From Analytics quoting Earl Doherty
It is no longer possible to maintain that such diversity—so much of it uncoordinated and competitive—exploded overnight out of one humble Jewish preacher and a single missionary movement.
I agree for the most part. The great cult of Isis was one of the main religions around the entire Mediterranean, (The Mother Goddess and her Divine Son was prominent in Early Christianity as well) another was that of Dionysus. Several studies of the impact, the overall power and spread of the ancient Greek Mysteries concerning the influence of Dionysus, give us very good background for at least one of the Gospels (John's) attempts at taking Jesus beyond the thresh-hold of the Dionysian influence, most interesting concentrated in the very place where John's Gospel was written - Ephesus, precisely where the Dionysian cult was strongly established.
Carl Kerenyi -
Dionysos, Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life
M. David Litwa -
Iesus Deus, The Early Christian Depiction of Jesus as a Mediterranean God
Carl A. P. Ruck, Blaise Daniel Staples, Clark Heinrich,
The Apples of Apollo, Pagan and Christian Mysteries of the Eucharist
Dennis R. MacDonald
The Dionysian Gospel, the Fourth Gospel and Euripides
Brian C. Muraresku
The Immortality Key
Grasping that each of the Gospels were written in different locales - Mark written in Rome; Matthew in Syrian Antioch; Luke written possibly in Antioch or Asia Minor at Ephesus or Smyrna; and John in Ephesus, of course, there are going to be differences in the story, and written over a spread of some what, 60 years(?) of each other, yet within a generation or two after Jesus, the story was being told, from adapting existing and available sources to these authors in these various locales, and all of them were concerned with a man named Jesus - utilizing stories from other gods and heroes - and improving on them with their version of Jesus for their receptive audiences.
The Gospel writers were already aware of the diversity, I cannot imagine how they could not be, and they used that diversity of sources (Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, Aramaic) to show their deity, this gent Jesus, surpasses them all. It was in a Hellenized world the Gospels arose in after all, and the Romans were obviously only too happy to allow whatever groups of peoples worshipped whoever they worshipped to continue doing so. There was no clamp down on accepting only a singular deity. But the effort does occur when it comes to Jesus having achieved a greater status from that diversity of various Mediterranean deities. Whether from his own experiences recorded or remembered, or some experiences embellished with the help of ancient hero/god stories as Vergil did within his
Aeneid from Homer's epics - which was
the story par excellence in early Roman times into Jesus' day - it would not be criminal or even an odd act at all for the various Gospel writers to propound their own version of this new deity's appearance into their world. Of course they were interested and anxious to show the greatness of Jesus, others had done so for their own deities - most and most importantly, Dionysus - which John specifically focused on and demonstrated over and over and over again throughout his gospel, that Jesus was an one greater who had come and now converting his own community to worshipping.
The uniqueness of Jesus lay not in what had happened to him, for that had been happening to various deities throughout the centuries. Jesus' uniqueness lay in that he was greater than all former deities, not that he had died and was resurrected again. The uniqueness of Jesus lay, as MacDonald so wonderfully shows (
The Dionysian Gospel) in the over-arching love and inclusion and saving of the people, not destroying them as Euripides does in the
Bacchae, especially to King Pentheus, and the Theban citizens. Jesus's gospel did not destroy people to elevate the deity,
it saved the people with the deity.