VI. Caveats: Generic or Historical Myth?
How definitively was Christianity the Product of Greek and Jewish Thought?
It has been shown that
Greek thought heavily influenced
Christianity. The most significant question, and the most sordid, is to what degree
Christianity owes its invention to
Greek Religion. Specifically, the quest is how related
Jesus the Christ and the other key tenets of
Christianity are to the
mythologies of Greece. Most of the evidence on these counts is circumstantial, relying on the weight of the many similarities between key
Christian doctrine and the
Mystery Cults' rites to suggest their cases. Plainer and more telling evidence is simply unavailable: early
Christianity would have wanted to distance itself as far as possible from the
pagan Cults, and the secretive nature of the
Mystery Cults prohibits historians from knowing their precise natures and purposes. Critics of the idea that
Christianity largely owes its invention to
Greek Religion have suggested that this is simply another case of generic
myth ("Mystery").
On the subject of comparative religion,
World Book presents three exceedingly useful distinctions when comparing how myths are related:
myths share common elements because they are related generically, genetically, or historically ("Mythology").
Myths that are generically related have no direct relation to each other; they simply developed in a parallel manner for various reasons, whether it was because the
myths' inventors lived under the same sort of conditions or simply because
mankind has a propensity for explaining certain things in certain ways. For example, the
myth of a great flood shared by the
Babylonians and
Incas is a likely example of
myths that are generically related: there is no evidence that they were exposed to one another, and such kinds of
flood myths seem common enough among the cultures of the world, it is probably that they tend to arise due to a similar
psychology among man. A genetic relationship, however, arises when a large society develops a
myth, breaks up, and the
myth goes on to develop in the society's fragments. An historical relationship occurs when peoples with disparate origin develop a similar
myth as a result of some kind of exposure. For example, the myth of a great flood shared by the
Jews and the
Babylonians is a likely example: because the
Jews were certainly exposed to
Babylonian mythology, because the two stories share some strikingly common elements, and because the
Babylonian story of the flood predates that of the
Jews, it seems likely that the
Jews acquired at least aspects of their story of
Noah from the
Babylonian story of
Utnapisthtim.
The question, then, is whether the story of
Jesus and the rites of
Christianity are related generically or historically to
Greek Religion. To determine how common such ideas are, and therefore how apt man is to develop them, it is necessary to look around the world.
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