REALITY, MYTH AND METAPHOR IN SACRED SCRIPTURES

There are many different kinds of literature in the Sacred Scriptures of every religion.

In particular, the Judeo-Christian Bible is not just a book:
It is an entire library of literary works from the ancient world.

As such, from an anthropological and historical point of view,
it is one of the most valuable collections in the world.

It is often handled and claimed in the most inappropriate ways,
worst of all in ways that clearly violate the intentions of the authors,
by the very people who claim it as the basis of their faith.

For example,
among the kinds of literature are law, poetry, what purports to be history, but would not be considered as such today,
prophecy, open letters, census documents, legends, myths, allegories, fables, apocalyptic treatises, gospels,
and a number of other kinds of writings.

Even from the most cursory examination,
one kind of document that is very familiar to us, but completely missing from the Bible,
is any kind of technical or scientific study.

It makes sense that no such literature is in the Bible,
because that kind of study has existed as we know it for only a few centuries.

And yet...

Religious people treat parts of the Bible as though they were addressing the same kinds of concerns as,
for an egregious example, Charles Darwin's great work, _The Origin of Species_.

Such violence done to the literature of the Bible
is done in the name of faith,
but it prevents allowing the Bible to speak for itself.

The first step in understanding any work of literature
is to try to ascertain something about the intent of the author.

It is necessary to know what kind of literature we are looking at.

A work of fiction cannot be expected to tell us the same kinds of things as a work of history,
although some purported works of history seem to be just as inventive as any work of fiction.

The kind of writing I want to talk about today
is mythology.

Many of the writings of the Bible include more than one kind of literature.

For example, from the first glance,
the opening chapters of Genesis
contain mythology.

Yet the structure of the first chapter is quite obviously poetry.

Many ancient myths are written as poetry,
so it does not surprise us.

In fact, there are two obvious signs of the poetry of the Song of Creation.

First of all there is the form of Hebrew poetry
which translates beautifully
because it is the rhyming of ideas
rather than the rhyming of sounds in any given language.

Second, the stanzas of the poem are marked by days of the First Week:
each stanza ends with the words,
"and there was evening and there was morning, one day," a second day, a third day, and so on.

It's the same marking of stanzas by days as we see in the familiar song,
"The Twelve Days of Christmas,"
where each stanza begins,

"On the First Day of Christmas, my true love gave to me..."
with each stanza numbered by First Day of Christmas, Second Day of Christmas, and so on.

To try to claim the passage of time within the Seven Days of the Song of Creation
is to destroy the meaning of the poem from the beginning.

Such irony!

The very people who are claiming that they believe the Bible
are preventing the understanding of the Bible on its own terms.

The mythology of the Song of Creation is obvious in its very first words:
It is telling us about the activities of God, Elohim, more correctly, the Gods,
the supernatural being or beings who created the universe.

Any discussion of the activities of supernatural beings is a myth, by definition.

To call some literary work a myth is not saying anything at all about its truth or falsehood.

There is a common misunderstanding of the term in our time,
using the word "myth" as synonymous with falsehood,
but that is a misuse of the word,
in no way the fault of the word itself!

For this reason,
people sometimes get very upset
if we talk about the Bible as containing myths,
as though that meant that the Bible contained falsehoods.

In fact, that Bible contains plenty of falsehoods, reported as such,
as would any kind of diverse literature,
but that has nothing to do with the use - or misuse - of the Bible as religious authority.

Likewise, the presence of myths in the Bible as a literary form
says nothing whatsoever
about the use - or misuse - of the Bible as religious authority.

There are canonical myths.

There are true myths.

There are false myths.

There are good myths and there are bad myths.

They are all myths.

I know I am preaching to the choir here,
but it seems vitally important to make clear
the terms in which I want our discussion to take place.

As I will use the term,
a myth is a story including the actions of supernatural beings and forces
that communicates meaning,
and the meaning is more important than the details of the events reported.

The events that a myth describes may or may not have taken place within recorded and verifiable history.

The history is not relevant to the myth or its meaning.

What really happened can be debated,
but in the end, for the myth itself,
what really happened does not matter.

What matters for the myth is what it means.

Let me repeat that,
because it is the single most important principle for what are talking about:

For a myth,
what really happened does not matter;
what matters
is what it really means.

The Song of Creation is like that.

The whole poem is teaching us how the whole world of space and time
was brought into being by the gods, or by the one true God, however you interpret it,
as the gods - or God - spoke or sang it into being.

It was fun for the Creator,
and when it was all complete, She rested.

I say She because we are created in the gods' own image,
male and female.

That is what it means.

We are male and female, and the image of God / Goddess,
is to be male and female.

Try to tell that to a Christian or Jewish fundamentalist.

Of course, they approach their supposedly infallible Bible, telling it what it may or may not say.

On the other hand, if we are able to read the beautiful Song of Creation, the first chapter of Genesis,
without all the baggage we bring to it,
as the beautiful mythic poetry that it is,
we can see it as an early human attempt
to understand the Creator's hand in the evolution, development, and unfolding of the world around us.

We are a part of Creation, not separate from it.

Hear the words:

"Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures,"

and hear the poetic representation of the creation of life,
close to what we now understand,
since life almost certainly came into existence in the sea.

Myths often describe in poetic terms
realities that we all experience on some level
but often fail to recognize.

In one of my least favorite Biblical myths,
we hear an echo of an event that almost certainly happened at some point, in some sense.

It is one of my least favorite stories because it is murderous.

It is the story of Abraham and his favored son, and tells us some important things about the birth of western religions.

Abraham lived in a culture that believed in and practiced human sacrifice.

The Biblical telling of the story is brutal.

