10
Christianity and Pagan Myths

Jesus as Myth

For fifty-seven years, Christmas in Santa Monica, California, included a two-block long display of nativity scenes, each depicting a different event from the story of the birth of Christ. Residents and tourists alike made a tradition of strolling slowly past the enclosures in Palisades Park. Well, most of them did. Not everyone was happy with the situation. In 2011 Raymond McNeely made national news when he won a lottery and got control of nine of the vandal-proof boxes. Instead of setting up Mary, Joseph, and the shepherds, however, McNeely left six of his containers empty while placing anti-Christian messages in the other three. One read RELIGIONS ARE ALL ALIKE—FOUNDED UPON FABLES AND MYTHOLOGIES.—THOMAS JEFFERSON. HAPPY SOLSTICE, proclaimed another. A third contained photographs depicting King Neptune, Jesus, Santa Claus, and the devil with the caption, 37 MILLIOn AMERICANS KNOW MYTHS WHEN THEY SEE THEM. WHAT MYTHS DO YOU SEE?112 That sign was sponsored by American Atheists, an organization well known for renting billboards with similar messages, including YOU KNOW IT’S A MYTH. THIS SEASON, CELEBRATE REASON!

McNeely’s view is gaining steam in our culture, and may well be a topic you will have to address when talking with skeptics. If you have been able to frame the conversation as a worldview discussion, the unbeliever may point to the similarity between the Christian story and ancient myths that preceded it as evidence that Christianity is just one more of those myths.

As Rene Girard points out, “From the earliest days of Christianity, the Gospels’ resemblance to certain myths has been used as an argument against Christian faith.”113 In his book Jesus Potter Harry Christ, Derek Murphy presents one of the latest incarnations of that argument. After documenting how the story of Jesus has similar characteristics to the tales of Gilgamesh, Dionysus, Pythagorus, Orpheus, Mithras, and many other gods, he concludes “that Christian writers assimilated elements from paganism into the Christian mythos.”114

The idea that the gospel writers invented a fictional character that goes far beyond the “Jesus of history” is widespread. Murphy represents an increasingly large and vocal group of skeptics who think that the gospel writers made up the character of Jesus by drawing from other myths.

Their basic argument is this: We know that the ancient myths were false. They were not historical accounts, but rather tall tales made up by primitive and ignorant people trying to make sense of a world they didn’t understand and couldn’t control. They are pious inventions arising from the imaginations of the storytellers themselves. The Jesus story is similar to these myths. Therefore, the Jesus story is likely a myth with the same cause rather than an actual historical account.

Step One: Clarify the Data

So we have the skeptic’s data and his explanation. The first step is to clearly establish the facts of the case and make sure we agree on the nature of the data. Is there actually a similarity between Christianity and the myths of ancient cultures and religions? If so, what is the nature of the parallels and just how close are they? After we have settled on some point of agreement about the facts, we can move on to critique the skeptic’s explanation of those facts and offer a more satisfying one of our own.

Parallels Between Christianity and Ancient Myths

Many Christians try to counter the skeptic’s claim that Christianity is just another myth by denying that there are any substantial similarities between other stories and the Gospels at all. This is a mistake. The truth is that most skeptics could go much farther than they do in exploring parallels between cultural and religious myths and the biblical narrative. There are many levels of correspondence between Christianity and pagan115 tales and legends. Let’s take Plato’s famous parable of the cave as an example.

In the story, slaves are chained in darkness for their entire lives, forced to stare at a wall. The only light comes from a fire burning behind them that casts shadows on the wall whenever objects pass between the slaves and the fire. The slaves assume that the shadows are reality. Then one slave escapes and discovers the truth. After seeing the beauty and solidity of the outside world, he returns to testify to the light. He reports that the shadows are just images of things much more real. Angrily, the slaves kill the prophet, assuming he is making fun of them. Many elements of this story are hardly unique to Plato. As David Marshall points out,

The pattern of a hero who descends into the earth to rescue those trapped in darkness, facing death to deliver those without hope, appears again and again in both ancient and modern mythology.116

