Ancient Myths and Biblical Faith: Scriptural Transformations

Are the Gospels Mythical?

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In addition to appreciating the promised blessing of land for his descendants, Abraham grew in his faith toward God and personally anticipated a spiritual reward. Abraham along with other people of faith anticipated a permanent city and country to come: We, too, live our lives as strangers and pilgrims on this earth, waiting with patience and faith for the Kingdom of God to be established on the earth, ruling from Jerusalem.

1. Meditation begins, but by no means ends, with thinking on Scripture.

We, too, are sojourners, desiring a better heavenly country—a country that is coming in the future. Abraham must have believed that God had a very good reason for asking him to sacrifice Isaac, and that somehow Isaac would have to be raised from the dead to fulfill the promises God had made concerning him.

We who are of the faith of Abraham must also believe that God can resurrect the dead. First of all, Abraham was justified by faith.

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God has ordained that all should be justified by faith. That means we are declared blameless in His sight by the blood of the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ and by faith in God. How then was it accounted? While he was circumcised, or uncircumcised? Not while circumcised, but while uncircumcised. And he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had while still uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all those who believe, though they are uncircumcised, that righteousness might be imputed to them also.

So, whether one is Jewish or not, those who have the righteousness of faith, righteousness imputed to them by God, they are the children of our father Abraham verse We must remember that the promises of God given to Abraham are realized through faith. Abraham and his seed, his true descendants who have faith, will inherit the promises of God given to Abraham. The promises given to Abraham are part of the gospel message. Abraham heard and believed in the gospel.

This is a good example for us who hear the gospel today. We are blessed through the righteous Seed of Abraham, who is Jesus Christ. The Dionysiac myths regard even the most horrible lynchings as legitimate. Pentheus in the Bacchae is legitimately slain by his mother and sisters, for his contempt of the god Dionysus is a fault serious enough to warrant his death. Oedipus, too, deserves his fate. According to the myth, he has truly killed his father and married his mother, and is thus truly responsible for the plague that ravages Thebes.

To cast him out is not merely a permissible action, but a religious duty.

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Even if they are not accused of any crime, mythical victims are still supposed to die for a good cause, and their innocence makes their deaths no less legitimate. In the Vedic myth of Purusha, for instance, no wrongdoing is mentioned—but the tearing apart of the victim is nonetheless a holy deed. In myth, violent death is always justified. If the violence of myths is purely mimetic—if it is like the Passion, as Jesus says—all these justifications are false.

And yet, since they systematically reverse the true distribution of innocence and guilt, such myths cannot be purely fictional.

Ancient Myths and Biblical Faith: Scriptural Transformations

They are lies, certainly, but the specific kind of lie called for by mimetic contagion—the false accusation that spreads mimetically throughout a disturbed human community at the climax when scandals polarize against the single scapegoat whose death reunites the community. The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates. There is nothing secret about the justifications espoused by myths; the stereotypical accusations of mob violence are always available when the search for scapegoats is on.

In the Gospels, however, the scapegoating machinery is fully visible because it encounters opposition and no longer operates efficiently. The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: This interpretation is reinforced by the optimistic endings of myths. The conjunction of the guilty victim and the reconciled community is too frequent to be fortuitous.

The only possible explanation is the distorted representation of unanimous victimization. The violent process is not effective unless it fools all witnesses, and the proof that it does, in the case of myths, is the harmonious and cathartic conclusion, rooted in a perfectly unanimous murder. W e hear nowadays that, behind every text and every event, there are an infinite number of interpretations, all more or less equivalent. Mimetic victimization makes the absurdity of this view manifest. Only two possible reactions to the mimetic contagion exist, and they make an enormous difference.

Either we surrender and join the persecuting crowd, or we resist and stand alone. The first way is the unanimous self-deception we call mythology.

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities. When we examine myths in the light of the Gospels, even their most enigmatic features become intelligible. Consider, for example, the disabilities and abnormalities that seem always to plague mythical heroes.

Oedipus limps, as do quite a few of his fellow heroes and divinities. Others have only one leg, or one arm, or one eye, or are blind, hunchbacked, etc.

Others still are unusually tall or unusually short. Some have a disgusting skin disease, or a body odor so strong that it plagues their neighbors.

In a crowd, even minor disabilities and singularities will arouse discomfort and, should trouble erupt, their possessors are likely to be selected as victims. The preponderance of cripples and freaks among mythical heroes must be a statistical consequence of the type of victimization that generates mythology. Mimetic violence is essentially disoriented; deprived of valid causes, it selects its victims according to minuscule signs and pseudo-causes that we may identify as preferential signs of victimization. In the Bible, the false or insignificant causes of mythical violence are effectively dismissed in the simple and sweeping statement, They hated me without a cause John Instead of the mob speaking to justify violence with causes that it perceives as legitimate, the victim speaks to denounce the causes as nonexistent.

To explicate archaic myths, we need only follow the method Jesus recommends and substitute this without cause for the false mythical causes. If true, those early anthropologists were approaching the right problem from the wrong end. Their reduction of the Gospels to an ordinary myth snuffed the evangelical light with mythology. In order to succeed, one must illuminate the obscurity of myth with the intelligence of the Gospels.

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If unanimous victimization reconciles and reorders societies in direct proportion to its concealment, then it must lose its effectiveness in direct proportion to its revelation. When the mythical lie is publicly denounced, the polarization of scandals is no longer unanimous and the social catharsis weakens and disappears. Instead of reconciling the community, the victimization must intensify divisions and dissensions. These disruptive consequences should be felt in the Gospels and, indeed, they are. In the Gospel of John, for instance, everything Jesus does and says has a divisive effect.

Far from downplaying this fact, the author repeatedly draws our attention to it. Similarly, in Matthew Instead of concluding with the reassuring harmony of myths, the New Testament opens up apocalyptic perspectives, in the synoptic Gospels equally with the Book of Revelation. Satan tries to silence Jesus through the very process that Jesus subverts. Open to the public Held. This single location in Australian Capital Territory: These 3 locations in New South Wales: Open to the public Book; Illustrated English Show 0 more libraries This single location in Queensland: M38 Book; Illustrated English Show 0 more libraries These 2 locations in South Australia: These 2 locations in Victoria: These 2 locations in Western Australia: None of your libraries hold this item.

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