I am always astonished to read and hear so often denunciations of the Judeo-Christian tradition because of parallels to ancient Near-Eastern myths.
For example:
The story of Noah is very similar to the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh.
Obviously Christianity is wrong.
What!? That is a logical leap that has nothing on the other side. You can very easily say that because of the two being similar, the Babylonians must be wrong.
The
better answer is that much of the Old Testament stories and Old Testament prophecies, nay,
ALL OF THEM did not exist in a vacuum. The Canaanites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Egyptians, the Nubians, etc. etc. etc. all existed in (relatively) the same era of human history. Stories were shared, as most of these people for quite a long time were predominantly illiterate and therefor relied extensively on oral tradition. What happens when a really good story is told around a campfire? You take it back to your people and recount it and it eventually finds its way into your literary tradition. Distortions are common in order to make it more accessible to one’s people, and to ensure that it, being a really really good story, is maintained.
Prophesies would likewise have been repeated over and over again as a form of “future story telling” in lands outside Israel where local iconography and symbolism would have been incorporated. Naturally, this argument extends to Israel as well, where stories and prophesies originating outside Israel found their way into the spiritual canon of the Israelites. Does this mean that these prophecies are false? Absolutely not. God works by providence, and I refuse to believe that God would have restricted entirely prophecies concerning the
Messiah as savior of all mankind to the Israelites alone. As such, stories necessary to ensure that Christ’s Church could establish itself outside the nation of Israel would have been inspired in non-Israelite cultures and would of course been heard by Israelite merchants and brought back to the home fire. Few anthropologists and theologians believe that such figures as Abraham, Noah, Isaac, etc. were
actual people in the sense that their stories are contemporaneous accounts of those people. But it is important to remember that, just as Odysseus may not have actually existed, there is truth behind the story and the embellishment, and the morals and purposes of the stories are not diminished but enhanced.
Anthropology is your friend in such conversations, Silyosha, where the virulent anti-Christians try to play off their anti-stance as “intelligence,” especially when there are tons of National Geographics available that discuss this very phenomenon.
) They mentioned how Christ’s resurrection is related to the cycle of the sun and all this stuff. Of course, I know this to be completely false, but what would be a good way to respond to this? Can someone explain this away for me? Thanks.
Lewis believed that all “real” pagan religions point to God.
