman empire. The problem is that whenever a religion becomes a state religion, bad things end up happening to that religion. By the time of Constantine, Christianity ceased to be the relationship with God and returned to the works based religion that Christ came to destroy.
