while back, I wrote a post entitled, Does the Christian God Copy Pagan Gods? The short answer is no, and the explanation is over there.
But that post gets search hits for a related question that’s actually quite different: Does the Bible contain pagan myths?
The answer is yes. And also, no.
Creation
Take, for example, this list of Canadian Aboriginal creation myths from U of Calgary. Another summary resource that’s cool to play with as well is The Big Myth, an interactive Flash tool for teaching comparative world myth to kids. For a comprehensive list, see Archaeolink.
Flood
The Chinese record a flood-type legend, as do the Canadian Mi’qmaq. Thinkquest has a list of summaries from around the world. Perhaps the most famous is the Gilgamesh Epic. Flood legends are often intertwined in cosmogonic records, as even a brief browse shows. Along with that, many small elements which could be related to details such as the story of Cain, the story of Noah and Ham, Joshua’s long day (which appears in North American legend as a long night) and others are present in some variations.
Building An Honest Investigation
The question is, have we asked the right question? When we write up a question, it often points us in a preconceived direction. In this case, the question assumes something about the antiquity of the Bible’s story versus the antiquity of others. It also contains assumptions about how the Bible was assembled, and the veridical quality of its text. In fact, I would say this type of question is actually a composite of three others:
- Is the Bible a mythological text?
- Is the Bible is a relatively recent text compared to other beliefs?
- Is the Bible is based on older mythologies?
The underlying questions might also be less purely academic and more personally serious, such as:
- Does the Bible pretend to an authority it doesn’t deserve by tricking people into superstition?
- Have I been subjected to fraud (well-meaning or otherwise), having been raised on Christianity?
- Is the Bible an aggressive text which has co-opted older, more peaceful beliefs into an oppressive program of fear and control?
One way to sum these up is, “Does the Bible contain pagan myths?”
Correcting For Today’s Cultural Influence
In examining any other culture or any other time period, we have to be careful not to impose our ideas on the materials as if we hold the obviously right, absolutely accurate perspective. In the United States particularly, a set of politics has arisen around evolution, creationism, science and mythology. For pagans, there is a politics to the question of the Christian religious right’s influence and its incursion into freedom of alternate beliefs.
For the time being, in gathering materials and determining what’s relevant, it’s important to set aside the political in favour of the historical. While the final question may be something along the lines of developing one’s own personal convictions due to faith questions, or developing a case for the damage done by religious politics, if we don’t know history we’re condemned to repeat it. We’re best to start by setting aside the present and examining the attitudes and issues from which our historical material was birthed.
Compiling Evidence
If one wants a quick conclusion, particularly if it was already the preferred one, it’s as simple as the two short paragraphs I opened with to conclude that these parts of the Bible are not a unique text — in fact, its older contents are globally ubiquitous. However, this tells us nothing about why this would be the case for this portion of it. It only prompts further questions.
- Why would similar ideas of cosmogony and deluge — or any such ideas at all — persist on a global scale, given that we evolved by random chance and have spread out as distinct populations over tens of thousands of years?
- What got this started, and why is it so pervasive?
- Why do world cultures share a common trait of treasuring their ancestral myths so reverently? Why is myth considered wisdom?
Creating a Custom Filter
It seems wise to begin with known and corroborated history, and use what can be shown as reliable to filter more indeterminate material and concepts. For a history of the manuscript development of the Bible, this site contains comprehensive information.
However, we can even more quickly and reliably start at the records relating to the life of the person known as Jesus Christ than we can with the records relating to the first moments of humankind, an eventuality which must have occurred — since here we are — but of which no human record can definitively be corroborated as an eyewitness account.
The Roman Empire is one of the most well-documented civilizations in history. Its writers and chronologists remain well-known. Its leaders and events still stand as landmarks in today’s cultural heritage. Until as recently as my mother’s generation, Latin remained a required subject in secondary school.
It stands to reason that if the claims regarding Christ fall down, the New Testament falls down. Christianity’s point of view is removed from the question. If the claims regarding Christ fall down, the Old Testament’s myriad forward-looking passages fall down (the word Christ means Messiah, the Jewish saviour, and the coming Messiah is the central theme of the Old Testament). Such circumstances would tend to suggest in favour of a Bible composed hodgepodge out of older myths.
