MYTHS IN THE BIBLE

This does not mean, however, that those accounts are to be dismissed as non-historical. It means, rather, that what is historical is interpreted by the very shape of the stories, so as to proclaim the gospel. The meaning expressed by those canonical stories is unique. Turning to the passion and resurrection narratives, it is true that we find mythical images of dying and rising gods in ancient mystery religions. But the details—the entire movement leading from the condemnation and death of the Son of God to His ultimate vindication—have no parallel anywhere insofar as their final meaning is concerned.

Here, as with the birth narratives, the biblical authors have as their primary intention to relate the past to the present. As much as any other real event, they declare, the victory of Christ is historical. His resurrection from the dead, which destroyed the power of death, is a fact: Yet it is one that has enduring value—eternal value—for us in our own present experience.

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And therein lies its unique and ultimate significance. This should have been clear from the outset, since myths and legends are innumerable while the rites and ordinances found throughout the world are surprisingly few and uniform, making it quite apparent that it is the stories that are invented—the rites are always there.

Are Bible Stories “Myths”? - Orthodox Church in America

Such indeed has always been the Latter-day Saint position. But if in later times members of some distant tribe, having inherited the rites, were asked to explain them, they would have to come up with some invented stories of their own—and that would be myth. It is in their contact with ritual that history and fantasy share a common ground and mingle with each other. Take the model heroes Theseus and Heracles, for example. We know that they are ritual figures because they repeatedly get themselves involved in well-known ritual situations.

Thus each in his wanderings is not once but often the guest of a king who tries to put him to death, forcing the hero to turn the tables and slay the host or his officiating high priest in the manner intended for himself. The nature of this business is now well understood, thanks to hundreds of similar examples collected from all over the world and from every century, making it clear that we have to do with an established routine practice of inviting a noble visiting stranger to be the substitute for the king—on the throne, in the favor of the queen, and finally and all too quickly on the sacrificial altar—thus sparing the king himself the discomfort and inconvenience of being ritually put to death at the end of a sacred cycle of years.

This exotic little drama was more than a fiction; it was an actual practice, surviving in some parts of the world down to modern times, but flourishing with particular vigor in the Near East around B. Since, as we have said, myths are invented or adjusted to explain ritual, the two are naturally identified, and hence any event reported in a myth is customarily dismissed as purely mythical.

The everyday activities of farming, trade, and war were all ritually bound to the cycle of the year and the cosmos. The great periodic rites were of a dramatic nature, but they were none the less real: It is hard for us to understand this ritualizing of history, but once it was a very real thing, and one can still find it miraculously surviving among the Hopi.

So when the ancient myths from all over the world show us the same situations and the same adventures and monsters recurring again and again, we may look upon this endless repetition not as discrediting the historicity of those events and situations but as confirming it. These myths tell about such things happening because that was the type of thing that did happen, and the ritual nature of the event guaranteed that it should happen not once but over and over again. Nothing illustrates this principle better than the long-despised by scholars and clergy and neglected Book of Abraham.

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Since we have chosen Theseus and Heracles as our archetypes, we may well consider the most spectacular and celebrated stories of how each escaped from his inhospitable host. The last and worst actor that Theseus had to deal with was Procrustes, whose notorious murder bed has become proverbial. Was there such a bed? A century ago the Egyptologist Lefebure noted that there are quite a number of old traditions around the eastern Mediterranean about kings who built cruelly ingenious altars, sometimes mechanically operated, usually of metal, and shaped like beds, on which they would put to death their noble guests.

Beer pointed out for the first time that Abraham belongs in the old Procrustes tradition, noting that the wicked Cities of the Plain where Abraham was given a bad time all had in their central market places ritual beds on which they would sacrifice strangers by stretching them out if they were too short and whacking them off if they were too tall to match the exact length of the bed.

So we have Abraham on the altar as another Theseus or Heracles, surprisingly sharing the fate of the great patriarch of the Athenians! This took place not in Greece nor in Asia, but in Egypt at the court of Pharaoh.

