Additional information
by Lindley Ross Johns (Author)
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.
Author Biography
L. Ross Johns taught high school in Tampa Florida for twenty-seven years in the area of the social sciences, retired and entered the Christian ministry. Graduated from Emory University and was ordained in the United Methodist Church (now retired), and presently holds ordained standing in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Georgia. He taught New Testament Greek to various district UMC ministers over the years, and after retirement, taught New Testament Greek at Beulah Heights University for several years. He is currently an adjunct instructor at Athens College of Ministry in New Testament Greek. The nature of this study was not to destroy religious faith; but, it was an exercise in the rational and objective considerations of modernity that would raise issues and provide some solutions to bring the linguistic dynamics of faith in all its diversity into the twenty-first century. It is to that end that he offers this book to stimulate discussion in the modern arena of religious debate.
