CHAPTER TWO

A HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE GOSPEL MIRACLES

A General Overview

Strauss (1801-1874) seems to have started it all. By the time of his writing, others had already called the historicity of the Gospel miracle accounts into question for naturalistic reasons, but Strauss’ contribution excited controversy because of his claim that the Gospel miracle accounts were mythical.[2] Strauss did not attempt to consign the entirety of the Gospel narratives to the realm of myth, but to investigate only those elements that he considered unhistorical.[3]

To explain Strauss’ own understanding of the origins of mythical elements in the Gospels, it is worth quoting him at length:

But, as we have shown, the greater part of these mythi did not arise during that period [between the death of Jesus and the commission to writing of the gospel narratives], for their first foundation was laid in the legends of the Old Testament, before and after the Babylonish exile; and the transference of these legends with suitable modifications to the expected Messiah, was made in the course of the centuries which elapsed between that exile and the time of Jesus. So that for the period between the formation of the first Christian community and the writing of the Gospels, there remains to be effected only the transference of Messianic legends, almost all ready formed to Jesus, with some alterations to adapt them to christian opinions, and to the individual character and circumstances of Jesus: only a very small proportion of mythi having to be formed entirely new.[4]

Strauss proposes two basic criteria by which to identify an account as myth: on the basis of form, and on the basis of content.[5] He seems to be operating on purely naturalistic or deistic presuppositions that events that cannot be assimilated to philosophical laws of natural cause and effect are not credible.[6] In this manner Strauss examines each of the Gospels, devoting a section of his work to miracles themselves.

In contrast to this quite skeptical view of miracles common in the nineteenth century and illustrated by Strauss, most Biblical scholars of the twentieth century have accepted that the historical Jesus did in fact perform many healings and exorcisms. This was so even after the “religions- und formgeschichtliche Schule” had denounced most of the Gospel miracles as later creations of the Hellenistic church.[7] However, these scholars, who accept that Jesus did perform exorcisms and healings, often deny that the Gospels provide an accurate witness to that fact; i.e., the miracle narratives themselves in the synoptics do not necessarily constitute historically accurate accounts of those events.[8] Furthermore, some scholars question whether the synoptic miracle accounts are anything more than generalizations made without reference to any specific events at all.[9] Yet some do find miracle narratives in the synoptics that they do believe arose from eyewitness accounts—notable among these is the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law (Mark 1:29-31 par.).[10] On the other hand, all but conservatives tend to discredit nature miracles and revivifications as inventions of the early church.[11] One wonders—are the criteria that are used to support Jesus’ healings also used to denounce his nature miracles, or do the nature miracles indeed find the same support by the same criteria? Blackburn seems to indicate that this denunciation of nature miracles and revivifications is done a priori by some who simply write them off as impossible. Others, he says, conclude for historical reasons that these types of miracles were “highly improbable.”[12]

In 1973, Geza Vermes published Jesus the Jew. As a part of that work, Vermes attempted to show that Jesus was a prime example of the miracle-worker from Galilee. Vermes identified a type that he called the ‘hasidim.’ Jesus was one example; so were Honi the Circle Drawer, Hanna and Abba Hilkiah, and Hanina ben Dosa.[13] While Vermes finds several points of contact between these men, Blackburn finds quite a number of serious flaws in Vermes’ argument, concluding that Jesus does not fit this class of hasidim, if indeed such a class ever existed as Vermes describes it.[14]

Morton Smith has made a large contribution to another view of Jesus and his miracles. In Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark, he finds that Jesus’ miracles parallel accounts found in the Greek Magical Papyri and Philostratus’ Vita Apollonii. This leads Smith to call Jesus a “magician.”[15]

Smith elaborates upon this view in, Jesus the Magician,[16] attempting to show that the historical Jesus fits snugly into the role of an ancient magician. For Smith, the Gospels are replete with ‘suppressed’ information that would show Jesus to be a magician, or added information that is meant to keep Jesus from looking like a magician. The Gospels are essentially Christian propaganda that shaped the tradition of the historical Jesus so as to make him appear less magical. Smith makes extensive use of parallels to the Gospel narratives to show that Jesus fits a ‘type’ of person from the ancient world—the magician, like Apollonius of Tyana. He does a good job of showing what non-Christians (and some heretical Christians) of the ancient world thought of Jesus, but he has to do some tough, text-critical gymnastics to say that Jesus actually was what his detractors conceived him to be; that is, a magician.

Smith uses the term ‘magician’ to class Jesus with a particular “social type” represented by the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM). Others, such as Aune, find parallels between Jesus and contemporary magicians, but decline to use the term primarily because it fails to take into account the importance of Jesus’ eschatology.[17]

E.P. Sanders also allows that such parallels can be drawn, but he clearly avoids labeling Jesus as a magician. He says,

We cannot, however, say that his healing activities put him on the level of magicians. It is a speculative possibility that he sometimes used one or more of their devices, including spitting and imitative physical behaviour. He seems principally to have healed by speech and touch.[18]

Instead, if a type is to be chosen, Sanders prefers to speak of Jesus as an exorcist.[19] Admittedly, Sanders’ case is much easier to substantiate from the Gospel narratives, but he, like Smith, also proposes that the Evangelists intentionally omitted material that would make Jesus look too much like the stereotypical exorcist, or, for that matter, like a magician. Nevertheless, Sanders, conscious of the speculative nature of his proposition, contents himself with pointing out that what the Gospels teach us is that Jesus did not gain his fame primarily as a teacher, but as a healer, and especially as an exorcist.[20]

Sanders’ view of Jesus’ ‘nature miracles,’ however, is not so positive. He is much more skeptical of the actual occurrence of miracles of this sort than he is of Jesus’ ability to exorcise.[21] In both cases, Sanders prefers to rationalize the miracle stories than to take them at face value.[22] On the whole, however, Sanders does an admirable job of showing the significance that Jesus and his contemporaries attached to his miracles.

H.C. Kee has brought to light substantial differences between the practitioners of magic and their practices as related in PGM and the accounts of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospels.[23] Kee has this to say about the techniques of magic:

The Greek Magical Papyri … show that the efficacy of magic depends on recitation of multiple divine names, on the forcefulness of the order given to the gods, and—above all—on the proper use of technique…. Often the formula consists of nonsense words or syllables. The individualistic and coercive aspects of magic are evident in PGM XIII.788-89…[24]

This does not sound like the description of Jesus’ miracles that we read in the Gospels. Kee affirms this; miracles in the N.T. may occasionally reflect “magic-type thinking,” but they fail to demonstrate any of the most salient features of magic.[25] Kee criticizes the work of Hull and of Smith for neglecting to adduce any first-century material in support of their conclusions that Jesus was a magician: “Both writers in these studies reason backward from third- and fourth-century evidence to posit historical conditions from which they draw conclusions about the first century. For that period no adequate documentation exists.”[26] Kee’s most poignant criticism of the conclusion that Jesus was akin to ancient magicians is that such a conclusion requires one to ignore “the essential features of the life-world which is in each case operative behind the literature.”[27] There are obvious differences between the methods and motives of magic and the methods and motives of miracle, and these differences are fundamental to the worldviews that produce magic and miracle.

John Hull has written an influential work entitled Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition in which he first describes the sources through which modern scholarship has become aware of ancient Hellenistic magical practices. He then proceeds to indicate the ways in which the Gospel traditions were influenced by this magical milieu.[28] A chapter devoted to the influence of magic in Luke-Acts leads Hull to conclude that Luke writes from within a magical world-view. For Luke, the world is a battleground for spiritual forces, angels and demons.[29] The miracles are seen as the outworking of ‘power,’ which is nearly a substance of some sort. That ‘power’ is transferable, so Jesus passed it on to the early church, along with ‘authority,’ which was a kind of power over all other powers.[30]

Achtemeier has argued that Luke places greater emphasis and higher importance on the miracles of Jesus than do the other Gospels. He believes that Luke was quite aware of the contemporary Hellenistic magical world-view, but that his accounts of the miraculous do not show such signs of having been infiltrated by magic as Hull suggests.[31] Again, as was said above, in his interpretation of the Gospel miracles, Hull has failed to take into account the worldview that is explicit in the Gospels, having turned instead to a magical worldview that is not at all apparent in the Gospels.

Since the publication of Hull’s seminal work, the use of magic in Luke-Acts has been further explored by Susan Garrett. In her Ph. D. dissertation, Garrett shows that Luke can simultaneously condemn magic and condone miracles.[32] She concludes that to Luke there was a clear distinction between the two: ‘Magic’ is Satanic, but miracles are from God. Luke used magic as a motif to convince his readers “that Christians had authority over the devil in the post-resurrection period.”[33]

Crossan follows Smith in labeling Jesus a ‘magician,’ but his unique contribution to miracle study lies in his reinterpretation of Jesus’ use of the Kingdom. Crossan thinks Jesus abandoned an apocalyptic understanding of the Kingdom and replaced it with a present Kingdom characterized by its “egalitarian ethos.”[34] The miracles become, to Crossan, Jesus’ way of undermining the monopoly that the temple and priests held on divine healing and forgiveness.[35]

Rudolf Bultmann’s work lies nearer to Strauss and to that which I propose to do. He asserts that the miracle stories have their origins, mostly, in Hellenistic culture:

...the Hellenistic miracle stories offer such a wealth of parallels to the Synoptic, particularly in style, as to create a prejudice in favor of supposing that the Synoptic miracle stories grew up on Hellenistic ground.[36]

Thus, he attempts to show that most Gospel miracle accounts developed not from historical events but from Hellenistic mythic motifs in an Hellenistic environment (although he attributes some to a Palestinian environment).[37] Yet Bultmann denies that the Hellenistic parallels were the actual sources for the miracle stories.[38]

Bultmann apportions twenty-some pages of his History of the Synoptic Tradition to a discussion of the origins of the miracle stories. However, his treatment of their Hellenistic parallels is rather shallow, relying mainly on unexegeted, partial parallels.[39] He admits: “There is still much for research to do at this point.”[40] Bultmann made use both of form criticism and of the History of Religions school in his criticism of the Gospel miracle accounts.[41] More will be said about Bultmann later.

J. Jeremias’ treatment of Jesus’ miracles is typical of the results of the historical-critical method in the mid-twentieth century. Submitting the miracles to literary and linguistic analysis, Jeremias concludes that many of the miracles can be explained as linguistic misunderstandings that led to the development of miraculous stories. Of course, the nature miracles are highly suspect: “It is hardly coincidental that it is the nature miracles that prove to be secondary.”[42] Jeremias, then, does not attempt to rationalize the miracles, showing how they could have occurred naturally, but to take the miraculous element out of the narratives altogether. In New Testament Theology, He does not, however, explain why any of the stories would have been preserved before the insertion of the miraculous elements. That is, he does not answer the question of what significance the miracle stories could possibly have had apart from their miraculous content.

In his New Testament Theology, Jeremias does no actual comparison of Jesus’ miracles with Rabbinic and Hellenistic miracle stories, yet on the basis of a few thematic similarities, he makes the following conclusion:

Some of these miracle stories display such close contacts with those in the gospels that we can hardly avoid the conclusion that the Christian tradition borrowed from its environment and at the least took over some individual themes from it.[43]

Jeremias then cites the parallel between Apollonius of Tyana and Luke 7:11-17, which, as it will be shown below, demonstrates nothing.

Further, Jeremias believes that a form-critical analysis of the miracles shows there to be two strata: he distinguishes the earlier Palestinian from the later Hellenistic stratum.[44] He suggests that such a distinction can be made on the basis of similarity in the forms of Hellenistic miracle stories to some of those found in the Gospels. He does not, however, show why such similarity of form necessarily supports his conclusion: “a form-critical analysis of the miracle stories results in a further reduction of their substance.”[45] There is no obvious reason why we should judge a miracle story whose form parallels the basic form of many Hellenistic miracle stories as lacking “substance.” All that similarity of form can rightly demonstrate is possible similarity of cultural milieu; it is a non sequitur to assert that there has been any borrowing that would call into question the originality of the Gospel miracle stories. At best, similarity of form can only show that an author has adopted the culturally appropriate mode of expression, not that the author has fabricated the story wholesale. Thus, similarity of form does not ‘reduce the substance’ of a miracle story; rather, it makes a miracle story intelligible to an audience in which form itself may have conveyed meaning.

Despite his essentially negative view of Jesus’ miracles, Jeremias does concede that Jesus must have done something miraculous that precipitated all the miracle stories. What Jesus did, however, was not to heal physical malady, but to heal “psychogenous suffering.”[46]

R.T. France, on the other hand, sees no reason to judge the miracles of Jesus as impossibilities. Instead, he accepts them as historical. France points out that the miracles of Jesus are different from the sorts of wonders performed by either miracle-workers or magicians of his or our day. In contrast to their feats, Jesus worked with unusual authority and did not make miracles the centerpiece of his ministry. France says,

The over-all impression is of the overwhelming authority of Jesus, deployed in response to faith to meet genuine human need as it confronted him, in whatever way was most appropriate to the case.... This was not a travelling circus, but a man of extraordinary power engaged in a battle against evil not only on the spiritual but also on the physical plane.[47]

France, then, is at odds with the likes of Sanders and Hull who prefer to classify Jesus with other miracle workers of the ancient world, and even to call him a magician.

Graham Twelftree has recently made a comprehensive contribution to the study of Jesus’ miracles in the Gospels. In his book, he sets out to accomplish four things: first, to explore the ways in which the Gospel writers themselves understood Jesus’ miracles; second, to explore how Jesus understood his own miracles; third, to explore the historicity of the miracles; and fourth, to determine how the results of his study apply to the quest for the historical Jesus.[48] Along the way Twelftree offers a sizable section on Luke, as well as some valuable perspectives on the history of scholarly treatment of Jesus’ miracles, including Bultmann’s demythologizing. Ultimately, Twelftree supports the historicity of Jesus’ miracles.[49]

Dennis MacDonald on Myth in the New Testament

The most recent contributions to the study of mythic parallels to the Lukan corpus have been penned by Dennis MacDonald, John Wesley Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at Claremont School of Theology. MacDonald has written several works attempting to show that Christian authors, including Luke and Mark, intentionally emulated Homeric epic. For example, in his article “Luke’s Emulation of Homer: Acts 12:1-17 and Illiad [sic] 24,”[50] MacDonald proposes that Luke’s narration of Peter’s escape from prison is in imitation of Priam’s rescue of Hector’s body and subsequent escape from the Greek encampment in Iliad 24. His assessment is based primarily on similarities in content and plot structure between the two narratives. He notes, however, that simple parallels of content and structure are not sufficient to conclude that there has been intentional “mimesis.” There are six criteria MacDonald has developed in order to defend any particular case of supposed mimesis:[51] 1) Accessibility. The text being mimicked must be readily attainable. 2) Analogy. Imitation is more likely when other ancient authors have also imitated the text in question. 3) Density (or volume) of parallels. There must be a persuasive number of parallels that can be drawn. 4) Sequence of parallels. The more the parallels follow the sequence of the original, the more chance there has been imitation. 5) Distinctive traits. “If an author wanted to alert the reader to the presence of a literary model, he often would use unusual words, names, or expressions to flag the text as an imitation of the antecedent with the same peculiarities.”[52] 6) “Interpretability.” One must be able to show why the author chose to imitate a given text. In “Luke’s Emulation of Homer” MacDonald shows that Acts 12:1-17 meets all these criteria with respect to Iliad 24, and states:

If my exegesis is correct, the Acts of the Apostles is self-conscious fiction. Its author expected the reader to recognize it as such and to compare his tales with similar tales in Greek poetry. The historical stratum, if any, is extremely thin and from my perspective quite uninteresting. The only historical information in Acts 12:1-17 may be that James the brother of John was martyred by Herod Agrippa and that, perhaps, Peter was imprisoned in Judea. The prison break is fiction, the angel is a fiction, Rhoda is a fiction. Furthermore, it is as fiction that Luke intended his readers to appreciate the tale.[53]

………………………………………………………………………………………

If this reading of Acts 12:1-17 is correct, its implications for reading all of Acts are enormous. Luke expected his more perceptive readers to recognize his stories as retold tales from Homer.[54]

MacDonald finds Luke mimicking Homer again in Acts 27 and 28, Paul’s shipwreck.[55] His comparison is with several different passages in the Odyssey, primarily books 5 and 12. MacDonald proposes that Paul’s shipwreck in Acts is an emulation of Odysseus’ shipwrecks in the Odyssey. He supports his proposal, again, mainly by pointing out similarity in content and narrative structure. This time he makes no effort to defend this supposed mimesis by demonstrating how the passage in Acts meets the six criteria mentioned above, but one can easily see how it would. The analysis itself creates no problems. It may very well be that Luke used Odysseus’ famous shipwrecks as literary models; the most striking parallels are the uses of epikellein, and the appearance of an heavenly being who warns of danger yet promises salvation.

Nevertheless, it would be inappropriate to conclude from these parallels that Luke’s story is fiction. Here is why: any two narrations of any two shipwrecks must use parallel vocabulary. A mast is a mast, and an oar is an oar; there are only so many words one can use to describe the parts of a ship or the look of a storm. Verbal parallels between Acts 27-28 and the Odyssey appear significant. However, Acts 27-28 is the only extant, detailed account of a shipwreck from this period. Had other accounts survived, we might have found similar instances of parallel vocabulary in them.

Furthermore, similarity of content and plot structure need not indicate direct borrowing. MacDonald lays out a parallel version of these various passages to visually demonstrate the similarity.[56] There is, however, a simple flaw in his argument: parallelism does not indicate borrowing. This can be demonstrated by the simple fact that the same similarities of content and structure can also be found when comparing Luke to the Gilligan’s Island theme song:[57]

“Gilligan’s Island” Theme, assorted lyrics: Acts 27 and 28, assorted verses:

Just sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
a tale of a fateful trip

That started from this tropic port, There [at Myra in Lycia] the centurion found an Alexandrian
aboard this tiny Ship. ship sailing for Italy and put us on board (27:6).

The weather started getting rough, Before very long, a wind of hurricane force, called the
“northeaster,” swept down from the island.

the tiny ship was tossed. The ship was caught by the storm and could not head into the
wind; so we gave way to it and were driven along (27:14-15).

If not for the courage of the fearless crew, “Unless these men stay with the ship,
the Minnow would be lost. you cannot be saved.” So the soldiers cut the ropes that held the

The Minnow would be lost.                         lifeboat and let it fall away (27:31-32).

The ship set ground on the shore of this      When daylight came, they did not recognize the land, but
uncharted desert isle                                they saw a bay with a sandy beach, where they decided to
                                                      run the ship aground if they could (27:39).

With Gilligan, the Skipper too,                 In this way everyone reached land in safety (27:44).
The Millionaire and his wife,
A movie star, the Professor and Mary Ann,
here on Gilligan's Isle.

The first mate and his Skipper too,                The islanders showed us unusual kindness. They built a fire
will do their very best,                              and welcomed us all because it was raining and cold. Paul
to make the others comfortable,                gathered a pile of brushwood… (28:2-3)
in their tropic island nest.

In drawing his conclusions, MacDonald neglects to consider other possibilities. For example, he never asks whether an author might structure his/her narration of an historical event in such a way that it would be at once historical and parallel to a well-known text. Until he has shown that this is impossible, or at least implausible, he cannot simply assume that emulation necessitates lack of historicity. Furthermore, this narrative occurs half-way through the book of Acts. In order to show that the entire book is to be read as a fictional emulation of Homeric epic, MacDonald has to show that such emulation is present from the outset of the book. This he has not done. If Luke is writing fiction based on Homeric epic, he would most likely ‘flag’ the text from the start, lest his readers realize his artistic mimesis only after the tale is half told. We conclude that while parallels may exist, MacDonald has drawn his conclusions hastily. Nevertheless, the criteria MacDonald has set forth for defending the possible instance of mimesis are reasonable and will aid in our own analysis of the miracle accounts in the Gospel of Luke.

Rudolf Bultmann on Myth in the New Testament

Bultmann indicates that myth is a sort of symbolic language for conveying the meaning of an almost ineffable reality: “All of us are probably acquainted with sagas and legends, pagan as well as Christian, in which the profound idea of the transformation of God has been concealed in the mythological representation of the metamorphosis of the deity or of gods, who visit a mortal incognito and unrecognized”[58] This is nearly an allegorical view of myth. As will be shown in the next chapter, allegorizing is generally considered to be a false reading of a myth. But, as the following quotations will show, myth, to Bultmann, is primarily a descriptive tool, a sort of extended metaphor for describing the world in an existential manner:

The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives.[59]

Myth speaks of the power or the powers which man supposes he experiences as the ground and limit of his world and of his own activity and suffering. He describes these powers in terms derived from the visible world, with its tangible objects and forces, and from human life, with its feelings, motives, and potentialities.[60]

The real purpose of myth is to speak of a transcendent power which controls the world and man, but that purpose is impeded and obscured by the terms in which it is expressed.

