New Myth for Old

Stroumsa ends his pre-history of comparative religion scholarship ( A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason , 160) with the observation that during the 19th century “the continuing degradation of the status of the Bible would dramatically weaken interest in the biblical story.” There was a pronounced “wish to look elsewhere than in the Bible for the religious origins of humankind” (163).

The elimination of biblical “myth” did not, however, eliminate mythology from comparative research, nor even an expulsion of “orientalism.” Instead, “new myths took its place . . . that would accompany some of the most ominous transformations of intellectual conceptions in modern European patters of thought” (160).

Specifically:

“Early Greek culture will then be denied any real Near Easter roots. The discovery of the Indo-European (or Aryan) family of languages will lead to the replacement of the old model by a new one, focusing on Indian parallels to the biblical story of the Flood. Rather than the end of the ‘Oriental mirage,’ we should then probably speak of the discovery of new horizons of the Orient with the passage to India. In contradistinction to the seventeenth-century attempts to contextualize the biblical myth, this new trend would offer a real ‘re-mythologization,’ by denying the cultural and historical context of the biblical text any deep significance and looking instead for structural and phenomenological parallels” (160).

Like most of what Stroumsa writes, this is a dense thicket of a paragraph. Let me point to a few of the branches. First, on Stroumsa’s telling, the Bible was not so much disproven as displaced. There was a deliberate effort to discover alternative ways of accounting for the beginnings of the human race. Second, this deliberate marginalization of the Bible blinded scholars to what should have been obvious – that is, the ANE sources of Greek language, art, mythology, and nearly everything else. From Stroumsa’s perspective, we can see just how significant the scholarship of ML West, Walter Burkert, Cyrus Gordon and others is, as they reach back to older scholarship to reconnect what was disconnected in the 19th century. We might even begin to see some point in what may be inflated theses about the “black Athena.”

Stroumsa, finally, shows that from the outset comparative religion scholarship was, like all scholarship, politically fraught. Deleting the ANE contribution to Greece was one part of a program of deleting the Hebraic sources of Western civilization. And if the expulsion of the ANE from its formative place in the development of Western culture helped make modernity, so the ANE’s return from exile will significantly remake modernity.