Ask most people whether there is Greek mythology in the Bible and they will say no. The Bible is a Jewish book. Greek myth is Zeus on Mount Olympus, Odysseus sailing home from Troy, the god Dionysus driving a city mad. The two seem to belong to different worlds.
Then you open the book of Acts and find a crowd calling Paul Hermes. And if you read the Gospels with Homer open beside them, some scenes start to look familiar: a hero asleep in a boat while his crew panics in a storm, a body begged from the enemy and carried off for burial.
So there are two questions. The first is easy to check: Greek gods, words and poets are named in the New Testament. The second is a real argument among scholars: whether the Gospel writers shaped whole stories about Jesus on Greek models.
How Greek got in
The Old Testament grew up among Babylonians and Canaanites, and its echoes of their myths are a story of their own. Greek rule reached the region with Alexander the Great in the 330s BC. Three centuries later, Greek was the shared language of the eastern Mediterranean, and every book of the New Testament was written in it.
Learning Greek meant learning Homer. Children practiced their letters by copying lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and among the school exercises that survive from Roman Egypt, Homer turns up more than any other author. Older students practiced retelling a famous passage in their own words. Imitation was a skill people admired. The best-known example is in Latin: Virgil's Aeneid, written a few decades before Jesus was born, borrows the shape of Homer's two epics to tell the story of Rome's founding.
That is the world the Gospels were written in. The question is how much of it got into them.
The names on the surface
Some of it is in plain sight. In the town of Lystra, in what is now Turkey, Paul heals a man who has never walked.
When the crowds saw what Paul had done, they shouted in the Lycaonian language, “The gods have come down to us in human form!” Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes, because he was the chief speaker. The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice.
Acts 14:11-13
Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes and stop the sacrifice. Later in Acts, the city of Ephesus riots over the goddess Artemis (Acts 19), and Paul sails to Rome on a ship with the Twin Brothers, Castor and Pollux, sons of Zeus, as its figurehead (Acts 28:11).
Paul quotes Greek poets too. In Athens he tells the philosophers, "as even some of your own poets have said, 'For we, too, are his offspring'" (Acts 17:28). The line comes from the Phaenomena of Aratus, a poem that opens by praising Zeus. Paul applies it to the God of Israel. "Bad company ruins good morals" (1 Corinthians 15:33) is a line from the comic playwright Menander, and the letter to Titus quotes a poet from Crete who called his own people liars (Titus 1:12). Whether Paul wrote Titus is its own debate. Most scholars read these quotations the way you would hear someone quote Shakespeare. The line is borrowed for its wording, and the poet's gods stay behind.
Some Greek words came over as well. Hades, the Greek name for the land of the dead, appears ten times in the New Testament, and 2 Peter 2:4 sends sinning angels to Tartarus, the pit where Zeus locked up the Titans in the poet Hesiod's telling. In both cases a Greek name carries a Jewish idea, and how the two fit into the idea of hell is a longer story. The Gospel of John opens with logos, "the Word" (John 1:1), a term Greek philosophers used for the reason that orders the universe. It has Jewish roots too, in a God who creates by speaking, and scholars still debate which background matters more for John.
All of that is Greek vocabulary, and none of it retells a Greek myth. The harder question is about the stories themselves.
Did Mark imitate Homer?
In 2000, Dennis R. MacDonald, a New Testament scholar at Claremont School of Theology, published The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark. He argued that Mark, the earliest Gospel, is a kind of prose epic modeled largely on the Odyssey and the end of the Iliad. In his reading, Mark wanted readers to set Jesus beside Odysseus and Hector and see a greater hero, one who wins by suffering and whose tomb is left empty. MacDonald calls his method mimesis criticism, from the Greek word for imitation.
He does not claim that Mark copied Homer word for word. Ancient imitation changed names, places and details on purpose. So MacDonald set out tests. Could the writer have known the older text? Did other writers imitate the same passage? How many parallels are there, and do they come in the same order? Are there odd details that only the older story explains? And do the differences make sense as deliberate changes?
Three of his examples show how it works.
The storm
Mark tells of a crossing of the Sea of Galilee at evening.
A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion, and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” And waking up, he rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Be silent! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.
Mark 4:37-39
In book 10 of the Odyssey, Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, gives Odysseus a leather bag with the storm winds tied up inside so he can sail home. Within sight of home, Odysseus falls asleep. His crew, sure the bag holds gold, open it. The winds burst out and the storm drives the ships back. MacDonald lines the two up: a hero asleep at sea, a frightened crew, a storm, and a master of the winds. In Homer the crew causes the disaster and the hero wakes to despair. In Mark, the one asleep in the stern is the one the wind obeys.
