ABSTRACT
The spiritual roots of the Christian Tradition reach deeply into the life of a first-century Galilean named Jesus (or Yeshua in his language). Volumes have been written adjudicating the historical, cultural, religious, and spiritual influences of that life on the subsequent emergence of the Christian tradition from the first century onward. Today, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in Palestine and the Nag Hammadi Library in Egypt in the last century (Robinson and Meyer 1988), these topics have received renewed focus and attention. New and sometimes startling conclusions have been reached which have far-reaching consequences on the way we read and understand the historic Christian tradition and how it quickly bifurcated into two very different and separate streams – the Occidental and the Oriental – with their own unique and often dissimilar characteristics.
