Modern thinking often treats myths as primitive fiction, old stories made up to explain what ancient people didn’t understand. This is a shallow and deeply flawed view. A myth, in its original form, was never just a tale. It was a framework for understanding reality. Myths carried the collective memory, theology, morality, and worldview of a people group. They encoded truth, not always literal in every detail, but meaningful, historical, and often rooted in real events, places, and supernatural encounters.
To dismiss myths because they involve divine beings or miracles is to miss their purpose. Ancient people did not separate the sacred from the secular. Their myths reflected how they understood the world and how they encountered powers beyond it.
Historical Memory Preserved in Myth
Some myths are poetic versions of real events. The story of the Trojan War, once thought to be legend, gained new weight when archaeological discoveries confirmed the existence of a city that fits Homer’s description of Troy. Likewise, while the legends of King Arthur are wrapped in fantasy, they are likely based on a real post-Roman warlord who resisted Saxon invaders.
Even in Scripture, the events that modern critics label “mythic” often show clear signs of historical anchoring. The global flood, the destruction of Sodom, the Tower of Babel, and the conquest of Canaan are presented not as metaphors but as real acts of God in human history. These accounts, though cosmic in scope, are rooted in geography, time, and national memory.
Myth as Cultural Lens
Myths also reveal what mattered most to a people. Norse mythology, shaped by harsh winters and unrelenting violence, emphasizes cold, fate, and struggle. Mesopotamian myths center on divine kingship and cycles of fertility, reflecting the importance of rivers, temples, and crops. These stories do not just preserve events; they preserve the lens through which cultures viewed divine activity.
In the Bible, this same pattern holds. Its creation narrative, flood story, and judgments are not recycled myths but deliberate responses to the surrounding pagan world. Scripture confronts and corrects the worldview embedded in other myths. It does not borrow their gods. It defeats them.
The Modern Turn Against the Supernatural
The rejection of mythic material as a source of truth is not ancient. It is modern. It was not the biblical writers or the early Church who dismissed the supernatural. That rejection began in earnest during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Western intellectual culture began shifting under the influence of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment exalted reason, skepticism, and empirical science. Thinkers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant argued that miracles violated the laws of nature and were therefore unreliable as historical events. Supernatural claims were relegated to the realm of fiction or psychological projection. This created a new definition of truth, one that excluded divine intervention, spiritual beings, and cosmic conflict.
In the nineteenth century, these assumptions were applied to the Bible through the historical-critical method. Scholars such as Julius Wellhausen dissected Scripture not as divine revelation but as a collection of evolving mythologies shaped by human communities. The creation narrative, the flood, the Tower of Babel, and the miracles of Jesus were no longer treated as actual events but as religious poetry or borrowed legends. In this model, myth was not something to be trusted. It was something to be deconstructed.
Even movements that sought to preserve the value of myth, such as Romanticism, did so by redefining it. Myths were not allowed to speak about divine realities. Instead, they were reduced to metaphors for the human condition. Their theological and historical weight was stripped away in favor of psychological interpretation.
Augustine’s Overcorrection: From Mysticism to Minimalism
But the groundwork for this modern rejection of mythic material was laid even earlier. Augustine of Hippo, one of the most influential theologians in Christian history, had once been deeply involved in Manichaeism, a mystical cult that emphasized a cosmic struggle between light and darkness. After leaving the cult and converting to Christianity, Augustine understandably sought to distance himself from the elaborate supernatural systems he had once embraced.
However, in doing so, he overcorrected. He rejected many established supernatural interpretations of Scripture, favoring more allegorical and philosophical approaches. Influenced by Neoplatonism, Augustine prioritized abstract spiritual realities over tangible supernatural beings. He reinterpreted Genesis 6, for example, not as a rebellion of divine beings, but as a moral tale about the intermarriage of the godly and ungodly.
Though Augustine never denied God’s power or the reality of miracles, his discomfort with mythic material and his desire for theological respectability led him to downplay or spiritualize the cosmic conflict found in much of the Bible. His influence steered much of Western theology away from the ancient worldview that accepted divine councils, rebellious spirits, and supernatural intervention as real components of history.
This theological shift made it easier for Enlightenment thinkers to later dismiss myth outright. The supernatural had already been contained and abstracted. In many ways, the modern rejection of myth did not begin with science. It began with Augustine’s reaction against his own past.
The Myth That Was True and the Myths That Remembered
Not all myths are lies. Many are distorted memories of real events, echoes of a spiritual history that the nations once knew but later twisted. The flood, the divine rebellion, the rise of giants, the war among the gods, these appear in cultures across the globe not because they were invented out of thin air, but because they preserve fragments of true events. The nations remembered the rebellion of the sons of God, but they passed it down in corrupted form. They remembered divine judgments, but attached them to false deities. Their stories are not false because they are myth. They are flawed because they lost the context of Yahweh’s supremacy.