Hence the importance of the New Testament mythology lies not in its imagery but in the understanding of existence which it enshrines.[61]

This puts an existential twist to Fontenelle’s understanding (and that of other eighteenth-nineteenth century mythologists): myth is the way in which a primitive people expressed their understanding of the world. Another example:

Myth is here used in the sense popularized by the ‘History of Religions’ school. Mythology is the use of imagery to express the other worldly in terms of this world and the divine in terms of human life, the other side in terms of this side. For instance, divine transcendence is expressed as spatial distance. It is a mode of expression which makes it easy to understand the cultus as an action in which material means are used to convey immaterial power. Myth is not used in that modern sense, according to which it is practically equivalent to ideology.[62]

Bultmann supposes that demythologization is demanded both by the nature of myth and by the New Testament (N.T.) itself. The N.T. demands demythologization because it is internally contradictory, says Bultmann in “New Testament and Mythology.”[63] The problem with his claim here, however, is two-fold: First, he indicates what he thinks are contradictions, but he does not explain why they are contradictions, and he makes no genuine effort to resolve these ‘contradictions’ through any other method than demythologizing them.[64] Second, because Bultmann has not defined why they are contradictory teachings, he has not seen the possibility that they could, in fact, be compatible.

In “New Testament and Mythology,” Bultmann discusses extensively the relationship between the N.T. understanding of human existence and that of existentialism.[65] His concern is that the authentic human life can be lived only by “an act of God.”[66] And Bultmann admits that the N.T. identifies that ‘act of God’ as the Christ event, the revelation of God’s love in Christ.[67] He must now ask whether that Christ event is mythical. Regarding this question, Bultmann says the following things, which help us to understand both the relationship between myth and Gospel in Bultmann’s mind and Bultmann’s understanding of what constitutes myth itself:

Now, it is beyond question that the New Testament presents the event of Jesus Christ in mythical terms. The problem is whether that is the only possible presentation. Or does the New Testament itself demand a restatement of the event of Jesus Christ in non-mythological terms? Now, it is clear from the outset that the event of Christ is of a wholly different order from the cult-myths of Greek or Hellenistic religion. Jesus Christ is certainly presented as the Son of God, a pre-existent divine being, and therefore to that extent a mythical figure. But he is also a concrete figure of history—Jesus of Nazareth. His life is more than a mythical event; it is a human life which ended in the tragedy of crucifixion. We have here a unique combination of history and myth. The New Testament claims that this Jesus of history, whose father and mother were well known to his contemporaries (John 6. 42) is at the same time the pre-existent Son of God, and side by side with the historical event of the crucifixion it sets the definitely non-historical event of the resurrection. This combination of myth and history presents a number of difficulties, as can be seen from certain inconsistencies in the New Testament material.[68]

First, notice that Bultmann does not explain why it should be considered mythical to identify Jesus as the pre-existent Son of God. One can only assume that Bultmann considers this mythical because it is not an empirically verifiable event. Perhaps it is mythical to Bultmann because his naturalistic worldview will not allow an incursion of the divine into the created order. In either case, he has not proven that the pre-existence of Christ is ‘mythical;’ he has only asserted it. Second, notice that the juxtaposition of myth and history in this passage indicates that for Bultmann whatever is mythical is not historical. This is congruent with Walter Burkert’s classification of myth as “non-factual storytelling,” which will be examined more detail in the next chapter.

Notice in the following passage that Bultmann does not use the term ‘mythical’ consistently with his earlier definition of myth:

We are compelled to ask whether all this mythological language is not simply an attempt to express the meaning of the historical figure of Jesus and the events of his life; in other words, significance of these as a figure and event of salvation. If that be so, we can dispense with the objective form in which they are cast....

...It is easy enough to deal with the doctrine of Christ’s pre-existence and the legend of the Virgin birth in this way. They are clearly attempts to explain the meaning of the Person of Jesus for faith. … Again, the figure of Jesus cannot be understood simply from his inner-worldly context. In mythological language, this means that he stems from eternity, his origin is not a human and natural one.[69]

In this case, Bultmann says that the meaning of the historical life of Christ is explained in a mythical manner. But recall that Bultmann’s definition of myth identified above claimed that myth describes the otherworldly in terms of the concrete things of this world. Here is a reversal of that statement; here Bultmann classifies as mythical that which describes the significance of events in this world in terms of the otherworldly. Myth, therefore, becomes not a means for the primitive, unscientific mind to describe the unseen, unknown forces of the world in terms of what can be seen and known, but the means by which a philosophical mind describes (existentially) what can be seen and known in terms of what can only be imagined and philosophized about. This is an important aspect of the demythologization Bultmann proposes in “New Testament and Mythology.” Thus, demythologization seeks to demythologize the Gospels from two angles: first, by taking the supernatural element out of the mundane; second, by taking the mundane element out of the supernatural. That is, when the divine is explained in terms of what we see in this world, Bultmann rejects that as mythical, and when the events of this world are explained in terms of the otherworldly, in ‘cosmic’ terms, Bultmann rejects that as mythical too. In both cases, he seeks a ‘true’ meaning that lies beneath the ‘mythical’ presentation. The problem is this: no matter what the Gospels say about the relationship between the supernatural and the natural, Bultmann dismisses it, a priori, as an impossibility; the supernatural realm, if Bultmann will even acknowledge its existence, cannot have direct relations with the natural realm at all.

For example, in the case of the crucifixion, Bultmann says that the Gospel portrayal of the event is mythical, meaning that the event itself happened, but its significance is explained in mythical language.[70] Of the resurrection, on the other hand, Bultmann calls it mythical, meaning that the event itself never happened; it is a mythical explanation of the significance of the cross.[71] This is all the result of naturalism and an uncritical scientism.[72]

Demythologization

Bultmann separates the Gospel kerygma from the package in which it comes. He labels the N.T.’s world-view as ‘mythological,’ and then postulates that there is a core message that is independent of this mythological worldview. To ‘demythologize’ the N.T. is to strip away this mythological worldview and present the kerygma without it because moderns do not accept this ‘mythological’ worldview as true.[73] The tacit assumption is that worldview does not affect meaning. That is, Bultmann, and many others who attempt to peel away the worldview of the N.T. in order to gain admittance to the core message of what those ancient authors wrote, take it for granted that it is possible for a statement to convey meaning apart from the worldview in which it is presented. That simply cannot be taken for granted. The worldview of an author is not the guise in which a statement is clothed, but that which informs the very essence of the statement itself. The kerygma of the N.T. is not packaged in a ‘mythological’ worldview; it is the result of such a worldview.

The worldview of the N.T. that Bultmann calls ‘mythical’ is essentially supernatural:

The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings—the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. [74]

‘Mythical,’ as used by Bultmann, is not Fritz Graf’s or Walter Burkert’s ‘traditional tale applied’ (again, see the next chapter). It is more general; whatever is supernatural is also mythical.

This ‘mythical’ worldview is, to Bultmann, not simply supernatural, but the result of unscientific thought, and, therefore, to be rejected by a scientific age:

Can Christian preaching expect modern man to accept the mythical view of the world as true? To do so would be both senseless and impossible. It would be senseless, because there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such. It is simply the cosmology of a pre-scientific age. Again, it would be impossible, because no man can adopt a view of the world by his own volition—it is already determined for him by his place in history.[75]

The assertion that “there is nothing specifically Christian in the mythical view of the world as such” is certainly debatable, as is the idea that one’s worldview is unalterably predetermined by one’s cultural surroundings. What is important in this passage is Bultmann’s reduction of myth to “the cosmology of a pre-scientific age.” Myth, to Bultmann, is an unscientific, supernatural worldview. There are obvious problems with this definition. First, by that definition, can the Oedipus story truly be called myth, since it does not contain much of the supernatural sort? That is, what has traditionally been known as myth does not always rely heavily on the supernatural. Second, this might reduce all sorts of ancient literature to the realm of mythology simply because it was written from within this “cosmology of a pre-scientific age,” literature that has previously been considered historical or philosophical. Third, such a definition rather unscientifically dismisses a priori all things supernatural. Bultmann is using ‘mythical’ in the sense of ‘false.’ His definition has less to do with science than with naturalism. The following quotations make this clear:

Man’s knowledge and mastery of the world have advanced to such an extent through science and technology that it is no longer possible for anyone seriously to hold the New Testament view of the world—in fact, there is no one who does….

…Now that the forces and the laws of nature have been discovered, we can no longer believe in spirits, whether good or evil…. The miracles of the New Testament have ceased to be miraculous, and to defend their historicity by recourse to nervous disorders or hypnotic effects only serves to underline the fact.[76]

Bultmann assumes that science has definitively disproved the existence of the spiritual world. The problem with that assumption is that science purports only to examine the natural world, that which can be seen and measured; it makes no claims at all regarding the possibility of a spiritual realm. This attitude toward the supernatural is the result of naturalism, not scientific investigation.

Myth and the Gospels in Bultmann

In “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” Bultmann does not call the Gospels ‘myth;’ rather, he calls parts of them ‘legend.’ This designation includes miracles, but also other types of narrative. For example: Bultmann believes that the cultic significance of the Lord’s Supper determined the form of the Last Supper narrative in Mark, which was thought to have been an event at some point in Jesus’ life, and would most naturally be assumed to be Jesus’ last supper.[77] So the narrative of the Last Supper in Mark explains the ritual; Bultmann call this a ‘cult-legend.’[78] This seems most nearly to approximate the myth-ritual school of interpretation of myth—with the exception that Bultmann does not take every ‘legend’ in the Gospels to be connected with a ritual.

Bultmann uses form criticism to demythologize because this allows him to
postulate various origins for Gospel pericopae. Bultmann indicates that the Gospels contain “distinct literary types.”[79] “It is self-evident that the laws of style governing a literary type are more or less elastic; at the same time each type has its own definite characteristics which may be observed in every example of the type, even though these characteristics are not all present in any one example.”[80] This is akin to Proppian theory, which posits that Russian folk tales follow common plot structures, any particular tale using some elements.

In “The Study of the Synoptic Gospels,” Bultmann compares Gospel miracles to other Hellenistic miracle narratives, not with myth as a world-wide phenomenon.[81] Miracle narratives can be divided into three parts:[82] 1) the narrative presents the patient and describes the ailment, with emphasis on its severity. 2) The healing itself is described. But Bultmann notes that the Gospel healings are especially lacking in the magical accoutrements that are frequently found in other miracle stories. Sometimes words are spoken in another language to perform the healing. Bultmann adduces Mark 5:41 and 7:34 as examples of this in the Gospels, but we must recall that the words there are in Aramaic, and Mark elsewhere used and translated Aramaic words for his readers. Furthermore, Aramaic would hardly have been an “unknown foreign tongue” in Palestine. The miracle is often performed privately, with no witnesses.[83] 3) The results of the miracle are then narrated: The witness(es) would voice approval or wonder. The healed person might do something indicating the effectiveness of the miracle, such as getting up and walking around or eating. If it was an exorcism, the fleeing demon would do something violent on the way out, such as sending the herd of pigs over the cliff in Mark 5:13.

This seems to be the gist of Bultmann’s agenda:

The mythology of the New Testament is in essence that of Jewish apocalyptic and the Gnostic redemption myths. A common feature of them both is their basic dualism, according to which the present world and its human inhabitants are under the control of daemonic, satanic powers, and stand in need of redemption….

The meaning of these two types of mythology lies once more not in their imagery with its apparent objectivity but in the understanding of human existence which both are trying to express. In other words, they need to be interpreted existentially….

Our task is to produce an existentialist interpretation of the dualistic mythology of the New Testament along similar lines.[84]

He does exactly that; but whether the authors of the N.T. intended an existentialist interpretation is another question altogether. Such an interpretation is anachronistic.

Note that Bultmann states here that the essence of N.T. mythology is that of Jewish and Gnostic redemption myths. Since the earliest date at which full-blown Gnosticism can properly be said to have arrived is hotly debated, there are obvious chronological problems with saying that N.T. myth is essentially Gnostic. Further, Bultmann’s own exegetical practice differs from his claim. In The History of the Synoptic Tradition, Bultmann lists mythological parallels to the various Gospel miracle stories, but his list is drawn almost entirely from Greco-Roman sources (Josephus being the primary exception). Lucian and Philostratus, second- and third-century authors whose work cannot have had any influence on the first-century Gospel tradition, comprise the majority of his citations. These authors are not Gnostics.

Bultmann believes that the miracle stories in the Gospels may have had some historical basis, but more certainly, that they have “central and peripheral motifs taken over from popular and even perhaps literary miracle stories.”[85] He seeks to show the literary parallels primarily by citing other canonical works (one wonders whether this demonstrates anything at all), Lucian of Samosata’s Philopseudes (a second century satire of superstition), Philostratus’ Live of Apollonius (a third century work),[86] and the more contemporary Josephus. Bultmann may have found parallels, but it is impossible for second- and third-century works by Lucian and Philostratus to have influenced first-century Gospels. Bultmann’s argument would have force only if he found parallels in contemporary, or earlier material.

In the past, the miracle stories of the Old Testament (O.T.) have been considered sources for the miracle stories of the Gospels. The feedings of the four thousand (Matt. 15:32-38 par.) and the five thousand (Matt. 14:15-21 pars.), for instance, have been said to have their source in 2 Kings 4:42-44, and the stilling of the storm (Luke 8:22-25 pars.) to have its source in Psalm 107:23-32 or in Jonah 1.[87] Bultmann thinks this is not very likely.[88] Instead, he finds it more probable that certain miracle stories had their origins within the early Church itself. Some post-Easter events were, perhaps, inserted into the pre-Easter life of Jesus, according to Bultmann. An instance of this would be the Miraculous Catch of Fish in John 21:1-14 being transplanted into the midst of Jesus’ ministry in Luke 5:1-11.[89] Bultmann cites Mark 4:37-41 (Jesus Calms the Storm—NIV section title) and 6:45-52 (Jesus Walks on the Water—NIV section title) as further examples.[90] In the latter two examples, no explanation is given as to where one might find the post-Easter event.[91]

Bultmann’s discussion of miracles in The History of the Synoptic Tradition is aimed at proposing possible avenues by which the stories have come to be incorporated into the Gospels.[92] The important thing for Bultmann in The History of the Synoptic Tradition is to identify Palestinian or Hellenistic influences; of the two, Bultmann is much in favor of Hellenistic influences, because of the preponderance of parallels between Hellenistic and Gospel stories.[93] More specifically, Bultmann says:

…in Q the picture of Jesus is made essentially from the material of the Palestinian tradition, while in Mark and most of all in his miracle stories Hellenism has made a vital contribution. So naturally we can rightly assume in the first place an Hellenistic origin for the miracle stories which Matthew and Luke have over and above those found in Q and Mark.[94]

It is significant for the present study of Luke’s miracles that Bultmann claims an Hellenistic origin for the miracles in Luke, not an historical origin in Jesus’ life.

For Bultmann, the primary purpose of the miracle stories in the Gospels is to draw attention to the person and nature of Jesus.

The miraculous deeds are not proofs of his character but of his messianic authority, or his divine power…. It is for this reason that the exorcisms of demons are in the first place the chief demonstrations of the Messiahship of Jesus. It is consistent with this to observe that what is as good as no notice at all is taken of the inner disposition of the person healed.[95]

Norman Perrin on Myth in the New Testament

For Norman Perrin, a myth is as an expression of a people’s (or a person’s) experience and understanding of reality; further, “[myths] are accepted without conscious thought as expressing the way things are, or can be, or should be.”[96] In so far as a myth succeeds or fails to do these things, Perrin calls it ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective.’[97] He is, however, not clear on what an ‘ineffective’ myth is. For if myth is, by definition, that by which a group gives expression to its experience and understanding of reality, then when a ‘myth’ fails to give expression to experience and understanding of reality, it cannot rightly be called myth, even ‘ineffective’ myth. By labeling a myth as ‘effective’ or ‘ineffective,’ Perrin appeals to more than his simple definition. That is, he is willing to call something a myth even if it fails to give expression to one’s understanding and experience of reality. Perrin seems to operate with a criterion for defining myth that he has not explicitly stated.

This becomes clear when Perrin begins to elaborate his view of the interrelationship between myth and history. Perrin believes that the N.T. is a mixture of myth and history. In his estimation, this combination of myth with historical event is unusual: “In general, myths do not involve an element of history; they normally take place in a special kind of mythical time, like the seven ‘days’ of God’s creation of the world.”[98] Though he considers Gen. 6-10 as more normative of myth, he also says:

But the myths of the Passover and of the cross as redemptive are different. Both involve events that took place in historical time, the flight of Jews from Egypt and the crucifixion of Jesus. In some way both myths involve an interrelationship between myth and history.[99]

Here Perrin labels narratives themselves as ‘myth,’ and also asserts that they are an admixture of myth and history. Thus, for Perrin ‘myth’ appears to function on two different levels. Despite his lamentation of the fact that much discussion of myth in the N.T. over the last two hundred years has focused on the issue of historicity, one of the levels on which ‘myth’ seems to function for Perrin is as that which is not strictly historical.[100]

Perrin admits that the N.T. contains information about ‘historical’ (historisch) events; that is, events that can be verified, events that actually happened (though perhaps not always as they are related in Scripture). Some of these events actually “embody” the myth.[101] That is, the substance of the myth is contained in a particular understanding of an historical event. The myth itself would not function as an ‘effective’ myth if it could be shown that the historical event did not happen as it is described in Scripture. On the other hand, Perrin does not feel that all myths are embodied by history. Historical events that do not embody a myth are open to elaboration or alteration because such historical inaccuracies would not render the myth ‘ineffective.’ Thus, historical accuracy is only important in certain cases. Where Perrin deems an event recorded in the N.T. to be historically inaccurate, he says that the myth that is narrated is serving to interpret the significance of the actual event (which is not narrated). In this case, the historic (geschichtlich) nature of the event is described as myth.[102]

Problems rapidly develop in Perrin’s definition and use of the term myth. First, by Perrin’s definition of myth and his assessment of the interrelationship between myth and history, we must designate as myth all history that is narrated in terms of its historic (geschichtlich) significance. Narratives of strategic battles in World War II must be called myth. Even an historical description of the Revolutionary War must be called myth, because it would necessarily relate historical (historisch) events that have historic (geschichtlich) significance for modern Americans.[103] Further, in Perrin’s general discussion of myth in the N.T. in The New Testament: An Introduction he fails ever to argue for the presence of myth in the N.T. Instead, he simply asserts that myth is present, and then begins to explain what he means by myth and how one should understand the N.T. in light of his assertion that myth is present.

Like Bultmann, Perrin is concerned with the impact a story makes on one’s life. Myth has an existential function for him. Unlike Bultmann, Perrin sees no essential reason to distinguish between what was myth and what was history. Bultmann assigned what he considered to be unhistorical stories, stories that seemed to run counter to the demonstrated results of the scientific method, to the realm of myth. Perrin, on the other hand, is not concerned with whether an event actually happened or not. Myth has an existential function that can be fulfilled whether or not the event actually took place as described. However, Perrin’s assignment of certain pericopae to myth and certain pericopae to history can only be random unless he appeals to some difference between the two. It is evident from his discussion of the interrelationship between myth and history that he operates on essentially the same set of assumptions that guided Bultmann: if it cannot be demonstrated by science (i.e., if it is supernatural), then it is myth.

Conclusions

Some conclusions must be drawn before bringing this section to a close. First, the total rejection of Jesus’ miracles that pervaded scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was largely abandoned in the twentieth in favor of more nuanced views of the miraculous. Many scholars of this most recent era will admit that Jesus performed miracles of some type, especially exorcisms and healings, though many will also deny that Jesus had any ability to control nature. Most modern scholars have sought some way of rationalizing all of Jesus miracles in one way or another—the miracles were chance occurrences; the healings were psychosomatic; the miracles are really Greek myth disguised as history for this reason or that. Whether Jesus’ miracles were chance occurrences or psychosomatic cures cannot be determined empirically. All we can say to these rationalizations is that the miracles cannot all be explained by appeal to coincidence; nor does it take less faith to say that the placebo effect was responsible for restoration of optic nerves when the blind were healed or for the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter than it takes to simply accept that these miracles happened.

The attribution of the miracle narratives to Greek mythology, however, can be tested through an analysis of the selected myths with selected miracle stories. That is the goal of this exploration—to determine whether the miracles in the Gospel of Luke bear enough semblance to Hellenistic mythology to be deemed a product of that mythological milieu. Furthermore, such attribution did not die with Bultmann; Dennis MacDonald, and Norman Perrin before him, evidences the continuing desire to relegate the N.T. miracles to the realm of myth, claiming only existential relevance for them. Are Luke’s miracles really myth with existential relevance? In order to address this question properly, we must first establish a definition of ‘myth.’

