Barry Powell, “Iliad” and “Odyssey” (Oxford, 2014), theorizes that written Greek came into being for the purpose of putting these remarkable oral epics into written form. Some clever people among the seafaring and trading Greeks, and the equally seafaring and trading Phoenicians (who had a consonantal phonetic alphabet), got together to devise a system to…

Richard Miller, comparing the translation narratives of Jesus and Romulus

The text refers to a πνεῦμα πύθωνα (pneuma pythona) which is translated in the NSRV as a “spirit of divination”. This is a reference to “the Python” which was a mythical monster slain by Apollo, and which became used firstly as the title of a famous oracle of Apollo, and then as a general name…

https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/influence-mystery-religions-christianity

Ancient Egypt Investigated: 101 Important Questions and Intriguing Answers (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), Thomas Schneider: Ever since Egyptian texts became widely known in the second half of the nineteenth century, scholars began searching for ancient Egyptian parallels to biblical texts. At first, their goal was to confirm the scripture, while later it was to situate the…

Justin Martyr: “But those who hand down the myths which the poets have made, adduce no proof to the youths who learn them; and we proceed to demonstrate that they have been uttered by the influence of the wicked demons, to deceive and lead astray the human race. For having heard it proclaimed through the…

Aune in his exhaustive commentary on Revelation, draws attention to the probable use of the Hellenistic Isis-Horus myth in the narrative about Jesus’ birth in Revelation 12. This is not entirely surprising since apocalyptic draws on mythological language and themes (as can be seen in Daniel 7 and the Book of Watchers of 1 Enoch),…