Jesus and the Trojan War

Michael Horan

Description

Jesus and the Trojan War looks at ways in which stories are presented and understood; and how story-tellers - and their listeners - may wittingly or unwittingly confuse fact with fiction. This book explores the parallels between four stories (the Trojan war, Moses, King Arthur, and Jesus), and the way their sources relate to their histories and contemporary relevance.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Folclore
• Folklore

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 14 juin 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781845408268
• Langue: English

Extrait

Title Page
Jesus and the Trojan War
Myth and meaning for today
Michael Horan
imprint-academic.com



Publisher Information
Published in the UK by
Imprint Academic
PO Box 200, Exeter
EX5 5YX, UK
Digital edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Copyright © 2007, 2016 Michael Horan
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without permission, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism and discussion.
The views and opinions expressed herein belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Imprint Academic or Andrews UK.



Introduction
To Begin at the Beginning
This book is about ways in which the past has been crafted by storytellers. More specifically, it looks at ways in which stories are presented and understood; and how storytellers - and their listeners or readers - may wittingly or unwittingly confuse fact with fiction.
The book began life as a brief enquiry into aspects of historicity, asking what grounds there may be for believing that events in what we call the past actually took place, and how we can know that the people who are said to have taken part in those events did in fact live. In its early stages, the discussion was in an even simpler form than the one it has finally taken.
Initially, the scope was a relatively narrow one, using Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as a model - which is not to imply, let it be added, that Homer is anything less than a lifetime’s study. However, from a perusal of the texts and the social context of the Homeric epics , a number of parallels, or at least comparisons and contrasts, began to emerge, between Homer’s poems and the biblical narrative of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt.
At the time, I was blissfully or naïvely unaware of centuries of scholarly debate about parallels between Greek literature and the Bible. Like others before me, I had been studying Homer and the Bible in separate water-tight compartments, with no inkling of how much the two have in common.
As my compare-and-contrast project progressed, two apparently unrelated incidents raised new questions, broadening the enquiry and ultimately (so it seemed to me) turning the discussion from an interesting, academic one into a challenge with wider implications. It may be helpful to summarise those two incidents here, as they influenced the direction that my thinking was to take, and began the metamorphosis through which the enquiry was to go.
In quite different parts of the country, I heard two ordained men - an Anglican vicar preaching an Easter sermon, and a Baptist minister speaking to a study group - use identical words: ‘the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus’. Neither indicated to his listeners what that ‘historical evidence’ might be, but left the undefined statement hanging in the air. Unable to question the first man on his sources for this evidence, I was able to ask the second for his. Disappointingly, but possibly predictably, his references were the already familiar quotations from the first-century writers Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius and Josephus, all of whom wrote almost in passing about the early Christians.
Now, it seems reasonable to accept these references to Christians within the Roman empire as reliable historical evidence that something extraordinarily dramatic happened after the death of Jesus. His followers, doubtless demoralized initially, were somehow inspired to renewed faith, and became zealous in their efforts to convert others to their beliefs, against all the odds. But it does seem to be quite another matter, to claim that these few brief Roman fragments provide historical, reliable evidence for a dead man’s return to life.
The second influence on my broadening enquiry was an article in a local church magazine, under the title ‘Can we rely on the Bible?’. The article’s author proposed that one proof of the Bible’s truth and reliability, in the sense that it records events that actually happened, is the existence of biblical sites in the Middle East which it is possible to visit and see for oneself. In his view, the existence of these ancient sites in itself provides tangible evidence for the historicity of the biblical patriarchs, the judges, the kings, and the prophets, since the biblical stories about these people are full of references to those places.
That argument seemed less than convincing. To use another example: when visiting Mycenae in Greece, one is aware of being in an extremely ancient place, one which is named in Homer’s Iliad and Odysse y . But the existence of this citadel does not in itself provide tangible evidence for the historicity of the Trojan war. Mycenae is certainly a place that features in legends, and is doubtless the original for the home of the legendary king Agamemnon, but its existence does not itself provide historical proof of the people and events in Homer’s epics.
So now yet another element seemed to have invited itself into my enquiry. It had begun with a study of Homer’s epic poems. That study had extended into an examination of parallels between the Greek Homeric texts and the Hebrew exodus narrative, comparing (for example) their oral origins and structure, but most significantly noting their common central theme of divine intervention and the dealings of gods with men. In considering the extent to which these ancient, heroic traditions could be seen to form the basis of what we call history, there arose the question, What grounds might there be for believing the content of the biblical narrative to be more reliably historical than the Greek ones?
In addition to thinking about how we might discover historical truth within ancient epic narrative and what, if any, historical fact lay behind legend or myth, I had now been surprised by two attempts to use dubious history as a technique of persuasion. The first attempt was the claim that passing references to Christians by first century Roman writers provide historical evidence for an actual event early in the present era, one which is without question a most fundamental tenet of the Christian faith - that is, the literal resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The second attempt was the suggestion that ruined ancient Middle Eastern cities and sites with names dating from biblical times afford in themselves an historical basis for religious belief.
What had taken my interest was this: conservative evangelical Christians appeared to be appealing to history to add authenticity to their beliefs. The conservative evangelical position is quite different from that taken by Christians of a liberal persuasion, who would say that whereas some biblical narratives may indeed be historical, others are much less reliably so, and may need to be read and understood as myth or metaphor. By contrast, the conservative position centres on a belief in the Bible’s inerrant nature as holy writ, on its infallibility in matters of doctrine, and, significantly, its reliability as an historical record of God’s dealings with mankind. And the more ardent the conservative standpoint, the further back in the Bible’s pages is to be found what is claimed to be the historical truth of, for example, a world-wide flood and Noah’s ark, the tower of Babel as the origin of linguistic and racial diversity, and at the very beginning, the six-day creation itself.
The conservative evangelical strand of Christian belief maintains that the Bible contains its own unquestioned and unquestionable truth, a kind of self-checking validation. Accordingly, faith requires no external, independent evidence. Religious faith is based on a belief in the supernatural and has no need for historical back-up. As the ancient writer of a letter included in the Christian Bible’s New Testament expressed it, ‘Faith gives substance to our hopes and convinces us of realities we do not see’ [ A Letter to Hebrews 11:1].
I was surprised by this paradox: that those who hold the Bible to be the unique and infallible word of God, containing literal and factually true accounts of God’s dealings with mankind throughout history, felt a need to authenticate their faith by reference to secular historical evidence. It was this that finally altered the direction that my thinking was to take and substantially shifted the book’s centre of gravity. It seemed valid that within my original enquiry into historicity there should be included questions concerning the continuing and widespread modern-day presentation and acceptance of biblical narrative as though it is historical fact.
All in good time, we shall give thought to what we mean by history. So far, the word has been used very loosely to signify little more than the past. We shall also come to what may be an obvious fact, that ‘what seems unquestionably true to one age or civilization differs from what seems unquestionably true to others’. That, E.L. Fackenheim continues, is the result of ‘an everincreasing historical self-consciousness [which] has not been without grave spiritual effects. In earlier ages, most men could simply accept religious beliefs as unquestionably true’ [Fackenheim 1996]. Just how grave any spiritual effects brought about by ‘historical self-consciousness’ have been is a point for discussion.
In The Bible in History , Thomas L. Thompson has asked, ‘Why is an understanding of the Bible as fictive considered to undermine its truth and integrity? ... To learn that what we once believed is not what we should have believed, is the ordinary intellectual process by which understanding grows’ [Thompson 1999]. That important question and observation underlie the argument in this book.
***
What, then, is my purpose here? Before summarising what it is that this book sets out t