Why Did I Bring Up Greek Myth?

What Henke Responded - up to "Henke2022aa" (with ab and ai looked up in advance, since referred to in previous) · Ah, Some New · Back to Philosophy · Beginning on Henke2022az? Nope. · Why Catalogue the Supernatural? Why Catalogue Fiction? · Henke(2022bi) Starts It Today! But I only get to Henke(2022bk) For Now. · New Batch of Henke Essays · Resuming at Henke(2022bL) after Interruption, up to 2022br. · Why Did I Bring Up Greek Myth? · Historicity of Certain Religious Stories, Notably Genesis

Henke (2022bx): “Lundahl (2022L) Rambles On and Fails to Make Any Mythology Look Believable”

Because I am a geologist, I was actually thinking of Pele, the Hawaiian volcano goddess, when I wrote the bolded sentence in the above quotation from Henke (2022b). Nevertheless, frankly, I don’t care about Mr. Lundahl’s efforts in Lundahl (2022L) to divide questionable and unreliable stories into “divine myths” and “heroic legends.” Unless Mr. Lundahl actually has archeological or other external evidence that demonstrates that any of the ancient characters mentioned in Lundahl (2022L) actually lived, he just might as well be dividing Superman, Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck into his categories.

Total miscomprehension of genre. Iliad, Odyssey, Greek Tragedy cannot be compared to novel writing. Including that of the graphic novels known as comics.

It’s good that Mr. Lundahl does not believe that the god Mars exists or that anything supernatural happened to Francisco Franco when he was in battle. We certainly have good historical evidence that Spanish general and dictator Francisco Franco lived. Sometimes soldiers fortunately escape being wounded or killed in battle. That’s not unusual. My dad fortunately was never harmed by the V1 and V2 rockets that exploded around him during WWII. However, just because Franco lived, that does not mean that we should automatically believe every story about him, no matter how realistic it sounds or how well it might fit into one of Mr. Lundahl’s “historical” categories. Sometimes heroic war stories are just made up. Nevertheless, what does the reality of Franco have to do with the Achilles’ story? Where’s the evidence that Achilles actually lived?

The point with Franco is, Arabs said there was a supernatural reason why he - admittedly historical - was not wounded.

The point with Achilles is, I have no problem believing that:

• he lived
• the supernatural reason of dipping into Styx was a bogus to fan fic expansion of a story like the bogus story of Rif Arabs about Franco.

And the point with Henke is, a normal reader, not put off by rambling, would have had no trouble getting that point. But Henke is a very specific and limited type of reader, one allergic to rambling. Too bad for him he encountered me.

Although it’s certainly possible that someone named Romulus actually lived and was involved in starting Rome, we need to be skeptical of his existence until evidence comes forward to demonstrate that he was not a myth. We also need to carefully separate any possible historical evidence for Romulus from any myths about him.

The point is that the "myth" as given in Livy is the historical evidence.

The parts involving Mars being, obviously, a misunderstanding of the events on some level. Like the Arabs' misunderstanding of Franco or the Achaeans' or Trojans' of Achilles.

The same thing is true about Hercules. Where’s the external evidence that he existed? Why should we automatically believe the stories associated with Hercules any more than Samson in the book of Judges?

We should believe both, and Beowulf as well. Hercules is not restricted to one spectacular text, you have a very prosy text by Eratosthenes which involves the Return of the Heraclids as one of the landmarks of Greek history after the Trojan War. And the spectacular texts are in fact usually not more than average demonic. Apart from obviously theological claims, like being born through Zeus impregnation or getting to Olympus and marrying Hebe from his funeral pyre. Going mad and killing one's children is precisely the kind of thing that the demons could do.

Of the twelve works, only the last two were such that for cosmological reasons we must reject the reality, and the originally agreed number was in fact ten. Hercules could very well have added the last two simply by bragging.

Mr. Lundahl’s “kind of evidence” is totally worthless in separating history from ancient myths. Why should we believe that Moses got revelations from God any more than the groundless stories about Hesiod getting inspiration from Muses?

Hesiod told in the poem itself how it was inspired by the meeting with the Muses, or rather how they sang most of it to him. The one evidence he showed of meeting the muses was being able to write two long poems (Theogony and the more bitter one Works and Days). Attributing such an ability to a gift from the muses was traditional, that's why he gave the Muses that credit. And that traditional attribution is worth as much as attributing Gerbert's comprehension of Arabic Numerals to his having made a deal with the Devil. Which people made in his day.

Moses by contrast parted the Red Sea.

And it is a very remarcable feat for such a story to have not been known to those in his or some given later time, and then to be accepted as normally transmitted history by the successors of that particular time.

