Putting Occam's Razor to the Doctrine of Salvation

Occam's razor is a colloquial way of referencing the law of parsimony: a simple answer is preferential to a complex one. So I ask in regard to our eternal destiny - what is the essence of salvation? What is the minimum set of requirements? To help answer this, I present the cases of four people, by birth year, each with lifespans of about 50 years:

60 BC - person lives and dies before Jesus is born.
30 BC - born pre-incarnation, dies pre-resurrection. No Gospel yet.
10 BC - born pre-incarnation, dies post-resurrection, but never hears the Gospel.
40 AD - born post-resurrection, hears the Gospel, but dies before Ecumenical Councils.

Four people born within 100 years… how is each able to reach eternity with God? Do they face different requirements due to a quirk of their birth date? And, in each scenario, does it matter if they are born Jew or Gentile?

It should be obvious that none in none of the above scenarios are the people required to believe in the inerrancy of the Gospel of Matthew or the Epistles of Paul, nor to be Trinitarian, or to sign off on the Nicene Creed (or perhaps even the Apostles' Creed), since those things were only codified as orthodoxy in the fourth century.

If salvation was possible prior to the development of both Canon and Creed, what was the message? What was required? (and why should it be anything more today?)

The "great cloud of witnesses" in Hebrews 11 includes primarily OT Saints, and they are portrayed as watching and having an active interest in the working out of OUR salvation. It would seem obvious that salvation in some sense was possible prior to the coming of Christ. What's more, some of those listed were not even covered by the Mosaic Law, and were still saved without it.

What then was the message of salvation to them? What was required? (and has anything really changed? If it has, then when, exactly, did God alter His requirements, and how did He notify us of the change?)

It seems to me that a consistent message about saving faith is scattered throughout both Old Testament and New, and it's this:

> Affirm (in mind & heart) that there is but One True God
> Associate yourself publicly with that God
> Align your life to actively reveal that association

Typically today these first two happen in public professions of faith and ritual acts like baptism; the third happens daily via living a God-honoring life through good works and avoiding evil. Examples of this formula abound in the Gospels, from Jesus' calling of the disciples, to His interaction with the rich young ruler, the woman at the well, and His blessing of the children. The apostle John's simple statements about salvation are examples, too: John 20:30-31, 1 John 5:10-13, and pretty much all of John 6. Paul picks up the simple theme in Acts 16:29-31, and James continues it in his epistle (1:27), which sounds a lot like an OT passage from Micah (6:8) and Amos (5:14-15).

Really it's not that complicated, doctrinally. Theologians have made it far more complex than necessary. Salvation is really pretty simple:

Affirm, Associate, Align.  (or if you prefer it without the alliteration: acknowledge, commit, live out). That's it.