The Bible among the Myths Quotes

“once a person or a culture adopts the idea that this world is all there is, as is typical of myth, certain things follow regardless of the primitiveness or the modernity of the person or culture. Among these are the devaluing of individual persons, the loss of an interest in history, fascination with magic and the occult, and denial of individual responsibility. The opposites of these, among which are what we have taken to be the glories of modern Western culture, are the by-products of the biblical worldview. As that worldview is progressively lost among us, we are losing the by-products as well. Not realizing that they are by-products, we are surprised to see them go, but we have no real explanation for their departure.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“We can no longer answer the “so what” questions. Reason for what? History for what? Individuality for what? Nature for what? In the absence of these answers we fall back to the pursuit of survival, dominance, comfort, and pleasure.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“History has become historicism, in which we assert that finally we can know nothing about the past except what we make up to serve our own historical fictions. Individuality has become individualism, in which we assert that individual rights come before everything else, with the result that we are each locked in lonely isolation. Nature has become naturalism, in which the cosmos becomes an end in itself serving its own implacable, mindless, and deterministic ends. In many ways Western culture and civilization is playing out The Bacchae again. We can no longer answer the “so what” questions. Reason for what? History for what? Individuality for what? Nature for what? In the absence of these answers we fall back to the pursuit of survival, dominance, comfort, and pleasure.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“from all of this is that contrary to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century delusion, science and logic are not self-evident. They cannot stand on their own. It was not until the biblical idea of one personal, transcendent, purposeful Creator was allowed to undergird them that science and logic were able to be fully developed and to come into their own.5 Without that undergirding, they fall to the ground under a barrage of contrary data, just as Euripides’ pale, rationalistic men fell under the knives of the vital, earthy women. We in the last two centuries have shown the truth of this statement. We have tried to make logic and science stand on their own, and they have begun to destroy themselves.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“So the fact that all of the developed cultures of the ancient Near East worshiped their deity (deities) in temples of similar structure is important, but not essential. What is essential was that there was no idol in the innermost cell of the Jerusalem temple. Today, the situation is turned on its head. Now it is the similarities that are understood to be essentials, while the differences are merely accidentals. What is essential is that Israel worshiped a god, as every other West Semitic religion did. The fact that the Old Testament insists from beginning to end that there is only one being worthy to be called “god” is an accidental.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“But the idea that this world is not self-explanatory and that revelation from beyond it is necessary to understand it is profoundly distasteful to us humans. It means that we are not in control of our own destiny or able to make our own disposition of things for our own benefit. This thought, the thought that we cannot supply our ultimate needs for ourselves, that we are dependent on someone or something utterly beyond us, is deeply troublesome.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?

“What has happened? Rationality has become rationalism. We have made the human mind the measure of all things and the result was a century in which two of the chief accomplishments were Buchenwald and Hiroshima. Rationalism has taught us that there is nothing worth thinking about. History has become historicism, in which we assert that finally we can know nothing about the past except what we make up to serve our own historical fictions. Individuality has become individualism, in which we assert that individual rights come before everything else, with the result that we are each locked in lonely isolation. Nature has become naturalism, in which the cosmos becomes an end in itself serving its own implacable, mindless, and deterministic ends.”
― John N. Oswalt, The Bible among the Myths: Unique Revelation or Just Ancient Literature?