Because, unlike the gap between St. Philomena's time and the time when the 19th C. nun had a vision, unlike the gap between the time when Moroni is supposed to have buried the golden tablets and the time when Joseph Smith is supposed to have "recovered" them, there is no time qualitatively comparable gap available from Moses' time to times when we know Moses was accepted as historic. At each point, within the time span, there is at least an account of people believing Moses to be historical. How come?

As I also discussed in Henke (2022b), Mr. Lundahl’s proclamations in Lundahl (2022c) and here in Lundahl (2022L) do absolutely nothing to demonstrate that anything in Genesis is history whether it was given by God entirely through visions (Hypothesis #2 as discussed in Henke 2022a and Henke 2022b) or by arbitrarily dividing Genesis into sections with limited visions from God and the rest supposedly through human transmission (Hypothesis #1).

The division is not very arbitrary.

Even the internal evidence in Genesis and Exodus fails to support Hypothesis #1 as I explained in Henke (2022b). That is, how did Moses know that Aaron was his brother? How did Moses know anything about his family, ancestors or anything that supposedly happened in Genesis when he was supposedly given up for adoption as an infant? Everyone agrees that Moses was not physically there to witness anything in Genesis, if anything mentioned in Genesis ever happened at all.

No, but the implication of accepting Genesis as historical (apart from the facts that are prophetically known) is that Moses had access to histories from back then.

Joseph getting his father to Egypt is just 215 years before the Exodus, that is just 135 years before Moses was born. How do I know the 1830 Revolution leading to Lewis Philip of Orleans becoming King of the French? If you see a very summarised account of me growing up, there is perhaps no actual mention of that being on the history program at school, or of my having an encyclopedia like Nordisk Familjebok ... the point is, how I know this is more likely to be lost than the implication that I know it. Once you admit Joseph, it's hard to stop earlier than Abraham, and Abraham could very easily have had accounts from the protagonists, if they were as short (and therefore as easy to memorise even orally) as the pieces between Genesis 2:5 and his own mention in Genesis 11's latest verses.

Now, the Mormons have a bogus, but simple, chain of custody for the book of Mormon, which is: Mormon à Joseph Smith, Jr. à The public.

Let's fact check the simplicity:

According to Joseph Smith, in 1823, when he was seventeen years of age, an angel of God named Moroni appeared to him and said that a collection of ancient writings was buried in a nearby hill in present-day Wayne County, New York, engraved on golden plates by ancient prophets.

• Moroni was an angel (purportedly), so the claim is prophetic rather than historic
• and the authors had no direct human contact with Joseph Smith, again making it not normally transmitted history.

How exactly do you get a more or less invisible transition (seamless is a word) from a bogus chain of transmission of bogus history to a real chain of transmission of real history? The simple answer is: you don't.

The relevance of Hercules and Romulus to my argument (and I could add Odin in Uppsala, as well as his descendants up to Ingjald Illråda for the Swedish-Norwegian accounts, or Frotho of Denmark) is, they have by learned men been seriously presented as examples of this mysterious process. I don't buy that.

Part of the reasons they would have is the stories are too spectacular. Reality is spectacular. Part of the reasons are, people want origin myths for their nations. USA has not forgotten George Washington and New York has not forgotten Nieuw Amsterdam. Part of the reasons are the few parts of the stories linked to pagan gods actually acting as gods (unlike Odin who acted as a false prophet) - usually, this would be misinterpretation, confer the words about Achilles. Part of it is certain people are shown with a strength that would seem to some "supernatural" - which a) means it begs the question why one would impose naturalistic philosophy as a criterium for historic credibility, except for those who for other reasons believe it; b) foregoes that while the average non-African percentage of Neanderthal genome is 2 %, what is available is 30 - 33 % (forget which) and Neanderthals were stronger. Someone 20 % Neanderthal would be stronger than any other around him not having that percentage. And if they worshipped Zeus as a strong god, they would probably attribute it to Zeus. And part of the reason is, Herodotus doesn't caution the Iliad without reserves - but the thing is, he has no qualms about the Ring if Gyges, and his tactic reason for dismissing the historicity of the Iliad was that Persians were taking its historicity as "Greek agression on Asians" and making this a case for "Asian retaliation on Greeks" - as reason after reason for the present paradigm is refuted, it should go. Which is my reason for using an opposite and older one, including in apologetics. Obviously also defending it against Mr. Henke's blatant prejudice.

Now, false stories or legends often become associated with real people. The Oxford English Dictionary, Mr. Lundahl’s favorite, provides the following definition of legend:

“A traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated; a fable, a myth.”

So, legends are either unreliable or false stories.

This is also a very popular reason for the paradigm: many people accept it already. The entry in OED is only showing that.

The point being: while OED is very reliable about English usage and unlike Merriam Webster gives the British spelling as the standard form, it is not a reliable encyclopedia of factual knowledge beyond the usages of English and of languages from which English borrowed.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
16th Lords Day after Pentecost
25th of September 2022