Tag: Myth
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Somewhere over the Rainbow …
In Genesis, after the all-encompassing waters of the Flood have at last abated, a memorable image makes its appearance in the clearing skies. “God said .. I will place my rainbow in the clouds .. whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears .. I will remember my promise that never again […]
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Myth and the Gospels
In my previous post, I wrote about myths in the Hebrew Bible, and also about contemporaneous Greek myths. There are also what we can call myths, I believe, in the Gospels, and here I’m suggesting an example in John’s gospel. By ‘myths’, I mean imaginative stories which include supernatural beings and events. The fourth gospel, […]
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Myth – A Personal View
Let’s try to return to basics (so I’m not writing anything new). One of myth’s functions was enabling people to find meaning in, and feel comfortable with, the cosmos. A myth was a story that tried to make sense of life as it was experienced, day by day. People wondered how and why they existed, […]
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Myth, Bible, Religion (ii)
In thinking about myth, I wrote last time about the sometimes limited ability of words to fully describe. This, of course, doesn’t hinder words from evoking the indescribable. A favourite example comes from William Wordsworth – That’s an eight line, non-description of what is intangible, but it’s also a matchless evocation of what Paul Tillich […]
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Cain and Abel – A Different Slant
Why, in Genesis 4, does this strangely ambiguous and shockingly bloodthirsty story make its appearance, about the two brothers Cain and Abel? Cain was not, of course, a historical person but an invention, a character in a story intended to portray something ‘true to life’. Needing to find him a name, the storyteller came up […]
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Genesis and Ugarit
From 1939 onwards, the excavation of a mound on the Mediterranean coast of northern Syria, (called Ras Shamra), uncovered the ancient Canaanite city of Ugarit. Included in the finds were tablets containing texts recording the religious beliefs of its people, which show that Ugarit and Israel shared a common linguistic and literary heritage, and provide […]
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Rethinking Jesus (15) My (current) Conclusions …
Firstly, there is the Jesus of History. I’ve had to acknowledge the fact that he had a view of the world which is different from mine, including beliefs I don’t share. For example, being a Jew, he believed in circumcision, in observing the sabbath day, (even if not in the inflexible, box-ticking way of others), […]