The man among the tombs
In Mark 5, Jesus meets a man living among tombs, so strong that no chain could hold him. Jesus asks his name.
Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” He replied, “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
Mark 5:9
The demons are sent into a herd of pigs, about two thousand of them, which rush into the sea and drown (Mark 5:13). MacDonald reads the scene against Odysseus's adventures, above all his visit to the witch Circe, who turns his men into pigs. (Matthew tells the same story with two men instead of one, in Matthew 8:28.)
The burial
At the end of the Iliad, Hector, the greatest fighter of Troy, has been killed and his body dragged in the dust. His father, King Priam, goes by night to the tent of Achilles, the enemy who killed him, and begs for the body. The god Hermes guides him there. Achilles gives the body back, and Hector is buried.
In Mark, after the crucifixion, a man appears who has not been mentioned before. Joseph of Arimathea, "a respected member of the council," goes "boldly to Pilate" and asks for the body of Jesus (Mark 15:43). He wraps it in linen and lays it in a tomb. MacDonald reads Joseph as a Priam. For him the difference is the point: Hector stays in his grave, and Jesus's tomb is found empty. In the oldest copies, Mark's Gospel ends a few verses later, with the women running from that tomb.
Euripides and the god of wine
The second writer MacDonald and others point to is Euripides, whose play The Bacchae was first staged around 405 BC and was still well known in Roman times.
In the play, the god Dionysus comes to the city of Thebes disguised as a human stranger. His cousin, King Pentheus, refuses to believe he is a god and locks up both the stranger and his women followers. The prison cannot hold them. The women's chains fall from their feet on their own, and the doors open without a human hand. An earthquake shakes the king's palace. Later the god tells Pentheus that he would do better to offer a sacrifice than to kick against the goads, a mortal fighting a god. Pentheus does not listen, and the play ends with his death.
Acts has some of the same pieces. When Peter is in prison, his chains fall off, and the iron gate opens for him "of its own accord" (Acts 12:10). The Greek word there, automatē, is the one Euripides uses for the women's chains coming loose. When Paul and Silas are jailed in Philippi, it happens again.
Suddenly there was an earthquake so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.
Acts 16:26
And when Paul tells how the risen Jesus stopped him on the road to Damascus, the voice uses the god's phrase.
When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.’
Acts 26:14
A goad was a pointed stick for driving cattle. The notes in The New Oxford Annotated Bible point readers to the Bacchae at both of these verses. They also call the goads line a well-known Greek proverb, meaning it is useless to fight fate. Other Greek writers used it too, so Luke may have known the saying without having the play in mind.
MacDonald later argued that John's Gospel was written with the Bacchae in view, in The Dionysian Gospel (2017). Dionysus was the god of wine, and stories were told of wine appearing at his festivals. In the Greek city of Elis, the travel writer Pausanias reports, three empty jars were sealed in a building overnight during the god's feast and found full of wine the next morning. The first of the signs in John's Gospel is water turned into wine at a wedding in Cana.
When the person in charge tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), that person called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”
John 2:9-10
The case against
Many scholars who have read MacDonald closely are not persuaded, at least about Mark. Their objections are worth knowing.
Mark never names Homer. He never quotes a line of Homer and never uses a Homeric name. Critics point out that ancient imitators usually wanted their model to be noticed, since spotting it was part of the pleasure. No one reads the Aeneid without seeing Homer.
Some parallels are loose. In Homer, the crew causes the storm by opening the bag. In Mark, the disciples do nothing to cause it. A classicist who reviewed the book found some chapters persuasive and others forced, and thought strong and weak parallels were given the same weight.
Stories share shapes on their own. Storms, boats and frightened sailors turn up in sea stories everywhere. A likeness can come from a common situation with no copying at all.
There is a closer model. A prophet asleep below deck in a storm sent by God, while the sailors panic, is the opening of the book of Jonah.
But the Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and such a mighty storm came upon the sea that the ship threatened to break up. Then the sailors were afraid, and each cried to his god. They threw the cargo that was in the ship into the sea, to lighten it for them. Jonah, meanwhile, had gone down into the hold of the ship and had lain down and was fast asleep. The captain came and said to him, “What are you doing sound asleep? Get up; call on your god! Perhaps the god will spare us a thought so that we do not perish.”
