Students of the New Testament will be familiar with the influential hypothesis from the first half of this century usually known as the Gnostic redeemer myth. This was the thesis, associated particularly with the name of R. Bultmann, that already in the pre-Christian period there was a widely held belief in a divine figure who came down from heaven and assumed human form in order to redeem the souls of men trapped within human bodies. They will also be aware that while Bultmann's thesis has come under heavy attack and is not widely held today, there are those who still attempt to argue for it, though usually in a substantially modified form. My purpose in this paper is to draw attention to one of the side-effects of this whole debate, an important side-effect which has not been given the attention it deserves. For it is my belief that the quest of the Gnostic redeemer myth within pre-Christian traditions, and the debate thereby stirred up, have together confused the history of Christology' beginings, particularly in the key issue of Christ's relation with God. Although principally concerned with soteriology, the discussion roused by the hypothesis of the Gnostic redeemer myth has raised the question of Christianity's thelogy (in the narrower sense of that term). In other words, it forces students of Christian origins to ask whether Christianity began as a departure from Jewish monotheism, whether Christianity was in fact a monotheistic faith from the beginning.
