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Because I saw a post on Tumblr with the old chestnut that Christianity's mythologies about the Flood and Adam and Eve are "unoriginal" because other religions also have similar ones. A rough draft of something I might post there later...
"By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept"
It refers to someone mourning the brutal loss of their homeland as they remain enslaved in a foreign country. In this case, the Jewish people during the period of Babylonian captivity. The survivors of the Babylonian conquest of Israel were taken away as slaves and POW and forced to assimilate or die. To the Jews, this was akin to an apocalypse (in fact, a lot of the imagery that isn't about Rome in the Book of Revelation* is using Babylon as a metaphor or as a reference its audience was meant to understand very clearly, Babylon remains a popular metaphor for Big Evil throughout the Bible).
The longer the Jews remained in Babylon, the more they were starting to assimilate. The most trusted people were finding positions in the government and military. The children were becoming Babylonians.
Prior to this time, as far as anyone knows Jewish history was mostly oral, but they would have lost a great deal of any information they had stored, when they were taken from their homeland. They realized they had lost, and were losing, their culture. The children no longer understood what it meant to be Jewish. So the scribes decided to create a permanent written record of Jewish history, mythology, poetry and religious law. It took a long time, and a lot of hard work attempting to reconstruct a history of their people while immersed in and influenced by, a foreign, pagan culture but...
This formed the basis of what we now refer to as The Bible. The story of the Flood, and Adam and Eve acquired uniquely Jewish twists and eventually became acknowledged canon scripture.
This is the Bible Jesus and his original followers grew up on, this is the book that formed the basis of how their world view worked. Jesus Christ was devoutly Jewish. His followers were a Rogue Offshoot of Judaism, steeped in those traditions and that mythology. One of the big kerfluffles of early Christianity, when it was still a heretical offshoot of Judaism, was "how Jewish do people have to be when they join?" Judaism and Christianity broke apart for reasons we don't need to get into here, and eventually the Jewish faction of Early Christianity lost a lot of power to the foreign pagan convert factions.
The Bible comes in two halves, the Jewish half, the Tanakh or "Old Testament" and the "New Testament" or Christian half. Christians use both halves, while Jews do not use or endorse the New Testament. What I'm saying is, that Christians have always been raised on the stories in the Tanakh.
The New Testament takes place in the 1st century CE, which is an incredibly long time after the Babylonian Captivity. Stories like the Flood were simply accepted as historical reality by Christians of Jewish descent that point.
When Greeks and Romans converted, they accepted this worldview as part of their new faith, just as Christians of Jewish descent absorbed traits of Greco Roman paganism (like the concept that there's a whole world of an after life where how you are treated depends on who you were in life, a concept not originally found in Judaism). Once Greeks and Romans became Christians, everywhere in the Empire they went, Christianity went with them. And of course, when Christianity took over as Rome's state religion, to be a part of Rome was to be Christian. Well,according to the ideals of the Roman government, which at this point still held all the cards and shaped Christianity into what suited them best.
To accept a world view and its associated mythology, made being Roman much easier. But Rome did this to everyone, they collected gods and mythologies like baseball cards, then spread them around the world. Christianity was another in a long line of pantheons they mixed and matched. Virtually every ancient world power did this. Sometimes it was on purpose, to pacify an conquered people, but sometimes it just happened as a consequence of trade and travel. Mythologies do not stay put or stay stagnant and to assume they do is very obviously never true when you think about it. If you're seeking some sort of purity in your mythology, free of conquerors and/or outside influence, don't bother.
Anyway, it seems weird to me that anyone would want their religion's mythology to be truly unique. Do you really want to be the weirdo with the stories no one else has, thus drawing accusations of making things up whole cloth? Doesn't it authenticate your stories more if other people are telling versions of it too? Doesn't it more indicate maybe you have something here?
Judaism has a tradition of the "midrash", basically Bible fanfiction. Christianity has something similar, which flourished for centuries before the modern era introduced a strange new kind of literalism.
The New Testament was compiled from letters and first hand accounts that had been constantly copied and passed around in the early Christian community. When it became the official text of this growing faith, it was translated into Latin. But eventually Latin became inaccessible to the average Joe, and an even wider section of the population couldn't really read, period. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the New Testament canon was finally formally codified into the book we've all been using since. During the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation*, some attempts at English translations were made. The population was much more literate by then, so soon people could actually read it from cover to cover. By the 1560s, the Geneva Bible had been produced, the first real complete translation. It was popular with Puritans and came with study guides. In 1611, English speaking Protestants got the (more royalist leaning) King James Version. This version is what many modern English versions are based on.
