Faith and Mythology: Conclusion

The Bible says we should have an answer when someone challenges our belief. It doesn’t say we should expect to convince them we’re right. I can argue till I’m blue in the face about how well-attested the Bible stories are by the discoveries of science, but I won’t convince anyone—I won’t even convince all the people in my Sunday school class. Someone else can argue equally about how their faith has given meaning to their life, and it won’t convince everyone. Only God can do the convincing. The best we can hope for, and long for, is to align ourselves with God. We point our neighbors towards His Word in the Bible—we’re careful not to point them away from His word—and we invite them to read for themselves in the hopes that sometime, somehow, God will make them listen. Meanwhile, God did save Lot in answer to prayer, and he did save Noah’s family even though only Noah was listening Him. So, we pray.

Faith and Mythology: Sodom and Gomorrah

The next big Bible story is another "angry God" story, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It's another story that people would like to claim can't be scientific, and it's another one with some fascinating corroborating details:

• A simple reading says God destroys the people because they’re bad. Allowing for more complex emotions, maybe the destruction is inevitable and God stops protecting them because they won’t listen, just like Noah’s compatriots.
• Lot doesn’t sound like a very nice guy, offering his daughters and raping them later, etc. But maybe God’s not saving him for being a nice guy. Maybe he’s saving him because Abram prayed, and prayer makes a difference. Maybe God doesn't save us for being nice guys either, and maybe we're not all that nice.
  
• The Sodomites sound very unpleasant, but rather similar cultural un-niceties are described in the time of the Judges. It wasn’t such unlikely behavior at the time.
• Where did the fire come from? In an earlier passage where Abram rescues Lot and the five kings, the Bible says there are bitumen pits nearby. Anyone remember the movie where a volcano rises from the Los Angeles tar-pits? In fact, archeologists have found a string of five city ruins along the Dead Sea, destroyed by fire landing on the rooftops. There’s even a small city that might have almost survived, just as Lot requested.
• What about pillars of salt? The Bible doesn’t say Lot watched his wife turn into a pillar of salt; maybe it's just what he deduced after she disappeared. The plain, after the volcanic eruption, was and still is dotted with salt pillars, which do indeed look like people.

It all gets even more exciting when you look at Exodus and the history and science behind it, but maybe I’ll deal with that if I ever get asked to give another talk…

Faith and Mythology: The Gilgamesh flood

Of course, the Babylonians had a flood story too in Gilgamesh. In fact, just like in Genesis, the flood and creation are told in the same book and are closely related. In Gilgamesh:

• A snake steals a magical plant that can restore health.
• Innocence is associated with nakedness, lost when wisdom is attained, but in Gilgamesh this is an achievement rather than a failure.
• Flood caused by divine anger (but this time gods at war, rather than gods angry with men).
• A god warns the flood is coming and tells hero how to build a boat.
• The hero carries family and animals on the boat.
• Three birds are released to check if the flood’s subsiding. (Three, like the sides of a triangle, represents divine certainty.)
• After the flood, the boat is left on top of a mountain.
• A rainbow appears in the sky after the flood (as a result of a goddess throwing her diamond necklace there).

Which story sounds more “mythological," the Bible or Gilgamesh? And which has the more "scientific" details? And just in case you're still thinking Noah's flood can't possibly be scientific...

• Civilization is thought to have been centered around the Black Sea plain—a warm place, cut off from the Mediterranean as it froze, with a river flowing away from the Mediterranean. Farming could well have spread throughout many cultures from here--the beginning of the need to store seed and keep animals safe.
• Global climate change (warming) at the end of the mini-ice age would have caused the Med to rise till it flooded over the Straits of Bosporus. There’s evidence of farming below the Black Sea, seed crops completely flooded to enormous depth in the space of a single year (around 5600BC). And the straits still have a sub-current flowing away from the Med at the bottom.

Faith and Mythology: The Flood

And then there’s the flood... How do we answer someone who says “You can’t believe the Bible. Story’s like Noah’s Ark are obviously myths”? They'll give some pretty good reasons not to believe it...

