Christian mythology

• 1. Introduction

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  Christian mythology is the name scholars give to the vast body of sacred stories, legends, and recurring narrative patterns found throughout Christian tradition. The term itself has always carried a charge. When Paul wrote to Timothy warning him away from "godless and silly myths" - bebēthous kai graōdeis muthous in Greek - he was using the same word, muthos, that by the time of Christ had already drifted from its original meaning of "story, narrative" toward something closer to "fable" or "fiction." That tension between story and truth has haunted the category ever since.

  What scholars mean when they use the term today is far broader than any one tradition or any single denomination. It encompasses Genesis creation narratives and medieval dragon-slaying saints, John Milton's Paradise Lost and C. S. Lewis's Narnia, the Harrowing of Hell and the Quest for the Holy Grail. These are stories that Christianity produced, absorbed, and transformed across two millennia. They raise questions that reach well beyond any church: Where did these narratives come from? How did older mythological patterns from Persia, Canaan, and Greece find their way into Christian scripture and legend? And what happens to a culture's imagination when its myths lose their grip?

  The story begins not with Christianity itself, but with the scholar Rudolf Bultmann, a Christian theologian and New Testament professor who argued that the cosmology of the New Testament is "essentially mythical in character" - a three-storied universe of heaven, earth, and underworld, populated by angels and demons, supernatural interventions and cosmic catastrophe. His observation points directly to the questions this documentary will trace.

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• 2. The Problem With the Word

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  In classical Greek, muthos simply meant story or narrative. By the time early Christian writers were working, it had gathered a cloud of skepticism around it. Paul's warning to Timothy shows how loaded the term had become, and early Christian writers were careful to avoid calling canonical scripture "myth" because of those connotations.

  The tension never fully resolved. Some modern Christian scholars tried to rehabilitate the word entirely. C. S. Lewis and Andrew Greeley both described elements of Christianity, particularly the story of Christ, as "true myth" - meaning a story that is myth in form but simultaneously true in fact. Scholars working in the academic study of religion take a different approach. In academic usage, a myth is simply a traditional story, though folklorists often refine this further to mean "tales believed as true, usually sacred, set in the distant past or other worlds, and with extra-human or heroic characters."

  Others resist any application of the term to Christianity at all. The objections tend to cluster around three concerns: the association of "myth" with polytheism, the use of the term to imply falsehood or non-historicity, and the fact that scholars still have not settled on a single agreed-upon definition. George Every, in his book Christian Mythology, cites the creation account in Genesis and the story of Eve's temptation as examples of what he calls biblical myths. That classification alone places him in contested territory - and has since the discipline began.

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• 3. Inherited Patterns, Ancient and Persian

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  Mary Boyce, regarded as an authority on the Persian religion Zoroastrianism, traced a striking list of doctrines back to the prophet Zoroaster: individual judgment after death, heaven and hell, the future resurrection of the body, a general Last Judgment, and eternal life for the reunited soul and body. Her argument is that these ideas became "familiar articles of faith" to much of humanity through borrowings by Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

  Mircea Eliade offers a more qualified position. He believed the Hebrews already had a sense of linear time before Zoroastrianism could have influenced them. But he argued that a number of other Jewish religious ideas were "discovered, revalorized, or systematized in Iran" - including a sharp dualism between good and evil, belief in a future savior, and an optimistic eschatology proclaiming the final triumph of good. The Zoroastrian concepts of Ahriman, Amesha Spentas, Yazatas, and Daevas probably shaped what Christianity came to understand as Satan, archangels, angels, and demons.

  The Canaanite contribution is equally traceable. Some scholars have identified the biblical creature Leviathan as a monster drawn from Canaanite mythology. According to Howard Schwartz, the myth of the fall of Lucifer existed in fragmentary form in Isaiah 14:12 and other ancient Jewish literature, and Schwartz argues it originated from the ancient Canaanite myth of Athtar, who attempted to rule the throne of Ba'al but was forced to descend and rule the underworld instead. The Book of Revelation carries a similar inheritance: the New American Bible notes that the image of a pregnant woman in the sky threatened by a dragon in Revelation 12:1-6 "corresponds to a widespread myth throughout the ancient world" in which a goddess pregnant with a savior is pursued by a monster.