I won't repeat it here.

But Abraham believed that it was his duty to God to sacrifice his first-born son, the one who opened the womb, to God.  

Among the ancient Hebrews,
daughters were more fortunate.

They were not often sacrificed, unless it were in the fulfilling of a vow or something like that,
and yes, there is just such a story in the Bible.

Needless to say, I really, really hate that story too. (Judges 11)

Any way, back to my point,
Abraham got all the way to the altar of sacrifice,
prepared to kill his son,
when somehow he came to the realization that God did not really want this sacrifice.

God did NOT want fathers to sacrifice their sons - or daughters - at all.

The myth says that he heard the voice of God telling him NOT to sacrifice his son.

How many fathers came to the same point,
but did not hear the voice of God crying out to them in their hearts,
"Do not sacrifice your son!"

Yet from this one realization,
from the revelation that somehow got into Abraham's heart,
were born three of the worlds great religions:
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

The myth in this story is the voice of God speaking to Abraham.

We don't have any personal interviews with Abraham available to us:
We have only the story as presented in Genesis;
so we do not know exactly how it all went for Abraham.

Something clearly happened in Abraham's heart and mind
that led him to understand God and his faith in God in a new way.

If Abraham could tell us that he heard the voice of God in his own heart,
it would be his own personal myth.

If the story involves a magical voice from on high,
then it is more of a cultural myth.

Because it involves the voice of God,
whether speaking in one man's heart or in audible form,
the story is a myth.

And now we come to the heart of the matter:

Somehow, human sacrifices came to an end, and we can all be grateful for that!

Along the way, it was necessary to attribute the ending of human sacrifice to divine revelation,
and so a myth was necessary.

To call it a myth is not to say it is false.

People did come to realize how wrong human sacrifice was.

In that regard the story is a true myth.

The story was also formative for cultures and religions: Jewish, Christian and Islamic,
and so it is a canonical myth.

It led to a positive change in human life, I think we can all agree,
and so it was a good myth.

It is still a myth in its literary form
because the revelation is divine in origin.

Accepting it on any level involves an act of faith.

Rejecting any aspect of it is a choice not to believe.

Because faith and believing are involved,
it is a matter for personal decision and conscience.

Since I am a Christian agnostic,
I'm just going to say, "Who knows?"

We do know this:
Abraham represents a sea change in people's understanding of their relationship with God,
and the sea change has endured through long ages of human life and experience.

Similar myths have been formative in the lives of people all through history.

I'm going to leap all the way forward to the myth of the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

To call this story a myth would be fighting words among many people in our communities,
but again, in literary form, the story is obviously mythological.

I believe I am safe speaking about the story in this way here:
Once again, I am preaching to the choir.

Historians are busy debating about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

Some will point out that there is not any reliable historical evidence that Jesus ever existed at all.

Others will tell us that there is plenty of documentary evidence,
not only of His existence,
but of many details about him.

Here is the problem:

All of the documentary evidence is tractarian in nature:

That is, it involves a kind of literature designed to persuade us of a point of view concerning Jesus.

All the documents we have about Jesus are more concerned with the persuasion
than with any details of what actually happened.

Therefore, we have to take everything they report with a grain of salt.

Everyone who examines and talks about the evidence, to this day, has an axe to grind.

Whether Jesus ever lived or not is very important to a lot of people.

His story is far more important than anything about Him
and whether or not it may or may not have really happened.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

I'm a Christian agnostic.

I don't know the answers.

I don't know what really happened.

I can't honestly say that I don't care what really happened.

In fact, I care very much,
but I have to admit we cannot know very much at all about the historical details.

No less a great Christian teacher than Albert Schweitzer did a careful study of the historical Jesus,
and he came to the conclusion that in terms of history, there was nothing there at all - nothing to find.

Schweitzer's life was modeled on the teachings of Jesus and the story of Jesus,
but he could not tell us what really happened.

I think that is precisely the point.

The whole Gospel story, start to finish, is a myth.

It all involves the work of God, ultimately claiming that the protagonist, Jesus Himself, is God in human form.

As He is presented in the Gospels, Jesus Himself would have been appalled by that claim,
but that is, as I often seem to say to you, another story.

None of what is said about Jesus in the documents that concern Him
can be claimed as objective history.

None of it at all.

The story itself communicates a lot about meaning - not only the meaning of the story of Jesus,
but the meaning of all of human life.

I feel that the meaning, as I understand it, is a very positive one.

Without pressing the details,
we can hear a message of healing love in the face of suffering,
and that is a message we all need.

If we press the details too much,
we make a number of serious mistakes.

The New Testament was written as the founding documents of a new religion of Christianity.

It was from the beginning in competition with the Judaism from which it sprang into being
and with the paganism which surrounded it.

The New Testament is full of attempts to seek advantage in the competition.

Judaism was blamed for the death of Jesus
when in reality only the Romans used crucifixion as a method of execution in that time and place.

If the Jews had truly killed Jesus, He would have been stoned to death.

Yet blaming the Jews for His death was the excuse for prejudice and mistreatment - sometimes killing them -
right down the years even until the century previous to our own.

The lesson we can take from the misuse of the New Testament mythology
is that any teaching leading us to judge or hate other people because of who they are
is a false teaching, not worthy of acceptance by people of good will.

As with any myth, the meaning is more important than the details of what happened.

If the New Testament records any events that really happened,
those events are far less important than their meaning.

The story of Jesus means hope, even in the darkest hours of human life.

Even in the face of death itself
we can have hope because of the Jesus story.

His resurrection, whether in the body or the spirit,
means a new beginning through all of life
and even in life beyond death itself.

So mote it be.

Blessed be.