Respect for Other Cultures
One important fallacy to avoid is the idea that because we’re more “modern,” we’re entitled to look down on ancient cultures as unenlightened and superstitious. Again, this attitude stems from an assumption that I know best. It shuts off questioning which would delve deeper into the reasons for a people-group’s beliefs and customs. It’s easy — and lazy — to make a scoffing dismissal by saying, “Oh, well, they used to believe lightning bolts were thrown from the sky by invisible super-beings.”
We don’t actually know what people believed about, for instance, the scientific nature of lightning. We know that they assigned spiritual meanings to natural occurrences. Given the sophistication of thought among minds such as Plato and Aristotle, Tacitus and Julius Caesar, and the fact that many ancient histographers had the integrity to simply record what was told them about older myths without forcing interpretations, we owe the ancient world due respect.
Forming Conclusions
Where paganism is concerned, it’s important to remember that the present-day, North American concept of paganism is substantially different from that of the ancient Near East. Modern paganism is informed by very old influences, but they do not necessarily manifest in contiguity with their original context. For example, empiricism and its connection to environmental science have altered the ideas of earth worship into a political formulation out of step with that expressed in ancient texts.
Always and ever, in studying ancient history, we have to be vigilant about the imposition of our presuppositions. In reading the ancient texts, I take deep interest in seeing strong indicators that the people-groups of the world do remember a shared history. The mere existence of this history, alongside many other corroborating evidences, strengthens rather than undermines my confidence in the genuineness and veracity of the biblical text. In a naturalistic, randomly evolved world, it would be surprising to see even a few such legends, let alone such a wide basic consensus on them.
Besides asking whether the Bible contains pagan myths, an alternate question which deserves asking is, Why does ancient myth reflect so much of the Bible’s earliest chapters? Put together, the two questions point to a legendary scope of adventure in inquiry.
Further resources:
- Flood Legends From Around the World and their relationship to the Bible
- Genesis: Myth or History?
- Forgotten History: Paganism, ancient atheism, and the pre-Christian study of primeval myth (PDF)
- Norse Myth and Bible History
Image Credits:
Stone of the Sun | Bomba Rosa on Flickr / CC BY-ND 2.0
Oannes | Public Domain / Wikicommons
Urban Legend | C.L. Dyck
Phaedra | Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons
Possibly one reason for the commonality between earlier stories and the accounts in the Old Testament is that the same sorts of situations reoccur through time. People tend to do the same things when faced with a particular set of circumstances. My opinion, this is probably because we’re all hard-wired pretty much the same beneath the overlay of culture. Shylock’s series of questions suggests this. It appears to me to be an argument for Carl Jung’s idea of archetypes, something I explored on my blog (15 January 2010 “The Joy of Archetypes” http://gkfields.blogspot.com/2010_01_01_archive.html ). It would also explain the cyclic nature of history.
Thinking about the modern version of Western paganism versus the old, the new seems an eclectic accretion of features from non-Christian religions from the whole book of anthropology (the cafeteria form of religious belief is something we mackerel-snappers are all too familiar with) rather than a settled group of commonly held beliefs. In other words, it’s like a phone book–plenty of characters but not much of a plot.
“mackerel-snappers”
LOL You will never run out of these, will you?
As an unabashed YEC type (though I reject simplicism and the propaganda of the question), it’s my feeling that with a perspective of acquiescence to the truth-value of the Scripture, we can work from the most confirmable parts outward and also accept things for which we cannot empirically test, such as heaven in the future or creation in the past.
From that point of view, it would be a reasonable prediction to expect to see a basic relationship between all of human cultural memory and the biblical account.
From a naturalistic/non-theistic point of view, one has to wonder why any form of spirituality exists at all. Historically, minds which seek for explanations from a foundation of natural existence will come up with things like the humours, or even phrenology, but they will base their ideas without appeal to the supernatural, unless influenced to do so from existing supernaturalist paradigms.
The only explanation the non-theist can invent (and it does not coincide with what we know of ancient intelligence or ways of thought), is that people may have been more foolish, may have had a superstition reflex as an evolutionary survival mechanism, or may have invoked the supernatural for purely political, authoritarian and social motivations. Charges which have been laid against the great church systems of history in lieu of honest investigation of Christian beliefs. None of that accounts for the ubiquitous basic agreement in ancient world cultures.