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT IS MYTH?

In determining the relationship between Luke’s miracle stories and myth, it is first necessary to define the term. This section will provide a working definition of myth that will serve multiple purposes in the remainder of this thesis. Primarily, it will be the definition in light of which I will later analyze Luke’s miracle accounts. But it will also serve as a standard by which I will evaluate the claims and conclusions of other scholars who have attempted this type of work. Any who assess whether the Lukan miracle narratives are mythical must have a definition of myth against which to analyze the narratives. The discussion in this chapter will aid in the evaluation of the definitions of myth with which others have worked, whether they be explicit or implicit. I will begin with a history of interpretations.

Interpretations of Myth

Claude Lévi-Strauss aptly summed up the state of the interpretation of myth in the 1950’s when he wrote:

Myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of a kind of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods. Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to idle play or to a crude kind of philosophic speculation.[104]

More recently there has been improvement of the situation, but the variety of ways in which myth is interpreted more than justifies an historical overview.

Ancient Interpretations: The epic poets and the genealogists, who rise out of the Dark Age, were responsible for assembling the various myths and creating relationships between them. The result was that Greek myth took on a chronological nature and became history-like.[105] The works of the mythographers and the tragedians of the fifth century B.C. also played an important role in the transmission of myth. It was mainly the early poets, the tragedians, and the mythographers who preserved myth for later generations and whose interpretations of myth survived.[106] During the Hellenistic period, catalogs of myth were assembled for the purpose of making clear the Classical allusions to myth. Most important among these collections are the mythological scholia on Homer (first-fifth centuries A.D.), a work by Eratosthenes (Star myths), and the Library by Apollodorus.[107]

As it was used by Homer in the eighth century B.C., mythos might refer to a speech, a recounting, etc., but which was not necessarily false. Homer demonstrates this clearly: “Then a busy house-keeper spoke a word (mu/qon) to him, ‘Hector, since you bid that we speak (muqh,sasqai) truly…’”[108] In Homer, a mythos is a speech, true or false. The point of contrast for Homer was between mythos, ideas made into sentences, and action, that which is done,[109] not between that which is true and that which is false: “For this reason he sent me to teach you all these things, to be both a speaker (r`hth/r’) of words (mu,qwn) and a doer (prhkth/ra) of deeds (ev,rgwn).”[110]

With the advent of prose writing in the sixth century B.C., however, this general use of mythos to refer to a speech was replaced by logos, and mythos came primarily to mean fiction, literature like that of the earlier poets of the eighth-seventh centuries B.C. Herodotus is the first to use mythos to mean “implausible story.”[111] His usage is illustrated in the following quotations: “But the one who speaks of the Ocean, having brought the story (to,n mu/qon) back to the point of uncertainty, admits of no disproof; for I at least do not know of any river called Ocean, but I think that Homer or some one of the earlier poets, having invented the name, brought it into a poem.”[112] A mythos is a story that lies in obscurity and that cannot be proven. Again, “The Greeks uncritically say many and various things. That story (o`,de o` mu/qoj) they tell about Heracles is a silly one of theirs, how when he came to Egypt the Egyptians crowned him and led him out in solemn procession intending to sacrifice him to Zeus…”[113] Here Herodotus uses mythos to mean something akin to an unlikely rumor. A mythos need not be false, but it is highly unlikely and in any event cannot be proven.

Thucydides uses the same root when he describes what the speeches and narratives in his history of the Peloponnesian War are not:

…And perhaps their lack of the fabulous (to. mh. muqw/dej) will appear less pleasing to the ear; but whosoever shall desire to look into what is manifest of the things that have happened and the things that are yet to be, which will again, at some time, according to the ways of things human, bear semblance to the events of the past, it will be sufficient for that person to judge my narrative useful.[114]

Thucydides refuses to dress his history in what is ‘fabulous’ in order that it might be more enjoyable. His success seems all too evident at times. His concern is for what is strictly true, or at least for what conveys the truth. Thucydides wants nothing to do with fiction. The contrast is between logoi and mythoi.[115] Pindar also puts mythoi on the level of falsity, calling them “stories embellished with variegated, beguiling lies.”[116] It is apparent, then, that the meaning of the word mythos changed over time. Further, we have indications that the myths themselves were re-interpreted over time.

It is with the Pre-Socratic philosophers that we first begin to see a more critical evaluation of the old myths. Xenophanes and Herakleitos make some scathing comments on Homer and Homer’s view of the gods. Xenophanes, for example, says, “Homer and Hesiod attributed all things to the gods, as much reproach and blame as there is among humans—stealing, adultery and mutual deception.”[117] Xenophanes believes that the gods ought to be more moral than humans; traditional myth, however, did not make them that way. He clearly does not take the Homeric view of the gods at face value. There is much he might have altered in the traditional conception of their gods. He concludes, for instance, that the gods were not born: “But mortals think that the gods were born, that they have their own clothes and language and bodies.”[118] Human perceptions of the gods were, for Xenophanes, just that, human perceptions:

But surely if cattle or lions had hands and could draw with hands and accomplish works as people do, horses would draw images of gods that resemble horses, and cattle, images that resemble cattle, and they would each fashion bodies of such a sort as they themselves have.[119]

For Xenophanes, the traditional myths are misguided attempts to describe gods who elude human understanding and are greater than humans. Herakleitos goes even further: “Homer is worthy to be thrown out of the games and beaten with a stick.”[120] To be fair, we must note that while Herakleitos acknowledged that Homer was capable of being deceived, he also called Homer the wisest of all the Greeks.[121]

There were also those who came to Homer’s defense, re-interpreting the older mythology in ways that they felt were better accommodated to the more critical, scientific revolution that Classical Greece was undergoing. One popular hermeneutic in their arsenal was allegory. Theagenes of Rhegion is said to have been the first to attempt an allegorical interpretation of Homer’s work.[122] Theagenes’ allegory was physical; that is, the gods corresponded to the physical world. Empedokles later takes up Theagenes’ methodology. Anaxagoras made use of moral allegorization.

Such a critical appraisal of myth, however, cannot be assigned to the ancient masses in general. There were still many authors who were very ready to accept myth as a sort of pre-history, albeit with minor alterations. Among these were Akousilaos, Hekataios of Miletos, Pherekydes, Hellanikos, and Herodoros.

As for the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides (whom I have mentioned above as making a distinction between what is mythos and logos) do not themselves always distinguish between what is myth and what is history.[123] Herodotus begins his ‘inquiry’ with a rationalization of the myth of Io; though he admits that it lies in uncertainty.[124] And Thucydides describes how the Greeks came to be called Hellenes because the sons of Hellen, the son of Deucalion, gave their name to the inhabitants of the various cities in which they settled.[125] Thucydides also counts Homer’s tale of the Trojan War as essentially historical, although robed in embellishment as poetry generally is.[126]

Historicism: Historicism, or Euhemerism, roughly pictures myth as mutilated history. It is called Euhemerism after Euhemerus of Messene who thought that the Greek gods were originally historical people, early Greek rulers who were glorified over time.[127] Nicolas Fréret (1688-1749), Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), and David Hume (1711-1776) were among the more important moderns to adopt some form of this position.[128]

Modern Interpretations: On the Origin of Fables by Bernard de Fontenelle (1657-1757) has been labeled “the cornerstone of modern mythology.”[129] Fontenelle neither allegorized myth, nor did he dismiss it as irrational. Rather, he sought the origins of myth in the psychology of primitive humans; through myth, primitive people were explaining the world in the only ways they could understand.[130] Thus, myth offers valuable insights into the ways in which primitive people thought about the world. His theory is still utilized today.[131] One problem with this mode of thought is that the ancients were not confined to mythological expression of their ideas. If myth is a way of explaining the phenomena of the natural world, “why,” as Lévi-Strauss has asked, “should these societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations?”[132] Fontenelle was also the first to hypothesize that myth was not simply diffused from a single culture to all other cultures, but that myth developed naturally in each culture as a result of common human nature.[133]

Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729-1812), a German philologist, and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), a German Romantic, developed approaches to the interpretation of myth that were to hold sway even into the twentieth century.[134] Heyne’s basic approach was to interpret myth through understanding its prehistoric, primitive origin. Myth gave expression to early people’s understanding of their natural and historical surroundings. “…in Heyne’s view, myth served primarily to explain natural phenomena and secondarily to memorialize events of the past.”[135] Myth was not primitive man’s religion. But the development of religion was contemporaneous with the development of myth. Heyne thought that because myth changed over time the interpreter must laboriously work back to the ‘original’ myth. Further, myth had a distinctly “national” flavor, because the experiences of every people are different.[136]

For Herder, myth, poetry, religion and language could be considered together: they were all a primitive human response to environment. Myth was not an explanation of natural phenomena, but the first human response to it. “These first mythic effusions would be the greatest works ever created by the Volk, for they were spontaneously generated from the depths of the national spirit (Volksgeist).”[137] Because myth was the result of experience, Herder emphasized the uniqueness of myth for each people.[138]

Karl Otfried Müller (1797-1840) was highly influential in the nineteenth-century study of myth. Realizing that myth grew out of specific places and in specific times, he understood the necessity of identifying the historical context of myth. In this way, K.O. Müller’s work would be influential in later historicist interpretations.[139] He was less aware, however, of the relationship between myth and language.[140] Heyne and Herder did see the relationship: for Heyne, poetry was the result of myth, because myth provided the language and content of poetry. For Herder, myth and poetry developed synchronously with religion and language: “What impelled early man to utter his first words, Herder believed, was his need to express a religious feeling. The form of this original speech was poetic, while its content was mythical.”[141]

Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941), author of the massive anthropological study of mythology, The Golden Bough,[142] was a major player in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century interpretation of myth. Under the influence of evolutionary theory, Frazer postulated three stages in the development of the human understanding of nature: human beings progressed from attributing natural phenomena to magic to calling it the will of the gods, and finally to considering it an object of scientific study—magic, religion, science.[143] The focus of Frazer’s mythological interpretation was on the magical stage. He believed humankind’s primary concern during the magical stage was the fertility of fields.[144]

Frazer’s work has been harshly criticized on many counts:[145] His comparative method, which neglected social context of the items he compared, has been questioned. The philosophical evolutionism within which he operated has become outmoded. The view that humans developed through these three distinct stages (magic, religion, science) was shown to be false. And Frazer’s use of evidence has been called uncritical. Despite the criticism, J.G. Frazer left an indelible mark on succeeding generations.[146]

Nearly all of the mythologists from Fontenelle to Frazer shared the basic assumption that the key to understanding myth was recognizing that the origins of myth lay in the mind of primitive humankind.[147]

Cambridge myth-ritual: In the early part of the twentieth century, a small group of scholars in England began to develop what has since become known as the Cambridge myth-ritual school. For these Cambridge myth-ritualists, myth originated as an explanation of ritual; thus, ritual is prior to its corresponding myth. Though he himself was not a myth-ritualist, Frazer was instrumental in laying the foundation upon which this school of thought would be built. The origin, however, of the myth-ritual school can only indirectly be attributed to Frazer, more because of the influence of his ideas than because of his own theories.[148]

Jane Ellen Harrison (1850-1928) is perhaps the most well known proponent of the myth-ritual school. Harrison thought it possible to trace all myth to a ritual that the myth sought to explain.[149] A major difficulty with this approach is finding a match for each myth and ritual. There are myths, such as the Oedipus myth, without corresponding rituals, or that cannot be reduced to a single ritual. There are rituals that do not have an extant corresponding myth. There are also instances where a multiplicity of myths are tied to the same ritual.[150] “The principal limitation of the method is that it delivers explanation at an antiquarian level, but does not always explain the continuing interest and force of the myth in … classical Greek society.”[151] As will be shown later, this “continuing interest and force of the myth” is essential to myth’s very nature. Thus, it is better to conclude with Graf that myth “develops autonomously according to the laws of narration.”[152]

Psychoanalytic interpretations: The psychoanalytic mode of interpretation originates with Sigmund Freud. According to Freud, dreams are an expression of the unconscious.[153] Freud distinguished between the manifest content and the latent content of dreams. The manifest content is what the dreamer remembers seeing in the dream. The latent content is the message being conveyed by the unconscious through the manifest content.[154] Michael Jacobs points out that “later research into dreams has indicated that the manifest content may be more important than Freud allowed for.”[155] Nevertheless, for Freud, dreams, and by extension myths,[156] are the creations of the unconscious mind, and can be analyzed in order to reveal the workings of that unconsciousness.

It is important to remember that Freud’s theories developed from his practice: “If the practice of most therapists is informed by their theoretical position, Freud’s theoretical position was principally informed by his practice.”[157] This carries a great implication about the validity of Freud’s theories. By definition, Freud’s patients were psychologically disturbed, else they would not have sought his help. Freud’s psychoanalytic theories derive from his experiences with psychologically disturbed people. Perhaps Freud’s theories helped him to understand a select group of disturbed Austrians, but does this mean they can legitimately be applied to all people?

Freud was himself aware of this potential flaw in his theoretical system. In discussing his understanding of the nature of fantasies, dreams and day-dreams as exercises in wish-fulfillment, Freud mentions that most of what he knew was gleaned from “victims of nervous illness,” whom he called his “best source of knowledge.”[158] In the same place, Freud claims that “we have since found good reason to suppose that our patients tell us nothing that we might not also hear from healthy people.”[159] But until a statistically significant sample of the world’s population can be shown to tell the same thing, this statement must remain inconclusive. Freud’s theories are based on his idiosyncratic evaluations of these “victims of nervous illness.”

This is all of particular interest to the present study of myth. Freud thought that original, creative writers wrote in a vein similar to that in which a dreamer dreams. Original, creative writing is wish-fulfillment just as fantasy is.[160] And “The motive forces of phantasies are unsatisfied wishes, and every single phantasy is the fulfilment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality.”[161] (Freud’s view on this moderated in later life, but essentially all fantasies and dreams remained wish-fulfillments).[162] The same is true on a larger scale with myth: “The study of constructions of folk-psychology such as these is far from being complete, but it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the secular dreams of youthful humanity.”[163] Freud thought that psychoanalytic techniques could shed much light on the interpretation of myth. Psychoanalysis helps one discover how the “secret meaning” of myths has been concealed through innumerable alterations to the myth.[164] Freud would not accept the idea that myth arose from primitive humankind’s desire to explain their natural surroundings as Heyne did. Nor did he accept the idea that myth and religion were necessarily tied together, as did the myth-ritual school:

It [psychoanalysis] cannot accept as the first impulse to the construction of myths a theoretical craving for finding an explanation of natural phenomena or for accounting for cult observances and usages which have become unintelligible. It looks for that impulse in the same psychical ‘complexes’, in the same emotional trends, which it has discovered at the base of dreams and symptoms.[165]

Dowden’s witticism contra this interpretation is worth quoting: “You can’t psychoanalyse unless there’s a psyche to analyse: if you attempt a psychoanalytic interpretation of a Greek myth, whose psyche is it anyway?”[166] One cannot analyze either the characters, because they are incomplete, or the author, because the preservation of a myth depends entirely upon its value to successive generations. Thus, Dowden concludes that there is only one remaining possibility: that myth expresses elements that are common to a group of people. This could be taken to mean a specific culture, such as the Greeks, or even a ‘collective consciousness.’[167] But again this rests on Freud’s idiosyncratic, psychoanalytic theories. Freud’s assumption that the psychoanalytic understanding of the individual human’s development is analogous to the development of entire societies is a psychological application of the prevalent interpretations of myth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that myth was the product of an infantile humanity.[168] Like J.G. Frazer, Freud also hypothesized a basic evolution of human thought from animism to religion and finally to science. “Myths, religion and morality find their place in this scheme as attempts to seek a compensation for the lack of satisfaction of human wishes.”[169] This perspective is clearly influenced by philosophical evolutionism, and from a twenty-first-century perspective, it seems a derogatory way of thinking about pre-historic peoples.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) formulated an altogether different brand of psychoanalytic interpretation. Jung postulated the existence of universal, inherited, mental patterns that he called ‘archetypes.’ Dreams and myths give expression to these archetypes through the use of similar symbols. A single archetype can be expressed in many different ways, which accounts for the appearances of the same archetype under different guises in different myths.[170] Jung’s problem, however, is finding the source of these inherited archetypes. Is it genetic? If so, that has yet to be proven. Further, given the possibility of archetypical influence on myth, whence comes the plot structure of a myth? Archetypes cannot explain storyline, an essential element of myth.[171]

The major difficulty with psychoanalytic interpretations of myth is that they admit of no disproof. The theories can be altered and the myths manipulated to produce any interpretation desired. Their major advantage is that they are capable of providing a vital link between the myth and the human psyche.

Structuralism: The structuralist interpretation of myth is to be identified chiefly with Lévi-Strauss. This approach generally disregards the historical context of myth, and focuses instead on finding answers to cultural problems. It does this by breaking myths down into their constituent elements, and, through systematically identifying relationships between these parts, particularly antithetical relationships, it proceeds to find resolution in the myth itself.[172]

Lévi-Strauss’ interpretation of myth is based on his theory that myth is comparable to language.[173] The impetus for Lévi-Strauss’ comparison of myth to language may be found in the fact that myth, like language, can be strikingly similar across cultures.[174] To Lévi-Strauss, the similarities indicate that myth can be studied like language. Fundamentally, his approach recognizes that the sounds of a language are arbitrary; only their combination gives them meaning.[175] Thus, Lévi-Strauss is unable to accept the Jungian idea that the archetypes of myth have any inherent meaning; they would be analogous to the arbitrary sounds of a language.[176]

As a phoneme is the most basic unit of speech, whose meaning is derived from its relationship to other phonemes, ‘mythemes’ are the most basic unit of myth, whose meaning is similarly determined.[177] Mythemes exist on the level of sentences.[178] They are meaningless in and of themselves, and have meaning only in relation to other mythemes. Lévi-Strauss identified individual mythemes, and, ignoring their order within the individual myths, sought to uncover the meaning of the myth through rearranging them. He thought this rearrangement necessary because he supposed myths to have not only a diachronic, but also a synchronic nature that required the mythemes to be analyzed as ‘bundles’ of relations.[179] The implication of this assumption is that all variants of a myth must be taken into account when the myth is analyzed. Ancient variants of the Oedipus myth are no more important to the interpretation of that myth than are Freudian variations.[180]

Mythic patterns can be found across cultures and throughout history; the language of myth is universal.[181] This is because the structures formed by the mythemes are logical and inherent in the human mind. Of the various logical relationships formed by mythemes, Lévi-Strauss focused mostly on the antithetical relationships mentioned above. The contradictions of these antithetical relationships are resolved by the myth itself. Indeed, for Lévi-Strauss, “the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction…”[182] Lévi-Strauss takes an admirable stride towards overcoming the idea that mythology was developed by primitive minds. The logic involved in the creation of myth is as complex as that involved in scientific discovery.[183]

Graf identifies two major problems in Lévi-Strauss’ theory:[184] 1) Since mythemes have no inherent significance, all meaning assigned to the myth is arbitrary; thus, one can find structure without finding meaning. 2) The narrative structure of the myth is ignored completely in favor of discovering this “deep structure.” But surely a narrative sequence has some importance for the listener. Lévi-Strauss’ ability to discern the constituent parts of a myth is a valuable innovation, but must take more account of the narrative sequence itself.

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) also developed a form of structuralism in which he identified thirty-one ‘functions’ that form the basis of Russian fairytales. These ‘functions,’ or themes, recur with different details in each story; not all ‘functions’ are required to be in every story, and characters may differ, but the ‘functions’ recur in a fixed order.[185] By Propp’s findings, myth can be identified as a tale that is made up of these ‘functions.’[186] The force of Propp’s work was to show that the narrative structure of a tale is, in fact, important. This might serve to rectify the virtual ignoring of narrative structure found in Lévi-Strauss’ approach. Others have also taken up the work of analyzing the plot structures of tales. Walter Burkert (1931-) is one such structuralist to adopt a Proppian approach. According to Graf, however, the results have been unsuccessful; the primary problem is that the plot structures are not confined to the traditional tale.[187]

Eliade: Similarly to Freud, Mircea Eliade believes there to be an intimate connection between the symbolism of myth and the content of dreams. Yet Eliade refuses to explain the content of myth by appeal to the unconscious. Such an explanation is reductionistic and does not value myth for what it is in itself.[188]

Eliade views myth as exemplary revelation:

[Myth] reveals something as having been fully manifested, and this manifestation is at the same time creative and exemplary, since it is the foundation of a structure of reality as well as of a kind of human behaviour.[189]

As the revelation of the foundation of a structure of reality, myth is exemplary.

