The New Testament and the People of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God Book 1)

by N.T. Wright

The gospels, then, are ‘myth’ in the sense that they are foundational stories for the early Christian worldview. They contain ‘mythological’ language which we can learn, as historians, to decode in the light of other ‘apocalyptic’ writings of the time. But they have these features because of their underlying, and basically Jewish, worldview. Monotheism of the creational and covenantal variety demands that actual history be the sphere in which Israel’s god makes himself known. But this means that the only language in which Israel can appropriately describe her history is language which, while it does indeed intend to refer to actual events in the space-time universe, simultaneously invests those events with (what we might call) trans-historical significance. Such language is called ‘mythological’, if it is, not because it describes events which did not happen, but because it shows that actual events are not separated from ultimate significance by an ugly ditch, as the whole movement of Deist and Enlightenment thought would suggest, but on the contrary carry their significance within them.

The "mythological" language of the Gospels depicts actual events with ultimate trans-historical significance within the Jewish apocalyptic worldview.