Mythology

a human father, the taint of Adam’s sin was therefore not transmitted. This theological argument was later applied to the birth of Mary as being the mother of God, and the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary developed during the Middle Ages until it was established as an article of faith in 1854 by the Papal Bull ‘Ineffabilis Deus’. It would seem to have been overlooked that Mary had a human mother, and that the process must go on ad infinitum. In the second place, it has been maintained by many scholars that the current existence of many myths of the divine birth of various heroes of antiquity, such as Herakles, Alexander, and others, played a part in the development of the belief in the virgin birth of Jesus. Whether pagan myths are likely to have influenced Jewish Christian writers may be questioned; but we have seen that Hebrew writers drew on heathen mythology in describing the divine activity in Creation, so that the larger question of the use of myth in describing the divine activity in New Creation cannot be disregarded. Lastly, a factor in the growth of the cult of the Virgin which must be taken into account is the wide-spread feeling among the uneducated masses for a female object of worship, for a Mother-goddess. This motive was greatly strengthened after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity, bringing into the Church vast numbers of half-educated or wholly illiterate barbarians. The issues involved in the question of the virgin birth can only be decided on theological grounds, and this is not the place for such a discussion. The main point which we are concerned to stress here is the possibility that we have in the birth narratives of the gospels an extension of the function of myth as a vehicle for conveying truths which lie outside the range of historical evidence. The Resurrection Narratives The second focal point round which mythological elements appear to gather is the point of departure of Jesus from the scene of history: In the birth narratives the apocryphal gospels show in an exaggerated form the tendency to use mythological material, so, in a similar way, the resurrection narratives of the apocryphal gospels, as, for instance, the apocryphal gospel of Peter, show the tendency to magnify the mythical element which already appears to some extent in the canonical gospels. One of the most important elements in the ancient myth and ritual pattern was the myth of the dying and rising god, seen in its earliest form in the Tammuz myth, perpetuated through the ages, and appearing in the various eastern mystery-cults so widely current in the Greco- Roman’ world in the New Testament period. Some scholars have put forward the view that the .gospel narratives of the passion and resurrection of Jesus have been modelled on the pattern of the Babylonian ritual myth, and that, for instance, the ritual humiliation of the king in the Babylonian New Year Festival ritual furnishes the pattern for the account in the canonical gospels of the mock kingship and humiliation of Jesus. This point of view was presented many years ago by the French scholar M. Couchoud in an article in the Hibbert Journal. With regard to this, two things may be said. First, if any non-historical factors were at work in shaping the pattern of the passion narratives, they are rather to be looked for in such Old Testament passages as Ps. 22 and Isa. 53, where the sufferings of the godly Israelite, and of the Servant of Yahweh, are described in

Note: If you are looking for good and high quality web space to host and run your jsp application check Lunarwebhost jsp web hosting services