Eliade sees cosmogony as the quintessential myth. Cosmogony reveals how the world came into being; thus, it is ontophany. It is narrated as actually taking place, but within a special frame of time, in illo tempore, to borrow Eliade’s phrase.[190]

And since all myths participate in some sort in the cosmological type of myth—for every account of what came to pass in the holy era of the Beginning (in illo tempore) is but another variant of the archetypal history: how the world came to be—it follows that all mythology is ontophany. Myths reveal the structure of reality, and the multiple modalities of being in the world. That is why they are the exemplary models for human behaviour; they disclose the true stories, concern themselves with the realities.[191]

Since religions are essentially revelations of ontology, of the way things really are, religion and myth are closely related.[192]

In seeking modern expressions of myth, Eliade looks to Christianity. He does not demythologize; rather, he asks whether Christianity has retained the mythical view of reality that characterizes archaic societies. His answer to that question is affirmative: “If we take account of the true nature and function of the myth, Christianity does not appear to have surpassed the mode of being of archaic man…”[193] This assertion has nothing to do with the factuality of miracles or the historical reliability of the Gospels. Rather, Eliade makes this statement:

by the very fact that it is a religion, [Christianity] has had to preserve at least one mythic attitude—the attitude towards liturgical time; that is, the rejection of profane time and the periodical recovery of the Great Time, illud tempus of “the beginnings”.[194]

Eliade sees Christianity as a modern expression of myth by virtue of the fact that Christian religious experience separates ‘profane’ from ‘sacred’ time.

A Christian is not taking part in a commemoration of the Passion of Christ… He is not commemorating an event but re-actualising a mystery. For the Christian, Jesus dies and resurrects before him hic et nunc. Through the mystery of the Passion or of the Resurrection, the Christian dispels profane time and is integrated into time primordial and holy.[195]

It should not be difficult for the Protestant theologian to see a difficulty with Eliade’s reasoning. Though Eliade admits that Christianity is focused on events that took place in the identifiable past, his own focus with Christianity is on its participation in “the Great Time.” If Christian experience is shown to be not the re-actualizing of a mystery, but the commemoration of an event and the participation in the ongoing results of that event, then this particular connection between Christianity and myth breaks down.

On another level, however, Eliade is right to compare Christianity and myth. The key elements in myth for Eliade are: 1) that myth is a revelation that makes an ontological claim about reality; 2) that myth is exemplary, since it reveals the origins of the different ways of existing in the world; 3) that myth occurs in illo tempore. On this last characteristic of myth, Eliade writes:

We must never forget that one of the essential functions of the myth is its provision of an opening into the Great Time, a periodic re-entry into Time primordial. This is shown by a tendency to a neglect of the present time, of what is called the ‘historic moment’.[196]

If this is all that is essential to myth, then Christianity indeed contains these elements. Christianity makes definite ontological claims and demands that some of those claims be taken as exemplary. Furthermore, it is possible for the modern Christian to think about the biblical narratives as taking place ‘then’ and ‘there’ in a world unlike our own. But then again, the same may be said of any account of the heroism of the American revolutionaries, the midnight right of Paul Revere, or the first lunar landing. Each of these stories make implicit ontological assertions about the nature of humankind, the central characters of each story are exemplary, and people of the present tend towards idealizing the moments in which these events took place. No matter how removed from the present the time and setting of Jesus’ life may be, we must admit that Christianity is ultimately concerned with the historical events of Jesus’ life, and not primarily with entry into the ‘sacred time’ in which those events are said to have taken place.

Eliade is helpful in defining myth, but his definition is too inclusive. This inclusiveness is apparent where Eliade seeks to identify not only religion, but also the leisure activities of modern people as mythical.[197] Eliade’s three characteristics of myth mentioned above seem to hold true as we consider Greco-Roman myths. However, because these characteristics may all apply to such a wide range of stories and activities, it seems necessary to further limit our definition.

Semiotic Interpretations: A final approach to the study of myth must be identified before moving on: the semiotic approach. It has had little influence on classical scholarship.[198] Nevertheless, it does raise some important questions for our study of myth. Roland Barthes (1915-1980), like Lévi-Strauss, conceived of myth on analogy with language. “Myth, in Barthes’s view, is not a language but a metalanguage, a secondary sign system built upon the primary sign system that is language: the linguistic sign, which consists of a signifier and a signified, becomes the signifier of myth, constituting, in combination with a new signified, the mythical sign.”[199] To make the necessary connection between sign and signified, one must understand the social environment in which the sign originated. With ancient societies, this is impossible to do completely, and we are left with identifying things signified by comparing the various signs with one another (a method employed by Lévi-Strauss to identify the significance of mythemes).[200]

Questions are now being raised about the possible ethnocentricity of modern scholarship on myth: Charles Segal’s moderate semiotic approach to the study of myth has led Segal to conclude that the sign-systems of myth cannot be interpreted apart from a prior study of the culture in which the myth arose. [201] If this is true, then myth is culture specific, and we must question whether myths are truly universal. Furthermore, Graf points out that certain studies of the terminology used by mythologists point to the ethnocentricity of modern scholarship.

These studies have shown that myth is a construct that arose in Europe during the age of Enlightenment. […] It is entirely possible that in speaking of ‘myths’ in non-European societies we are projecting our own conceptions, which go back to fifth-century Athens, onto those societies.[202]

Nature of Myth

Walter Burkert: In the realm of the study of myth, Walter Burkert has dominated the academic scene from 1960 to the present.[203] Drawing on Geoffrey Kirk, Burkert says, “Myth belongs to the more general class of traditional tale.”[204] To define myth in terms of a ‘traditional tale,’ we must understand both what is meant by ‘traditional’ and what is meant by ‘tale.’ If myth is traditional, the question of a myth’s origins are irrelevant, because in order to become a myth, it must first be transmitted, received and preserved to be transmitted again.[205] Transmission and reception are essential to every myth.

Burkert defines ‘tale’ in terms of linguistic theory (sign, sense and reference): a tale is neither text (sign) nor reality (reference); it is ‘sense,’ and therefore independent of any language or text. Myth cannot, therefore, be the domain of a single genre, even poetry.[206] Thus, a myth can be told in many languages or in a variety of texts and still retain its identity as a traditional tale.[207] Fritz Graf concurs that myth can be translated from culture to culture without losing its status as myth, but he also shows that studies of African myth indicate that something is lost in translation, because those myths are “syntheses of musical, dramatic, and narrative art forms.”[208] But Burkert’s point is well taken: an English translation of The Library of Apollodorus is no less mythical than the original Greek of Homer’s poetry. Each telling of the myth has an author, but the myth itself has none.[209]

Burkert goes on to say, “Every tale has a basic element of poíesis, fiction. Myth, then, within the class of traditional tales, is nonfactual storytelling.”[210] To identify myth too closely with reality necessarily forces the myth to conform with known reality, and inevitably destroys the myth: “All interpretations on these lines must use Procrustean methods to make the tale isomorphic with the purported reality, must cut off excesses attributed to uncontrolled ‘fantasy,’ and thus really kill the tale, and the myth.”[211] The impossibility of identifying myth too closely with external reality extends also to the more subtle interpretations of myth, such as psychological or theological interpretations. Burkert says that these psychological and theological interpretations “[have] the advantage of admitting neither of verification nor of refutation, since those nonempirical entities may be constructed to fit exactly the presuppositions of some set of myths.”[212] Burkert’s conclusion is that myth cannot be linked directly to any form of reality.[213] Because myth is not identical with reality, there need be no one-to-one correspondence between reality and the tale.[214] Myths are not factually true; they contain elements of falsity. But their power depends on those aspects of falsity.[215]

Burkert’s definition of ‘tale’ includes structural aspects as well. He identifies the ‘program of actions’ as the basic structure of tales. This ‘program of actions’ is far from simple; it can be as complex as life itself, and defies the simplicity of “binary opposition,”[216] the thesis-antithesis, or contradictions of Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism. Burkert’s programs of action reflect “elemental biological or cultural realities.”[217] That is, the narrative sequence corresponds to something that happens in real life, like the life stages of an individual. Because it happens universally, the structure of the plot is found universally.[218] Burkert’s hypothesis does not preclude relationships between myth and ritual, but neither does it exalt that relationship, admitting also of various other biological and cultural realities. The structure that the ‘program of actions’ imposes on the tale makes that tale easily remembered and transmitted.[219]

Burkert theorizes that there may even be different levels of structure in a tale. On the most basic level, there is the ‘program of actions,’ but this sequence of actions must be elaborated upon by the details of the story. Another level of structure is then imposed which adds what Burkert calls ‘crystallizations’ to the tale. An example of a crystallization is the hero-villain contrast: the hero may be nice, intelligent and handsome, but the villain will be dark, sinister and ugly.[220] Burkert’s theory is all-or-nothing; all myth must correspond to some sort of biological or cultural reality in its program of actions.[221] Herein lies a chief difficulty with Burkert’s theory, and one wonders whether Burkert himself must finally resort to using “Procrustean methods to make the tale isomorphic with the purported reality” [222] as well.

For Walter Burkert, then, myth is, in its very nature, a fictional story that is transmitted and received from generation to generation, that is capable of being told in any number of languages or texts without losing its essential mythic qualities, and that conforms to certain structural patterns corresponding to organic or cultural realities. If myth is a type of traditional tale, traditional tale being the more general category, what is the difference between myth and tale? It is not structure, as Burkert has shown. That is common to both. Neither is it content. One cannot simply say that a myth is a story about the gods. The Oedipus story is considered a myth, even though it is not a story about the gods, or overtly supernatural.[223] Burkert claims that the hallmark of myth is that it provides “secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.”[224] By this, he means that myth is a traditional tale that has been applied, often to common aspects of social life.[225] Proper names have references in myth, but not in fairy-tale.[226] Myth, then, is a way of thinking by means of applying traditional tales to objects of collective import. Burkert is worth quoting here to clarify and exemplify:

Mythical thinking was, and is, not a mechanical repetition of absurdities, but a mental activity which can be quite subtle and effective. It provides, most of all, a synthesis for isolated facts. To take the simplest example, genealogy. Hellen had three sons, Dorus, Xuthus, and Aeolus; Xuthus sired two sons, Ion and Achaeus. That means: the Greek tribes know they belong together. Dorians, Aeolians, Ionians, and Achaeans: they are all Hellenes, though Ionians and Achaeans are somewhat closer to each other, which, incidentally, has been confirmed by the study of Greek dialects.… Evidently the question of ‘historical truth’ is absolutely irrelevant in such a tale; it is neither more nor less effective even if it is true; in its application, it creates a system of coordinates to cope with the present or even with the future.[227]

There is certainly some reference to reality evident here. When Burkert claims that tales have no direct reference to reality, his emphasis seems to lie in the word ‘direct.’ It is not that myth has no referent in reality, only that there cannot be any direct reference or isomorphism with reality. There are references to reality, but they are secondary, partial and certainly not isomorphic.

Fritz Graf is in essential agreement with Burkert on this point. He too claims that the difference between folktale and myth is cultural relevance, the application of the myth to that which is of social import. Myth must have cultural significance, and, therefore, is often set in a specific time and place; folktale, on the other hand, does not need this relevance, and so is not set in a specific time or place: once upon a time…,[228] or perhaps: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

Greek mythology is fundamentally about men and women, it is a ‘historical’ mythology. For the most part it is not the participation of gods, talking animals or magic that makes Greek myth mythical; rather, it is the participation of men and women who lived in illo tempore (‘yon times’), the times before recorded history began and beyond reliable oral tradition, in the para-history or proto-history.[229]

Most Greek myth takes place in what the Greeks would consider ‘recent’ history; that is, only a few generations distant.[230] We may consider something to be pre-historical and “beyond reliable oral tradition” that the Greeks thought to be recent history. It is this air of historicity that makes the myth relevant.[231]

Because cultural relevance is a necessary aspect of myth, myth must be variable and change with each transmission: “A myth makes a valid statement about the origins of the world, of society and of its institutions, about the gods and their relationship with mortals, in short, about everything on which human existence depends. If conditions change, a myth, if it is to survive, must change with them.”[232] This is what Burkert means when he says that myth makes a secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.

“The cultural relevance of a myth varies with the social context in which it is narrated.”[233] That is to say, a myth is a valid myth so long as it is culturally relevant. The validity of a myth, then, has little to do with its correspondence to propositional truth. It has more to do with correspondence to social ideology. This is very similar to (but not exactly the same as) Perrin’s conception of a valid myth as that by which a people gives adequate expression to their understanding of reality, and the same question arises: What do we call a ‘myth’ that is no longer culturally relevant? Perhaps the best way to approach this conundrum is first to recognize that cultural relevance is a measure of function, and then to recognize that one person’s myth may be only another person’s fictional story. For example, the myth of Oedipus is technically an ancient Greek myth; it is not our myth. This is because it held cultural relevance for the Greeks but does not hold similar relevance for us. The nature of the myth has not altered in 2,500 years, but its function has. So, what do we call a myth that is no longer culturally relevant? We call it myth, but not our myth. For us their myths may be no more than an interesting, fictional story. Nevertheless, the original cultural relevance is essential for the story’s identification as their myth.

If we are to understand any given myth in all its details, we have to face the fact that it bears the marks of its history, of multiple levels of application and crystallization. It is possible to disregard this, to build up an all-embracing structural pattern; but the effects of transmission are there.[234]

It is inherent in the nature of myth for it to be applied and crystallized over and over again. For Burkert, then, there can be no search for the ‘original’ meaning of the myth, because no one application of the myth is any more appropriate than the next; although each new application and crystallization may append additional elements to the essential structure of the myth.[235] This does not mean, however, that one cannot understand myth. To understand myth, one must understand both the tale itself, and its specific application (which makes it a myth).[236] This is, perhaps, similar to Herder’s emphasis on the uniqueness of myth for each people and to Heyne’s conclusions that myth has ‘national’ flavor—a tale applied.

Questions Raised by These Observations

What is the result of applying the myth-ritual theory to the study of the Gospels, if we inquire whether Gospels contain myth? Some of the pericopae could be tied to ritual, but not all of them. In any case, is the 35 years between Jesus’ death and the writing of the Gospels enough time for a ritual to develop and then a myth to form around that ritual, particularly if there were still eyewitnesses available? There would seem to be chronological difficulties, if nothing else, in applying this scheme to the Gospels as well.

Context is important to the interpretation of Greek myth. Dowden’s overview of modern methods of interpretation shows that there is an “acknowledgement of the usefulness of specific and distinctive historical data,” and of the “sensitive and systematic exploration of themes and their place in the map of Greek culture, thought or ideology.”[237] If it is true that Greek myth had important meaning that was in part tied to ‘distinctive historical data’ like the geographic location in which a myth developed, then a myth transported to Palestine would lose an important part of its meaning. This is true of the cultural and ideological aspects of a transported Greek myth also. There are, of course, significant implications for MacDonald’s theses, if the meaning of a myth is thus uniquely linked to its culture of origin. His assertions of emulation tend to neglect the importance of socio-cultural context, and, therefore, to cast doubt on his conclusions. However, postulating transvaluation of a myth, helps to overcome this deficit.

What does Burkert’s assertion that myth cannot be identical to any form of reality mean for the study of the Gospels? If we call it myth at all, there can be no attempt to separate what is true from what is not, otherwise we would inevitably destroy the message. On the other hand, what happens if we say that the Gospels are not myth? Are they then some other form of fiction, perhaps analogous to a Platonic dialogue? Are they aretalogy? Biography? History?

Remembering the criticism of ethnocentricity raised by Graf in conjunction with semiotic approaches to the interpretation of myth, we might ask whether modern scholarship has erred by viewing the Gospels as myth through ethnocentric lenses. Are we not risking ethnocentricity if we classify the Gospels as a type of Greco-Roman myth? Any who would call the Gospels myth must not only propose an adequate definition of myth, but also be careful to avoid ethnocentrism. Have scholars projected a modern idea of myth, based on Golden Age Greece, onto a Palestinian, Hellenistic milieu? If so, can that rightly be done?

Conclusions

Having said this much, we must draw some conclusions concerning a definition of myth. First, this survey shows no general consensus on the definition of myth. This should raise immediate questions about Bultmann’s demythologizing: what definition of myth did Bultmann adopt? It cannot do for him to label the Gospels, or parts of them, as myth without first defining and defending what he means by myth. A crucial part of Bultmann’s study, as well as my own, must be the development of a definition of myth by which to judge what is and what is not mythical.

It should be apparent from all that has been said above that such definitions do not come ready-made; thus, it is needful for me to explicitly state what I consider ‘myth’ to be. In order to be fair to the various interpretations discussed above, and to be most impartial and comprehensive in my definition, I will attempt to define myth in terms of as many of the above interpretations as I consider defensible. Note, however, that my criticism of some of the above methodologies will be applied here too, and not every system will have a place in my definition.

Yet it is obvious enough that many of these approaches are mutually compatible. A myth may trace something of its construction to history, may be used in a superficial way to explain a ritual, may, when more deeply probed, tell us something about that ritual, may – viewed together with other myths – form part of a systematic, even unconscious, way of dividing up and thinking about the perceived world. Historicism, myth-ritual, structuralism all have their dangers, but they lie chiefly in exaggeration.[238]

I take as my starting point that definition formulated by Walter Burkert: myth is traditional tale, non-factual storytelling. First, myth is fictional. The ancients realized this as well. (The reader is encouraged to look again at what has been said above about the uses of the term mu/qoj in antiquity).

Can myth be historical in any sense at all? Burkert is correct; all myth is fictional at its core and cannot be forced to conform too closely with acknowledged reality. That is not to say that myth is entirely fictional. It should be evident from a quick perusal of various ancient myths that they include references to reality: Troy was an ancient city-state; so was Athens. Crete is a real island. The fact that Caesar Augustus appears in Virgil’s Aeneid does not make the Aeneid any less mythical. Nevertheless, the primary content of myth is fictional. This is apparent both from our sources of ancient myth as well as from extant ancient historiography: Historians like Thucydides make a clear distinction between what they did and what mythographers did; namely, the historians attempt to make their stories align closely with actual fact. Our sources of ancient myth, on the other hand, are explicitly fictional. Recall that the tragedians are one of our primary sources of ancient myth. Recall also that different tragedians presented the same myths in different ways. A play-goer would know the essentials of the plot, but all the details would be left to the playwright, and one play could be very different from another on the same subject. Myth, then, is intentionally fictional.

With Lévi-Strauss, and against Fontenelle and Heyne, I must deny that myth was a primitive way of explaining the natural world. It is evident that the ancients were possessed of the ability to explain their surroundings in non-mythical terms. I deny this because not all myth is etiological. Similarly, I also reject the essentially evolutionary theories of myth put forth by Frazer and Freud. They too ignore the highly developed intellect of the ancients and rely rather dogmatically on much-contested evolutionary theory. Freud’s psychoanalytic interpretations are also rejected for the reasons mentioned above. However, these eighteenth and nineteenth century mythologists offer us the valuable insight that myth is rightly interpreted when one rightly understands the ancient way of thinking; myth must be taken in its socio-cultural context.

Structuralist theories offer a better explanation of the nature of myth. They also have the potential advantage of helping us to identify a myth when we see one. The criticisms leveled against Lévi-Strauss’ theory of ‘mythemes’ earlier in this chapter prevent me from a wholesale acceptance of his theory. However, his emphasis on the interrelationships of the basic units within a myth and his recognition of the existence of universal mythic patterns are helpful in that they reveal that there is something inherent in every myth that moves us to recognize and label it as myth.

Propp’s structural approach to Russian fairytales, further developed by Burkert, adds some stability to Lévi-Strauss’ system by its insistence that order of the individual units within a myth is significant. Interrelationships are important, but so is order. I am in essential agreement with Burkert on this matter. However, I do not concur that Burkert’s ‘program of actions’ is the best way to understand the order found in myth. This will apply to my attempts later in this thesis to compare individual Gospel miracles with individual myths. If it is true that there are structural similarities between myths, and if the Gospels miracle accounts are mythical, then there must be structural similarities between them.

Eliade’s three characteristics of myth (myth is a revelation that makes an ontological claim about reality, that is exemplary, and that occurs in illo tempore) are helpful, especially in the attempt to uncover modern myths. However, they are also too broad. They fail to narrow the definition of myth sufficiently for our purposes. Nor do they take proper account of myth’s traditional nature. These shortcomings are evident in Eliade’s own application of these characteristics even to modern leisure activities.

I wish to make a final point before concisely stating my definition of myth. We must not ignore the possibility that myth can be described as a genre of literature. That is, although myth may take on forms such as poetry or prose, it may itself be a genre separate from the form it takes. As with any genre, there will be indications within the text itself that tell the reader that the story under question is a myth.

