Biblical Hebrew Forum

["Stoney Breyer" <stoneyb AT touchwoodcreative.com>]

George -

>> James, I think you may be mixing the categories of myth and legend. A 
myth has absolutely no historical basis at all, even though it may be 
trying to explaining something very real. The Greek gods belong to this 
category. Legend, on the other hand, has an historical kernel around which 
an embellished tradition has accrued. The Greek heroes Heracles and 
Odysseus are probably just such 'legendary' figures.

Without prejudice to your rejection of James' Euhemerism, I don't think the 
old myth/legend dichotomy is very useful: it speaks to the accidents of our 
historical knowledge, not to either the historical knowledge of the 
narrator and his audience or any other property of the narrative itself. 
The historical Charlemagne doesn't tell us much that's useful about the 
Chanson de Roland. 

And it opens some very iffy doors. You're willing to postulate a 
'historical' (in some sense) Heracles and Odysseus; will you extend the 
same conjecture to Arthur or Gradlon? How about Siegfried? David and 
Solomon? Samuel? Joshua? Moses? Abraham? Noah?

But it's always fun to watch the discussions of 'myth' and 'history'. I 
anticipate considerable heat and maybe a little light, along the lines of 
Edmund Kean's Lear - "like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."

Stoney Breyer