Christianity & the Hellenistic World, by Ronald H. Nash, pub. 1984 by Zondervan and Probe Ministries International. This review was published on GoodReads on May 8, 2026.

C&THW is a capable review of the scholarship around the question: Did Christianity actually arise from Platonism/Stoicism, Gnosticism, or the Hellenistic mystery religions?

The view that it did, became popular in the late 1800s/early 1900s, especially in a German school of thought called Comparative Religions, or the “History of Religions School” (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule — one of the many great ideas that German philosophers have given us). (p. 117) These claims were fairly quickly debunked by theologians and early-church historians, and they stopped being taken seriously in theological circles.

However, as often happens, the bad idea had escaped the barn and was wandering freely throughout the neighborhood. The idea that Christianity’s inception lay in Hellenistic thought-systems and not in the Jewish Law & the Prophets followed by the events of 30 A.D. was still being taught as fact by various philosophers and historians years later. (p. 11)

Nash’s book was written to survey the Comparative Religionists’ claims and present the debunking evidence for the lay person. It’s what I would call a popular-level scholarly book. The topic is scholarly and there are a ton of references, but it never gets too far into the weeds on any one topic. For example, I would have liked a lot more detail about the mystery religions, but that is not this book’s purpose, and you don’t need to know a lot about the mystery religions before you see that they are nothing like the Christian communion ceremony, for example.

The writing itself is matter-of-fact, capable, and not flashy. Probably many people would find this book boring. I certainly wouldn’t have picked it up ordinarily. But my interest in this topic had been piqued because I recently read Mary Renault’s The King Must Die, a lot of which is about ancient Greek “solar kings.” I was struck by how they parallel Jesus, and yet are very different from Him at the same time. I wondered whether anyone has tried to claim that Christianity was just the solar king myth repackaged for the Jews. Turns out, they have. So this book came to me at just the right moment to be pretty interesting. It’s going in my home library for sure.