What is myth? Myth is a genre whose nature is distinguished by its fictional content, its narrative form, and its traditional character. Functionally, myth has cultural relevance that may display itself in any number of ways, for example, as an expression of a people’s understanding of reality. If a story lacks any of these items, it cannot be considered myth.

CHAPTER FOUR

MYTH AND MIRACLES: THE COMPARISON

Introduction

That early Christian authors may have made use of Greco-Roman myths in the construction of their own literary works is neither impossible nor implausible given the enormous amount of ideological cross-pollination in the Hellenistic world. In fact, the Homeric myths were certainly among the most influential objects of cultural Hellenism in antiquity. Dennis MacDonald concisely summarizes the position of Homer in the church during the first few centuries: “…Homer’s status in the Church ranged from pariah to Brahman. He was banished and embraced, excoriated and adduced, repudiated and imitated. In general, however, early Christians viewed his poems as unfortunate inevitabilities…”[239] It is reasonable to conclude that the authors of the various N.T. books were familiar with Greco-Roman mythology.

Did the authors of the N.T. utilize Greco-Roman mythology in the composition of their own books and letters? That is, are there places where Greco-Roman mythic tradition runs through any portion of the N.T.? Are the authors of the N.T. drawing from the same font of mythic tradition from which stories commonly recognized as myth also drew? If we acknowledge that the authors of the N.T. were acquainted with ancient myths, then that is a question worth pursuing. It would not be saying anything new if we were to suggest that they used that mythic tradition to one degree or another to serve their own purposes. It is commonly recognized, after all, that the Apostle Paul quoted from pagan literature on more than one occasion. It should not surprise us to find authors other than Paul making similar use of the literature or ideas of their day. It would, however, be a different sort of thing to say that portions of the N.T. actually are myth. That latter sort of statement is what I have set out to determine. The focus of my examination will be on the places within Luke’s Gospel that have most frequently been called ‘myth’ or ‘mythical;’ namely, the miracle stories. The question I set out to answer in this chapter centers on determining whether Luke’s miracle stories can rightly be placed in the same class as Greco-Roman mythology—whether one can rightly say of Luke’s miracle stories that they came from the same tradition as those Greco-Roman stories that are widely recognized as myths. Did Luke make use of Greco-Roman mythic tradition in the miracle accounts of his Gospel, and, if he did, how did he use it?[240]

Some Points on Methodology

There are three ways in which Luke may have used Greco-Roman myth. First, he might have borrowed a myth directly, making only slight modifications so that the myth would fit his story about Jesus. In this case, we might expect to see identical plots, characters, setting, etc. There would be a one-to-one correspondence between the elements in the miracle story and the elements in the myth. One would expect a great amount of verbal parallelism. The sequence of events would be identical. Characters would perform in identical ways (though their names must necessarily be altered), and so on. This is direct literary borrowing, and there would be an identifiable source (though it may no longer be extant). Some of the same principles will apply in determining this type of borrowing as are operant in the major Synoptic source theories.

Second, Luke might have used traditional mythic material in the development of his miracle stories. Luke’s stories and other contemporary expressions of that mythic material would have had a common tradition. In this case, there would not be a one-to-one correspondence between Luke’s story and any single written work. The relationship would be on a more elemental level. The analysis of connections between myth and miracle on this level will necessarily be more subjective than the analysis done on a miracle that has been borrowed directly from some literary source. One will look for similar setting, similar plot, and similar characters.

Yet similarity of these things alone cannot prove that two separate stories derive from a common tradition. We have already shown it to be a fallacy to conclude that because separate stories that are topically related include similar elements such similarities must necessarily indicate literary borrowing or mimesis. The same is true with regard to an author’s possible adaptation of a mythic tradition. Consider again the example of Gilligan’s Island. Here we have a story that is obviously part of a long line of shipwreck and survival stories. Thus, the story does draw from traditional elements: There is a shipwreck and the survivors have to live primitively on a desert island until they can be rescued. This type of tale has taken many expressions through time: The Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Gilligan’s Island, Lord of the Flies, Tom Hanks’ Cast Away. We would not say that these are all the same story in different forms, yet it is evident that there is a common tradition running through them all. But these stories are all fictitious. What are we to conclude when we read a factual story containing similar elements? Consider Sir Ernest Shakleton’s Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914. Here we have an amazing tale of shipwreck and survival that is all the more amazing because it actually happened! Thus, it would be a fallacious overstatement to say that all stories with similar elements derive from the same tradition; even though it will certainly hold true in some cases.

Whereas the determination of direct literary borrowing would properly fall under the type of analysis called source criticism, the determination that two stories have utilized an identical tradition falls within the realm of form criticism and spills over into redaction criticism. With reference to the object of form criticism, Laurence McGinley says:

Granted that two stories relate a cure, it is inevitable that there should be common traits: history of the illness, request for a cure, healing, verification of the healing, reactions. In these general features, the Gospel miracle-narratives differ but little from the latest reports of the medical examiners at Lourdes; and yet—this is the important point—such common traits obviously do not prove a similarity of atmosphere, a parallel community creation of cult-legends, the influence of primitive literary laws, or a similar Sitz im Leben in the Palestine of long ago and the southern France of today.[241]

It will be granted, then, that a Lukan miracle story will display formal elements similar to other miracle stories (of any age or sort). Yet the conclusion that any given Lukan miracle story is actually worthy of being called ‘myth’ must rest on more than formal similarities to acknowledged myth alone, though formal similarities must play a part in the determination.

The third way in which Luke may have used a Greco-Roman myth (a source), a Greco-Roman mythic tradition (a form), or both, is for the purpose of making a point. We might label this use of a myth or a mythic tradition as literary or cultural allusion. This type of use is not the same thing as endorsing the myth or the mythic tradition in all its elements. Though it certainly could be that; it could also be akin to what Paul (and Jude, and perhaps others as well) did when he quoted non-canonical works to make his point.

In this case one must look for explicit or implicit references to a myth or a mythic tradition. These references may take the form of mimesis for the purpose of transvaluation (à la MacDonald). They may show themselves as quotations from an identifiable source. They will be intended to call to mind the essential elements of a myth or mythic tradition so that the myth or mythic tradition itself informs and is informed by what Luke writes.

Dennis MacDonald outlines five major criteria that must be met before one can confidently assert that one item is literarily dependent upon another. “… (1) density and order, (2) explanatory value, (3) accessibility, (4) analogy, and (5) motivation.”[242] MacDonald exemplifies a marvelous application of these criteria in his analysis of the apocryphal Acts of Andrew, which, he concludes, mimic Homeric epic.[243] With some modification, these criteria will enable our present comparison of select Lukan miracle accounts with individual Greco-Roman myths, regardless of whether Luke chose to use myth in any of the three ways mentioned above or in none of the three ways mentioned above.

I must make a note regarding the nature of these criteria. Under the criterion of ‘density and order,’ we will be looking for verbal and conceptual parallels between widely recognized myths and miracles in Luke. We will also be looking for similar sequences of events. The greater the number of verbal/conceptual parallels and the greater the similarity of event sequence in the plots, the greater the possibility that Luke has made use of a myth or mythic tradition. I say ‘possibility’ because any conclusion of such magnitude cannot rest solely on the fulfillment of a single criterion. Again I call to mind the example of a shipwreck and survival story mentioned above. Further, I would stress that Luke’s outright borrowing of a myth, Luke’s adoption of a mythic tradition, or Luke’s allusion to a myth or mythic tradition will all display verbal/conceptual parallels and similar event sequences to some extent. If these were entirely absent, the reader would be unaware of any borrowing, use of tradition, or allusion whatsoever. Thus, the application of this criterion to each of the three possible uses of Greco-Roman myth will return positive results that vary only in amount of density and order.

I will attempt to address the questions of ‘accessibility’ and ‘analogy’ in my general discussions of the myths below. Essentially, I will be attempting to discern whether the proposed myth was widely known throughout the first century Mediterranean world, and whether any other authors referenced the myth. This assesses the likelihood that any given author may have similarly used the myth. It falls short of actually telling us anything about the text in question. And it presupposes that one author is as likely as the next to make such use of myths, regardless of the author’s unique social, cultural and religious backgrounds. This presupposition is the weakest point of this criterion, yet it does enable us to say that there is or is not precedent for Luke’s possible use of a myth. ‘Explanatory value’ and ‘motivation’ go hand in hand. They will be addressed throughout the comments that follow and will work to answer the question, “Why?” Why would Luke have made use of a particular myth?

In the analysis that follows, we will be searching for the following things: 1) density and order of verbal/conceptual parallels, 2) the reasons why Luke may have used a myth or mythic tradition, 3) historical precedent for Luke’s possible use of a myth or mythic tradition, 4) historical availability of the proposed myth or tradition.

Miracles of Resuscitation

Earlier (chapter 1) I cited R. Bultmann as saying that “…naturally we can rightly assume in the first place an Hellenistic origin for the miracle stories which Matthew and Luke have over and above those found in Q and Mark.”[244] Thus, a fitting place to begin our inquiry into the nature of the Gospel miracles would seem to be a miracle that is uniquely Lukan. Further, because Bultmann has already identified Luke 7:11-17, which has no Synoptic parallel, as a resuscitation story of the Hellenistic type,[245] I shall begin my comparison of the Gospel of Luke with Greco-Roman mythology by focusing on Hellenistic parallels to Luke 7:11-17, the resuscitation of the widow’s son at Nain.

There are several ancient parallels to this Lukan narrative.[246] However, the most commonly cited examples (those from Philostratus, Artemidorus, and Apuleius) are all, strictly speaking, not myths. Whether or not they are fictional is irrelevant. Not all fiction (even ancient fiction) is myth, and we are attempting a comparison with the mythic genre. Furthermore, they are late; Artemidorus and Apuleius lived during the second century A.D., and Philostratus during the third. Marshall is correct in saying that these parallels cannot speak to the historicity of Luke 7:11-17.[247] Nor can they demonstrate whether it is myth. What they do contribute, however, is evidence that resuscitation narratives were present in the ancient world. The truly mythic parallels of the Greco-Roman tradition to this resuscitation narrative could be approached from two directions. One might focus primarily on the resuscitator or primarily on the resuscitated. Asklepios and Apollonius come readily to mind as prime examples of the former; Alcestis of the latter. We shall treat Alcestis first.

Alcestis

By focusing on the resuscitation of Alcestis, we are able to narrow the field of possible mythical parallels down to a single episode of a single myth. This permits a comparison of two well-defined pericopae.

The Sources. The myth of Alcestis’ resuscitation was wide-spread in the ancient world. Alcestis appears first in the Iliad as the wife of Admetus, the mother of Eumelus, and the daughter of Pelias.[248] She is mentioned in some sources in connection with the myth of her father’s (Pelias’) death at the hands of his daughters; sometimes she is held culpable of the patricide,[249] sometimes exonerated.[250]

The first extant source to portray Alcestis as the faithful wife who gives her life for her husband (Admetus) is Euripides’ Alcestis (438 B.C.).[251] However, it appears that the story of Alcestis’ sacrificial death and Heracles’ fight with Thanatos for her resuscitation was present earlier, as the fragment of the lost play Alcestis by Phrynichus and Servius’ commentary on the Aeneid indicate.[252] Regarding Servius, this is inferred from his words, “Others say that Euripides leads Orcus [= Hades] on stage bearing a sword with which he cuts Alcestis’ hair, and that Euripides borrowed this from Phrynichus, the ancient tragedian.”[253] The link is with Euripides’ Alcestis 72-76, where Thanatos states that he intends to perform upon Alcestis the sacrificial haircut of the dead. Servius’ claim is that Euripides has borrowed this material from Phrynichus’ play.[254]

Plato and Apollodorus, however, mention an alternate version of Alcestis’ resuscitation. In Plato’s Symposium, because of the noble character of her sacrificial death for her husband, the gods allow Alcestis to return again to life.[255] Apollodorus’ version is similar,[256] claiming that Persephone released Alcestis to life again; though Apollodorus also records that some say Heracles fought with Hades (not Thanatos) for Alcestis’ life. The difference between that version recorded by Euripides and that found in Plato and Apollodorus is that in the former, Alcestis has not yet reached Hades; Heracles rescues her from Thanatos at the grave. In the latter version, Alcestis must have already descended to Hades, where she was subsequently released again to life either by Persephone or by the gods. Margot Schmidt indicates that the age of this latter version is difficult to determine,[257] though it must date as early as the Symposium. Schmidt also proposes that the various references to the return of Alcestis from the underworld can most likely be understood as paraphrases that are grounded in both the version presented by Euripides and that of her release by Persephone.[258]

There are references to Alcestis in imperial-age literature (anything written from 27 B.C. onward), especially in the moralizing sort of literature, which may be seen as an extension of the reference found in Plato’s Symposium (see above), and which look upon Alcestis as an example of faithful conjugal love beyond death. Schmidt takes these references as literary counterparts to the conspicuous popularity of Alcestis in Roman funerary art.[259] Finally, Schmidt notes that imperial-age epitaphs like “ ;Alkhstij ne,h eivmi,” (“I am a new Alcestis”) are important for our understanding of the role Alcestis played as an exemplary figure.[260]

What this textual and archaeological evidence shows is that the Alcestis myth was widespread in the ancient world, and particularly in the imperial age. Her presence in tomb art and epitaphs hints at the hope the ancients held in Alcestis as a figure symbolic of the resurrection of the dead. Because the myth of Alcestis appears so frequently in imperial-age literature and art, we are safe in judging the myth to be of significant importance to our present study. It is roughly contemporary to the Gospel of Luke.

The Myth. The myth, as we have it, is best preserved in Euripides’ play “Alcestis.” The short summary that follows is dependent upon that work.[261]

Zeus killed Asklepios, Apollo’s son. Apollo then took revenge by killing the Cyclopes, offspring of Zeus. As punishment, Zeus constrained Apollo to serve the mortal Admetus by tending his cattle. Apollo took a liking to Admetus, and so persuaded to Fates to allow Admetus to escape his day of death by finding another who would willingly take his place. Admetus asked his parents to die for him, but they would not. Instead, his wife, Alcestis, offered her life in place of his. The day of Alcestis’ passing comes, and the bereaved morn her death.

Apollo

Halls of Admetus, hail! I stooped my pride

Here to brook fare of serfs, yea I, a God!

The fault was fault of Zeus: he slew my son

Asclepius—hurled the levin through his heart.

Wroth for the dead, his smiths of heavenly fire,

The Cyclopes, I slew; for blood-atonement

Allfather made me serf to a mortal man

To this land came I, tended mine host’s kine,

And warded still his house unto this day.

Righteous myself, I found a righteous man,

The son of Pheres: him I snatched from death,

Cozening the Fates: the Sisters promised me—

“Admetus shall escape the imminent death

If he for ransom gives another life.”

To all he went—all near and dear,―and asked

Father and grey-haired mother who gave him life;

But, save his wife, found none that would consent

For him to die and never more see light.

Now in his arms upborne within yon home

She gaspeth forth her life: for on this day

Her weird it is to die and fleet from life.

I, lest pollution taint me in their house,

Go forth of yonder hall’s belovèd roof.

Lo, yonder Death;―I see him nigh at hand,

Priest of the dead, who comes to hale her down

To Hades’ halls—well hath he kept his time,

Watching this day, whereon she needs must die.[262]

On that very day, not long after Alcestis’ has died, Heracles passes through town on his way to perform one of his famed labors for King Eurystheus of Tiryns, and he decides to stop and request Admetus’ hospitality. Heracles sees that all are in mourning, but is led to believe that the dead woman is only a family friend, not a family member. He turns to take his leave so as not to intrude upon the sorrow of Admetus’ household. But Admetus prevails upon Heracles to stay. Heracles reluctantly accepts Admetus’ offer of hospitality, and enters the home. Only after the actual burial of Alcestis does Heracles discover the true identity of the one who has died. Heracles is remorseful over having accepted Admetus’ hospitality on the very day of Alcestis’ death, so he plans to steal away to Alcestis’ tomb and fight Thanatos (Death) for Alcestis’ life. Heracles beats up Thanatos and brings Alcestis back to life before Thanatos has the opportunity to take her to the Underworld. Heracles thus returns Alcestis, alive, to Admetus. Thanatos is left twice cheated.

Hercules

O much-enduring heart and hand of mine,

Now show what son the Lady of Tiryns bare,

Electryon’s child Alcmena, unto Zeus.

For I must save the woman newly dead,

And set Alcestis in this house again,

And render to Admetus good for good.

I go. The sable-vestured King of Corpses,

Death, will I watch for, and shall find, I trow,

Drinking the death-draught hard beside the tomb.

And if I lie in wait, and dart from ambush,

And seize, and with mine arms’ coil compass him,

None is there shall deliver from mine hands

His straining sides, ere he yield up his prey.

Yea, though I miss the quarry, and he come not

Unto the blood-clot, to the sunless homes

Down will I fare of Cora and her King,

And make demand. I doubt not I shall lead

Alcestis up, and give to mine host’s hands,

Who to his halls received, nor drave me thence,

Albeit smitten with affliction sore,

But hid it, like a prince, respecting me.

Who is more guest-fain of Thessalians?

Who in all Hellas? O, he shall not say

That one so princely showed a base man kindness.[263]

Text to Text Comparison.

Luke 7:11 Kai. evge,neto evn tw/| e`xh/j evporeu,qh eivj po,lin kaloume,nhn Nai<n kai. suneporeu,onto auvtw/| oi` maqhtai. auvtou/ kai. o;cloj polu,jÅ 12 w`j de. h;ggisen th/| pu,lh| th/j po,lewj( kai. ivdou. evxekomi,zeto teqnhkw.j monogenh.j ui`o.j th/| mhtri. auvtou/ kai. auvth. h=n ch,ra( kai. o;cloj th/j po,lewj i`kano.j h=n su.n auvth/|Å 13 kai. ivdw.n auvth.n o` ku,rioj evsplagcni,sqh evpV auvth/| kai. ei=pen auvth/|( Mh. klai/eÅ 14 kai. proselqw.n h[yato th/j sorou/( oi` de. basta,zontej e;sthsan( kai. ei=pen( Neani,ske( soi. le,gw( evge,rqhtiÅ 15 kai. avneka,qisen o` nekro.j kai. h;rxato lalei/n( kai. e;dwken auvto.n th/| mhtri. auvtou/Å 16 e;laben de. fo,boj pa,ntaj kai. evdo,xazon to.n qeo.n le,gontej o[ti Profh,thj me,gaj hvge,rqh evn h`mi/n kai. o[ti VEpeske,yato o` qeo.j to.n lao.n auvtou/Å 17 kai. evxh/lqen o` lo,goj ou-toj evn o[lh| th/| VIoudai,a| peri. auvtou/ kai. pa,sh| th/| pericw,rw|Å[264]

The first step in determining whether Luke 7:11-17 demonstrates affinities with this popular Greco-Roman resuscitation myth is to perform a simple textual analysis. Are there any verbal or conceptual parallels that might indicate borrowing? Are there any verbal or conceptual parallels that might suggest a common tradition? Are there any structural or thematic parallels that might betoken borrowing or that might be common to various narratives within the same tradition (if there is such a tradition)? These are the sorts of questions this section will set out to answer. In essence, this section sets out to discover any of the “red flag” textual markers that MacDonald has indicated should be a part of any “hypertext.”

The first step in this process was to read through both the Lukan miracle narrative, and the Euripidean version of the Alcestis myth. Time constraints dictated that Alcestis be read thoroughly in English, and possible parallels subsequently followed up by a closer examination of specific portions of the Greek text. The results of this reading are revealed below.

The next step was to perform a word search on Euripides’ Alcestis, the main source of this myth, using the Perseus searching tool to scan the entire document for inflected forms of certain root words. The root words searched were gleaned from Luke 7:11-17 as words that were either uncommon in the N.T. or in some other way stood out as important to the pericope. Searches performed for the following words returned zero matches; that is, the words/roots were not present in Euripides’ drama in any form: sumporeu,omai, ov,cloj, splagcni,zomai (splagcni,zw), soro,j, evgei,rw, lale,w, profh,thj, peri,cwroj. Searches for poreu,w, pu,lh, basta,zw, and komi,zw returned several matches. Only those pertinent to the task are listed below. They are described together with the possible parallel from Luke 7:11-17.

· Searches for poreu,w were most fruitful. Several key figures come and go from the stage. Alcestis’ first appearance on stage is indicated by this verb: The chorus has just finished proclaiming Alcestis’ fate, that she shall die on that very day, when Alcestis and Admetus emerge from the house and the chorus exclaims: ivdou. ivdou,, / h[d’ evk do,mwn dh. kai. po,sij poreu,etai.[265] Soon after Alcestis dies, poreu,w is used again by the chorus as they bid her farewell:

O Pelias’ daughter, I hail thee:

I wave thee eternal farewell

To thine home where the darkness must veil thee,

Where in Hades unsunned thou shalt dwell.