For example, notes Marshall, Orpheus traveled to Hades to rescue his lost love; Chinese Buddhist saint Miao Shan freed prisoners chained in the underworld; and the Egyptian god Isis rescued Osiris, god of the Nile, from death at the hand of the god Set. Even contemporary film heroes such as James Bond and Indiana Jones are known for descending into the very heart of darkness to rescue those in peril.117 We could go on and on, of course. Frodo and Sam enter the black land of Mordor to throw the One Ring into Mount Doom and save the world from the evil Sauron. Luke Skywalker offers himself into the hands of the dark lord Darth Vader in order to rescue his friends on Endor and save the Rebel Alliance. All these stories parallel Jesus in that he sacrificed himself in order to proclaim the truth and rescue those trapped in darkness and slavery. In this, Derek Murphy is quite right to compare Jesus to Harry Potter as well. And this is just one level of similarity.

Indeed, let’s expand the data pool in this area (and potentially give the skeptic some more ammunition) by pointing out that there are many other ways in which the beliefs and practices of ancient cultures and religions find common ground with Christianity.

For example, the idea of atonement, “a substitution of something offered, or some personal suffering, for a penalty which would otherwise be exacted,”118 seems to be as old as history itself. “The practice of atonement is remarkable for its antiquity and universality, proved by the earliest records that have come down to us of all nations, and by the testimony of ancient and modern travelers.”119

Even the symbols that ancient people used to represent metaphysical and supernatural concepts have parallels in Christianity. In The Sacred and the Profane, an authoritative treatise on the use of myth, symbol, and ritual in religion, Mircea Eliade notes that religious symbols have a remarkable uniformity across all cultures and times.

For example, the earth (as in dirt, terra firma) has everywhere been understood as the mother of all things, the womb from which man proceeds. And water is universally associated with both death and rebirth. Immersion in water is seen as a return to the primordial chaos and is equivalent to death, while at the same time being the source of fertilization and regeneration of life.120 These ideas are certainly not foreign to biblical religion. Adam was born of the dust of the ground, and as we have already studied in this book, water is a means of destroying evil and at the same time bringing forth new life at creation, the flood, the crossing of the Red Sea, and, of course, baptism. Eliade also details the universal symbolism of many other physical objects, including the sun, sky, serpents, and even rocks.121

So we can affirm with the skeptic that there are similarities between Christianity and other ancient religious beliefs and practices, even beyond the connections they usually make.

Step Two: Evaluate the Skeptic’s Claim

Having established the facts, it’s time to move on to evaluate the skeptic’s claim and offer the Christian explanation for the data. There is no set order for these two steps, although sometimes the situation may lend itself to one or the other. For example, if the skeptical claim is clearly self-contradictory or full of factual errors, you may want to point that out before offering the Christian position. However, I don’t follow a hard and fast rule in this regard. Also, these steps usually overlap; evaluating the skeptic’s account and explaining the Christian understanding go together. I’ve labeled this section Step Two, but that is only to help clarify for you the steps we are taking; it is not meant to be a dogmatic formula.

Mythical Does Not Mean Unhistorical

The skeptic’s argument is that all myths are unhistorical and therefore the Jesus story is unhistorical too. Let’s start with a quick point of logic. Even if we grant that ancient pagan myths are unhistorical, that does not mean every story that is similar to those myths is unhistorical. In other words, just because a story sounds like something out of a movie script does not mean that it never actually happened.

For example, Michael Phelps won eight gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Olympics in a fashion that would have seemed corny and unbelievable if it had been written into the plot of your average Disney film. But it happened. Events with mythical elements happen all the time. We talked above about the hero who sacrifices himself on behalf of those in slavery and darkness. You don’t have to look far into history to find a whole bunch of those types of people in real life:

A frail Hindu lawyer fasts the British empire into submission while in jail. A Baptist preacher shakes prison dust off his suit and wins African Americans the right to be treated with respect. Both heroes . . . pay for their ambitions with their lives. A Filipino senator, imprisoned, then exiled, returns home and dies for the liberty of his island nation. An African statesman emerges from decades in prison, shaky and pale, to overthrow apartheid and bring racial reconciliation to a nation on the verge of civil war. An army officer turned novelist is released from the Gulag and prays to God to “make me a sword to smite the forces of evil.” He strikes the Evil Empire with his pen, and it withers and dies like a dragon in a fairy tale. These epics of national death and resurrection did not occur in an obscure corner or in a Hans Christian Andersen tale; they defined the twentieth century. They remind us that sometimes, myths come to life. And when they do, society itself may be reborn.122

As such, it just doesn’t follow that the story of Jesus must be unhistorical simply because it sounds like some stories that are. This is the logical fallacy that traps those believers who expend so much energy trying to disavow any similarity between pagan myths and Christianity. Their attempts are simply not necessary.