Jonah 1:4-6
A psalm praises the God who "made the storm be still" (Psalm 107:29). When Jesus feeds a crowd with a few loaves and there are leftovers, the prophet Elisha had done the same on a smaller scale (2 Kings 4:42-44). Most scholars read Mark first against the Jewish scriptures, which he quotes by name.
Between the two sides there is a middle view. Some scholars think Luke, the author of Acts, knew Greek literature and expected some readers to catch its echoes, as with the goads. One study of the prison escapes in Acts argues that they draw less on any single play than on a story everyone knew: when a new god arrives, the rulers who try to lock him up fail. Whether Mark was built on Homer is the part of the argument that stays most open.
An argument as old as the church
People noticed the likenesses long before MacDonald. Around 150 AD, Justin Martyr, a Christian teacher in Rome, wrote to the emperor that what Christians said about Jesus should not sound strange to Greek ears. Greeks told of sons of Zeus, of Hermes as the word who brings messages from the gods, of Perseus born to a virgin, and of Asclepius, who healed the sick and rose to heaven. Justin's case was that Jesus was greater than all of them, and that the myths were the work of demons.
A few decades later, a Greek critic named Celsus turned the comparison around. The Christian story of a man coming back from the dead, he wrote, was like the old tales of Orpheus, Heracles and Theseus, heroes said to have gone down to the underworld and returned. We know his words only because the Christian scholar Origen quoted them in order to answer them.
Words, and maybe more
So is there Greek mythology in the Bible? The gods are named, by a crowd at Lystra and on a ship's prow. Greek poets are quoted. Greek words carry Jewish ideas: Hades, Tartarus, logos. No Greek myth is retold as a myth. Whether the Gospel writers shaped stories about Jesus on Homer and Euripides, and what it would mean if they did, is still argued.
For further exploration
- Read Mark 4:35-41, then Jonah 1:1-16. If you can, add book 10 of the Odyssey, lines 1-79. List what each story shares with the other two.
- Read Acts 12:6-11 and Acts 16:25-34. Then read the prison scenes in Euripides' Bacchae, lines 434-450 and 576-641. Note what matches and what does not.
- Read Mark 15:42-47. Then read book 24 of the Iliad, and ask what Joseph and Priam each risk by asking for the body.
- Read Acts 14:8-18. Notice what Paul tells the crowd that thinks he is Hermes.
Sources
- Acts 14:11-13; Mark 4:37-39; Mark 5:9; Acts 16:26; Acts 26:14; John 2:9-10; Jonah 1:4-6 (NRSVue)
- Also referred to: Acts 12:10; 17:28; 19; 28:11; 1 Corinthians 15:33; Titus 1:12; 2 Peter 2:4; John 1:1; Mark 5:13; 15:43-46; Matthew 8:28; Psalm 107:29; 2 Kings 4:42-44 (NRSVue)
- The New Oxford Annotated Bible, notes on Acts 14:11-13, 16:26, 17:28, 26:14 and 28:11, 1 Corinthians 15:33, Titus 1:12 and 2 Peter 2:4
- Bart D. Ehrman and Hugo Méndez, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, on the religions of the Greco-Roman world and the gods of Homer and Hesiod
- Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, on the Greek world of the New Testament
- Homer, Odyssey 10.1-79 (Aeolus) and 10.210-243 (Circe), and Iliad 24 (Priam and Achilles)
- Euripides, Bacchae, lines 443-448 (the chains and doors) and 794-795 (the goads)
- Hesiod, Theogony, on the Titans in Tartarus
- Aratus, Phaenomena, lines 1-5
- Pausanias, Description of Greece 6.26.1-2, on the wine at Elis
- Justin Martyr, First Apology 21-22
- Origen, Against Celsus 2.55
- Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (Yale University Press, 2000)
- Dennis R. MacDonald, The Dionysian Gospel: The Fourth Gospel and Euripides (Fortress Press, 2017)
- Robert Rabel, review of The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2000.09.16
- Margaret M. Mitchell, "Homer in the New Testament?" The Journal of Religion 83, no. 2 (2003): 244-260
- Karl Olav Sandnes, "Imitatio Homeri? An Appraisal of Dennis R. MacDonald's 'Mimesis Criticism'," Journal of Biblical Literature 124 (2005): 715-732
- John B. Weaver, Plots of Epiphany: Prison-Escape in Acts of the Apostles (Walter de Gruyter, 2004)
- Raffaella Cribiore, Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Princeton University Press, 2001)
- George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Society of Biblical Literature, 2003)
- Everett Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 3rd ed. (Eerdmans, 2003), on Greek religion and philosophy