Jesus and the Leaven of Salvation

Extract

That there has recently been an eruption of opinion on the nature of myth in the New Testament is scarcely a matter of surprise. For too long we have been content to use words in one context as if they had no significance in any other. The significations of “myth” are legion, and current debate about myth in the New Testment must remain quite pallid until definitions are agreed: which is not something anyone familiar with the history of myth could possibly think imminent. But if “myth” is certainly the most notorious of lightly-used and little-comprehended terms, “symbol” and “metaphor” are no more respectable. Both are related to myth, which speaks typically through received symbols of one kind or another, and which rests upon the imagery of metaphor. Giambattista Vico defined metaphor long ago as “a fable in brief’, and certainly the notion that myth grows out of metaphor, and the related notion that metaphor summarises myth, are both familiar enough to students of literature. And the notion that the literal reading of metaphor in the Bible is the source of much of the mythologising that some now wish to see reversed is familiar enough to students of the New Testament. The difficulties that might be involved in that reversal, however, must give us pause. It is in illumination of some of these difficulties, rather than in any attempt to solve them, that this paper is offered.