Meditations On: Acts is Mythology - And that’s Okay

It’s unfortunate that when people hear the word “Myth” they generally think: non-historical made up bullshit. Last month, after reading Dr. Stavrakopoulou’s book, God: An Anatomy, were the scholar attempted to peel back the millennia of cultural reinterpretations, to what the ancient Israeli tribes might have understood about their stories, I pondered on why modern Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians are so insistent that the Bible be treated as perfect history and most definitely NOT mythology. Friends at a bible discussion group that I attend pushed back a bit, mostly holding to the Myth Bad/History Good binary and that’s too bad. In my previous article, from a month ago, I argued that when I was a believer, while I held to the historical point of view, I still looked to the Bible for spiritual guidance that used the words of the text, but were not just the words of the text. I wanted to hear God’s voice behind what was written. I thought that idea was that God was a “living God” and not some silent stone idol or words written in an ancient language frozen in time. Back then I thought the words were historical, but the words of God were not limited to ancient script that fell silent over 2,000 years ago.

So, the challenge from this past week was looking at the writings of Paul in the New Testament, are those words mythology? I’ve seen videos from mythicists who don’t think that any of it is “historical,” who would also reduce the whole thing to the “myth is bullshit” camp. But that’s not helpful. It was interesting that during our last discussion, some believers in the group seemed okay with the notion that stories like Jonah and Whale are mythical, but don’t feel the same way about the miracle stories in the Gospels. Curiously, the thought then that came to me that Paul’s correspondence was pretty early a decade or more after Jesus’ crucifixion and were more persuasive writing and personal correspondence than “storytelling.” The first three gospels were many decades later and were very much in the storytelling tradition, had some supernatural elements, but kept things more grounded, possibly because the audience would still have people who were around during that time. The Acts of the Apostles and the Gospel of John take things up a notch, employing elements of Divine Intervention and Divine Declarations that would never be uttered by the Jesus portrayed in Mark’s Gospel. And then when we get to the writings of the second and third centuries, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the lost Gospel of Judas, things start to really take on a “Jonah and the Whale” type of mythological writing.

It’s as if the writings where the audience would have people who were still alive during the time depicted in the stories had just enough “supernatural” for the stories to be noteworthy but believable. Whereas second and third century writers didn’t feel that limitation and went full “mythology” in their storytelling. This is something that Paul Veyne, in his book, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, noted as the “foggy wall” that stands between the contemporary readers of the text and the age or the miraculous times depicted in the stories being told. The people or heroes in those stories are not at all like the people we interact with everyday. It was a different, better time, with different and better people. How the story changes over the centuries seems pretty easy to see for me.

The idea that because the Gospels or the Old Testament are not academically historical, therefore they are all bullshit is childish, unhelpful and very much missing the point. I get that since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution we like our histories to be verifiable and much less “fable” or “fairytale.” Sorry, but ancient writers weren’t writing for you and your “multi-source historical facts” audience. They were writing for kings and rulers cultural custodians who were trying to figure out who we got to whatever situation we were in at the time. They were writing from within the limitations of their own understanding at the time.

Their cosmology wasn’t our cosmology. The Earth was covered or surrounded by a crystalline dome that protected us from the water above us that sometime came down as rain. And deep below us was where the dead went and mostly suffered. And beyond the dome and the water above us was a celestial realm where the Gods lived, and crossed the skies in knowable patterns year after year after year in ways that were far more consistent than anything they experienced here on a mostly capricious difficult world. And these ideas changed over the centuries as the writers encountered other peoples with other stories about the world that they came from. That’s what humans do, we tell stories that help us understand and figure out our place in this world, limited by whatever our current understanding of how things work and our cruelly short lifespans.

It’s unfortunate that biblical literalists have strapped the message of the text to the historical veracity of the text, which is human nature, but in many way, like a good parable, entirely unnecessary. For the past decade I have enjoyed the stories of the heroes of the MCU without the slightest concern that the kinds of G-forces Ironman would experience every time he engages his repulser beams from his hands and his feet to catch himself just before striking the pavement would break every major bone in his body (or how the hell he would hold that static flying position for however long he’s in flight!). It’s the human struggles of these imperfect heroes, not their superpowers, but how the world tests and challenges them to do the right things, even to the point of self-sacrifice and death. I’ve loved these stories because of the deeper, human truth that they convey, but these stories are just beyond the veil of reality that exists outside my door. There’s so much of value in these stories, that were skillfully written, that take us away from the mundane and meaningless, to a deeper, sometimes difficult, sometimes ecstatic reality that exists just beyond this reality.

This past week this video popped up in my feeds from a scholar who seems to hold the same healthy appreciation for the cultural heritage given to us, in this case, through Luke’s Acts of Apostles. Enjoy.