Wonder Woman, Star Wars, and Jesus: The Reality of “Myth”
Another classic from the archive! This article was originally published for Christmas, but the argument works for all Christian festivals, including All Hallows’ Eve. What would it be like to find yourself inside a fairy-story? Would you wear the costume of a saint? I have 1000 words to convince you to celebrate Christmas—or, as one of MILO’s Facebook fans put it, “The Jesus Myth.” Right. I could try to convince you that Christmas is a fully Christian celebration, having nothing to do with supposed appropriations of pagan festivals, but that presumes that you care about celebrating Christmas as Christian in the first place . What I need to do is convince you that the myth matters as a myth . This is not a comfortable thought for many modern Christians, used as we are to the accusation that we worship a fairy-tale sky god. If you are a Protestant, you can blame Rudolf Bultmann (d. 1976), the great German Biblical scholar famous for attempting to “de-mythol