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• 4. Recurring Mythical Structures

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  Lorena Laura Stookey observes that many myths across cultures feature sacred mountains as "the sites of revelations" - places where spiritual ascent promises purification, insight, and knowledge of the sacred. She connects this theme to the revelation of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai, Christ's Sermon on the Mount, and the Ascension from the Mount of Olives. The pattern repeats across traditions with striking regularity.

  David Leeming, writing in his Creation Myths of the World, argues that the Christian crucifixion at Golgotha belongs to an equally widespread mythological category: the axis mundi, or world center, often a tree or upright object serving as the axle around which the cosmos turns. In Eastern Christian folklore, Golgotha was the summit of the cosmic mountain at the center of the world, the location where Adam had been both created and buried. Leeming reads the cross itself as "the axis mundi, the center of a new creation," a reading Leeming says is embedded in many medieval artistic representations of the crucifixion that show Adam's skull at the foot of the cross.

  The dying-and-rising god is another category that James George Frazer traced through a large number of myths in his influential study The Golden Bough. Frazer and a number of other scholars have placed the Christ story within this theme. In his 2006 homily for Corpus Christi, Pope Benedict XVI acknowledged the similarity directly, describing pagan myths of dead and resurrected gods as the soul reaching "toward that God made man, who, humiliated unto death on a cross, in this way opened the door of life to all of us." Leeming adds a further detail: where dying gods are typically associated with physical fertility, Christ can be seen as bringing fertility "of a spiritual as opposed to physical kind."

  Huston Smith, a professor of philosophy and writer on comparative religion, identified one more parallel worth noting. In Buddhist mythology, the demon Mara tries to distract the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, before he can reach enlightenment. Smith highlighted the close structural resemblance between Mara's temptation of the Buddha before his ministry and Satan's temptation of Christ before his.

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• 5. Legend, Folktale, and the Non-Canonical

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  Christian tradition has produced a rich body of stories that were never incorporated into official scripture. Legends were a staple of medieval literature, and hagiographies - the stories of saints - gave ordinary people a local, particular mythology that church councils could not fully control. The historical figure of Brendan of Clonfort, a 6th-century Irish churchman and founder of abbeys, serves as a precise example. Around his authenticated biography grew a legendary journey called the Navigatio, in which Brendan and his shipmates encountered sea monsters, a paradisal island, a floating ice island, and a rock inhabited by a holy hermit. Tim Severin later recreated this voyage, and found evidence suggesting the legends encoded encounters with whales, icebergs, and the rock formation of Rockall.

  Folktales occupy a different category. Folklorists define folktales, in contrast to "true" myths, as stories considered purely fictitious by their own tellers, and often lacking any specific setting in space or time. Christian-themed folktales circulated widely among peasant populations. One widespread genre is the Penitent Sinner, classified as Type 756A, B, C in the Aarne-Thompson index of tale types. Another popular cluster describes a clever mortal who outwits the Devil.

  Arthurian legend braids canonical and non-canonical threads together. Sir Balin discovers the Lance of Longinus, the spear that had pierced Christ's side. According to a tradition widely attested in early Christian writings, Adam's skull lay buried at Calvary, and when Christ was crucified his blood fell over it, symbolizing humanity's redemption from Adam's original transgression. These stories accumulated layers across centuries without ever requiring official sanction.

  One English folk belief held that certain herbs acquired their healing power specifically from having been used to treat Christ's wounds on Mount Calvary. The non-canonical narrative had attached itself to folk medicine, crossing from story into practice - a case where mythology generated its own material culture.

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• 6. Eschatology and the End of Time

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  The Second Coming of Christ holds a central place in Christian mythological imagination. According to Matthew's gospel, when Jesus stood before Roman and Jewish authorities, he claimed: "In the future you will see the Son of Man sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One and coming on the clouds of heaven." That statement generated centuries of expectation. The legend of the Wandering Jew - a man who taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion and was cursed to walk the earth until the Second Coming - shows how eschatological belief could spin off its own mythological sub-genres.

  When Christianity was a new and persecuted religion, many believers understood the end as imminent. This belief, called millennialism after the thousand-year reign of Christ described in Revelation, comforted the persecuted precisely because it promised deliverance regardless of human effort: "The seeming triumph of Evil made up the apocalyptic syndrome which was to precede Christ's return and the millennium." As Eliade observed, the Roman Church's eventual condemnation of millennialism marked what he saw as "the first manifestation of the doctrine of progress" in Christianity.

