Don Howell explains the general rationale for the diminishing of this 'borrowing' position [BibSac, V150, #599, Jul 93, p310]:
"At the turn of the 20th century a new approach to Paul was forged by the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, "the History of Religions School." Spawned in Germany, this approach built on the Tübingen dichotomy between Palestinian and Hellenistic Christianity, and found the origins of the more developed Pauline Christology in the mystery religions and pagan cults of the Greek world. The mystery religions of Greece (Eleusian), Egypt (Isis and Osiris), Syria (Adonis), Asia Minor (Cybele), and Rome (Mithras) were researched and mined for parallels with Pauline theology. A dying-rising redeemer god, the exalted kurios, sacramental redemption, initiation into mystic participation in the deity, gnosis, and pneumatic experience were mystery-religion concepts claimed to have conditioned Paul’s thinking.
"Two pioneers in this field were Bousset and Reitzenstein. Bousset argued that the Jesus of the primitive Palestinian church was the eschatological Son of Man, largely derived from Daniel 7:13–14. But in the Greek-speaking Christian communities like Antioch, Jesus was transformed, under the influence of the Hellenistic mystery cults, into the acclaimed kurios. "Behind the personal piety of Paul and his theology there stands as a real power and a living reality the cultic veneration of the kurios in the community." With consummate skill Bousset explored the Hermetic literature, Philo, Gnostic documents, and the cults of Isis, Osiris, and Orphis and discovered "parallels" with Paul’s Christ-mysticism ("in Christ"), doctrine of the Holy Spirit, Christ-Adam theology, cross and sacrament, and the dying-rising Redeemer. Reitzenstein, a philologist and authority on Eastern Gnosticism, researched the second-and third-century Hermetic literature and concluded that Gnostic terminology was the source of Paul’s Christology. Neill, in an extended survey of the History of Religions approach, credits the Harvard scholar Kirsopp Lake with popularizing in America the arguments of German scholars such as Bousset and Reitzenstein .
"The influence of the various religionsgeschichtliche models has greatly diminished in recent decades with the discovery of the Qumran scrolls and wider research in the Jewish materials of the intertestamental (Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha) and New Testament (rabbinical traditions) periods. It is no longer feasible to separate Hellenistic and Jewish influences into two hermetically sealed compartments. Paul’s Jewishness is in the process of being rediscovered. But a more fundamental issue is the entire logic of the comparative religionist methodology which presupposes the apostle to have been an inclusivistic, impressionable absorber of alien ideas rather than the proclaimer of a pure gospel of faith and repentance. As Hunter comments,
They did not stop to consider that their knowledge of these mysteries was really very scanty, that all this amazing transmogrification of the Gospel must have taken place within twenty years, that, if Paul derived his message from his environment, he did what no other missionary has ever done--borrowed his gospel from the people among whom he worked.
And, C.E. Arnold, in his article on Syncretism summarized the current state of scholarship in this way:
"To what extent did the Hellenistic/Roman syncretism influence the development of early Christianity? H. Gunkel and other adherents of the History-of-Religions School argued that it was a major factor. Gunkel, in fact, concluded that, "Christianity is a syncretistic religion" (Gunkel, 95). He argued that the NT was strongly influenced by many foreign religions, but that these beliefs entered Christianity in the first instance through Judaism, which itself was very strongly syncretistic. R. Bultmann spoke of syncretism more often in connection with Hellenistic Christianity, which he sharply distinguished from Jewish Christianity. He noted, "on the whole, one could be tempted to term Hellenistic Christianity a syncretistic structure" (Bultmann, 1.164). For Bultmann the Jewish apocalyptic kerygma of Jesus was combined with the gnostic myth of redemption as Christianity spread to the Gentile world. Like Gunkel, however, he saw Hellenistic Judaism as "in the grip of syncretism" (Bultmann, 1.171) and therefore as the purveyor of these concepts to Christianity.
"The subsequent course of scholarship has effectively dismantled many of the conclusions drawn by the History-of-Religions School. Various studies have demonstrated that there was not one coherent gnostic redeemer myth nor was there a common mystery-religion theology. We have already touched on the fact that Judaism was not the syncretistic religion that some scholars once thought that it was. Now most scholars are reluctant to assume that Gnosticism even existed during the genesis and early development of Christianity.
"The majority of scholars are reaffirming the essential Jewishness of the early Christian movement. The background of various Christian rites, ideas and terms is being illustrated out of the OT and Judaism, in contrast to the previous generation that pointed to gnostic texts and the mystery religions. The background of the Christian practice of baptism, for instance, is now seldom traced to the mystery initiation sacraments of Attis, Adonis or Osiris but to the OT initiation rite of circumcision and the Jewish water purification rituals.
