Survivals and Camouflages of Myths

The relations between Christianity and mythical thought can hardly be presented in a few pages. For the fact is that their relations raise several quite separate problems. First of all, there is the equivocal use of the term "myth." The earliest Christian theologians took the word in the sense that had become current some centuries earlier in the Greco-Roman world, i.e., "fable, fiction, lie." They therefore refused to see a "mythical" figure in Jesus and a "myth" in the Messianic drama. From the second century on, Christian theologians had to defend the historicity of Jesus against the Docetists and the Gnostics as well as against the pagan philosophers. We shall presently see the arguments they employed to support their thesis and the difficulties they had to meet

Mythology · Classics · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies · History · Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

• Gilbert Durand et l'étude des mythes

  Frédéric Monneyron•Sociétés•2014

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