Know, Dark-haired, thy grey Spirit-wafter

Hath sped not with twy-plashing oar

Woman nobler, nor shall speed hereafter

To Acheron’s shore.[266]

Whereas in Luke the dead body is brought forth with the verb evkkomi,zw, which can mean ‘to carry out a corpse for burial,’[267] in Alcestis, the parting of the dead woman is described with a form of poreu,w.

On the other hand, both Jesus’ and Heracles’ arrivals are pronounced with poreu,w: Heracles has just entered the stage for the first time and has begun a dialogue with the chorus when the chorus asks him, “And whither journeyest? To what wanderings yoked?”[268] And, upon learning that grief has befallen the home to which he has come, Heracles tells Admetus that he will go (poreu,somai) to another’s home.[269] Of course, he remains with Admetus, and, once he has learned of Alcestis’ death, he wanders off to accost Thanatos. Heracles’ re-entry, this time with the resuscitated Alcestis in tow, is announced by the chorus with the verb poreu,w.[270] Finally, after Heracles has toyed for a while with Admetus, who does not yet recognize his resuscitated wife, he says: “O that such might I had as back to bring / To light thy wife from nethergloom abodes, / And to bestow this kindness upon thee!”[271] The word Euripides uses here for “to bring back” is poreu,w.

Though Euripides makes extensive use of the word, especially to introduce important characters to the stage, there are at least two reasons why we should not take this similarity as indicative of literary borrowing on Luke’s part. First is the fact that poreu,w is a common-place word, used in many different contexts. Luke might have used a different word in this pericope, but why? Forms of poreu,w occur 153 times in the N.T.; 51 times in Luke and 37 times in Acts. Second, in at least three places, Euripides’ choice of the word is for metrical reasons.[272]

· A search for komi,zw returned three occurrences in Alcestis. First, having returned from his wrestling match with Thanatos, Heracles pretends to Admetus that the woman he leads by hand was given to him as the prize for having won in athletic competition against some men upon whom he happened. Heracles says that it is from this competition that he leads (komi,zw) this woman, having taken her as the victor’s reward.[273] Second, just as Heracles said he “leads” the woman, so Admetus begs Heracles to “lead” (ko,mize) her away from his eyes because she looks so much like his beloved wife.[274] In these first and second instances, komi,zw appears in the same place in each line, again for metrical reasons. The third use of this word comes shortly after the first two: Heracles has succeeded in his plea for Admetus to care for the woman in his absence, but Admetus, faithful still to his wife, will not touch the woman, but says only, “Lead ye her, if mine halls must needs receive.”[275]

Whereas Luke uses a compounded form of komi,zw when he describes the funeral procession of the dead son, Euripides uses the word only with reference to the men “leading” the living Alcestis back into Admetus’ home. The word is significant for our study because it appears in the N.T. only here,[276] and does not appear in the LXX at all.[277] Plummer notes that evxekomi,zw “is equivalent to evkfe,rein (Acts v. 6, 9, 10) and efferre, and is used of carrying out to burial…”[278] Euripides uses evkfe,rein twice in Alcestis (lines 601 and 716), but only the second of the two occurrences has to do with the dead Alcestis. Pheres, in the midst of his argument with his son, shouts, “What?—art not burying (evkfe,reij) her in thine own stead?”[279] But certainly Luke’s use of a synonym, though conceptually parallel, is not enough to call evxekomi,zw a flag that points to the Euripidean text.

· Of greater significance, perhaps, to the comparison of the two stories would be the place where the savior meets the dead person. In Luke 7:12, Jesus and his disciples meet the funeral procession at the city gates (pu,lh). In the first chorus, pu,lai are mentioned once in Strophe 1, twice in Antistrophe 1, and once again in Antistrophe 2. In Strophe 1, the chorus looks to the gates and finds no servant there who would announce Alcestis’ death.[280] These are the city gates. The first instance of pu,lh in Antistrophe 1 refers again to the city gates, but the second to the “gates of the dead,” Hades.[281] So also, the occurrence in Antistrophe 2 refers to Hades.[282] Two other uses of the word in Alcestis refer to Heracles’ initial reception to Admetus’ house after Alcestis had died but before she was removed for burial and before Heracles was notified that it was she who had died.[283]

In both cases the deceased either appears or is expected to appear at the city gates. Bock’s comment on Luke 7:12 indicates that it was customary to carry the deceased outside of the city for burial.[284] Thus, for the chorus to look to the city gates for evidence of Alcestis’ death, or for Jesus to encounter the funeral procession at the city gate would not be out of the ordinary. Because this is true, it is unlikely that the ancient reader would have seen Luke’s mention of the city gates as any sort of flag marking this Lukan miracle as a hypertext. pu,lh would have called to mind any number of funerals that the reader may have witnessed.

· After Jesus told the bereaved mother to cease crying, he approached the bier and laid hold of it. Those who carried the bier stood still as Jesus commanded the young man to rise up. The pallbearers are called oi` basta,zontej (Luke 7:14). In the early verses of Alcestis we are likewise told, through Apollo, that Alcestis is on her death bed borne up in her husband’s arms (evn ceroi/n basta,zetai).[285] Later in the heated discussion Admetus has with his father, Pheres says to Admetus, “Not mine old corpse to the grave thou bear’st (basta,zwn) with glee!”[286] Thus, Admetus is twice identified as the bearer of his dead wife, once as her spirit was passing away and once as she was taken to the tomb. In bitter contrast to that, in his grief after the funeral Admetus laments that the home to which he now returns wifeless was the home into which he once led his newly wed wife (fili,aj avlo,–…cou ce,ra basta,zwn).[287] Other instances of basta,zw in Alcestis are unimportant to our discussion.[288]

The identification of Admetus as the one who bears his dead wife evokes sympathy from us towards him, especially because of his irreproachable hospitality. Heracles feels sympathy too, and so tackles Thanatos to retrieve Alcestis for Admetus, who bore his dead wife. In contrast, in Luke 7:11-17, the miracle is clearly performed for the sake of the widow, not the pallbearers. Jesus has done this thing for her, who is nowhere identified as the bearer of her dead son. Thus, the Gospel story does not go to the same lengths to evoke our sympathy for the widow as Alcestis does for Admetus.[289] The significance is in the way the stories are told; what the authors are attempting to accomplish. This illustrates the differing objectives of Luke and Euripides. Euripides writes to evoke our pity. Luke writes to tell us something about Jesus.

· We will make final note of ku,rioj (Luke 7:13). David Lee suggests that Luke’s use of ku,rioj at this point in the narrative is significant because it links Jesus’ Lordship with his power over death: “The title denotes Jesus when he raises to life the son of the widow of Nain, and so an association begins (but is not developed) between the title ‘Lord’ and Jesus’ power over death.”[290] This is the first instance in Luke’s Gospel where Luke himself calls Jesus ‘Lord.’ Many commentators have found this significant.

Comments. A possible “transvaluation” of the proposed “hypotext” is Luke’s statement that the youth “began to speak” (Luke 7:15). In the Euripidean version of the myth, the resuscitated Alcestis is mute. Heracles tells Admetus: “’Tis not vouchsafed thee yet to hear her voice, / Ere to the Powers beneath the earth she be / Unconsecrated, and the third day come. /” It is possible that Luke includes this bit of information about the young man beginning to speak in order to make explicit the differences between the resuscitation done by Jesus and that performed by Heracles. In fact, the restriction placed on Alcestis in the Euripidean drama that she could not speak may have left the play-goer wondering what type of resuscitation Heracles had actually performed. Is Alcestis really back from the dead? (Of course, her life might have been evident from the staging of the play, but it is not so evident from the text). Though Admetus is ecstatic when he realizes that his wife is again alive, there is no indication in the text of the play that Alcestis experienced any emotion but apathy! In the Lukan miracle, on the other hand, the son’s sitting up and speaking confirms the reality of his life.[291] In Alcestis, the netherworldly powers require Alcestis to be “unconsecrated” before she will speak. But in Luke, Jesus has ultimate authority over the living and the dead. There is no need for the resuscitated to be unconsecrated to the netherworldly powers. They are unimportant, and not even mentioned.

This is directly related to the main point of the Lukan narrative. This is the first resuscitation performed by Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. Heretofore he has healed the sick and cast out demons, but now Luke shows that Jesus’ authority extends even to the realm of the dead. A purpose of Luke’s account seems to be to illustrate this fact of Jesus’ ultimate and unqualified authority over the grave, as well has his compassion for the helpless.[292] Heracles demonstrates only a qualified authority over the grave. It is evident that he is able to wrest the dead Alcestis from the arms of Thanatos, but it is not evident that he would be able to do it on multiple occasions. That fact that Asklepios was killed by Zeus for doing such a thing should make us pause to consider whether Heracles would be allowed to resuscitate the dead more than once (though it may be asking too much for the various Greco-Roman myths to make use of an inter-myth consistency). Most likely we are meant to see here a special dispensation on the part of the gods allowing Heracles to resuscitate Alcestis because of her virtuous, faithful love for her husband even in the face of death. Furthermore, Heracles is not able to bring Alcestis back in an unqualified manner. She still must be ‘unconsecrated’ to the ‘Powers beneath the earth’ before she will be able to speak. Jesus’ work, however, faces no such qualification.

In both the myth and the Gospel miracle, those who witness the event respond similarly, but not identically. In the Gospel, fear seized the crowd and they began to praise God (7:16). In the myth, Admetus reacts with skepticism that soon turns to joyful bliss. With his last words in the play, he calls for celebration and worship throughout his realm. Likewise, in Luke “This news about Jesus spread throughout Judea and the surrounding country” (7:17; NIV).

The Chorus is given the final lines in the drama, wherein it sings of the strange ways of the gods. Of the response of the crowd given in Luke to the miracle, Fitzmyer says, “Joined to the glorification, it is intended as a sort of Greek-chorus-like reaction to the miracle that has been wrought.”[293] There are indeed similarities between Luke 7:16 and the choral finale to Alcestis. The chorus ends Euripides’ play by praising the gods:

O the works of the Gods—in manifold forms they reveal them:

Manifold things unhoped-for the Gods to accomplishment bring.

And the things that we looked for, the Gods deign not to fulfil them;

And the paths undiscerned of our eyes, the Gods unseal them.

So fell this marvellous thing.[294]

In a similar manner, the crowd in Luke “praised God saying, ‘A great prophet has been raised up among us,’ and ‘God has cared for his people.’”[295] In both Alcestis and in Luke, the speakers praise the gods/God for their wondrous deeds. Furthermore, in both Alcestis and Luke the praise is rendered by a group of people. Whether Luke actually intended a “Greek-chorus-like reaction” is difficult to say, but the fact that the praise in 7:17 is rendered to God by a group of people certainly produces a Greek-chorus-like effect.

Each story’s moral is different. While one point of Luke’s narrative is apparently to demonstrate Jesus’ ultimate authority and his compassion for the helpless, Euripides’ point is not that Heracles has that kind of power or authority. Euripides’ point is not even that Heracles has compassion on his host (which he does), but that Admetus did right to receive Heracles into his home even on the day of his wife’s death. Note how the point is driven home at the close of the play:

Hercules

‘Tis not vouchsafed thee yet to hear her voice,

Ere to the Powers beneath the earth she be

Unconsecrated, and the third day come.

But lead her in, and, just man as thou art,

Henceforth, Admetus, reverence still the guest.

Farewell. But I must go, and work the work

Set by the king, the son of Sthenelus.

Admetus

Abide with us, a sharer of our hearth.

Hercules

Hereafter this: now must I hasten on.

Admetus

O prosper thou, and come again in peace![296]

Thus, the point of Euripides’ Alcestis is twofold: “Its object is to show that conjugal affection and an observance of the rites of hospitality are not suffered to go without their reward.”[297] It must be granted that in Euripides we have preserved only one possible moral to the story; others may have existed in antiquity in other forms of the myth. Nevertheless, were Luke drawing from the myth of Alcestis at this point, we might say that he is presenting a transvaluation of the myth. His purpose is greater than to encourage hospitality and self-sacrificial love (though this certainly may be found in Luke as well). It is possible that Luke, knowing of Alcestis, has made an allusion to the drama for the purpose of showing that Jesus is not the sort of resuscitator that Heracles is. He is altogether different because of his unqualified power. This is perhaps why Luke calls Jesus éo` ku,rioj in 7:13—Luke’s first use of this Christological appellation in his Gospel. “Luke looks back and characterizes Jesus’ acts in terms of the authority that the disciples later came to understand as a reflection of his earthly ministry.”[298] Furthermore, while Heracles raised the dead Alcestis because he was indebted to his host, and while the gods allowed her to be raised perhaps because of her faithful conjugal love, Jesus raised the dead purely out of compassion. The bereaved mother did nothing to deserve it; her tears were enough to move Jesus to action.

On the other hand, no transvaluation of a Greek myth is strictly necessary. As many commentators have noted, it is easy to conceive that Luke had Elijah (1 Kings 17:7-24) and Elisha (2 Kings 4:8-37) in mind when he recorded this miracle,[299] or at least that those who witnessed the miracle thought about Elijah and Elisha.[300] In contrast to Elijah’s and Elisha’s resuscitations, Jesus raises the dead effortlessly. But in all three cases, the deceased is a son, and he is restored by the resuscitator to his mother. In fact, Luke 7:15b is identical to 1 Kings 17:23b LXX: “kai, e;dwken auvto.n th|/ mhtri. auvtou/.”[301] This fact gains significance when we compare Luke 7:15a with 1 Kings 17:22: Luke records that the widow’s son began to speak upon resuscitation (h;rxato lalei/n; 7:15). The story of the lad’s resuscitation at the hands of Elijah in 1 Kings 17 does not record such an occurrence…in the MT. The MT says simply, “And the LORD heard Elijah, and the boy’s breath returned to him, and he lived.”[302] Interestingly, the LXX reads, “And thus it happened, and the little child cried out (avnebo,hsen).”[303] It is quite possible that Luke recorded that the boy began to speak because he knew what the LXX read at this point, thus emphasizing the O.T. parallel.

The remembrance of the O.T. counterparts to this story prompts those who witness Jesus’ miracle to exclaim that God had raised up a great prophet among them. This statement and the similarity in theme between this miracle of Jesus and those of Elijah and Elisha are probably meant to flag Luke 7:11-17 as an allusion to the passages in 1 and 2 Kings. That is, Luke intends for us to remember Elijah and Elisha. This likelihood is further supported by additional references in the Gospel of Luke to these two O.T. prophets: Luke 7:1-10—which recalls 2 Kings 4:8-37, and is particularly significant in light of the fact that it immediately precedes the passage under question; Luke 9:51-56—which recalls 2 Kings 1:1-18; and especially Luke 4:24-27—which explicitly refers to 1 Kings 17:7-24. Still, as Van Der Loos has pointed out, the differences between the raising of the widow’s son at Nain and the resuscitations performed by Elijah and Elisha argue against Luke’s use of those O.T. texts as sources for his story about Jesus.[304] However much Luke may have wished to allude to those two O.T. prophets, he did not use their miracles as a source for this one.

But the allusion goes further than Elijah and Elisha. As Marshall has indicated, “This narrative… provides the ‘text’ on which the ‘commentary’ regarding the person and work of Jesus in 7:18-35 is based.”[305] That is, this text is the justification for how Jesus replies to the question asked by John the Baptist’s disciples: “Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?”[306] Jesus responds,

Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cured, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is preached to the poor. Blessed is the man who does not fall away on account of me.[307]

So the narrative unit from 7:11 to 7:17 has its own purpose of showing Jesus’ power and compassion, but it also functions within Luke’s larger authorial scheme to set up the implied claim in 7:18-35 that Jesus is, in fact, ‘the one who was to come.’

For these several reasons, we conclude that Luke’s intent was not to emulate the Euripidean version of the resuscitation of Alcestis. There are certainly a number of conceptual parallels between the two texts, especially the idea of speaking (or not speaking, as the case may be) upon resuscitation. However, because of Luke’s obvious allusions and references to Elijah and Elisha in other places throughout his Gospel, and because of the close parallels between 1 Kings 17:22-23 (LXX) and Luke 7:15, and especially the verbatim quotation in Luke 7:15b of 1 Kings 17:22b LXX, we conclude that if Luke had a similar text in mind, it was most likely 1 Kings 17:7-24, and not a pagan miracle. That said, we do not exclude the possibility that Luke also chose to allude to a myth such as that of Alcestis in order to demonstrate Jesus’ altogether different nature and power. Certainly the information about the resuscitated son speaking out could bring to mind the fact that Alcestis did not speak for three days after her resuscitation.[308] Also, any ancient familiar with the basics of the Alcestis myth would have recognized the parallel restoration of the resuscitated dead. The widespread influence of Alcestis in literature and art would have made her myth a prime object for allusion. While Luke 7:11-17 does not appear to bear enough similarity to Euripides’ Alcestis to warrant labeling Luke 7:11-17 either as an emulation of Alcestis, the drama, or as a reworking of the Alcestis tradition, the conceptual parallels suggest that Luke may have alluded to the Alcestis myth (perhaps even the Euripidean version) in order to draw a distinction.

Asklepios and Apollonius

Earlier I mentioned the possible significance of pu,lh in Luke and in Alcestis as the place where the dead would appear. I mentioned that the second (Antistrophe 1, line 102) and third (Antistrophe 2, line 127) uses of pu,lh worth noting in Alcestis were in reference to Hades. It is appropriate to note that in Antistrophe 2 the chorus is bewailing the fact that Asklepios is dead:

Were life’s light in the eyes

Of Phoebus’s son,

Then our darling might rise

From the mansions of darkness, through portals of

Hades return to our skies;

For he raised up the dead,

Ere flashed from the heaven,

From Zeus’ hand sped,

That bolt of the levin.

But now what remaineth to wait for?—what hope of her life is given?[309]

Phoebus is Apollo, and his son is Asklepios, the healer. Asklepios is said to have been able to raise the dead, but was killed by Zeus for doing so. Ancient testimony varies as to whom Asklepios resuscitated, but Hippolytos is a recurring candidate.[310] Although the subject of resuscitation varies in the testimony, the outcome is always the same: Zeus kills Asklepios for daring to raise the dead by hurling a thunder-bolt through him. Although there are accounts of Asklepios performing resuscitations, they are not generally treated as full-length myth. Instead, many references to his resuscitations come second hand as one ancient author mentions that another ancient author recorded the event. Two major exceptions are the stories recorded by Ovid and Virgil about Hippolytos.[311] These, however, are in Latin and would, therefore, add greatly to the already complex task of comparing myth to miracle. So, because an account of Asklepios raising the dead could not be found in a full-length narrative that has widely been recognized as a myth, and because Euripides’ treatment of Heracles and Alcestis is widely recognized as myth, the later was chosen for comparison with Luke over the former.

In a form critical discussion of miracle stories, Bultmann says, “It is a traditional feature of revivifying the dead for the healer to meet the funeral procession…”[312] He then cites Luke 7:11ff. as a N.T. example, followed by a few other ancient accounts, including the story by Philostratus of Apollonius of Tyana resuscitating a dead man in a very similar fashion to that which we find in Luke 7:11ff. Bultmann’s citation of this latter story about Apollonius meeting a funeral party and resuscitating the deceased apparently is meant to indicate that both Luke and Philostratus were drawing from a similar spring of traditional material, each adapting the tradition for his own use.

In his study of the Lukan widow traditions, Robert Price arrives at the same conclusion: Luke draws this story of resuscitation from traditional material common to that used by Philostratus. Indeed, he considers the story of Apollonius to lie nearer the original form of the story than does the story of Jesus.[313] Price attempts to argue that the traditional material was originally handed on by women themselves for the purpose of encouraging resistance to the patriarchal system,[314] and that Luke has unwittingly preserved the material.[315] Price’s argument, however, only proves our point. He makes reference to several late occurrences of this story-type, and implies that there are early occurrences as well,[316] but he does not mention any instances of this form that pre-date the Lukan account except for the Elijah and Elisha accounts in 1 and 2 Kings. Price also neglects to include in his analysis of the form the very similar healing performed by Asklepios, in which no woman was even involved. We conclude that Price builds his thesis on shaky ground by relying only on material that antedates the Gospel of Luke. Instead, contra Price, we conclude that many of the parallels he adduces are best seen not as occurrences of a supposed form also found in Luke 7:11-17.