• There’s not and never has been enough water to cover the whole earth. True, but typically, whole earth means whole of the known earth, and that can and does become flooded.
• Rain wouldn’t cause the water-level to rise so fast. True, but the Bible doesn’t say the rain came first; it might even be saying the floods rose up first.
• You couldn’t fit two of every animal on one ship. True, but you could, and probably would, do everything you could to save breeding pairs of whatever flocks you kept.
• What did the animals and people eat on the ark? Food; why would the story give us details?
• There must have been rainbows before the flood. The Bible doesn’t say God made the rainbow then; it says he set it in the sky—i.e. he pointed to a rainbow and said “Look at it,” and made it a sign.
• A good God wouldn’t kill people: But perhaps the wonder is that anyone survived—the Bible says Noah was the only one still listening to the good God’s warnings.

There are actually some surprisingly rich details in the Bible story. After the ark lands, Noah is told not to eat flesh with its blood in it—an invaluable warning not to eat floodkill. And the first record of drunkenness occurs soon after the flood story—it’s not impossible that grapes stored in barrels on the ark were the first fruit to naturally ferment instead of going off.

Faith and Mythology: Creation myths

The Bible starts with creation of course, so let's look at creation myths around the world and see how they agree or disagree. There are some surprising similarities if you look for them. For a start, d’you suppose that seven-day weeks really come from the Bible account of creation? How come they’re so prevalent; how come the names of the days are so consistently non-Jewish? In fact, many (but not all) cultures made seven a symbolic number—it divides the lunar 28-day month into four manageable units; it accounts for the seven “visible” heavenly wanderers among the stars (sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter), hence Greek and Roman gods, etc…

So there’s going to be sevens in creation myths. What other similarities will we find?

• World parent myths: God as father, or two gods as father and mother: The Bible says we are God’s children
• Earth and sky are often the two parents, or
• Chinese: Pangu is born in an egg, breaks it in two to make sky and earth, then his body parts become the different parts of the earth
• India: the golden womb
• Native-American: Earth-mother / midwife
• Creation out of nothing / out of chaos: Not just a Judeo-Christian idea.
• Ancient Egypt: The world came out of a lifeless sea of chaos when the first sun rose; first to appear was a pyramid. Different versions accentuated different gods. (And, of course, the Bible often uses a sea to represent chaos, see Revelation.)
• India: In Indian stories, the creation hymn sounds very similar to the Bible—“not the non-existent existed, not did the existent exist…” is one translation. Existence grows from heat, and desire is the primal seed.
• Many animist faiths have similar tales.
• Built world: Formed out of dust perhaps?
• Scandinavian mythology: world egg, world tree
• Many myths have the broken parts of god forming the parts of the world. God’s sacrificial love?

Faith and Mythology: Which came first, Hebrews or Babylonians?

What questions do myths try to answer? They’re not so different from those we answer in our Bible.

• Creation myths—how did we get here? Everyone wants an answer to that one.
  
• Flood myths—natural disasters, earth-shattering changes: we want them not to be pointless.
• Hero myths—give us hope in the face of feeling powerless.
• God as man myths—answer our need to feel we matter… And we have the ultimate God-as-man story in Jesus.

People who study these things look for similarities between myths then track how tribes and peoples traveled through the stories they left behind. If they find similar stories in different places, they’ll deduce that one culture “borrowed” the story from another and built on it. They’ll often say, for example, that the Bible builds on Babylonian myths, and claim it must have been written during the exile in Babylon. Jews and Christians say the first books were written by Moses, but it’s certainly true that we have older records of Babylonian versions of the stories. Does that mean they wrote them first, or just that they learned to write earlier?

Going back to my school library books, I fell in love with everyone else’s myths, and pretty soon I was wondering why the Bible was so boring. Why didn’t God hire better writers? Of course, what I was missing was that most of these stories were retellings, not translations of the original. As language gets richer, the retelling becomes more colorful. If I “retell” a Bible story I’ll give you details that aren’t really there. I try to make readers relate and ask questions and make the story their own--it's the way I write. But what if people don't write--if they're keeping oral traditions alive with stories round the camp fire? There are basically two ways they might use:

• My way, with lots of imagination and extra details, or
• The religious way, with lots of recitation and nobody dares to change a thing.