Unbelievers also fall prey to this problem. Many skeptics seem to think that the similarities between other cultural beliefs and Christianity prove that Christianity is not true. Bishop Fulton Sheen points out that one of the major false assumptions people make in regard to the study of comparative religions is to believe that “divine and true religion must be different from all other human religions. Since the Christian and non-Christian religions are not absolutely different, in all details, it is falsely concluded that the Christian religion is not divine.”123 Again, this does not follow. This does not mean that the Jesus story is true, of course, but it leaves the door open to the possibility. That prospect becomes more likely when we consider a little more closely some other aspects of the skeptic’s claim.

The Jewishness of Jesus

One key to the “Jesus is another myth” position is the assertion that the gospel writers didn’t really expect their readers to take the stories literally. The idea is that the authors of the New Testament weren’t lying about Jesus so much as they were creating, in the words of Robert Price, a “pious fraud” that used Jesus as a “euphemistic fiction” in the same way that McDonald’s uses Ronald McDonald and the Walt Disney Corporation uses Mickey Mouse.124 In this view, Jesus was intended to be the embodiment of spiritual principles and sound worldly wisdom rather than an actual historical figure. Unfortunately, according to Price and those who share his position, readers have had it wrong for 2,000 years.

This proposition has many huge holes in it, but I’ll focus on just one: Jesus is presented as the Jewish Messiah. The gospel writers, regardless of their various audiences and theological emphasis, were unanimous in arguing that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Jewish hope for a savior. That is to say, the gospel authors all saw Jesus as the ultimate end to which all of Jewish history had been leading. Consequently, the writers could not have been intending for their readers to take the accounts of Jesus as nonhistorical because that would be meaningless within the context of Jewish theology. No Jew would accept it.

As we have seen throughout this book, the God of the Jews is not a God who speaks mystically and vaguely about principles for successful living. He is a God who breaks into history and acts in time and space. Jews did not worship a set of ideals, but a God who had called a specific person, Abraham; built him into an actual genetic, physical entity, a family of humans; brought that family out of Egypt from literal slavery at a specific point in time with great physical signs and wonders; defeated other nations in battles that spilled real human blood; and established a political kingdom on earth led by an actual, physical person named David.

These events were not viewed as parables or inspirational myths. They were understood as God’s hand in history, and it was on the historicity of these events that the Jews placed their hope for the future. They were expecting God to act again because he had done so in the past. They were looking forward to a time when God would again break into history and redeem them from their current state of slavery. If those past events didn’t actually happen, the Jews had no god to worship and no hope for a Messiah. They put their faith in a person, not a set of ideals (read Psalms, for example).

As such, to present a nonhistorical savior to the Jews, which is what these “Jesus as Myth” scholars say happened, would be ridiculous. A savior who didn’t act in time and space would be no savior at all.

Of course, it is clear that the New Testament writers did intend their readers to see Jesus as historical. For example, look at the sermons as recorded in the beginning of Acts: Peter (Acts 2:14–41) and Stephen (Acts 7:2–53) both concentrate their sermons about Jesus on the fact that God has worked in the past and has now worked in history again. They clearly did not see Jesus as a nonhistorical myth.

Step Three: Offer the Christian Explanation of the Data

Christian orthodoxy is not threatened by the existence of pagan myths that are similar to the Gospels. Indeed, the existence and nature of those myths simply lends more credibility to the claims of Christianity. In this section we will examine how Christianity explains the parallels between itself and other traditions. We will also see that, even as it is similar in many ways, Christianity differs from and transcends the pagan stories and religions.

