David Litwa’s new book, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths — whose central claims are summarised in a recent article on this site — is a fascinating study about the relationship of the Christian gospels to certain mythological motifs from antiquity. In a nutshell, Litwa regards the gospels as a form of “mythic historiography.” Instead of seeing the gospels as history that over the time became myth, he suggests, to the contrary, that they were always a type of mythology that was given the features of history for the sake of apparent verisimilitude.

Let me offer three points of affirmation and then three points of disagreement.

First, the fundamental strength of the book is in its contention that the Gospels must be located within the literary and religious environment of the Graeco-Roman world.

While some interpreters like to emphasise how Christianity is different from Graeco-Roman religions, I take the point from Luke Timothy Johnson, among others, that we cannot understand how Christianity and Graeco-Roman religions are different until we first understand how they are similar. So comparison must precede contrast. Whereas some want to use Hellenistic Judaism as a kind of buffer between “pagan” ideas and Christianity, in order to avoid any direct borrowing of Christianity from ostensibly pagan sources, Litwa contends that the gospels draw from the same cultural pool of Hellenistic literature. That is because, writes Litwa, “Hellenistic culture was never really ‘outside’ Christianity.” Christianity emerged and germinated in this Hellenistic milieu.

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In addition, Litwa offers his comparisons usually without falling into the fallacy that analogy means genealogy, or moving from literal parallel to literary dependence. Litwa is rightly circumspect on the reasons for the similarities between the gospels and ancient literature, preferring to speak instead of “dynamic cultural interaction” or shared “cultural setting.” So I think it is on this point, with a positive comparison of the gospels with Graeco-Roman mythology and its historicalisation, that Litwa is offering a courageous thesis on how the gospels reflect the literary tropes and religious symbolism of antiquity.

Second, Litwa reopens the question of the relationship between Christianity and myth.

The issue of Christianity and myth was a very live one in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, especially when it came to the gospels. For a long time, the gospels were regarded as a kind of aetiological myth — in effect, an origins story for a religious and semi-divine hero. The reason for the decline of characterisations of the gospels as mythology are manifold:

the rejection of a dichotomy that identified parts of the gospels as either “Jewish” or “Hellenistic”;

the demise of form criticism as method of study for assuming that stories of Jesus from a Palestinian setting were given a Hellenistic and mythical overlay;

the dismantling of the “divine man” hypothesis about so-called ancient semi-divine miracle workers as anachronistic and too varied to be of any use;

the dangers of using later sources to infer things about Jesus, the Jesus tradition and the gospels in the first-century (for example, comparing Jesus with Philostratus’s second century account of the first century figure Apollonius of Tyana);

a general agreement on the genre of the gospels as biography rather than novel, epic, or fable; and

attention given to social memory and the presence of eyewitnesses as forces that preserved the Jesus tradition.

Now anyone who has studied Graeco-Roman backgrounds to the New Testament will know that ancient accounts of miracles, gods descending to earth and ascensions to heaven are prevalent in Hellenistic literature and are regarded as myth. Many of those myths were otherwise incorporated into standard historical works and subsequent interpreters differed on how to treat them. Litwa’s reopening of the question of the gospels as “mythic historiography,” where myth has become historicalised, means one cannot escape the question of what modern interpreters are to do given that the gospels are, in various ways and in varying degree, reflective of the religious, symbolic and mythic world of antiquity.

It is worth remembering that the topic of Christianity vis-à-vis myth is not a new problem. Justin Martyr, the second century Christian apologist, knew about the similarities between the virgin conception of Jesus and that of Perseus, he didn’t deny them. Justin oscillated between theoretically having no problem with Jesus being born of normal procreation, to regarding the stories as the same while insisting that Jesus was simply superior to Perseus, to considering the Perseus birth story as a serpentine counterfeit to divine work. In any case, Justin wrestled with the category of myth in relation to the gospels. For others, like Origen of Alexandria, finding myth it the gospels was no problem, it was a great opportunity to engage in some allegorical exegesis and to uncover the deeper sense of Scripture.

That same wrestling with myth was quite evident in Rudolf Bultmann’s famous demythologising project, which, if viewed as a way of addressing a materialistic rather than antiquarian worldview, had its advantages. David Congdon has recently tried to revitalise Bultmann’s demythologising of the Bible as an exercise in intercultural hermeneutics. That said, Bultmann’s demythologisation was considered, even by his closest supporters, to be a crude method since Bultmann wrongly believed he could separate symbol and substance from the Bible. (Litwa offers some good observations on the deficiencies in Bultmann’s program as well.)

Demythologisation was mostly abandoned, but it still appears in some form in modern scholarship. For example, the neo-pagan author Sallustius said concerning myth: “Now these things never happened, but always are.” The sentiment is echoed in John Dominic Crossan’s account that “Emmaus never happened. Emmaus always happens,” as his way of explaining the Lucan resurrection narrative.

Litwa’s conclusion to How the Gospels Became History — which feels a bit like a kind of Rudolf Bultmann, Dale Martin, Dale Allison remix — briefly tackles that very issue of the abiding significance of the gospels as mythological historiography for today. That said, I was seriously weirded out by Litwa’s suggestion that the study of Christianity should be shifted to the mythology courses of Classics Departments. May it never be!