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The Greeks regarded this as the first and oldest example of the oft-repeated royal sacrifice of an honored visitor, the archetype of them all, and they always located it in Busiris, which actually was, from prehistoric times on down, the most celebrated and venerated center of human sacrifice in Egypt. Egyptologists do not doubt the reality of a periodic sacrifice of the King of Egypt in early times, or the practice of drafting a substitute preferably a noble redheaded stranger to take his place, first on the throne to establish his identity with the king, and then on the altar.

The same Theseus is also related to Abraham in a like situation by the peculiar name and nature of his evil host Procrustes. And Abraham in turn is tied to Heracles as the intended but miraculously delivered victim on the altar of a pharaoh of Egypt. What are we to make of these three heroes? Do their stereotyped adventures cancel each other out? On the contrary, they confirm each other as long as we recognize that the reality that lies behind them is a ritual reality.

These non-canonical Christian myths include legends, folktales, and elaborations on canonical Christian mythology. Christian tradition has produced a rich body of legends that were never incorporated into the official scriptures. Legends were a staple of medieval literature. A case in point is the historical and canonized Brendan of Clonfort , a 6th-century Irish churchman and founder of abbeys. Round his authentic figure was woven a tissue that is arguably legendary rather than historical: The legend discusses mythic events in the sense of supernatural encounters.

In this narrative, Brendan and his shipmates encounter sea monsters, a paradisal island and a floating ice islands and a rock island inhabited by a holy hermit: This voyage was recreated by Tim Severin , suggesting that whales , icebergs and Rockall were encountered.

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Folktales form a major part of non-canonical Christian tradition. Folklorists define folktales in contrast to "true" myths as stories that are considered purely fictitious by their tellers and that often lack a specific setting in space or time. One widespread folktale genre is that of the Penitent Sinner classified as Type A, B, C, in the Aarne-Thompson index of tale types ; another popular group of folktales describe a clever mortal who outwits the Devil.

Christian tradition produced many popular stories elaborating on canonical scripture. According to an English folk belief, certain herbs gained their current healing power from having been used to heal Christ 's wounds on Mount Calvary.

In this case, a non-canonical story has a connection to a non-narrative form of folklore — namely, folk medicine. Examples of 1 Christian myths not mentioned in canon and 2 literary and traditional elaborations on canonical Christian mythology:. Some scholars believe that many elements of Christian mythology, particularly its linear portrayal of time, originated with the Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. Zoroaster was thus the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, Heaven and Hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body.

These doctrines were to become familiar articles of faith to much of mankind, through borrowings by Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Mircea Eliade believes the Hebrews had a sense of linear time before Zoroastrianism influenced them. However, he argues, "a number of other [Jewish] religious ideas were discovered, revalorized, of systematized in Iran". These ideas include a dualism between good and evil, belief in a future savior and resurrection , and "an optimistic eschatology, proclaiming the final triumph of Good".

In Buddhist mythology , the demon Mara tries to distract the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama , before he can reach enlightenment. Huston Smith , a professor of philosophy and a writer on comparative religion, notes the similarity between Mara's temptation of the Buddha before his ministry and Satan's temptation of Christ before his ministry. In the Book of Revelation , the author sees a vision of a pregnant woman in the sky being pursued by a huge red dragon. The dragon tries to devour her child when she gives birth, but the child is "caught up to God and his throne".

This appears to be an allegory for the triumph of Christianity: Academic studies of mythology often define mythology as deeply valued stories that explain a society's existence and world order: This is a very general outline of some of the basic sacred stories with those themes. The Christian texts use the same creation myth as Jewish mythology as written in the Old Testament. According to the Book of Genesis, the world was created out of a darkness and water in seven days. Unlike a Jew, a Christian might include the miracle of Jesus' birth as a sort of second cosmogonic event [35] Canonical Christian scripture incorporates the two Hebrew cosmogonic myths found in Genesis In the first text on the creation Genesis He creates the universe over a six-day period, creating a new feature each day: On the seventh day, God rests, providing the rationale for the custom of resting on Sabbath.

