147 - WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER HEARD THE GOSPEL_ THE VIRTUOUS PAGAN - SIMPLE ENOUGH FOR A CHILD TO UNDERSTAND

Does Salvation Require Knowledge of Jesus?
by Dennis Linscomb 

How can God be all-loving and all-just in condemning to hell all of the people who, by no fault of their own, happened to be born in a time and place in which they had no contact with the gospel or even any Judeo-Christian influence?  

If God did not condemn these people to hell but offered them some plan of salvation, what did this offer look like?  

Does salvation require knowledge of Jesus?  

A conservative estimate of the number of people who lived on earth from 10,000 BC to 2,000BC is 64 million (the sum of the Lower Summary figures from the US Census Bureau link-see the Works Cited section at the end of this paper for this and all other references). I started with10,000 BC because that is the earliest estimate I could find.

The reason I stopped at 2,000 BC isbecause this is roughly the time when Abraham of the Old Testament (OT) lived and marks thebeginning of Yahweh's dealings with the OT Patriarchs. So there were at least 64 million peoplewho lived their entire lives and could not possibly have come into contact with any OT oral orwritten theology.

I think you can easily increase this figure of 64 million significantly by adding to it the millions,possibly billions, of people who lived and died after 2,000 BC who never came in contact withany OT or New Testament (NT) oral or written theology.

This would include the following groups of people: • those who lived after 2,000 BC but before Jesus lived and who had no contact with OT oralor written theology • those who lived during the time of Jesus but had no contact with OT oral or writtentheology nor any contact with the Palestine region to know about Jesus' teachings • those who lived after Jesus but had no contact with OT or NT oral or written theology Can we as Christians really believe that God ignored these people and condemned them to hell because they lived during the wrong period in history?  

Porphyry (c. 234-305 AD), a critic of Christianity, recognized this problem when he asked: "If Christ declares himself to be the way of salvation, the grace and the truth, and affirms that in him alone, and only to souls believing in him, is the way of return to God, what has become of men who lived in the many centuries before Christ came? ... What, then, has become of such an innumerable multitude of souls, who were in no wise blameworthy, seeing that he in whom alone saving faith can be exercised had not yet favored men with his advent?" 

If God "wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2:4), then it logically follows that everyone must have some kind of access to salvation.