[Another essay from my favorite liberal heretic. Rowland
July 15, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

The title of this essay, “Mythology,” literally means “words about story.” I’ll bend grammar a tad to make it “words about stories.” Mythology is an entire academic field. In its vast collection of primary texts we meet such unforgettable characters as Oedipus, Orpheus, Antigone, Prometheus, Icarus, Janus, Pandora, Odysseus and Sisyphus to name a very few.

In other no less significant texts we meet other such equally compelling characters as Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Around each of those characters a primal story or stories have grown. MythOLOGY is the commentary about them.

Antigone was not an actual person, and no one thinks her story is an account of an actual series of events. But she personifies S ˜ren Kierkegaard’s teleological suspension of the ethical – that is, she breaks a law in order to fulfill a higher moral (or religious) purpose. As such, Antigone and her story have come down from antiquity to inform human beings in the making of exquisitely difficult decisions.

Icarus was obviously not a real person, and his story on the face of it incredible. But he stands as the symbol for overreaching. Pandora opened one too many boxes – another kind of overreaching that is all too familiar a pattern in human behavior.

Adam and Eve, the biblical fundamentalists’ first parents, made a story to end all stories. They overreached, all right, by seeking to be god-like and ended up as confused as their mythical descendants would be when the Tower of Babel was brought down. Is it necessary to say that Adam and Eve were not real persons in a real time – as Bishop Ussher would say, circa 4004 B.C.E.?

And yet how real a story (myth) as their post-Eden fate is decreed in the choices they made even as the consequences visited upon real human beings are so often the result of their choices.

The closer we come to modern times the line between myth and historical account becomes blurred. The Graeco-Roman myth cults have long since died out as anything like actual religions, making it easier to understand that the characters in their texts represent types or personae rather than historical figures.

But the inceptions of such Western religions as Judaism, Christianity and Islam are, by comparison, more recent, making it harder (for some people) to understand that the characters that appear in their texts are likely to be types and personae as well.

That brings us to Jesus for whose existence attestation outside the gospels (both canonical and extra-canonical) is limited to fewer than a half dozen, often confusing references. And as for the gospels being in any sense documents of ancient journalism, forget it. The word “gospel” is a corruption of an Old English word meaning “good story” – not so far off the Greek word euagglion, which means “good message.”

Before its association with Christianity, the word meant what today we would call “propaganda,” the intention of which was to persuade people to believe a thing ranging all the way from an improbability to a clever lie woven with elements of truth. Think of such ads of old as “More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.”

Jesus, in whose existence (past and present) evangelical Christians insist that we believe, is the central figure of the gospels – texts that properly belong under “M” for myth in the library. That is not to say the gospels are worthless or even documents of untruth.

But it is as much a mistake to think of a real person turning water into wine or multiplying five loaves and two fish into dinner for 5000 persons or being raised from his grave as it is to think of Icarus actually taking flight on waxen wings from some ancient Greek promontory and traversing enough of the 93 million miles between Earth and the sun that the wings would melt and send him plummeting back to Earth.

This essay is occasioned by the recent publication of Reading Judas that can only be classified under “mythology,” because it is all “words about a myth,” or, in this case, another mythological character named “Judas” – he famously of Iscariot. Top New Testament scholars Elaine Pagels of Princeton and Karen L. King of Harvard wrote the little book that includes a translation and commentary upon the much remarked upon Gospel of Judas that was sensationalized last April on television by the National Geographic Society.

Read uncritically, the Pagels/King book will be likely to give legitimacy to the belief that Judas was a real person whose treachery was a real-time thing. And if he “handed over” (not “betrayed” as the usual expression is) Jesus, then Jesus must have been a real person, too, just as accounted for in the New Testament gospels. And his deeds as therein recorded must be as dependably historical as George Washington throwing the silver dollar across the Potomac and declining to lie about cutting down his father’s cherry tree, or Abraham Lincoln walking 15 miles backward through the snow to refund a widow’s overpayment of a penny.

Oh, wait. Aren’t those stories, as we say, “myths”?

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.