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henny -> RE: There where more than two creations (4/26/2008 11:36:16 PM)
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There's lots of different definitions of what constitutes "myth" so whether or not Genesis would be "myth" depends on who you will ask to a certain extent. But Generally the first sections of Genesis would be considered "myth," mainly because they concern a God or gods, tell an origin story, and pertain to a religious or symbolic system (or greater mythology). At a base level, that's usually all that the word "myth" connotes (and for the record, "myth" usually isn't regarded as a "genre." It's usually seen as acting on a more basic and fundamental level than that, concerning itself with basic religious beliefs. So to say that "myth" is a genre is a bit like saying that "religious belief" is a genre, which I don't think works. Some have made the case that basic types of genres grew out of basic types of myths, though).
Although if you want to get into stylistic elements, what is "mythic" is usually is seen as being more simplistic in structure (or at least in terms of the style of plot and characterization -I don't mean to suggest that mythology as a whole can't be complex, as it certainly can be) and conforming to basic patterns that repeat throughout many different cultures (i.e. Genesis can be read as another "promethean" type myth, for example -which doesn't mean that I'm suggesting that it was based on it, just that they employ similar narrative structures). Plus usually things tend to be more symbolic/archetypal in construction, so characters often will "stand in" for things as a whole or be reduced to some basic form, just as the actions of the characters will reverberate beyond the individuals to affect mankind as a whole on a grand universal scale (so for example, in Genesis, "Adam" was basically a general Hebrew word for "man." This doesn't necessarily mean that Adam wasn't also an "individual" if you want to read it that way, but it is clear that he was meant to represent much more beyond just himself, just as his actions have wide reaching effects on mankind in general, as oppossed to just affecting him as an individual). I think if you compare something like the first 3 chapters of Genesis with later stuff from other sections of the Old Testament, you do see huge differences in style. The latter sections of the Bible tend to have more character development at times, or be more historically oriented at other times, or legal oriented (to the point of being nothing other than recorded law), or turn into poetry (Pslams), or prophecy, etc, etc -in ways that really don't conform to a similar mythic style (so something like Leviticus or Psalms are not "mythic" really at all).
Although like I said before, to a large extent what constitutes myth depends entirely on who you ask (i.e. in the early 20th century myth analysis was huge amongst people like Levi-Strauss, Jung, etc -and the whole explosion of interest in myth, basic patterns/structures, and archetypes grew along side structuralism, so I think a certain amount of the ideas from that movement were incorporated into the definition of the word as an unintended side-effect. Which isn't necessarily a good thing, as structuralist anaylsis of myth often imposed an overly rigid uniformity, consistency, and structure which I suspect wasn't always there, but nevertheless "seemed" to be there by virtue of the application of their theories. This is way off topic, though).
But I don't think Christians need be offended when someone calls Genesis "myth." I know that the word has taken on connotations in recent years as being another word for "false" -but speaking in terms of literary classification, the word "myth" really says nothing about whether the stories themselves are true or false.
Reduced to its most basic definition the word usually just means "supernatural origin story." So given that, it's possible to see Genesis as both "myth" and 100% accurate, as the two really don't necessarily contradict one another (indeed, the word comes from the greek, to whom the word "myth" basically meant any story or plot, whether that story was true or untrue).
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