Otto Weinreich, whom Bultmann cites in his discussion of Luke 7:11-17 in The History of the Synoptic Tradition, notices the similarity between the Luke 7:11-17 and the miracle performed by Apollonius, but denies any essential connection. Rather, he says that one should not consider such similarities as indicative of emulation or of polemical tendencies unless ancient aretalogy fails to give an adequate account of the presence of the material.[317] In the case of Philostratus, there is sufficient reason to believe that he is neither emulating nor offering a polemic against the N.T.:

Ich halte es methodisch für geboten, Nachahmung neutestamentlicher Wunderberichte in heidnischen Wundererzählungen dieser Zeit nur da anzunehmen, wo die antike Aretalogie als Vorbild versagt oder wo eine polemisch-rivalisierende Tendenz bemerkbar ist. Sonst sollten nicht einmal wörtliche Anklänge zu dieser Annahme führen, denn Loci communes sind gerade in der Wundererzählung häufig. Philostratus schöpft durchaus aus der antiken Aretalogie; es ist weder Nachahmung noch Polemik gegen das Neue Testament bei ihm zu erkennen…[318]

This statement is especially helpful in confirming our methodology for comparison of myth with miracle. Even verbal parallels are insufficient grounds for concluding emulation across socio-cultural boundaries, if there is sufficient precedent within the socio-cultural boundaries of a given text for the use of such verbiage. As applied to our current endeavor, we should only contemplate the possibility of emulation or transvaluation of pagan mythology where there is insufficient precedent within the Judeo-Christian background itself. Thus, we are better to see reference to 1 and 2 Kings in Luke 7:11-17 than to the mythic tradition of Alcestis.

J. Nolland identifies the form of this Lukan pericope (7:11-17) broadly as a miracle story, “though obviously the prior death of the sufferer distinguishes somewhat the form of a resuscitation account from that of other healings.”[319] Nolland’s differentiation between this form of a miracle story and other forms seems forced, however, when one realizes that most of Jesus’ healing miracles (if not all) were done for people who had already been in a state of suffering for some time; he does not meet and heal them at the onset of their illnesses. Like Bultmann, Nolland also refers to the similarity of form between Luke 7:11-17 and the aforementioned story of Apollonius. Nolland’s conclusion, however, is closer to Weinreich’s:

Despite the striking correspondences there is no need to postulate dependence in either direction. The two stories share a similar subject matter, a common milieu in the storyteller’s art, and an obvious desire to exalt a great figure. While it is the account concerning Apollonius which bears most similarity to the Lukan account, Jewish and Greco-Roman sources contain a number of accounts of the resuscitation of the dead…[320]

This is essentially akin to our observation in Chapter Two that similarity of subject matter will prompt similarity of narrative form, or even verbal and conceptual parallels. Remember Gilligan’s Island. This is true even if one account is fictional and the other account is not. Ostensibly, there is nothing in the Gilligan’s Island theme song to tell us that the account is fictional; its setting in late twentieth century sit-com television programming is what tells us that it is fictional. The context in which a story is related plays a major role in our ability to discern between fact and fiction, history and myth.

The more important point of relevance regarding the story put forth by Philostratus, and cited by Bultmann as was mentioned above, concerns the circumstances of the resuscitation and their relation to other ancient miracle accounts. Philostratus records that Apollonius met a funeral procession and commanded them to lay down the bier because he would bring an end to their grief, which he did when he woke up the seemingly dead woman.[321] As I have already pointed out above, Weinreich is reluctant to see an emulation of the N.T. in this story. What he does find, however, is perhaps more important to our research. The story about Apollonius exemplifies a common motif, which he labels “Begegnung und Wunder unterwegs.”[322] Weinreich claims that this motif first appears in ancient literature in the inscriptional testimony to healing found at Epidauros, the cultic center of Asklepios worship. One finds there the story of a certain Sostratos who stayed at the temple in Epidauros but was not healed because the god had gone away for a time. While he was returning home unhealed, Asklepios met him on the way, ordered that the stretcher upon which Sostratos lay be set down, and then healed him.[323] Thus there was an encounter and a miracle while the party was ‘underway.’

Taking this as a recurring motif, we are in a position to further evaluate the amount of similarity between the resuscitation of the widow’s son at Nain by Jesus and the resuscitation of Alcestis by Heracles. In the Lukan story, it is evident that the motif Weinreich has suggested is present; Jesus met the funeral procession on the way to the tomb and then performed the miracle. Whether this is an adaptation of the motif is impossible to say, but the possibility cannot be ignored. However, Heracles does not meet Alcestis’ funeral party ‘underway.’ Rather, he comes before the funeral party leaves Admetus’ household, and he performs the miracle only after she has been committed to the tomb. Euripides’ account of the resuscitation of Alcestis does not demonstrate “Begegnung und Wunder unterwegs.” Because of the poetic license available to the playwright, it is conceivable that in other forms the myth of Alcestis’ resuscitation did employ that motif. However, the motif that Weinreich identifies as common to both the miracle performed by Jesus and those performed by Asklepios and Apollonius is lacking in the Euripidean version of the Alcestis myth. Thus, another possible Lukan ‘flag’ to Alcestis turns out not to connect the two stories at all.

Based on the fact that the story of Apollonius is late compared to the Gospel accounts, and the fact that there is precedent within realm of pagan aretalogy, I conclude that there is no direct connection between the miracle performed by Apollonius and the one performed by Jesus in Luke 7:11-17. If there is an earlier tradition from which Philostratus and Luke both draw in the writing of their miracle accounts, instances of that tradition that predate Luke have yet to be identified. If there is any connection between the two accounts at all, we ought to see Luke as the archetype of a tradition from which Philostratus and others drew, not vice versa. While miracles performed by Asklepios may very well be worth comparing with the Lukan story, some more complete narrative account of his resuscitations must first be found. Until such an account surfaces (and I may simply have failed to discover one), there is no compelling reason for us to include in this study a comparison of Luke 7:11-17 with the extant accounts of Asklepios’ resuscitations.

Nature Miracles

We mentioned earlier that many of the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels have, in the last century, been widely accepted, miracles other than nature miracles, that is. Many are able to find psychosomatic maladies underlying the cures that Jesus performs on people, so that a placebo is all that is needed to effect the cure. Of course, other rationalizations are also made. For more discussion on this point, see Chapter Two. On the other hand, miracles demonstrating power over nature are often rejected a priori because naturalism prohibits credence in natural intervention by God.[324] For this reason, I have chosen to include in my study, not only a miracle of healing (Luke 7:11-17), but also one of Jesus’ nature miracles, the calming of the storm (Luke 8:22-25). I have selected this particular miracle account for two reasons. First, it has synoptic parallels. This puts it in a category separate from the resuscitation of the widow’s son at Nain. Because it is Markan material, this study will examine what is unique to Luke as well as what Luke shares with the Matthew and Mark. Second, MacDonald has already proposed that Mark’s parallel to this story was borrowed from Homeric epic. It is reasonable to expect that if Mark’s account displays mythological influences, Luke’s might as well, especially if MacDonald is correct in his assertion that Mark has borrowed this story from the Odyssey. For even if Luke were not intentionally mimicking Homer at this point, his account of Jesus calming the sea should still show some affinity with Homer because he would have been using Markan material. Furthermore, MacDonald has already identified several mythological motifs in Acts, Luke’s second volume. Of course, the fact that this is Markan material confuses the analysis somewhat, because it is impossible to tell whether Luke is alluding to Homer or simply borrowing from Mark.[325] However, although there are differences between the Markan and Lukan versions of the story, the essential similarity of plot indicates that, whether Mark or Luke wrote first, any mythic borrowing, parallels or allusions should be apparent in both accounts.

As a final note of introduction, I would like to direct the reader to a comment made by J. Fitzmyer regarding this miracle:

Faced with such a miracle-story in the gospel tradition, one is further tempted to ask to what extent it is mythological. It is, indeed, seeking to express in human words an aspect of the impact that Jesus of Nazareth made on his contemporaries.[326]

In this comment Fitzmyer does not pronounce judgment on the historicity of this miracle. However, what he says here is clearly reminiscent of the Bultmannian concept of myth. I will not duplicate here the arguments I have already offered in reply to Bultmann’s view of myth and the Gospels. I mean only to point out from Fitzmyer’s adoption of this definition that Bultmann’s influence has been lasting, and, therefore, that such a study as this is still needed.

The myth with which Luke 8:22-25 will be compared is that of Aeolus, keeper of the winds.[327]

Aeolus

The Sources. Like Alcestis, Aeolus was well-known in the ancient world. He appears in a variety of sources and in a variety of genres. In fact, several different Aeoli appear in several different places, and they are sometimes confused in the ancient literature. A quick reading of Diodorus,[328] who assembles the various Aeoli into a single genealogy, will demonstrate the ease with which confusion may arise.

We first find Aeolus, master of the winds, in book 10 of Homer’s Odyssey, the famed ‘nostos’ section of the epic.[329] Homer relates that Aeolus is the son of Hippotas, and “dear to the immortal gods.”[330] He has six sons and six daughters, whom he gave to his six sons in marriage.[331] Homer leaves Aeolus’ wife nameless; though Clement of Alexandria says that he was married to Hippo, daughter of Chiron the Centaur.[332] Odysseus and his men happened upon Aeolia, the floating island realm of Aeolus,[333] and sojourned there for a month, telling Aeolus tales of the Trojan war. At the end of the month, Odysseus inquired whether Aeolus might be able to help him and his companions on their way.[334] Aeolus was happy to oblige:

He gave me the skin of a nine-year-old ox he had flayed,

And in it he had bound the courses of the blustering winds.

For the son of Cronos had made him steward of the winds,

So he could make the one he wished rise up or subside.

He bound it in the hollow ship with a shining cord

Of silver, so it would not blow at all, not a little.

Then he set a breeze of the West Wind blowing for me

That would carry the ship and the men onward. He was not

Destined to complete it. We were lost by our own foolishness.[335]

“Lost by our own foolishness.” It was fair sailing for Odysseus and his men. Ten days and they were within sight of Ithaca, close enough even to see the fire-tenders on shore.[336] But a heavy sleep fell over Odysseus, for he had not slept since leaving Aeolia. As he slept, his companions wondered among themselves what was in the bag Aeolus had given him. Believing that it was treasure, they opened the bag, releasing the winds and causing a terrible storm to come upon them. Odysseus woke to find them blown far out to sea. The storm carried them all the way back to Aeolia.[337] This time, however, Aeolus was unwilling to help them on their return, and Odysseus left the island unaided, embarking upon a very long journey home:

‘Go quickly from the island, most shameful of living men.

It is not lawful for me to help or to send on his course

Any man who is despised by the blessed gods.

Go, since you came to this place despised by the gods.’

When he had said this, he sent me deeply groaning from his halls.[338]

By the fifth century B.C., the incestuous relationships of Aeolus’ progeny was evidently found to be unacceptable. Euripides, whose now lost play, Aeolus, surviving to us only in its ‘hypothesis,’ took incest for its theme.[339] In this play, Euripides has Aeolus force his daughter to commit suicide because of her incestuous love for her brother.[340]

Rationalizing, Diodorus Siculus offers his own understanding of the nature of Aeolus’ power to direct the winds. Of the Homeric myth, he states:

…furthermore, he introduced sea-farers to the use of sails and had learned, by long observation of what the fire foretold, to predict with accuracy the local winds, this being the reason why the myth has referred to him as the ‘keeper of the winds’; and it was because of his very great piety that he was called a friend of the Gods.[341]

Diodorus also mentions what appears to be a cult of Aeolus localized in Lipara. He relates that Agathocles, king of Syracuse, demanded fifty talents of silver from the Liparaeans:

When the Liparaeans begged him to grant them time for what was lacking in the payment and said that they had never turned the sacred offerings to profane uses, Agathocles forced them to give him the dedications in the Prytaneum, of which some bore inscriptions to Aeolus and some to Hephaestus… But a wind came up and the eleven of his ships that were carrying the money were sunk. And so it seemed to many that the god who was said in that region to be master of the winds at once on his first voyage exacted punishment from him…[342]

Though the Liparaean Isles have not, to date, divulged any documentary evidence concerning Aeolus, Filippo Giudice thinks that the cult of Aeolus mentioned by Diodorus, can likely be confirmed by an inscription found on a piece of pottery from Castello in Lipara.[343] Certainly, Homer’s merely human Aeolus was, in other quarters, implicitly divine, as is evidenced by the portrayal of the winds over which he rules as minor deities themselves:

So, in the cave of Aeolus, he prisoned

The North-wind, and the West-wind, and such others

As ever banish cloud, and he turned loose

The South-wind, and the South-wind came out streaming

With dripping wings, and pitch-black darkness veiling

His terrible countenance. He beard is heavy

With rain-cloud, and his hoary locks a torrent,

Mists are his chaplet, and his wings and garments

Run with the rain.[344]

This is also seen in book 1 of Virgil’s Aeneid where the winds nearly have personalities of their own.[345] Aeolus’ implicit divinity is especially evident in the following quotation from the Aeneid wherein Aeolus claims that by Juno’s will he has authority over wind and cloud and sits at table with the gods: “tu das epulis accumbere divum / nimborumque facis tempestatumque potentem.”[346]

In artistic representation, Aeolus appears in the late fifth century B.C. as an aged man with a beard and white hair. He is dressed in a cloak that leaves his chest uncovered; and he carries a cane in his right arm.[347]

Text to Text Comparison.

Luke 8:22 VEge,neto de. evn mia/| tw/n h`merw/n kai. auvto.j evne,bh eivj ploi/on kai. oi` maqhtai. auvtou/ kai. ei=pen pro.j auvtou,j( Die,lqwmen eivj to. pe,ran th/j li,mnhj( kai. avnh,cqhsanÅ 23 pleo,ntwn de. auvtw/n avfu,pnwsenÅ kai. kate,bh lai/lay avne,mou eivj th.n li,mnhn kai. suneplhrou/nto kai. evkindu,neuonÅ 24 proselqo,ntej de. dih,geiran auvto.n le,gontej( VEpista,ta evpista,ta( avpollu,meqaÅ o` de. diegerqei.j evpeti,mhsen tw/| avne,mw| kai. tw/| klu,dwni tou/ u[datoj\ kai. evpau,santo kai. evge,neto galh,nhÅ 25 ei=pen de. auvtoi/j( Pou/ h` pi,stij u`mw/nÈ fobhqe,ntej de. evqau,masan le,gontej pro.j avllh,louj( Ti,j a;ra ou-to,j evstin o[ti kai. toi/j avne,moij evpita,ssei kai. tw/| u[dati( kai. u`pakou,ousin auvtw/|È

As with the myth of Alcestis above, we will begin our comparison of the miracle and the myth with a simple textual analysis. Because the Homeric (Epic) dialect mainly utilizes Aeolic and Ionic forms of words and, to the reader of the N.T., some very archaic modes of expression, it would be futile to search for direct verbal parallels between the Homeric and the Lukan texts. Instead, one must look for verbal and conceptual similarities. As with Luke 7:11-17, one must pay special attention to words that are infrequent, unusual, strange in their context, or strikingly parallel to the myth under question. The operating hypothesis is that such ‘special’ words stand out as possible ‘red flags’ indicating the author’s adaptation of a well known text, the Odyssey in this case. In quickly reading Luke 8:22-27, the following words immediately appear worthy of further investigation:

· ploi/on/ple,w: pl¡w appears 6 times in the N.T., 4 of which are in Acts and 1 in Luke. ploi/on is much more common, being used some 33 times in the N.T., mainly in the Gospels and Acts. Investigation of these words is warranted because of their intimate connection with the miracle to be studied. Homer often uses nhu/j for “ship” rather than ploi/on (10.15, 23, 26, 32, 51, 53, 57). But the variation in terms is insignificant, and so is the correlation. As has been mentioned before, there are only so many words in a language with which to describe a concept; synonyms are limited. It is true that poetic license may allow for some variation (for instance, maybe a boat could be called a chariot of the sea, or something of the sort), and if that same kind of poetic appellation were found in both the Odyssey and Luke, that would be a possible ‘red flag’ pointing from hypertext to hypotext. But where we find two common words (and different at that) we should probably not find any indication of borrowing—the same is true of ple,w.

We might note of ple,w (found in Odyssey 10.28 and 77, and at 10.80 at the end of the passage), however, that it appears to be a subordinate concept in this portion of Odyssey 10 to that of sending, pe,mpw. More important than Odysseus’ sailing is the persuasion of Aeolus to send. The concept of sending is absent from Luke 8:22-25. However, if we read a little farther in Luke, we find that sending is important to the larger story of which this pericope is a part. The crowd of Gerasenes who came to see Jesus after he had cast the demons out of the unidentified man in 8:26-39 asked Jesus to leave them (avpelqei/n avp’ auvtw/n) because they were afraid (8:37). Jesus simply got in the boat and prepared to go. The man whom he had saved requested to go with Jesus, but Jesus sent him away (avpe,lusen de. auvto.n), telling him to go and tell all that God had done for him. Here, on the one hand, the crowd fails to recognize the significance of what Jesus has done and sends him away. On the other hand, the formerly possessed man does recognize its significance, yet Jesus sends him away. The crowd sends Jesus away in order to get rid of him, as Aeolus got rid of Odysseus; Jesus sends the healed man away in order to spread the good news, and the man goes obediently. Aeolus sends Odysseus away to Odysseus’ demise. The crowd sends Jesus away to their own demise. Jesus sends the formerly possessed man away to bring the good news to the surrounding country.

· avfupno,w: This word is a critical link between the Homeric myth and the Gospel miracle. Both Jesus and Odysseus sleep in the vessel at some point during the storm. Furthermore, avfupno,w appears only here in the N.T. The cognate noun is also relatively uncommon in the N.T. u[pnoj appears only six times, half of which are in Luke and Acts. The two occurrences in Acts are found in the story of Eutychus’ fall from the window and subsequent resuscitation in 20:7-12. That story has already been alleged by MacDonald as Homeric in origin.[348] More significant than the nautical terminology in these passages is the sleep-wake sequence. In Luke 8:23, Jesus falls asleep while in the boat before the storm (avfu,pnwsen). That Jesus is asleep when the storm comes on is important for setting the scene. Luke juxtaposes Jesus’ calm with the disciples’ fear and the lake’s turbulence.[349] “A situation that is fraught with danger in the disciples’ view is no cause for worry with Jesus.”[350] However, the basic plot of the story could remain unchanged even if Jesus had been awake. Odysseus’ sleep, on the other hand, is essential to the action of the Odyssey. Had Odysseus not fallen asleep, he might have prevented his companions from opening the bag, thereby averting the storm and saving himself a very long journey home!

Fitzmyer sees the mention of Jesus’ sleep as contrasting with the power he is about to display; “he is subject to human fatigue.”[351] Odysseus’ sleep, on the other hand, illustrates the opposite case. Odysseus had not slept for ten days. He was not subject to ‘normal’ human fatigue. He displayed super-human endurance until the moment the shores of Ithaca came into view. Odysseus had strength, but it was not enough. Jesus, for all appearances the epitome of weakness, had power more than sufficient to the task.

Marshall notes that the Lukan version of the story moves the detail about Jesus being asleep forward in the story so that it is mentioned before the storm is;[352] whereas Mark mentions that Jesus was asleep after he indicates that a storm had come up. This is perhaps significant. Recall that in the Odyssey, Odysseus falls asleep before his companions untie the bag, and so before the storm comes upon them. Likewise, in Luke, Jesus falls asleep before the storm begins. Not only are both of them asleep during the storm, but both Homer and Luke make a point of explicitly stating that they were asleep at the onset of the storm. Of course, if would not make any sense for either to fall asleep after the storm had come up, but the fact that Luke has changed Mark’s sentence order at this point (not Mark’s conceptual order)[353] may indicate that he wished to be explicit about the fact that Jesus was asleep before the storm came up. It is possible that the importance of Jesus’ sleep is indicative of a Lukan desire to allude to the Odyssey. It is certainly the one thing about Luke 8:22-25 that brings the Odyssey to mind. Without Jesus’ sleep this is just another stormy journey. It is the detail of his sleep that causes us to recall our Homer.

· diegei,rw: diegei,rw appears six times in the N.T., twice in 2 Peter, once in John to describe the turbulence of the waters upon which Jesus walks, and twice in this passage from Luke. Examination of the word is justified because the concept of awaking from sleep is so crucial to the miracle but relatively unimportant to the myth. In Luke’s Gospel, the disciples wake Jesus, and he immediately calms the storm, saving them from disaster. Jesus’ question, “Where is your faith?” is probably not meant to indicate that they would have been fine even if Jesus had remained asleep. Jesus rebukes the disciples for their lack of faith, but he does not indicate that they should have let him remain asleep. Their failure seems to stem from the manner in which they approached him. evpista,ta, evpista,ta is an urgent call for help. Bock is right in saying that the disciples think they are on the verge of death.[354] Their fault is not in coming to Jesus in their time of need, but in fearing when they ought to be believing.