Unhistorical Does Not Mean Completely False

The foundation of the skeptic’s argument is that pagan myths are false. They build from the idea “We know that every god in the pagan pantheon is completely imaginary” to suggest that Jesus was imaginary too. The first point to make in explaining the Christian approach to pagan myths is to point out that they are not completely imaginary. Let’s talk for a moment about the source of pagan myths.

Skeptics suggest that religious myths are humanity’s poor attempt to explain the world and our place in it. The stories are primitive and ignorant people’s attempt to answer the big questions of life. Humans didn’t know how the universe works, so they made up a bunch of legends about animals in the sky. There is some truth in this. Certainly many pagan traditions are the result of an effort to describe the “mysterious and mysteriously ordered”125 reality in which people find themselves.126

Humans ask questions and then answer those questions with supernatural myths. However, whereas the skeptic thinks that ancient people failed in their quest to find answers, and the myths are completely false, Christianity asserts that the pagans actually found some right answers to the big questions of life. The myths are not entirely wrong. Ancient people didn’t know the full extent of the truth, certainly, but they weren’t totally out in left field either. As I expand on this point, we will see how it explains the parallels between Christianity and pagan myths.

Knowledge of God Outside of Israel and the Church

I have argued throughout the book that God’s desire is to know and be known. And so he has been revealing himself in the world from the very beginning. We noted in chapter 8 that this involves both interacting directly with people in time and space (special revelation) as well as “pouring forth speech” through creation itself (general revelation). The bottom line, as Francis Schaeffer famously put it, is that “God is there and he is not silent.”127

From the perspective of the Christian worldview, then, all people have access to some knowledge of the one true God. This might come through reflection on the cosmos or through some interaction with special revelation, for instance stories handed down through generation after generation of a supreme god who acted in times past. So one does not have to be a Jew or a Christian to have understanding of the one true God. Indeed, Scripture itself is full of pagans who knew, albeit sometimes imperfectly, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus.

Perhaps the most famous of these was Melchizedek, the king of the Canaanite city of Salem who was also a priest of El Elyon, or “God most High.” Melchizedek brought bread and wine to Abram and blessed him by El Elyon, saying that this God was the maker of heaven and earth (Genesis 14:19) who had defeated Abram’s enemies (Genesis 14:20). Abram, a follower of Yahweh (often interpreted in our Bibles as LORD), then tithed to Melchizedek, affirming that he acknowledged Melchizedek’s position as a priest. Interestingly, when another character in this story, the king of Sodom, wanted Abram to take the spoils of the battle, Abram refused, saying, “I have sworn to the LORD, God Most High, maker of heaven and earth, that I would not take a thread or a sandal-thong or anything that is yours, so that you might not say, ‘I have made Abram rich’” (Genesis 14:21–23 NRSV). Gerald McDermott offers some good insight into this text: “Notice what Abram had done in these words: he identified Yahweh with El Elyon in two ways. He has joined the two names in a gesture that suggests they point to the same God, and—as if it were not completely clear—he has given Melchizedek’s description of El Elyon to Yahweh: maker of heaven and earth.”128

Though Melchizedek lived in Canaan and had a different name for Yahweh, clearly he was worshiping the same God as Abram. Whether that came from general or special revelation is a matter of debate among Bible scholars,129 but the point here is that knowledge of God was found apart from Abram and his direct descendants. In other words, the culture in Canaan at the time had some knowledge of Yahweh apart from what he was doing in the main biblical narrative.

This same knowledge was also available to the Greeks living in the sixth century BC. According to solid ancient sources,130 during this time Athens came under the grip of a terrible plague. After appealing for a solution to the hundreds of gods in the Greek pantheon without success, the leaders of Athens decided to solicit the advice of an outside expert: the Cretan Epimenides. He told the Athenians that they should offer sacrifices to the supreme god who was more powerful than all their local deities. This they did, and in order not to risk offending this god by giving him the wrong name, they set up altars with the inscription TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. By the next morning the plague was receding, and within a week it was gone. It was one of these altars that Paul mentions in Acts 17:

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.”