The second creation myth in Genesis differs from the first in a number of important elements. Here the Creator is called Yahweh elohim commonly translated "Lord God", although Yahweh is in fact the personal name of the God of Israel and does not mean Lord. This myth begins with the words, "When the L ORD God made the earth and the heavens, and no shrub of the field was yet in the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the LORD God had not sent rain upon the earth It then proceeds to describe Yahweh creating a man called Adam out of dust. Yahweh also creates animals, and shows them to man, who names them.

Yahweh sees that there is no suitable companion for the man among the beasts, and he subsequently puts Adam to sleep and takes out one of Adam's ribs, creating from it a woman whom Adam names Eve. A serpent tempts Eve to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she succumbs, offering the fruit to Adam as well. As a punishment, Yahweh banishes the couple from the Garden and "placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden the cherubim with a fiery revolving sword to guard the way to the Tree of Life". He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever" Genesis 3: Although the text of Genesis does not identify the tempting serpent with Satan , Christian tradition equates the two.

This tradition has made its way into non-canonical Christian "myths" such as John Milton's Paradise Lost. According to Lorena Laura Stookey, many myths feature sacred mountains as "the sites of revelations": Many mythologies involve a "world center", which is often the sacred place of creation; this center often takes the form of a tree, mountain, or other upright object, which serves as an axis mundi or axle of the world.

In his Creation Myths of the World , David Leeming argues that, in the Christian story of the crucifixion, the cross serves as "the axis mundi , the center of a new creation". According to a tradition preserved in Eastern Christian folklore, Golgotha was the summit of the cosmic mountain at the center of the world and the location where Adam had been both created and buried. According to this tradition, when Christ is crucified, his blood falls on Adam's skull, buried at the foot of the cross, and redeems him. Many Near Eastern religions include a story about a battle between a divine being and a dragon or other monster representing chaos—a theme found, for example, in the Enuma Elish.

A number of scholars call this story the "combat myth". According to David Leeming, writing in The Oxford Companion to World Mythology , the harrowing of hell is an example of the motif of the hero's descent to the underworld , which is common in many mythologies.

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This story is narrated in the Gospel of Nicodemus and may be the meaning behind 1 Peter 3: Many myths, particularly from the Near East, feature a god who dies and is resurrected ; this figure is sometimes called the " dying god ". In his homily for Corpus Christi , Pope Benedict XVI noted the similarity between the Christian story of the resurrection and pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods: Many cultures have myths about a flood that cleanses the world in preparation for rebirth.

According to Sandra Frankiel, the records of "Jesus' life and death, his acts and words" provide the "founding myths" of Christianity. Christian mythology of their society's founding would start with Jesus and his many teachings, and include the stories of Christian disciples starting the Christian Church and congregations in the 1st century.

This might be considered the stories in the four canonical gospels and the Acts of the Apostles. The heroes of the first Christian society would start with Jesus and those chosen by Jesus, the twelve apostles including Peter, John, James, as well as Paul and Mary mother of Jesus. Rank includes the story of Christ's birth as a representative example of this pattern. According to Mircea Eliade, one pervasive mythical theme associates heroes with the slaying of dragons, a theme which Eliade traces back to "the very ancient cosmogonico-heroic myth" of a battle between a divine hero and a dragon.

George, famed for his victorious fight with the monster. In the Oxford Companion to World Mythology David Leeming lists Moses, Jesus, and King Arthur as examples of the heroic monomyth , [69] calling the Christ story "a particularly complete example of the heroic monomyth". In terms of values, Leeming contrasts "the myth of Jesus" with the myths of other "Christian heroes such as St. George, Roland , el Cid , and even King Arthur"; the later hero myths, Leeming argues, reflect the survival of pre-Christian heroic values—"values of military dominance and cultural differentiation and hegemony"—more than the values expressed in the Christ story.

Many religious and mythological systems contain myths about a paradise. Many of these myths involve the loss of a paradise that existed at the beginning of the world. Some scholars have seen in the story of the Garden of Eden an instance of this general motif. Sacrifice is an element in many religious traditions and often represented in myths. Related to the doctrine of transsubstantiation , the Christian practice of eating the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ during the Eucharist is an instance of theophagy. The theological concept of Jesus being born to atone for original sin is central to the Christian narrative.

