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Ion — The Patriarchal Blessing and the Father of a Nation
Apollo forces Creusa in a cave under the Acropolis, has their son raised in his temple at Delphi and hands him to her husband as the husband’s own. Euripides’ Ion beside Joseph and the supposed father of Luke’s genealogy, the boy Jesus in his Father’s house, Rebekah and Jacob, and the question Athens put to…
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Cultivating humaneness, a noble heart and the holy spirit
Around five hundred years before Christ, a teacher in the small state of Lu gathered students around him and told them something that was not obvious at the time. A good society cannot be built by rearranging people. It has to be built out of good people, one at a time, starting with whoever is…
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King Shibi (Sanskrit: शिबि), the dove, the hunter, and the sacrificial king
In the Hindu Mahabharata, a king called Ushinara was famous for his righteous reign. The Hindu Gods tested the reputation of his son the next king. The story below is told in the Mahabharata, Vana Parva, in the section on the pilgrimage to the sacred fords (Tirtha-yatra Parva, chapters 130–131). The passages set as block…
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Cassandra and Jesus — Prophets of a Doomed City
Apollo gave Cassandra true sight and took away belief. Jesus wept over a city that would not hear him. Aeschylus and the Gospels side by side, with Ovid’s Paris taking her fire for love, Josephus’s other Jesus crying woe on the walls, the Locrian girls sent to Troy for a thousand years and the lampstand…
Every ancient culture tells stories about a god who fathered a son on a mortal woman. This site reads those stories beside one another, and beside the Bible.
One way of reading them is very old and entirely Christian. The Church Fathers held that the seed of the Word had been scattered among the nations, so that people who had never heard of Israel still managed to say true things. Lewis and Tolkien called the myths good dreams, and called one of them fact. Taking that seriously means going to look for the same shape in Greece, India and Egypt, and it is there.
The second way of reading asks what a story was for. A miracle can cover a crime, and an account of slaying giants can be the tidied version of killing people. Whoever wrote these things down had usually won.
Both readings run here at once. New readers should start with Why do different cultures have similar myths?