I don’t consider one’s sense of social anthropology a pragmatic test of orthodoxy;
I do find it an interesting study, though.
“it’s like a phone book–plenty of characters but not much of a plot.”
Thinking about superstition, for the populace at large, if you can’t do the math, quantum physics is just another religious belief system. The quest for God, in whatever form it takes, is one of things I suspect is hard-wired in us. There is probably a fair amount of truth in the line, “If there was no God, man would have to invent Him.” Happily, there seems no need. Besides, it saves a major league patent search.
“The quest for God, in whatever form it takes, is one of things I suspect is hard-wired in us.”
It does seem so. Marc has listed in his blog’s sidebar a book by R.C. Sproul entitled, “If There is a God, Why are There Atheists?” I haven’t read it, myself, but it makes me chuckle, because I always want to turn it on its head, so:
“If there is no God, why are there atheists?”
Atheistic philosophy is, at its core, devoted to the explanation of God. It goes for the “invention” preference, but nonetheless.
“Besides, it saves a major league patent search.”
LOL I’m trying to picture this, and all that comes to mind is a massive tangle of American lawsuits, and people in decorous pinstripe suits fighting like roosters in a dirt ring behind a Mexican bar…
“these parts of the Bible are not a unique text — in fact, its older contents are globally ubiquitous.”
Most of them, anyway. Imagining these parallels were not present, I can already hear the cry of the skeptic: “yeah, right, there was a global flood, yet no other culture remembers it.”
The difficult scenario for the Bible is not that the parallels exist; the difficult circumstance would arise if they did not. After all, if God is active in human history, we would predict something to filter down through culture, even if it becomes diluted and distorted along the way.
“One important fallacy to avoid is the idea that because we’re more “modern,” we’re entitled to look down on ancient cultures as unenlightened and superstitious.”
Such a common error, too. The one who commits this error fails to realize that his own views are similarly invalidated, as a future culture may dismiss us in the same manner. That notwithstanding, it seems to me there need be some allowance made for the drastic increase in knowledge over a very recent span. It’s arguable that the writers of the Bible, even the OT, may in fact have had more in common with the 18th or 19th century than we do.
“We know that they assigned spiritual meanings to natural occurrences.”
So do I, Cat, *at times.* I’ll bet you do, too. I’m not ashamed of it, either, as I assume you and most Christians are not.
“we owe the ancient world due respect.”
Yes we do, and we need to remember how critical they’d be of us in so many ways. Here’s a cool word: mellontolatry–as far as I know, “popularized” by CS Lewis.
“In a naturalistic, randomly evolved world, it would be surprising to see even a few such legends, let alone such a wide basic consensus on them.”
I may have to disagree on this, given the ubiquitous existence of widely-held mythologies within the naturalist camp itself
“Why does ancient myth reflect so much of the Bible’s earliest chapters?”
Good question. Part II for extra credit: why are these ancient myths so much more mythical in nature than the biblical text? A superb counter to the parallel myth argument is to have the skeptic actually cite the texts they’re basing their argument on (or read them).
“It’s arguable that the writers of the Bible, even the OT, may in fact have had more in common with the 18th or 19th century than we do.”
The better for them than us…
Here we find the nuance of scita and scienda — I mean as terms, not as the name of this blog. If we accept the biblical chronology as accurate, we need to consider the different ways in which knowledge can amass.
At the same time, there is a difference between the accumulation of knowledge, and the accumulation of information…and again, the accumulation of information repositories. If anything, we may still be somewhat at the start of a curve, in that globalization is only just getting its legs. At the same time, the Europeans would tell us that specialization counters erudition.
However, none of this changes the lightning-bolts-and-lonely-goatherds fallacy in that truth is always true, as you wrote. What the accumulation of knowledge can indeed achieve is the obscurity of wisdom amid haystacks of trivia.
“mellontolatry”
That’s the raison d’etre of sci-fi, is it not?
“I may have to disagree on this, given the ubiquitous existence of widely-held mythologies within the naturalist camp itself”
What heresy is this you speak??
“why are these ancient myths so much more mythical in nature than the biblical text?”
A topic for another post, I assure you…
“A topic for another post, I assure you”
OK. Hey, where’s the 1-ton hammer?
At men’s prayer meeting with the junior lad. I asked him for a blog date tomorrow. Waiting breathlessly for my paramour’s response…
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Christ means anointed one*