5 Christian Myths and Their Origins and Variations

Today we are going to review the most popular 5 Christian Myths, their origins and variations. Enjoy with us these passages.

Christian Myths

Christianity is the world’s largest religion because of its enormous popular movement toward the beliefs of Jesus Christ. With more than 2 billion adherents, there is no religion or belief system that comes close. But being such a large movement has made it an easy target for creating Christian stories and myths. Unlike Christian symbols that do have spiritual meaning and biblical reference.

One of those Christian myths is based on a book called “Jesus a fanatic”, in these speculations and inventions of Christian mythologies they point him out as an example of hypocrisy or simply state without any biblical value as a kind of narrow minded.

Half-truths about the personality of Christ, lies and Christian myths seem to increase with the movement of the misnamed social networks creating a Christian mythology. There are misrepresentations that speak of science as well as Christianity, the divinity of Christ and the veracity of the Bible. There are so many half-truths that it would take a lot of volume to dispel them. Here are 5 Christian myths and their meanings that require examination.

1. Jesus was born in Bethlehem

The myth of Jesus’ birthplace is one that has been passed down from generation to generation because of biblical ignorance. Early Christians seem to have had little interest in the early years of Jesus. Stories about his birth and childhood are notably absent from the earliest documents written about him: the letters of Paul (written between AD 50 and 60) and the Gospel of Mark (written after AD 70).

But as interest in the person of Jesus grew, the nascent Christian community sought to fill in the gaps of his youth to align his life and mission with the myriad, and often conflicting, prophecies about the messiah in the Hebrew scriptures.

Possible locations

One such prophecy requires that the messiah, as a descendant of King David, be born in the city of David: Bethlehem. But Jesus was so identified with Nazareth, the city where most scholars believe he was born, that throughout his life he was known as “the Nazarene.“

Early Christians needed a creative solution to bring Jesus’ parents to Bethlehem so that he could be born in the same city as David. For the evangelist Luke, the answer lay in a census called by Rome in A.D. 6, which he said required each subject to travel to his or her ancestral home to be counted.

Since Jesus’ father, Joseph, was from Bethlehem, he and his wife, Mary, left Nazareth for the city of David, where Jesus was born. And so the prophecy was fulfilled.

However, this Roman census covered only Judea, Samaria, and Idumea, not Galilee, where Jesus’ family lived. Moreover, since the purpose of a census was taxation, Roman law assessed an individual’s property in the place of his residence, not his place of birth.

In short, Luke places Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem not because it took place there, but because that story fulfills the words of the prophet Micah: “But you, Bethlehem . . from you shall come for me a ruler in Israel.”

2. Jesus was an only child

The second of the Christian myths also evokes the person of Jesus Christ and his family, but, was he really an only son? Despite the Catholic doctrine of the perpetual virginity of his mother Mary, we can be sure that the historical Jesus came from a large family with at least four brothers named in the Gospels: James, Joseph, Simon and Judas, and an unknown number of sisters. That Jesus had brothers and sisters is attested repeatedly by the Gospels and Paul’s letters.

Even the first century Jewish historian Josephus refers to Jesus’ brother James, who would become the most important leader of the early Christian church after Jesus’ death.

Some Catholic theologians have argued that the Greek word used in the Gospels to describe Jesus’ brothers, “adelphos,” could also mean “cousins” or “half-brothers,” and that these could be Joseph’s children from a previous marriage.

While that may be true, nowhere in the New Testament is “adelphos” used to refer to anything other than “brother.” Therefore, there is no rational argument for viewing Jesus as an only son.

3. Jesus had only 12 disciples according to Christian myths

The doubt about the 12 disciples is another Christian myth based on a misunderstanding of the three categories of Jesus’ followers. The first consisted of those who came to hear him speak or to be healed by him whenever he entered a village or town. The Gospels refer to this group as “multitudes”.

The second category was composed of those who followed Jesus from town to town. These were called disciples, and according to Luke’s Gospel, there were 70 or 72 of them, depending on which version of the text you believe.

The third category of Jesus’ followers was known as the apostles. These 12 men were not mere disciples, for they did not just follow Jesus from place to place. On the contrary, they were given permission to go off on their own and preach his message independently and without supervision. They were, in other words, the main missionaries of the Jesus movement.

4. Jesus had a trial before Pontius Pilate

The fourth of the Christian myths focuses on the Gospels where Pontius Pilate is portrayed as an honest but weak-willed governor. Moreover, he was strong-armed by the Jewish authorities to send a man he knew to be innocent to the cross. The Pilate of history was famous for sending his troops into the streets of Jerusalem to kill Jews whenever they disagreed with even the slightest of his decisions.

In his 10 years as governor of Jerusalem, Pilate, anxious and without judgment, sent thousands to the cross, and the Jews filed a complaint against him with the Roman emperor. Jews generally did not receive Roman trials, much less Jews accused of rebellion. Therefore, the idea that Pilate would spend a moment of his time pondering the fate of another Jewish rioter, much less grant him a personal audience, beggars the imagination.

It is, of course, conceivable that Jesus would have received an audience with the Roman governor if the magnitude of his crime merited special attention. But any “trial” Jesus got would have been brief and perfunctory, its only purpose being to officially record the charges for which he was being executed.

5. Jesus was buried in a tomb according to Christian myths

The fifth of the Christian myths we address answers the question: Was Jesus buried in a tomb?

According to the scriptures this was so, specifically in the gospels where it tells what happened after the death of Jesus in the crucifixion and the decision to take his body from the cross and taken to the sepulcher (tomb). If that were true, it would have been due to an extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented, act of benevolence on the part of the Romans.

The act of crucifixion was not just an extreme form of giving the death penalty in the Roman capital. In fact, some criminals were executed first and then nailed to a cross. The main purpose of crucifixion was to deter rebellion; that is why it was always carried out in public. It was also the reason why the criminal was always left hanging long after his death; those crucified were almost never buried, but placed in a common grave called gehenna outside the city of Jerusalem.

Because the point of crucifixion was to humiliate the victim and frighten the witnesses, the corpses would be left to be eaten by dogs and picked over by birds of prey. The bones would be thrown on a garbage heap, which is how Golgotha, the site of Jesus’ crucifixion, earned its name: the place of the skulls.

It is possible that, unlike virtually every other criminal crucified by Rome, Jesus was taken down from the cross and placed in an extravagant rock-hewn tomb fit for the richest men in Judea. But it is not very likely.