Tag: Myth
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The Bible and Canaanite Myth
Previous posts have explored the use made by the writers/editors of the Hebrew Bible of the Babylonian myth of Marduk and Tiamat, goddess of the salt waters. A different version of this story is found in the mythology of Israel’s fellow Canaanites, and appears in tablets (see above) discovered at ancient Ugarit on the Mediterranean […]
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The Bible and Babylonian Myth
The scrolls of the Hebrew Bible most probably reached their final form after the Israelites’ 6th century BCE return from exile in Babylon. While there, they’d have encountered the ‘Enuma Elish’, the Babylonian myth of creation and the rise of the storm god Marduk to become the chief of their gods. In those days, the […]
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Unconditional Love (i)
There was a time when I was a conservative evangelical minister, fervently believing in the complete historicity and literal factuality of the Gospels, and accepting therefore the historical, traditional, orthodox, Christian interpretation of them. I don’t regret that, because it means that I know about this way of seeing things – I’ve been there – […]
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The Withered Fig Tree
How should we read the Gospels? Let’s take the example of a puzzling story in which Jesus (in a seemingly bad-tempered moment) makes a fig tree wither and die! The Gospels, of course, are not eye-witness records, but carefully crafted accounts, assembled more than forty years later, mostly from word-of-mouth stories. These were already ‘translations’ […]
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Myth, Religion and Kaleidoscopes
Because I’m interested in religion (though not a paid-up member) I’m interested in mythology. Religion and mythology, being bed-fellows, inter-penetrate. Both paint pictures that can be felt to convey deep-seated truths about ourselves and our world – which unadorned and prosaic literalism would seem to have much less ability to convey. The same is true […]
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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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