"Gunkel, Bultmann and others clearly undervalued the formative influence of the OT and Judaism for early Christianity. Neither were they sufficiently open to the possibility that the NT writers could use religious language shared by adherents of other religions without adopting the full meaning of that language, as it was understood in other religious contexts. In other words, Christian writers could use the term mystery (e.g., Rev 10:7; Ign. Magn. 9.1; Diogn. 4.6) without implying that Christianity is a mystery religion like the cults of Cybele or Mithras. John could use the image of light (1 Jn 1:5, 7; 2:8, 9, 10) without dependence on a gnostic light-darkness dualism. Both of these terms have long histories of usage in the OT that provide us with the essential conceptual framework for understanding their NT usage. Yet at the same time they are terms that would communicate in a Gentile world, albeit now with a different set of connotations.
"There is also evidence that the apostles and leaders in the early Christian movement made explicit and earnest attempts to resist the syncretistic impulses of the age. For example, when Paul preached in Lystra (Acts 14:8–20), he was faced with an opportunity to make a syncretistic innovation to the gospel. Luke records that after Paul healed a crippled man the people of the city mistook him for Hermes (the messenger of Zeus) and Barnabas for Zeus. Rather than allowing any form of identification with their gods (even the identification of "the living God" with Zeus), Paul takes the bold step of telling them to "turn from these worthless things" to the one God, the Creator (Acts 14:15). Earliest Christianity appears to have made stringent effort to resist the larger cultural trend toward the identification of deities and directed people to the God of Israel, who had now revealed himself in the Lord Jesus Christ.
To illustrate this from one of the alleged examples of borrowing, "washed in the blood of the Lamb" makes perfect sense being seen against the background of OT usage:
"Making robes white with blood is clearly a ritual rather than visual image: sacrificial blood purified utensils for worship in the Old Testament (see comment on Heb 9:21–22), and white was the color of robes required for worship in the New Testament period.
Likewise, the same goes for "sprinkled with the blood of Jesus", which could refer back to either of two OT passages/themes [although the Numbers 19 passage does not have any blood actually in the water of purification]:
"Such an understanding helps explain why obedience precedes rather than follows the "sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ." The latter phrase gives concreteness and vividness to Peter’s brief glance at Christian conversion. "sprinkling with the blood," recalls the Jewish sacrificial system, particularly as seen from a distance or in retrospect by the early Christians. The apparent origin of the (sprinkling) terminology is the ceremony described in Numbers 19 in which ashes from the burning of a red heifer are mixed with water and sprinkled for purification on those who have defiled themselves by contact with a corpse (the phrase "water of sprinkling," occurs repeatedly in Num 19:9, 13, 20, 21 LXX). In Barn. 8, this passage in its entirety is applied to Christ’s redemptive death, its imagery of sprinkling being associated with Jesus’ blood rather than with water and ashes (Barn. 5.1; 8.3; in the NT cf. Heb 9:13–14).
"More significantly, Hebrews uses the same language (where the LXX did not) in connection with the institution of the Mosaic covenant: Moses built an altar at the foot of Sinai, and when he had sacrificed cattle he threw half of the blood against the altar; the other half he put in bowls, and read aloud to the people out of the scroll of the covenant the Lord's commands. When they promised to obey all that the Lord commanded, Moses took the bowls and threw the remaining blood at the people, saying (in the words of Heb 9:20), "This is the blood of the covenant which God commanded you" (cf. Exod 24:3–8; Heb 9:18–21). In Hebrews, the blood of the covenant poured out by Moses corresponds to the "blood of sprinkling" shed by Jesus, the "mediator of the new covenant" (Heb 12:24; cf. 10:29). The participants in this new covenant are invited to "draw near with a true heart in the full confidence of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse a guilty conscience and having the body washed in pure water" (10:22). Peter lacks the direct reference to Christian baptism (although cf. 3:20), but the close connection between obedience and sprinkling suggests that Exod 24:3–8 is as determinative for his imagery as for that of Hebrews. Without speaking explicitly of a "new covenant" or the "blood of the covenant" (which may in his circles have been reserved for the Eucharist, cf. Mark 14:24; 1 Cor 11:25), Peter relies on language that had perhaps become already fixed among Christians as a way of alluding to the same typology. To "obey" was to accept the gospel and become part of a new community under a new covenant; to be sprinkled with Jesus’ blood was to be cleansed from one's former way of living and released from spiritual slavery by the power of his death (cf. 1:18). Peter’s choice of images confirms the impression that he writes to communities of Gentiles as if they were a strange new kind of Jew.
If you are interested looking more closely into the Copy Cat theories, let me know. I apologize for the length of the post my brothers and sisters, I just figured it was an interesting read.
In His Grace,
~Tommy