  The amillennial view that replaced it reinterpreted the Kingdom of God as already present through the Bible, the Holy Spirit, and the church itself. The shift changed how Christians related to their own eschatological myths: instead of waiting for God to renovate the world, the church now believed itself to be improving the world through human action. This is not a small theological adjustment. It is a fundamental reorientation of how a civilization imagines its own history and agency.

  Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy is the most elaborate literary cartography of the Christian afterlife. Describing Hell in the Inferno, Purgatory in the Purgatorio, and Heaven in the Paradiso, Dante gave European culture a geography of the afterlife that shaped art, literature, and popular imagination for centuries. The Book of Revelation's promise that God "will wipe every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning, wailing or pain" fed into a vision of total world renovation that Dante's poem made vivid and spatially specific for any reader.

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• 7. Mythology Absorbed and Transformed

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  After Christian theology was accepted by the Roman Empire - promoted significantly by Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century - it moved northward through the agency of Charlemagne and the Frankish people. The pre-Christian Germanic and Celtic mythologies native to the tribes of Northern Europe were officially denounced and submerged, while saint myths, Mary stories, Crusade myths, and other Christian narratives took their place. The displacement was never total. Pre-Christian myths mingled with Roman Catholic frameworks to produce new composite stories: mythological kings and miracle-working saints, sagas like Beowulf and the Norse and Icelandic cycles reinterpreted with Christian meanings.

  The Knights Templar, Prester John, and the paladins of medieval romance all generated their own mythology within this blended tradition. Eliade identified a significant eschatological myth introduced by the 12th-century theologian Gioacchino da Fiore: the idea of an imminent third age that would renew and complete history in a "reign of the Holy Spirit." This Gioacchinian myth influenced a number of messianic movements in the late Middle Ages, and Eliade traces its philosophical descendants through Lessing, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling.

  In the early modern period, Christian demonology developed into an elaborate sub-mythology. Martin Delrio, in his influential Disquisitiones magicae, provided a detailed account of the Witches' Sabbath that was widely cited during the intensification of witch hunts. Major works of Christian demonology, including the Malleus Maleficarum, were dedicated to implementing Exodus 22:18 - "You shall not permit a sorceress to live" - and contributed directly to the violence of that period.

  By the Renaissance, writers like Milton used the inherited mythology as material for their own elaborations. Paradise Lost, which describes Satan's rebellion against God and the Fall of Man, is described by some scholars as both an "epic elaboration of the Judeo-Christian mythology" and a "veritable encyclopedia of myths from the Greek and Roman tradition" - two mythological streams braided into a single work.

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• 8. Mythology and Modern Culture

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  Christian mythological structures did not stop generating new forms when the Enlightenment arrived. The philosophes used criticism of myth to aim veiled criticisms at the Bible and the church, according to Bruce Lincoln, who argues that they "made irrationality the hallmark of myth" and positioned philosophy as the antidote - which by implication cast Christianity as a powerful and dangerous instance of irrational myth.

  Reinhold Niebuhr described the modern idea of ethical and scientific progress as "really a rationalized version of the Christian myth of salvation." Carl Mitcham made the connection more structural, arguing that "the Christian mythology of progress toward transcendent salvation" created the conditions under which modern ideas of scientific and technological progress could develop. Hayden White called the myth of Progress the "secular, Enlightenment counterpart" of Christian myth.

  Mircea Eliade called Marxism "a truly messianic Judaeo-Christian ideology", arguing that it inherited the structure of the ancient eschatological myth of the redemptive role of the righteous or elect - "whose sufferings are invoked to change the ontological status of the world." David Leeming extended this argument to claim that Judeo-Christian messianic ideas influenced 20th-century totalitarian systems, citing the state ideology of the Soviet Union as an example.

  C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L'Engle, J. R. R. Tolkien, and George MacDonald all produced fiction that commentators have categorized as Christian mythopoeia. In 1968, David W. Noble argued in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden that the Adam figure had been "the central myth in the American novel since 1830," citing works by Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Tom Beaudoin explored a more recent version of the same argument in Virtual Faith: The Irreverent Spiritual Quest of Generation X, tracing Christian mythological structures into pop-culture phenomena like Madonna's Like a Prayer and Soundgarden's Black Hole Sun. The thread from Genesis to the charts of the 1990s is long, but according to these scholars, it is unbroken.

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