At this point, Britain had been Christian for centuries and Protestant for over a hundred and thirty seven years. When people talked about the "old religion" they often meant Catholicism, not paganism, or saw them as basically one in the same.
But for centuries, since so many people couldn't read, they'd just make stuff up about the Bible and the history of the saints or they'd add elements into the stories. There are so many pieces of art and literature based on Christian mythological traditions that aren't found in the Bible.
St. Christopher was walking along when he met the Christ Child, who asked to be carried across the river. Thus, Christopher, his name meaning "God bearer", became the patron saint of travelers. During Vatican II** it was discovered that Christopher probably never existed. But people still give travelers St. Christopher medals.
Two other famous examples of people just making stuff up are so famous and beloved everyone forgets they're not official canon. I'm talking about Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. It's also funny that they subscribed to such wildly different versions of Christianity*, yet everyone just nods like "Oh yeah, well, that makes sense" to both and adds them to the same unofficial canon.
Notes
-The term "mythology" is used academically here. It doesn't mean I'm assigning anything as true or false. I'm merely stating that these are stories a group of people believe in.
-The Book of Revelation (NOT plural) is the final book of the Christian Bible. It features the apocalyptic visions of St.John of Patmos. It's a favorite of 20th/21st century American conservative evangelical Protestants and is worth understanding if you want to have a grasp of how they think. Because uh, it's guiding our foreign policy right now.
-The Protestant Reformation was...it was...complicated. A bunch of European countries decided they weren't going to obey the Pope anymore (because they felt the Vatican was corrupt, or in the case of Henry VIII, he wouldn't let them divorce their wife). The Church split and suddenly there were some new churches under the umbrella of "Protestant".
-Vatican II was a major overhaul of Catholic law and canon which was undertaken in the 1960s. The Vatican introduced conducting services in the local language instead of Latin, abolished headcoverings for women during services, loosened up some rules for nuns, ended mandatory meatless Fridays and found like, 500 saints who never existed.
-Milton was a Puritan.
- People from churches founded after 1611, IMO, are more likely to be the ones complaining about "you can't tell the story that way, that's not how it Happened in the Bible". Which is what I mean by "strange new literalism".
"By the waters of Babylon, we lay down and wept"
It refers to someone mourning the brutal loss of their homeland as they remain enslaved in a foreign country. In this case, the Jewish people during the period of Babylonian captivity. The survivors of the Babylonian conquest of Israel were taken away as slaves and POW and forced to assimilate or die. To the Jews, this was akin to an apocalypse (in fact, a lot of the imagery that isn't about Rome in the Book of Revelation* is using Babylon as a metaphor or as a reference its audience was meant to understand very clearly, Babylon remains a popular metaphor for Big Evil throughout the Bible).
The longer the Jews remained in Babylon, the more they were starting to assimilate. The most trusted people were finding positions in the government and military. The children were becoming Babylonians.
Prior to this time, as far as anyone knows Jewish history was mostly oral, but they would have lost a great deal of any information they had stored, when they were taken from their homeland. They realized they had lost, and were losing, their culture. The children no longer understood what it meant to be Jewish. So the scribes decided to create a permanent written record of Jewish history, mythology, poetry and religious law. It took a long time, and a lot of hard work attempting to reconstruct a history of their people while immersed in and influenced by, a foreign, pagan culture but...
This formed the basis of what we now refer to as The Bible. The story of the Flood, and Adam and Eve acquired uniquely Jewish twists and eventually became acknowledged canon scripture.
This is the Bible Jesus and his original followers grew up on, this is the book that formed the basis of how their world view worked. Jesus Christ was devoutly Jewish. His followers were a Rogue Offshoot of Judaism, steeped in those traditions and that mythology. One of the big kerfluffles of early Christianity, when it was still a heretical offshoot of Judaism, was "how Jewish do people have to be when they join?" Judaism and Christianity broke apart for reasons we don't need to get into here, and eventually the Jewish faction of Early Christianity lost a lot of power to the foreign pagan convert factions.
The Bible comes in two halves, the Jewish half, the Tanakh or "Old Testament" and the "New Testament" or Christian half. Christians use both halves, while Jews do not use or endorse the New Testament. What I'm saying is, that Christians have always been raised on the stories in the Tanakh.
The New Testament takes place in the 1st century CE, which is an incredibly long time after the Babylonian Captivity. Stories like the Flood were simply accepted as historical reality by Christians of Jewish descent that point.
