Mythology

Egypt and the epiphany on Sinai, the challenge of Elijah breaking into the dismal history of the Israelite monarchy, and, finally, the use of myth by Jewish writers to describe how God would wind up world-history. Similarly, when Jewish writers, whose minds had been moulded by these patterns, came to describe what they had been brought to regard as a new and overwhelming display of the might of Israel’s God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, seen in a new creation, a new exodus, a new epiphany, a new covenant, and a new future, they used the same mythological patterns to clothe the historical events in which the divine activity was expressed. The Christ-myth of Drews and Robertson is now little more than a curiosity of literature, but the presence of myth in Christianity continues to agitate the minds of theologians. The demand for a process of ‘demythologization’ associated with the name of that eminent New Testament scholar Dr Bultmann, has aroused a considerable controversy both in this country and on the continent; but it is very doubtful whether the attempt to purge Christianity of its mythical element can ever be successful. In religion, and above all in that form of it which is Christianity, we are confronted by realities of which it is impossible to speak without using the language of analogy; the mind must have recourse to the help of images and symbols, and of these myth is compounded. As in the Old Testament the first focal point round which mythological elements gather is the divine act of Creation, the beginning of things, so in the New Testament the first focal point is the beginning of ‘new creation’, the mystery of the Incarnation. The Birth Narratives Of the four canonical gospels only two contain accounts of the birth and childhood of Jesus, namely, Matthew and Luke. There is a wide divergence between their accounts. Luke, in his preface claims to have obtained his information from people who ‘from the beginning were eye-witnesses’, and his account has far less mythological colouring than that given by Matthew; but the story of the angel Gabriel’s appearance to Zacharias in the Temple to announce the birth of John the Baptist, his subsequent appearance to Mary to announce the birth of the Messiah, the angel’s announcement to the shepherds of the same birth, and the subsequent chorus of the heavenly host singing ‘Glory to God in the highest’, are all features of a mythological rather than an historical character. It is also noticeable that here Luke’s narrative shows a distinct tendency to be coloured by Old Testament narratives of remarkable births. There are parallels with the story of the announcement of the birth of Isaac to Sarah when she was long past childbearing; also of the announcement of the birth of the hero Samson to Manoah and his wife by an angelic messenger who declares that the child is to be a Nazarite from his birth, and who, after telling Manoah that his name is ’secret’, ascends in a flame of fire from the altar. According to the Lukan narrative, the parents of Jesus bring him to be circumcized eight days after his birth; it does not say where the ceremony was performed. Then, after thirty-three days, the regulation period of ritual uncleanness for a woman who has given birth to a male child, the parents go up to Jerusalem for Mary’s purification and to present Jesus in the Temple as a first-born child, according to the law. Then they return to Nazareth. In the Matthaean narrative there is no account of the birth of John the Baptist; Mary is betrothed to Joseph, who discovers, before the time for their marriage arrives, that she is with

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