According to Christian theology, by Adam disobeying God in the Garden of Eden, humanity acquired an ingrained flaw that keeps humans in a state of moral imperfection, generally called "original sin". According to Paul the Apostle, Adam's sin brought sin and death to all humanity: According to the orthodox Christian view, Jesus saved humanity from final death and damnation by dying for them. Most Christians believe that Christ's sacrifice supernaturally reversed death's power over humanity, proved when he was resurrected , and abolished the power of sin on humanity.

According to Paul, "if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many" Romans 5: For many Christians, atonement doctrine leads naturally into the eschatological narratives of Christian people rising from the dead and living again, or immediately entering heaven to join Jesus. Paul's theological writings lay out the basic framework of the atonement doctrine in the New Testament. However, Paul's letters contain relatively little mythology narrative.

Although the Gospel stories do not lay out the atonement doctrine as fully as does Paul, they do have the story of the Last Supper, crucifixion, death and resurrection. Atonement is also suggested in the parables of Jesus in his final days. According to Matthew's gospel, at the Last Supper , Jesus calls his blood "the blood of the new covenant, which will be poured out for the forgiveness of many" Matthew John's gospel is especially rich in atonement parables and promises: Jesus speaks of himself as "the living bread that came down from heaven"; "and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world" John 6: The sacrifice and atonement narrative appears explicitly in many non-canonical writings as well.

The Harrowing of Hell is a non-canonical myth extrapolated from the atonement doctrine. According to this story, Christ descended into the land of the dead after his crucifixion, rescuing the righteous souls that had been cut off from heaven due to the taint of original sin.

The story of the harrowing was popular during the Middle Ages. In modern literature, atonement continues to be theme. In the first of C. Lewis's Narnia novels, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , a boy named Edmund is condemned to death by a White Witch , and the magical lion-king Aslan offers to die in Edmund's place, thereby saving him.

Aslan's life is sacrificed on an altar, but returns to life again. Aslan's self-sacrifice for Edmund is often interpreted as an allegory for the story of Christ's sacrifice for humanity; although Lewis denied that the novel is a mere allegory. In the early modern period , distinguished Christian theologians developed elaborated witch mythologies which contributed to the intensification of witch hunts. Theologian Martin Delrio was one of the first to provide a vivid description in his influential Disquisitiones magicae: There, on most occasions, once a foul, disgusting fire has been lit, an evil spirit sits on a throne as president of the assembly.

His appearance is terrifying, almost always that of a male goat or a dog. The witches come forward to worship him in different ways. Sometimes they supplicate him on bended knee; sometimes they stand with their back turned to him. They offer candles made of pitch or a child's umbilical cord, and kiss him on the anal orifice as a sign of homage.

Sometimes they imitate the sacrifice of the Mass the greatest of all their crimes , as well as purifying with water and similar Catholic ceremonies. After the feast, each evil spirit takes by the hand the disciple of whom he has charge, and so that they may do everything with the most absurd kind of ritual, each person bends over backwards, joins hands in a circle, and tosses his head as frenzied fanatics do.

Then they begin to dance. They sing very obscene songs in his [Satan's] honour. They behave ridiculously in every way, and in every way contrary to accepted custom. Then their demon-lovers copulate with them in the most repulsive fashion.

Are Bible Stories “Myths”?

Christian eschatological myths include stories of the afterlife: Eschatological myths would also include the prophesies of end of the world and a new millennium in the Book of Revelation , and the story that Jesus will return to earth some day. The major features of Christian eschatological mythology include afterlife beliefs, the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, and the final judgment. Most Christian denominations hold some belief in an immediate afterlife when people die.

Christian scripture gives a few descriptions of an immediate afterlife and a heaven and hell; however, for the most part, both New and Old Testaments focus much more on the myth of a final bodily resurrection than any beliefs about a purely spiritual afterlife away from the body. Much of the Old Testament does not express a belief in a personal afterlife of reward or punishment:. It is described as a region "dark and deep," "the Pit," and "the land of forgetfulness," cut off from both God and human life above Pss.