Greek Mythology and Christianity

Essay by mikhelaUniversity, Bachelor'sA, April 2004

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This essay cites works which are included within a book entitled Classical Mythology: Images & Insights by Stephen L. Harris and Gloria Platzner. Published by McGraw-Hill Co. New York, NY 2004. The works used are Theogony and Works and Days by Hesiod, and the stories of Dionysus paralled to Jesus Christ.

Greek Myth and Christianity

Mythology in Greek and Roman history were used to try and explain their surroundings. Because of their lack of scientific knowledge they attributed much of nature, both human and physical, to be controlled by these deities. Whether it was because of ignorance or imagination the stories tell the quasi-history of events that happened in fantastical ways. It is my belief that Greek and Roman Mythology was the catalyst for the establishment of the Christian religion.

It is said that Christianity is a historical religion. But, like myth it is not based on strict historical facts.

There is a history there, but that history has been subjected to a great deal of interpretation and embellishment. One of the first parallels that is evident is the creation as the women as "the catalyst of humanity's cataclysmic decline"(p. 110). Both Pandora and Eve have been used to illustrate how women essentially ruined the good life for all of human kind. Hesiod goes even further in his poems Theogony and Works and Days to say that Pandora, the first women, was created to spite Prometheus and bring hardship for the rest of human kind. As if men couldn't do that for themselves. However, what is often overlooked is the fact that humanity would not even exist without the opening of Pandora's jar.

Another instance of similarities can be seen in the stories of Dionysus and Jesus. Like Jesus, Dionysus is a God in human form, who dies and...