When Greeks and Romans converted, they accepted this worldview as part of their new faith, just as Christians of Jewish descent absorbed traits of Greco Roman paganism (like the concept that there's a whole world of an after life where how you are treated depends on who you were in life, a concept not originally found in Judaism). Once Greeks and Romans became Christians, everywhere in the Empire they went, Christianity went with them. And of course, when Christianity took over as Rome's state religion, to be a part of Rome was to be Christian. Well,according to the ideals of the Roman government, which at this point still held all the cards and shaped Christianity into what suited them best.
To accept a world view and its associated mythology, made being Roman much easier. But Rome did this to everyone, they collected gods and mythologies like baseball cards, then spread them around the world. Christianity was another in a long line of pantheons they mixed and matched. Virtually every ancient world power did this. Sometimes it was on purpose, to pacify an conquered people, but sometimes it just happened as a consequence of trade and travel. Mythologies do not stay put or stay stagnant and to assume they do is very obviously never true when you think about it. If you're seeking some sort of purity in your mythology, free of conquerors and/or outside influence, don't bother.
Anyway, it seems weird to me that anyone would want their religion's mythology to be truly unique. Do you really want to be the weirdo with the stories no one else has, thus drawing accusations of making things up whole cloth? Doesn't it authenticate your stories more if other people are telling versions of it too? Doesn't it more indicate maybe you have something here?
Judaism has a tradition of the "midrash", basically Bible fanfiction. Christianity has something similar, which flourished for centuries before the modern era introduced a strange new kind of literalism.
The New Testament was compiled from letters and first hand accounts that had been constantly copied and passed around in the early Christian community. When it became the official text of this growing faith, it was translated into Latin. But eventually Latin became inaccessible to the average Joe, and an even wider section of the population couldn't really read, period. It wasn't until the Middle Ages that the New Testament canon was finally formally codified into the book we've all been using since. During the Renaissance, and the Protestant Reformation*, some attempts at English translations were made. The population was much more literate by then, so soon people could actually read it from cover to cover. By the 1560s, the Geneva Bible had been produced, the first real complete translation. It was popular with Puritans and came with study guides. In 1611, English speaking Protestants got the (more royalist leaning) King James Version. This version is what many modern English versions are based on.
At this point, Britain had been Christian for centuries and Protestant for over a hundred and thirty seven years. When people talked about the "old religion" they often meant Catholicism, not paganism, or saw them as basically one in the same.
But for centuries, since so many people couldn't read, they'd just make stuff up about the Bible and the history of the saints or they'd add elements into the stories. There are so many pieces of art and literature based on Christian mythological traditions that aren't found in the Bible.
St. Christopher was walking along when he met the Christ Child, who asked to be carried across the river. Thus, Christopher, his name meaning "God bearer", became the patron saint of travelers. During Vatican II** it was discovered that Christopher probably never existed. But people still give travelers St. Christopher medals.
Two other famous examples of people just making stuff up are so famous and beloved everyone forgets they're not official canon. I'm talking about Dante's Divine Comedy and Milton's Paradise Lost. It's also funny that they subscribed to such wildly different versions of Christianity*, yet everyone just nods like "Oh yeah, well, that makes sense" to both and adds them to the same unofficial canon.
Notes
-The term "mythology" is used academically here. It doesn't mean I'm assigning anything as true or false. I'm merely stating that these are stories a group of people believe in.
-The Book of Revelation (NOT plural) is the final book of the Christian Bible. It features the apocalyptic visions of St.John of Patmos. It's a favorite of 20th/21st century American conservative evangelical Protestants and is worth understanding if you want to have a grasp of how they think. Because uh, it's guiding our foreign policy right now.
-The Protestant Reformation was...it was...complicated. A bunch of European countries decided they weren't going to obey the Pope anymore (because they felt the Vatican was corrupt, or in the case of Henry VIII, he wouldn't let them divorce their wife). The Church split and suddenly there were some new churches under the umbrella of "Protestant".
-Vatican II was a major overhaul of Catholic law and canon which was undertaken in the 1960s. The Vatican introduced conducting services in the local language instead of Latin, abolished headcoverings for women during services, loosened up some rules for nuns, ended mandatory meatless Fridays and found like, 500 saints who never existed.
-Milton was a Puritan.
- People from churches founded after 1611, IMO, are more likely to be the ones complaining about "you can't tell the story that way, that's not how it Happened in the Bible". Which is what I mean by "strange new literalism".