Parable or Myth?

Parable or Myth? Reflections on Borg’s and Crossan’s Use of Parable

I have been reading the book The First Christmas by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan.¹ I have a small group of people from the church I serve reading the book as we approach Advent and Christmas, 2017. In the book the authors explore the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke. Early in the book they ask a crucial question, namely, what kind of stories are these? They lead up to their answer to that question by positing that for most people today there are only two possible answers to it. The stories can be fact or they can be fable. The assumption behind these two possible answers is that if the stories are not fact they are not true. They use Borg’s categories of “precritical naiveté” and “conscious literalism” to explain why both people who insist that the stories are factually true and those who insist that they aren’t both believe that facts are true.²

Then the authors propose a third way to answer the question of what kind of stories these are. They say they are “parables.”³ They say they base their understanding of the birth stories as parables on the parables of Jesus. No one, they say, claims that the events recounted in Jesus’ parables really happened, and no one thinks the truth of a parable depends on the parable recounting facts, that is, events that actually happened. Everyone, they claim, understands that parables are about meaning not about fact. No one worries about whether there ever was a Samaritan who stopped to aid a victim of a violent robbery on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. Everyone knows that isn’t the point. The point is not did it happen but what does the story mean. Fair enough. No one, or not much of anyone, worries about whether the events in one of Jesus’ parables ever happened.

By calling the stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke parables Borg and Crossan hope avoid the question of the stories’ factuality and to lead readers to ask of those stories not did they happen but what did and do they mean. That is a worthy goal. I can’t tell you how many times I have said to church people don’t ask if this story happened, ask what it means. If calling the birth stories parables helps someone get beyond the question of factuality to the question of meaning that is all well and good.

Yet whenever I read Borg, or Crossan, or the two of them together using words like parable or metaphor (which Borg in particular used a lot) to characterize biblical stories I am brought up short. You see, in using words like those, these two popular authors are intentionally avoiding using the theological term that truly names what these stories are. They are not metaphors. They are not even parables. They are myths.⁴ Myth is the technically correct term for what these stories are. A myth is a story that acts like a symbol. That is, a myth is a story that points beyond itself to God and works to connect us with God. A true myth conveys truth about God and God’s relationship with us by telling a story. A true myth mediates between us and God. It has a foothold in our created reality and in the reality of God and acts as a bridge between those two realities. A myth does not depend on factuality for its truth. It deals in truth far deeper, more important, and more powerful than mere fact. The stories of Jesus’ birth in Matthew and Luke aren’t parables, they’re myths.

And Borg and Crossan consistently avoid using the word myth to characterize any of the stories in the Bible. They do linguistic cartwheels in their efforts to avoid using that word, and it is not hard to understand why they do. There is an enormous problem with using the word myth today to mean something that is in any sense true. That’s because the word myth has taken on another meaning in popular usage. Today when people call something a myth they mean that it is precisely not true. In popular usage a myth is something that someone thinks is true that in fact is not true. Someone says Sasquatch is real. Someone else will deny that statement by saying “that’s just a myth.” They could just say that’s not true. Or they could say you’re lying. But they are also very apt to say that’s a myth, and everyone will understand that they mean the assertion that Sasquatch is real is false. There’s no truth in the statement at all.

I have experienced this difficulty with the word myth first hand. When I was having an adult ed group at the first church I served read the manuscript of Liberating Christianity my use of the word myth in that book was the one thing in it that some of those good folks just couldn’t understand or accept. No matter how many times I told them to use my technical, theological definition of myth not the popular definition they just couldn’t do it. Myth has so come to mean something that isn’t true that asking people today to accept that it can mean instead something that is deeply true may be asking too much. Borg and Crossan clearly think it is asking too much of their popular audience.

None of which changes the fact that the technically correct term for what the birth stories of Jesus are is myth. They aren’t parables because they aren’t introduced as parables and they aren’t little stories that Jesus tells to make a point. They aren’t metaphors because they don’t say a thing is one thing that it isn’t in order to make a point about it, or at least that’s not all they do. They are myths because they tell stories intended to make a point about the divinity of Jesus and other aspects of his life, ministry, death, and resurrection. They are told to connect us with the truth of Jesus’ divinity, a truth that may not be factual but is nonetheless powerfully true. The birth stories in Matthew and Luke seek to convey faith confessions about Jesus in the way the first century Greek and Jewish worlds mostly conveyed deep truth, not by writing theological essays like this one but by telling stories. The fact that general audiences resist this theological meaning of the word myth doesn’t change the fact that the technically correct term for the stories of Jesus’ birth is myth.

So if thinking of the stories as parables, or as metaphors, works for you, OK. I won’t insist that you call them myths. But I hope you understand that that’s what they are. I hope that you understand that Borg and Crossan are avoiding the use of that term not because the term isn’t correct but because they don’t think they could get their large and largely lay audience to understand its technical meaning, a meaning that is essentially the opposite of its popular meaning. And I do find the loss of the technical meaning of the term unfortunate. When we understand the Bible’s stories precisely as stories that do, or at least can, work deep in our souls to connect us with ultimate reality, with our God Who utterly transcends our reality (and that means Who utterly transcends mere fact) we find a depth and power of meaning that only myth can give. That’s what true myth gives us, and no, that’s not an oxymoron. That’s why I so wish we could resurrect the word myth, not that I expect that to happen any time soon.

1Borg, Marcus J. and Crossan, John Dominic, The First Christmas, What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Birth, HarperOne, New York, 2007.

2For an earlier discussion of mine of Borg’s scheme of precritical naiveté, conscious literalism, and postcritical naivete see my Liberating Christianity, Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium, Wipf and Stock, Eugene, Oregon, 2008, pp. 39-41.

3The First Christmas, p. 33

4For a more detailed discussion of the nature of symbol and myth see Liberating Christianity, pp. 23-29.