Third — this is my favourite point — this is a book that is going to initially excite Jesus mythicists, people who think Jesus did not exist, and then leave them totally dejected.

I sit on the board of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, and we have quite a diverse group of editors, Christians of every kind, some Jewish colleagues, agnostics and even atheists. We disagree on just about everything there is to disagree on about the historical Jesus. But we all agree on at least two things: that Jesus existed as a historical person; and people who say he didn’t are a curious, albeit annoying, phenomenon.

Litwa’s contention that the gospels are myths made to look historical will initially be met with gasps of excitement and anticipation by the online Jesus mythicist community — and their gasps of joy will dissipate just as quickly once they realise that Litwa himself is not a Jesus mythicist, but believes in a historical Jesus, Litwa states that the existence of Jesus “is the most plausible hypothesis to explain the gospels as literary products.” To his credit, he overviews Bruno Baur, Richard Carrier and Thomas Brodie as exponents of the mythicist view, but then states why it is ultimately unsatisfying and probably ideologically driven.

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Of course, as with any book, there are areas with which one will find grounds to disagree. I have many points of earnest disagreement. The usual, “Yes, but …” A few, “Hmm, no, not quite.” And of course, “Oh goodness me, you can’t be serious!” For me, it boils down to the following.

First, the danger of overestimating Greek hegemony over local cultures.

This might seem like a bit of a red herring, but I think Litwa overstates the permeation, accessibility and predominance of Greek culture everywhere and almost all the time. Litwa claims that:

Linguistically, most citizens of the empire spoke Greek as the common tongue. Even in the ‘boondocks’ of rural Galilee, there remained a dominant cultural ethos privileges the values, art, language, and lore of ancient (‘classical’) Greece.

In order for the various literary parallels to have the cumulative effect, Litwa has to assume that people in the eastern Mediterranean are pretty much immersed in Greek language, mythologies, histories, tragedies and literature.

Rick Strelan has an important essay on the languages of Asia Minor in which he shows that we should not assume that everyone in Asia Minor knew Greek language, literature and mythology. You could apply the same argument to Galilee where Aramaic remained dominant. Yes, thanks Martin Hengel, we know that all Judaism was Hellenistic Judaism, but, on a point of order from Mark Chancey, not all Judaism was penetrated by Hellenism in the same way or to the same degree. In the case of Galilee, its Hellenisation did not hit full speed at least until after 70 CE, and then particularly in the second century. The same applies to Roman Armenia, Syria, Phrygia and Egypt. We cannot assume that Greek language was everyone’s default setting and Greek culture was everyone’s encyclopedia when local languages and cultures remained not merely extant but dominant.

As a result, I think it is perhaps an exaggeration to assume that Greek mythology was part of the pre-understanding all Jews and Christians, even those in the eastern Mediterranean. Yes, it was there, and well known, but not necessarily omnipresent.

Second, some of the similarities that Litwa makes are superficial.

Litwa is aware of the dangers of “skating over differences based on locality, time, and culture,” as well as actual divergences in content when it comes to stories of dying and rising gods. Litwa critiques Richard Carrier and R. MacDonald on those scores. Even so, at a few points, I did feel myself murmuring the proverb, “Physician, heal thyself.” The many similarities that Litwa makes often skirt over the huge differences. For instance:

Horace’s rhetorical accolades of Augustus as an incarnation of Hermes are honorific, not ontological, so I find it hard to see an incarnation of divinity in Augustus that’s operating in the same semantic and conceptual theatre as Paul or John.

Even if Philostratus’s “Damis” is a fictional character, I’m not sure I’d equate him with the Beloved Disciple of the Fourth Gospel. After all, the second-century church claimed that they had a chain of transmission with John, whether the apostle or the elder, who wrote the fourth gospel.

Third, the primary intertext for the New Testament is the Greek translation of the Bible, or Septuagint.

A criticism I have of Litwa is that irrespective of whatever parallels we find between Graeco-Roman literature and the gospels, the fact remains that gospel’s primary textual background is the Septuagint — at least at the level of citation, allusion and echo, in sayings and narratives. That is not to negate or deny a broader Graeco-Roman context and broader influences in cultural background. But all things being equal, given the scripturalised texture of the gospels, one will find more often than not, closer connections with Hosea than Herodotus when it comes to the gospels.

The best example to my mind is the genealogies. While Litwa does a commendable job of comparing the Lucan and Matthean genealogies to Greek ones, I was convinced by my former PhD student Jason Hood that the genealogies are more closely related to the Hebrew Bible and are intended as summaries of Israel’s Story. That was confirmed by my own study of the genealogies of 1 Esdras. The main influence here is the Septuagint’s genealogies. It is in the Septuagint that we have genuine dependence and influence beyond any Graeco-Roman allusion.

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David Litwa’s book is a fine piece of comparative ancient religious literature; it raises the question of Christianity vis-à-vis Greek mythology and will infuriate Jesus mythicists. However, I think he overplays the influence of Greek mythology at the expense of local lore and language, that many of his similarities are superficial and that the gospels should be located primarily in the Jewish world.

Michael F. Bird is Academic Dean at Ridley College in Melbourne, an Australian College of Theology Senior Research Fellow and co-author (with N.T. Wright) of The New Testament in its World.