Brian Muraresku on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1543
SUBJECT: HISTORY
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
In 1950, Dr. King wrote a paper called The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity. You can Google it.
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Martin Luther King Jr. did write a paper titled "The Influence of the Mystery Religions on Christianity" while a graduate student at Crozer Theological Seminary, for a course titled Development of Christian Ideas, in the term running November 1949 to February 1950. The paper survives and is archived by the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford, which records that King's professor graded it an A. However, the paper was a routine graded seminary course assignment, not an independently published or peer-reviewed scholarly work, and the Papers Project's own annotation notes that King repeats material from an earlier paper of his, "A Study of Mithraism," extending the discussion to other mystery religions. This pattern of reusing material from earlier student papers without full attribution appears elsewhere in King's Crozer and Boston University coursework and is documented by the King Papers Project and discussed by King scholars. The claim that King wrote this paper in 1950 is accurate, but presenting it without this context implies a level of independent scholarly originality and authority the document does not have.