Acts 17:22–23

Paul accepts that the God to whom the Athenians sacrificed half a millennium earlier is the same God that he is preaching about. He even goes on to quote approvingly from the third century BC poet Aratus: “As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring’” (Acts 17:28). Clearly Paul believed that there was some revelation of the true God even amid all the abhorrent idolatry of Athens.

So our Christian explanation of the parallels between pagan myths and the gospel starts with the proposition that people of pagan cultures do have some knowledge of the one true God, and this is reflected in their myths. If God’s revelation is known everywhere, it makes sense that the ancient stories would be infused with at least some of this truth. Jesus is the fullest and clearest expression of God’s truth, but other cultures and religions are not completely void of fact.131

Why Myths?

Let’s answer a couple of questions that might arise at this point. First, if knowledge of God is available to all, why don’t the pagan religions proclaim him more clearly? Why do they resort to using myths? The problem, writes Michael Christensen, is that “transcendent reality, when envisioned by the imagination, does not readily adapt itself to interpretation and communication.”132 As finite human beings, constrained by the limits of human language, it is difficult if not impossible for us to conceptualize and express religious experiences and supernatural truths in straightforward and literal terms. “Language can only point to that which cannot be adequately communicated. The reality to which language points must be experienced in order to be known.”133

The best way to communicate a supernatural truth, according to C. S. Lewis, is myth, because it takes an abstract reality and enables us to experience it. Myth puts a person in touch with ultimate reality in a more intimate way than would be possible simply by knowing what is factual. “In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.”134 Properly understood, myths are not about the literal details of the story, as if anyone is supposed to believe that a giant frog actually swallowed up all the waters of the sea. They are about something that can’t be described in propositional language. Ancient people used myths not because they were ignorant of natural laws and wanted to try to explain them, but because they wanted to communicate the transcendent truth behind the natural laws, and myths were the best they could do.

The Transcendence of Christianity

The next question to answer is “Are all religions and myths equal, then?” So far I have presented pagan myths in a positive light. Now let’s state unequivocally that this does not mean all religions are on par with Christianity. Jesus is absolutely the only way, truth, and life.

Even as it affirms that truth is found in other faiths, Nostra Aetate notes that the church is duty-bound to proclaim Christ, “in whom God reconciled all things to himself” and “men find the fullness of their religious life.”135 The last part of that sentence is an important key to understanding orthodox Christianity’s approach to other religions: They must be understood in relation to Christ because he is the full self-revelation of God and as such is absolutely unique. Indeed, unique is not an adequate term to describe Christianity, because it insinuates that Christianity is just a myth with different characteristics from the rest. That doesn’t quite capture what I am saying here. Christianity is not just a different myth; it is transcendent over other myths. It is a different kind of thing altogether. The myths are humanity’s feeble attempt to explain the transcendent. Christianity is the transcendent come down to humans.

As Sheen points out, transcendence

does not consist in proving that Christianity is better than any other religion, but that it is above comparison. Transcendence is a “change of degree, order, and species.” . . . Transcendence does not imply that Christianity must bear no resemblance to pagan religions, because similarities do not prove the same cause; nor that Christianity enjoys truth and all other religions are in darkness, but rather that it has historical superiority over them.136

Sheen is saying that while pagan myths result, at least in part, from humanity’s attempt to understand what I labeled earlier general revelation, Christianity is all about God’s special revelation in time and space.

C. S. Lewis refers to the Christian revelation of God coming down to earth in time and space as “myth become fact.” In his wonderful sermon “The Weight of Glory,” Lewis eloquently summarizes the major theme of this chapter. He writes that if divine revelation is available to all people,

We should, therefore, expect to find in the imagination of great Pagan teachers and myth makers some glimpse of that theme which we believe to be the very plot of the whole cosmic story—the theme of incarnation, death, and rebirth. And the differences between the Pagan Christs (Balder, Osiris, etc.) and the Christ Himself is much what we should expect to find. The Pagan stories are all about someone dying and rising, either every year, or else nobody knows where and nobody knows when. The Christian story is about a historical personage, whose execution can be dated pretty accurately, under a named Roman magistrate, and with whom the society that He founded is in a continuous relation down to the present day. It is not the difference between falsehood and truth. It is the difference between a real event on the one hand and dim dreams or premonitions of that same event on the other.137