In the Odyssey, Odysseus apparently wakes on his own, but the result is entirely different. Rather than calming the storm and thereby averting danger, Odysseus contemplates whether it would be better to cast himself into the sea and die or to suffer and stay alive. He opts for the latter and, covering himself (as a sign of sorrow?), he lies down once again within the ship while the storm carries them back to Aeolus’ isle.[355] Odysseus alert is no more help than Odysseus asleep. Homer does not use diegei,rw; he uses the middle of the uncompounded word evgei,rw instead. The difference in wording is trivial; here any parallel is conceptual.

· lai/lay: Besides this instance in Luke, lai/lay is found in the N.T. only in Mark 4:37, the synoptic parallel to Luke, and in 2 Pet. 2:17, where it is used as a metaphor for the forces that drive false teachers. Though Homer is familiar with the word, and uses it a number of times,[356] in this passage his word of choice is qu,ella. It is possible that Luke, intending to allude to Homer at this point, simply confused his vocabulary and chose a word that is common enough in Homer but was not the one used in Odyssey 10. Of course, to hypothesize Markan priority would suggest that Luke simply took the word as it is found in Mark.

It is interesting to note that both Luke and Homer modify their chosen words with the genitive of a;nemoj. Homer uses the phrase avne,moio que,llh| (10.54) in the final three feet of his hexameter in several places both in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Euripides and Hesiod also use the phrase. lai/lay avne,mou (Luke 8:23 // Mark 4:37) is not used in exactly the same way (probably for metrical reasons). lai/lay and avne,mou are, however, used together by a number of authors. This raises the question: is this genitive form of a;nemoj as a modifier of either lai/lay or qu,ella a Homerism; or, is it a common Greek idiom?

Investigating this question proves fruitful. a;nemoj occurs near qu,ella roughly seventy-five times in ancient Greek literature. Three of these occurrences are in the Iliad; twenty are in various sorts of commentary on the Iliad; four are in the Odyssey; seven are in various sorts of commentary on the Odyssey. This makes a total of thirty-four out of seventy-five instances. a;nemoj occurs near lai/lay roughly seventy-seven times in ancient Greek literature. One of these is in the Iliad; ten are in various sorts of commentary on the Iliad; five are in the Odyssey; nine are in various sorts of commentary on the Odyssey. This makes a total of twenty-five out of seventy-seven instances. Furthermore, a;nemoj also occurs near lai/lay once in Mark, once in Luke, once in LXX Job, four times in commentaries on Job, and twice in Wisd. of Sol. More research needs to be done, but because a;nemoj occurs so frequently with both lai/lay and que,llh| in texts by or about Homer, and because of the relative paucity of phrases like avne,moio que,llh| in other ancient literature, we conclude that this combination of words is a Homerism.[357] Thus, when Luke wrote lai/lay avne,mou he may have intended a verbal parallel. Fitzmyer says of this Lukan construction that the descriptive genitive is “really unnecessary.”[358] The similarity of expression, therefore, should cause us to take note and ask whether Luke intended an allusion.[359]

The question would lose force if the phrase had come straight out of Mark, but interestingly, Luke changes Mark’s wording at this point. Mark (4:37) reads: kai. gi,netai lai/lay mega,lh avne,mou kai. ta. ku,mata evpe,ballen eivj to. ploi/on; whereas Luke (8:23) reads: kai. kate,bh lai/lay avne,mou eivj th.n li,mnhn kai. suneplhrou/nto kai. evkindu,neuon. This is interesting because Luke 8:23 is the only verse in this Lukan pericope that contains a full line of dactylic hexameter (I have italicized the hexameter in the above quote; scansion: ¾ È È / ¾ || ¾ / ¾ || È È / ¾ || ¾ ½ / ¾ || ¾ / ¾ || x). The combination of dactylic hexameter and the unnecessary lai/lay avne,mou in this verse signal a possible allusion to Homer. One loses conviction, however, when one stops to examine the quality of this proposed Lukan dactylic hexameter: Though the scansion of the line reveals a stylish strong caesura in the third foot and a very stylish bucolic diaeresis, the culmination of the line in kai. begs for a continuation of the meter, but the following words simply cannot be forced to fit. Probably the occurrence of the hexameter at this point is coincidental rather than intentional, especially in view of the fact that Luke makes a number of other changes to the Markan form of the story. Might it be that Luke draws his material at this point from sources other than Mark alone?[360] As with ploi/on, any allusion made by Luke to Homer is most likely conceptual rather than verbal.

· avpo,llumi: While not a rare word by any standard, being found 90 times in the N.T., avpo,llumi is one of the few direct verbal parallels to the mythical passage in the Odyssey. Before the narrative of the storm even gets underway, in the same breath with which Odysseus narrates their imminent return home (“Then he [Aeolus] sent forth a breeze of the Zephyr to blow for me, / in order that it might bear both the ships and us ourselves”[361]), he says, “Nor was it / to achieve [that purpose]; for we perished (avpwlo,meq’) by our own folly.”[362] In the case of the Odyssey, the statement is true. It is by their own folly that all of Odysseus’ crew is killed in one way or another before ever they reach home. Odysseus alone returns to Ithaca, and that after many long years. In the case of the Gospel, the disciples’ exclamation that they are perishing is premature and lacks faith that Jesus will save them. That is why Jesus asks them, “Where is your faith?” Odysseus’ crew does indeed perish, but the disciples do not. Their folly lies purely in failing to trust Jesus.

· pau,w and le,gontej pro.j avllh,louj: These words are in the same category as avpo,llumi. They are used frequently, but have verbal and conceptual parallels in Odyssey 10.

· kai. evge,neto galh,nh and qauma,zw: galh,nh appears elsewhere in the N.T. only in the synoptic parallels to this passage. While there are no verbal parallels to either of these in Odyssey 10, there are conceptual parallels worthy of mention.

· to. pe,ran th/j li,mnhj: pe,ran occurs 23 times in the N.T., and only in the Gospels. Of those twenty-three occurrences, six are in conjunction with this miracle and its immediate context. Fourteen are used with reference to the Sea of Galilee, eight with reference to the Jordan river, and the word is used only once with reference to something other than water—John 18:1. Thus, the phrase to. pe,ran th/j li,mnhj is a possible flag because of the frequency with which it is found in relation to this miracle, its confinement to the Gospels, and the fact that pe,ran is used so frequently with reference to the Sea of Galilee and other bodies of water.

Plot to Plot Comparison. Apart from textual parallels, there is the issue of narrative parallels. Does Luke use a plot structure similar to that found in Odyssey 10? The first few verses of this pericope do parallel the plot of the beginning of Odyssey 10:

Odysseus and his men make landfall at

Aeolia.

Odysseus and his men stay with Aeolus and

tell him stories.

Aeolus gives Odysseus the magic bag of

wind and sends him on his way.

Jesus and his disciples get in a boat. Odysseus and his men get in their boats.

Jesus falls asleep during the voyage. Odysseus falls asleep during the voyage.

Odysseus’ men open the bag.

A storm comes upon Jesus and the A storm comes upon Odysseus and his men.

disciples.

The disciples wake up Jesus. Odysseus wakes up.

The disciples express their fear to Jesus.

Jesus rebukes the storm and the disciples.

In both cases the storm subsides with no one hurt.

Odysseus goes back below deck.

In both cases the boats make landfall.

The pericope immediately following Luke 8:22-25 continues the Gospel story.[363] There Jesus performs the exorcism; the local Gerasenes stand in awe of Jesus’ power; the Gerasenes send Jesus away and Jesus sends the healed man away. None of that action is paralleled in this section of Odyssey 10. There is, however, a parallel concept in the sending. The Gerasenes send Jesus away from their land just as Aeolus sent Odysseus from Aeolia in Odyssey 10. All instances of sending occur after the storms. Jesus’ sending of the healed man, however, differs dramatically in motivation from both the sending of the Gerasenes and the sending of Aeolus.

The plot is really only parallel in the major action of each narrative: sailing, sleeping, storming, landing and sending. One may justifiably question whether parallelism of major action is indicative of borrowing or emulating. However, the unusual overlap of the sleep and wake cycles, which one would not expect to find in every other narrative of a storm at sea, is sufficient to keep the options of borrowing, emulating or alluding open to consideration.

Comments. The desire to control the winds and the rain is found among peoples the world over.[364] Denys Page explains that the various approaches to control of the winds and the rain are essentially of two sorts: magical and religious.[365] The magical can include very elaborate rites performed to attain control of the elements. The religious often relies upon appeal made to the gods, who control the winds, to give what is desired. Homer’s story of Aeolus, according to Page, combines the magical and the religious.[366] On the one hand, it rests on the Greek religion. Aeolus is a human, favored by the gods, whose control of the winds is a trust given him by Zeus. “Thus the function of Aeolus in the Odyssey is essentially Olympian-religious; he has an office within the government of Zeus.”[367] On another level, however, we see that Aeolus’ manipulation of the winds is fundamentally magical: he captures the winds in a bag and gives them to Odysseus for fair sailing. Page, through a number of examples, shows how this technique is more magical than religious. The magician who claims the power to control the winds holds that power independently of any deity and can proffer the winds as wares.[368]

The sale of devices to control the winds has been common for ages throughout the world. The one most like the bag of Aeolus is the knotted cord or cloth which contains the winds in its knots. Each knot may contain a different wind; or the force of the same wind may depend on the number of knots untied.[369]

Herein lie the primary differences between Aeolus’ control of the winds and Jesus’. Aeolus’ authority over the wind is derived; Jesus’ is inherent. The inherent nature of Jesus’ power over the elements sets him apart from others who took part in similar miracles of nature. Bock points out that in similar Jewish stories, it is not the human who causes the storm to cease; it is God.[370] Fitzmyer too says, regarding any possible dependent relationship between Luke 8:22-25 and similar Jewish stories, that “If there is literary dependence, one has to recognize the obviously christological thrust of the story in its Synoptic form: Jesus delivers by a word of power, commanding winds and waves.”[371] Jesus’ authority over the elements in this story is unique. Aeolus’ bag o’ wind resembles common magical technique; Jesus calms the wind with a word, no magic involved. This miracle of Jesus begins a series of miracles in Luke 8 that demonstrate Jesus’ absolute power in all areas (over nature, 8:22-25; over the spiritual realm, 8:26-39; over the body, 8:40-48; and even over death, 8:49-56), and that provoke the question, “Who is Jesus?” and Peter’s answer, “The Christ of God.”[372]

Conclusions. The verbal parallels are pretty slim. What stands out more are the conceptual parallels. Man and friends are in boat at sea; man is asleep in boat; storm arises and boat is in trouble. What causes one to think of the Odyssey when hearing or reading Luke is the mention that Jesus is asleep at the outset of the storm. Apart from that, this stormy voyage looks just like any other stormy voyage (e.g., Gilligan’s Island). It is Jesus’ sleep that makes one think of the Odyssey: the storm came upon Odysseus and his men, in part because Odysseus fell asleep (10.68-69). Sleep is an important part of both stories; though it is crucial in the Odyssey.

Let us imagine for a moment that we are pagan Greeks hearing Luke’s Gospel for the first time. Let us imagine what we might think:

“While they were sailing,” we hear, “he fell asleep…”

That sounds familiar, we think, but I can’t quite place it…

“And a storm of wind came down upon the lake, and … they were in trouble.”

Ahh!—recognition dawns—I know where I’ve heard that! This is like Odysseus! But who let the wind out of the bag?

“They went to Jesus and awakened him,” the reader continues, “saying, ‘Master! Master! We’re going to die!’”

What’s going to happen? Are they going to sink? Are they going to be blown off course? back to land?

But the reader continues, “Having been awakened Jesus rebuked the wind and the waves; and they ceased and it was calm…”

Whoa! Wait a minute! Odysseus never stopped the wind! Only Aeolus could do that!

“But,” we hear, “he said to them, ‘Where is your faith?’ And they were amazed and afraid and said to one another, ‘Who is this guy that he commands the wind and the water, and they obey him?’”

And we wonder, Who is he indeed? He isn’t like Odysseus; He’s too powerful for that… Aeolus? Poseidon? He can control the water too, after all… Who is this guy?

But the story doesn’t stop there. The reader keeps reading, so we keep listening. And we hear him say that Jesus and his disciples made landfall, and they were met by a demon possessed man. And Jesus cast out the demons too! Amazing! They do what he tells them to do! What did they call him before he cast them out? Son of the highest god? Which god is that? What did they mean? Oh, but there’s more… Pigs? Hey, if I lost my livestock, I’d be kind of upset too! But don’t send him away; he just healed that man! Wait, Jesus! Don’t send the healed man away, either! What’s that you said? Proclaim what god has done for you? But you healed him!

“And the man went through out the whole town telling what Jesus had done for him.”

Who is this Jesus? Is he a god?

It is unnecessary for Luke to make use of several verbal parallels where one well chosen conceptual parallel will do. We make the assumption, based on the evidence listed above, that the myth of Odysseus and Aeolus was well-known to Luke’s audience. If that is so, it is no stretch to suppose that they might have heard the story like this. A sleeping man on a stormy sea sounds a lot like Odysseus, but this one is bigger than Odysseus—he makes the storm stop!

“Who is he?” we ask with the disciples. The disciples do not comprehend, but the formerly demon possessed man does. “Tell what God has done for you.” “And he told what Jesus had done for him.” This Jesus, who commands wind and water and demons, and whom they all obey, is God.[373] This identification of Jesus with God gains strength with the realization that the O.T. frequently portrays God as the one who has power over nature, including the sea (see Ps. 89:9; 93:3-4; 106:9; especially 107:23 ff.; Isaiah 51:9-11).[374]

Who but divinity can handle nature like this? Barriers are being breached here, as with Jesus’ other actions. Those who are theologically sensitive know that nature is not in the hands of mere mortals. The Psalms note who controls creation. Regardless of whether one is Jewish or Greek, one knows this to be true. Such common understanding serves as background to answer the question raised by the calmness that Jesus generated. The calmed waves testify to Jesus’ identity.[375]

If this is Luke’s purpose in the narrative of Jesus’ journey to Gerassa and back again (8:22-39)—to inform the reader who Jesus is—then we do not need to assume that he has emulated Homer, just that he may have used Homer to make the point. This need not necessarily be a transvaluation of Homer’s tale. In fact, if it were, we might be tempted to say that Luke is a pretty poor emulator. He is weak on the dactylic hexameter, and his story lacks color, comparatively—no bag of wind, no long lost homeland, no silver cords. Jesus was not driving the ship, and Luke does not even tell us what Jesus said to the wind![376] We don’t get any of the interesting details one finds in a normal myth. Luke’s version reads more like an abridged Reader’s Digest version, compared to Homer. We conclude that Luke is not emulating Homer. But he may be alluding to Homer in order to say that Jesus is greater than the greatest Homeric hero. He is playing with the Greek mind to force the question, “Who is this man?”[377]

[1] See E.P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (New York: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1993), 132-143.

[2] Graham H. Twelftree, Jesus: The Miracle Worker: A Historical and Theological Study (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 32-33.

[3] David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, ed. and with an intro. by Peter C. Hodgson, trans. from the fourth German edition by George Eliot, Lives of Jesus Series, ed. Leander E. Keck (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), 87.

[7] Barry L. Blackburn, “The Miracles of Jesus,” in Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research, ed. Bruce Chilton and Craig A. Evans, New Testament Tools and Studies, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, vol. 19 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1994), 354.

[13] See Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels, 1^st American ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 78-80.

[14] See Blackburn, “Miracles of Jesus,” 375-379.

[15] Blackburn, “Miracles of Jesus,” 380-381.

[16] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978).

[17] Blackburn, “Miracles of Jesus,” 381-384.

[23] Blackburn, “Miracles of Jesus,” 381-384.

[24] Howard Clark Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World: A Study in Sociohistorical Method (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 63.

[25] Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World, 215.

[26] Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World, 211 n. 69.

[27] Kee, Miracle in the Early Christian World, 218.

[28] John M. Hull, Hellenistic Magic and the Synoptic Tradition, Studies in Biblical Theology: Second -Series, ed. Peter R. Ackroyd...[et al.], 28 (Naperville, Ill.: Alec R. Allenson, 1974), 4.

[31] Paul J. Achtemeier, “The Lukan Perspective on the Miracles of Jesus: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Perspectives on Luke - Acts, ed. Charles H. Talbert, Special Studies Series, No. 5 (Danville, VA: Association of Baptist Professors of Religion; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1978), 165.

[32] Susan Renninger Garrett, “Magic and Miracle in Luke-Acts” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1988), 17.

[35] Blackburn, “Miracles of Jesus,” 389-392.

[36] Rudolf Bultmann, The History of the Synoptic Tradition, trans. John Marsh (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 240; originally published as Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck u. Ruprecht, 1921); 2. Aufl., 1931.

[39] See Bultmann, History, 218-244 and Colin Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing; Exeter, Devon, U.K.: Paternoster Press, 1984), 251.

[41] Brown, Miracles and the Critical Mind, 250.

[42] Joachim Jeremias, New Testament Theology: The Proclamation of Jesus (New York: Charles Schribner’s Sons, 1971), 88.

[47] R.T. France, I Came to Set the Earth on Fire: A Portrait of Jesus (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1975), 69.

[50] Dennis R. MacDonald, “Luke’s Emulation of Homer: Acts 12:1-17 and Illiad [sic] 24,” Forum, n.s., 3 (Spring 2000): 197-205.

[51] The following items are enumerated in MacDonald, “Luke’s Emulation of Homer,” 201.

[52] MacDonald, “Luke’s Emulation of Homer,” 201.

[53] MacDonald, “Luke’s Emulation of Homer,” 197.

[54] MacDonald, “Luke’s Emulation of Homer,” 205.

[55] See Dennis R. MacDonald, “The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul,” New Testament Studies 45 (January 1999): 88-107.

[56] See MacDonald, “The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul,” 96-97, n. 48.

[57] I have performed and arranged this comparison on analogy with the comparison done by MacDonald in “The Shipwrecks of Odysseus and Paul,” 96-97, n. 48.

[58] Rudolf Bultmann, “The Idea of God and Modern Man,” trans. Robert W. Funk, in Translating Theology into the Modern Age, ed. Robert W. Funk, Journal for Theology and the Church, 2 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck]; New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 94-95. “The Idea of God and Modern Man” was originally published as “Der Gottesgedanke und der moderne Mensch,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 60 (1963): 335-348.

[59] Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Rudolf Bultmann … [et al.], Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans Werner Bartsch, revised ed. of this translation by Reginald H. Fuller (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 10. “New Testament and Mythology” was originally published in 1941 in Offenbarung und Heilsgeschehen (München: Lemp); reprinted in Kerygma und Mythos, 15-53 (Hamburg: Reich u. Heidrich, 1948).

[62] Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 10, n.2.

[64] See Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 11-12.

[65] See Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 17-33.

[70] Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 35-38.

[71] Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 38-40.

[72] ‘Scientism’ may be defined succinctly as “The theory that investigational methods used in the natural sciences should be applied in all fields of inquiry” (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3^rd ed., s.v. “scientism”). More precisely, scientism is a form of positivism that developed in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. “Key positivist ideas were that philosophy should be scientific, that metaphysical speculations are meaningless, that there is a universal and a priori scientific method, that a main function of philosophy is to analyse that method, that this basic scientific method is the same in both the natural and social sciences, that the various sciences should be reducible to physics…” (Harold Kincaid, “Positivism in the Social Sciences,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, vol. 7, ed. Edward Craig [London: Routledge, 1998], 558; italics original). See Kincaid’s entire article for a critique of positivism in general, and, by extension, scientism in particular. His article also has useful information in the relationship between positivism and naturalism, the belief that “there is one scientific method common to all the sciences…. It says that the social realm, as part of the natural world, can and must be studied by standard scientific methods” (Kincaid, “Positivism,” 558).

[75] Bultmann, “N.T. and Mythology,” 3; italics original.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER TWO

A HISTORY OF THE CRITICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE GOSPEL MIRACLES

A General Overview

Dennis MacDonald on Myth in the New Testament

Rudolf Bultmann on Myth in the New Testament

Demythologization

Myth and the Gospels in Bultmann

Norman Perrin on Myth in the New Testament

Conclusions

CHAPTER THREE

WHAT IS MYTH?

Interpretations of Myth

Nature of Myth

Questions Raised by These Observations

Conclusions

CHAPTER FOUR

MYTH AND MIRACLES: THE COMPARISON

Introduction

Some Points on Methodology

Miracles of Resuscitation

Alcestis

Text to Text Comparison.

Asklepios and Apollonius

Nature Miracles

Aeolus

Text to Text Comparison.

CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSIONS

WORKS CITED

Ancient Sources

Modern Sources