Re: OT More pens (was Re: Phoneme winnowing continues)

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

> For the last two, you have solid hard evidence that indeed, the Earth is
> round, and indeed, Octavian was the first emperor of Rome. Christ is
> something else. We did learn at school about the historical character
> Jesus, for the little we know about him, and about the historical
> development of Christianity.
Here's a nice passage from the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye:

# Many fallacies result from the notion that 'a' myth remains buried
# underneath all its later literary developments like a repressed desire.
# We spoke a moment ago of the Samson stories in the Book of Judges, which
# seem cruder and wilder than other stories, like those told of Samuel,
# for instance, in its general vicinity.  We may notice that Samson's name
# resembles early Semitic words for the sun, and that his story tells of a
# supernaturally powerful hero associated with the burning of crops, who
# eventually falls into a dark prison-house in the west.  That the story
# shows structural or narrative analogies to the kind of story that might
# be suggested by the passage of the sun across the sky is true, and no
# storyteller worth his keep would try to eliminate such analogies.  But
# to say that the Samson stories 'derive from' a solar myth or that a
# solar myth 'lies behind' them is to say more than anyone knows.
#
# To use an example I have given elsewhere, anyone writing the life
# of Napoleon might speak of the 'rise' of his career, the 'zenith'
# of his fame, or the 'eclipse' of his fortunes.  This is the language
# of solar mythology, but it does not follow that the story of Napoleon
# evolved from a sun myth.  What follows is that mythical structures
# continue to give shape to the metaphors and rhetoric of later types
# of structure.  The Samson stories are of a very different type from
# that of any conceivable life of Napoleon, but the solar elements in
# them are still metaphorical and rhetorical elements.
        --_The Great Code: The Bible and Literature_

I grabbed this from http://www.members.shaw.ca/kschindler/frye_2.htm ;
http://www.members.shaw.ca/kschindler/frye_1.htm is also very interesting,
on Biblical literalism.

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John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
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