In the twentieth century, this idea was captured powerfully in a conversation between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. At the time, Lewis still considered myths to be beautiful lies, moving, meaningful, but ultimately untrue. Tolkien challenged that view. He explained that myths resonate because they point to something real. Humanity tells stories of gods and sacrifice and resurrection because it dimly remembers. Made in the image of a Creator who speaks through story, we carry within us a longing for the true version of the story all nations once knew.
Tolkien told Lewis, “The story of Christ is a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference: it really happened.” The point was not that the other myths were worthless, but that they were shadows. The gospel is the fulfillment of what all the others pointed toward. It is not myth in the modern sense of fiction, but myth in the ancient sense of divine reality revealed in story.
Where the nations preserved pieces of divine truth wrapped in confusion, Scripture restores the original pattern. Where paganism elevates rebel gods and obscures justice, the Bible reorients the mythic structure around Yahweh, the Most High. It does not erase the mythic imagination. It redeems it.
Yahweh Is Not Bound by the System He Created
A major reason people reject mythic material is the presence of supernatural events. Miracles, divine appearances, and acts of judgment are written off as fabrications because they do not conform to natural law. But that objection is built on a misunderstanding of who Yahweh is.
If we believe that Yahweh is omnipotent and created the universe, then nothing is outside His reach. He is not bound by the laws of nature. He is the one who established them. Miracles are not violations of order. They are expressions of divine authority over creation.
A helpful analogy is that of a network administrator. To the average user, a computer system is fixed and limited. There are permissions, access barriers, and visible constraints. But the network administrator exists above that framework. They can override protocols, access hidden layers, and operate freely in ways that others cannot. To the user, such actions might appear impossible, but only because they lack the perspective and authority.
Yahweh is not a character within the system. He is the architect. His interventions do not break the rules of the world. They demonstrate that He is above them. The parting of the sea, the resurrection of the dead, the calming of the storm, these are not fables. They are the rightful acts of the Creator engaging with His creation.
Attempts to reduce these events to natural explanations, light refractions, rare weather patterns, group hallucinations, reveal more about our discomfort with divine power than about the events themselves. Yahweh does not need to conform to the limitations of His creatures. He acts as He wills.
Conclusion
The belief that mythic material cannot be real is not only false. It is dangerous. Myths preserve historical memory, cultural identity, and spiritual truth. They remind us that the world is not flat and mechanical. It is layered, enchanted, and under the authority of a sovereign God.
The Bible does not fear mythic themes. It confronts them head-on. It reclaims them, redeems them, and reveals the One true God behind them. By taking the supernatural seriously, we gain a clearer view of both history and reality. Miracles are not relics of a gullible past. They are the footprints of Yahweh acting in power, and they have never stopped.
Discussion Questions
- How does the modern definition of “myth” differ from its ancient usage, and why is that distinction important when reading Scripture?
- In what ways did Augustine’s rejection of supernatural interpretations, influenced by his former cult involvement, shape the direction of Western theology?
- How can the persistence of global mythic themes—like divine rebellion, floods, and giants—be understood as corrupted memories of real spiritual events?
- Why is it logically inconsistent to affirm the omnipotence of Yahweh while denying His ability to intervene supernaturally in creation?
- What does Tolkien’s argument to Lewis—that the story of Christ is the true myth—reveal about the biblical approach to reclaiming and correcting pagan mythology?
Want to Know More?
- Michael S. Heiser, The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible
This book restores the ancient context of Scripture by reintroducing the role of divine beings, supernatural conflict, and the unseen realm. It directly challenges the post-Enlightenment flattening of the biblical narrative and reinforces the legitimacy of mythic material in Scripture. - C.S. Lewis, The Myth Became Fact (essay in God in the Dock)
In this foundational essay, Lewis explains how myths resonate with human longing because they reflect fragments of divine truth. He argues that Christianity is the true myth, where the themes found in world mythology are fulfilled in historical reality. This idea grew out of his conversation with Tolkien and directly supports the article’s core argument. - John Walton, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament
Walton compares Israel’s worldview with its ancient neighbors, explaining how myth functioned in the ancient world and how the Bible often reclaims and redirects it. A valuable resource for understanding how Scripture interacts with surrounding cultural myths without borrowing them uncritically. - Barry Strauss, The Trojan War: A New History
Strauss provides historical and archaeological analysis showing that legendary events like the Trojan War likely contain kernels of truth. This supports the article’s claim that myth can preserve real events distorted by time and cultural memory. - Werner Keller, The Bible as History
A classic that surveys archaeological findings supporting biblical accounts often dismissed as myth. Keller’s work affirms the historical core behind many scriptural narratives and challenges modern assumptions that supernatural events are automatically fictional.
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