Which way do you think the ancient Hebrews would have passed on their stories? And the Babylonians? Hence the rather boring Bible, and the exciting chronicles of Gilgamesh.

Faith and Mythology: Is the Bible different?

Eventually you end up asking yourself, just how is the Bible different from all those myths?

• The Bible doesn’t ask me to believe in monsters. What about the Nephilim and the giants?
• The Bible doesn’t have fantastical gods. But it does have some very strange stories about God. And, just for reference, a Hindu friend who was asked about her "fantastical gods” replied that her mythology is a collection of stories to explain the unknowable of how one infinite God relates to mortal humanity. No so different as I’d expected.
• The Bible doesn’t make gods out of emperors. But ancient religions didn’t pretend the emperors were inherently divine. They just became divine as a reward of office—and the Bible says we all inherit eternal life, so we’re all “divine” in that sense, which might be even more unbelievable.
• The Bible can be explained by science. Okay, I’ve got to throw that one in there. I think, if the details of Bible stories can be explained by science, then it’s easier to believe they’re true than that someone imagined them and got them right. And if the facts are true, I need to believe in God to explain the coincidences. But that’s just me.

Faith and Mythology: How do we decide something's a myth?

How do we decide something is a myth?

• Perhaps if it's provably false? But how is that different from any other kind of fiction.
• Deceptively false then? Not that anyone expects us to believe in the gods of Mount Olympus these days, but maybe people were expected to believe when the stories were first written down.
• Perhaps the story's just too convenient? Too unlikely? Of it doesn’t ring true to someone who has the right sort of knowledge (a neurosurgeon, for example, reading that internet email about the girl whose brother needs brain surgery).

So, what if your son phones home after a psychology class to accuse you of only believing “that Bible stuff” because it’s the cultural myth you grew up with. It sounds kind of arrogant—I’m intelligent enough to recognize a myth when I see one—but he probably means well. He thinks you’re intelligent too. That’s why he’s asking. So what answers would you give? D'you think these would work (whatever that means)?

• Lots of people convert to Christianity? Yes, but they convert from it too.
• There’s got to be a reason Christianity spread round the world. Okay, but Islam's spreading too.
• Jesus is a real historical person. But that doesn’t prove he’s God.
• I know the Bible’s true. But my non-Christian neighbor is just as convinced it’s not.
• The stories don’t sound like myths. That’s because I’m looking for evidence that they’re not. Other people’s stories may not sound like myths if they interpret them right either.

You'll probably end up trying to define how the Bible's different from myths, so, more next time...

Faith and Mythology: Where to begin?

I'm teaching another Sunday school class at church soon, on Faith and Mythology this time (we did faith and science earlier). So where shall I begin? Perhaps I'll post my ideas here first, just like I did last time, and see where it goes...

I love mythology. In the equivalent of junior high we had to take one fiction and one non-fiction book out of the library each week. When I realized “mythology” was classified as non-fiction I proceeded to take out two “story” books each week and pat myself on the back for beating the system. And those stories were good…

• Greek and Roman gods with all their inter-relationships
• Babylonian legends, older but just as fun
  
• Norse sagas with their long-running histories
  
• Native American tales
• Stories of Hindu gods and goddesses…

Sometimes I even read the non-fiction introductions to the books. I learned how all cultures have a “basic human need” to “make sense” of things, and we do it through story—I suspect C.S. Lewis might call it an example of our “God-shaped hole” and remind us that in God, the stories are true and make sense. But there are other myths too, less classic perhaps, even Christian ones. What about…

• The three kings, or an unspecified number of wise men?
• The dank dark stable, or the stable area of a house of hospitable relatives?
• Paul doesn’t respect women, even though he frequently mentions them having authority?
• And then there’s those urban internet myths; the girl who goes to the store to buy a miracle and meets a neurosurgeon...

How do we decide if something is a myth, or fiction, or true? To be continued...