The myths of pagan religions and cultures are shadows of the real thing. Christianity is transcendent over religion in that it fulfills religion. This is why Daniélou can state that

there is, for religious man, no better way of being faithful to his religion than to adhere to revelation. This is why conversion to Christianity is never an infidelity for the pagan. This point should be emphasized over and over again. The pagan will keep all the religious values of his paganism, but he will find in Christ the response that all his desires called for. As St. Paul says, this God for whom he was groping but only through shadows and symbols, this God comes looking for him to give Himself to him, and to reveal to him what he is.138

In this vein, Karl Rahner calls Christianity the “absolute religion,”139 because only Jesus can bring participation in the divine life. He is not just another religious leader, but the one in whom all religions are judged and find their fulfillment. Even though we can find “seeds of the Word” in all religions, Jesus is the savior of all humankind and the only mediator between God and people.140

What Went Wrong: The Negative Aspects of Pagan Myths

Before concluding this chapter, let’s answer one final question: If pagan myths can correspond to Christian truth and even reveal it, why are the foreign gods often treated so harshly in Scripture and false religions consistently condemned?

We have already seen examples of this in the Bible stories above. Abram was willing to acknowledge that Yahweh and El Elyon were the same, but he refused to grant that this God was on par with the deities of the king of Sodom. Also, Paul did not put the unknown God that he was proclaiming on equal footing with the other gods of Athens. They were clearly inferior and to be abandoned. In our discussion of the Exodus earlier in the book, we saw that God fought against the pagan gods of Egypt and Canaan. How do we reconcile these facts? What went wrong to turn these potentially helpful myths into enemies of the truth? There are many dimensions to the answer, but I’ll make three quick points.

First, a problem develops when a culture forgets that the symbol is just a symbol. Idolatry occurs when people worship the sun or the river rather than the One to whom the sun and the river point. The trajectory of this descent is detailed in Romans 1:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. . . . They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised.

Romans 1:20–25 NIV1984

Second, pagan religions become enemies of God when they fail to yield to the superior revelation of the gospel. Daniélou’s insight shines brightly here again:

The tragedy of religions is . . . wishing to persist once revelation has arrived. . . . We may say that there was a time when Buddha was right . . . that is to say that there was a moment when Buddha, through his experience, in his natural mysticism, interpreted that which was accessible of God through his revelation in the world. But from the moment when this God whom Buddha was seeking manifested Himself, the precursor, whose very mission was to prepare, has to efface himself. This is why [Romano] Guardini says that Buddha was perhaps a great precursor of Christ, and that he will unquestionably be His final enemy. Thus it was when the Old Testament, which was preparing for Christ, became Judaism, opposed to Christ. Something which has been true can become false, at the precise moment when it becomes outdated.141

Third, pagan religions can actually be the worship of false gods. Supernatural beings that hate God and actively work against his purposes do exist. The pagan gods of the Bible are, for the most part, treated as if they are real and have some authority and control. Again, we saw this in the Exodus account, where Pharaoh’s magicians had some power, just not enough power. The New Testament affirms this worldview, as Jesus spent much of his ministry casting out demons, and the apostle Paul understood his ministry as a fight against supernatural evil forces that were trying to entice entire cultures to worship them instead of the one true God. As he wrote to the Ephesians: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Ephesians 6:12). Indeed, as George Caird points out, “The idea of sinister world powers and their subjugation by Christ is built into the very fabric of Paul’s thought, and some mention of it is found in every epistle except Philemon.”142

Conclusion

The Christian worldview has nothing to fear from the parallels between the gospel and pagan mythology. It can account for the data in a comprehensive and satisfying way. Indeed, Christianity can point to the parallels between all of the religious stories and symbols as evidence against the skeptic’s theory. After all, if all myths arise only from people’s imaginations, shouldn’t they be completely different from place to place around the world? But they aren’t. Rather, they have an almost uncanny similarity. The naturalistic view of the origins of religious myth cannot account for this, while the Christian view certainly can. It teaches that the myths are not just the result of people’s imaginations, but rather our encounter with objective reality: the universe created by the Christian God.