The Problem of Definition

source  New Testament Interpretation, JDG Dunn  page 287

The basic problem of myth is the problem of definition. There are two
questions here: (1) What is myth? Is the word “myth” a hold-all for a wide
diversity of meanings, or should its use be restricted as a narrowly defined
technical term – clearly marked off, for example, from legend and saga, folk
tale and fairy tale, symbol and analogy? (2) What is the function of myth;
what does myth do? Or, as I prefer to put the question, What is the truth of
myth? Does one remain at the level of explicit statement and story? Or is
the truth of myth implicit – a subconscious and unintended disclosure of the
nature of man and his world?

(1) What is myth? “There is no one definition of myth, no Platonic form
of a myth against which all actual instances can be measured.” 1 The problem
of definition extends back to the original usage of the word pv801;. In
terms of etymology it means simply “word” or “story”. And in early Greek
literature its meaning can range from a “true story”, “an account of facts”,
and so “fact” itself, to an invented story, a legend, fairy story, fable or poetic
creation. But in later Greek thought mythos came to stand in antithesis
both to logos (rational thought) and historia, and so came to denote “what
cannot really exist”. In a western Europe conscious of its Graeco-Roman
heritage it was inevitable that this sense of “myth” should be determinative,
so that in the 19th century “myth” usually meant anything that was opposed
to reality. For the same reason it was probably inevitable that the
term should become attached primarily to the ancient stories of the Greeks
– the stories of Prometheus, Perseus, Heracles, etc. – so that the “classical”
(and still popular) meaning of myth is a fabulous, untrue story about gods
(or demi-gods) set at the dawn of time or in a timeless past.

In the 19th and 20th centuries however the concept of myth has been
thrown back into the melting pot, and its meaning and the precise demarcation
of its meaning are the subject of a vigorous and ongoing debate. In his
recent essay on the subject W. Pannenberg distinguishes three main competing
views.

(a) “Myth” as used by anthropologists and comparative
religionists – that is, myth as a story whose subject is the primal age and
whose function is to provide a basis for the present world and social order in
that primordial time – what M. Eliade calls “archetypal history”. “Myth
narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial
time, the fabled time of the ‘beginnings’.”

(b) Myth as defined originally byC. G. Heyne – myth, that is, as a primitive conceptual form, the “mode of
conception and expression” in the childhood of the human race, exposing
the structure of primitive consciousness as yet untouched by modern
science; such mythical thought has been rendered obsolete by modern
science. As we shall see, it is this concept of myth which has dominated the
debate about demythologizing within NT hermeneutics.

(c) Myth as poetry, myth as belonging to a sphere where it is judged by standards other
than that of its understanding of the world, myth as symbol and drama able
to awake feeling, “invite thought” and evoke response.
When we turn to the problem of myth in the NT we must bear in mind
this diversity of meaning of the word “myth” and not permit any one definition
to determine and answer the problem from the outset.
(2) What is the truth of myth?

The paradox of a word which could mean both “fact” and “invented story” did not escape the Greeks, and the
problem of the truth content of myth was one which tested the finest minds of the ancient world as it does today. Above all we should mention Plato.

Plato was openly critical of traditional myth, though he allowed that the best
of them, even if false  had a value in teaching children~ More important,
he recognized that mythical thought was an indispensable complement
to rational thought (logos). “Myth carries the lines of logos organically
beyond the frontiers of conceptual knowledge . . . It arises when there is
need to express something which can be expressed in no other way.”

In the modern discussion about the truth of myth many answers have
been proposed. The following are probably the most important.

(a) The dominant view among anthropologists at the turn of the century (E. B.
Tylor, J. G. Frazer, etc.) was that myth only tells us something about
primitive man, how he speculated about the heavens and the annual cycle of
nature and fertility, how he handled his fears of the unknown (particularly
death and beyond), how he conceptualized the mysterious in his present experience
(gods, demons, spirits), how he sought to control and manipulate
these powers by ritual magic, and so on.

(b) Closely associated with the first was the view that myth fulfilled a legitimation function: that myth originated
from ritual and its truth lay in legitimizing the cult (W. Robertson-Smith), or
the broader idea of “charter myth” – a story used to assert and justify a
tribe’s rights, loyalties and beliefs and lacking any deeper meaning (B.
Malinowski).

(c) More recently the recognition of the importance of
dreams in psychoanalysis has led to the understanding of myth as the expression
of the subconscious, the archetypal images rising from the depths
of man often drawing on the psychic heritage of centuries and so telling us
something about man as he is. “Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate
stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.” “Myths
are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements
about unconscious psychic happenings.”

(d) Somewhat analogous is the structuralist definition of the French anthropologist C. Levi-Strauss who
holds that the true “message” of myth is nothing to do with content as such;
myth is rather a piece of algebra about the workings of the human mind in
the abstract. Levi-Strauss believes that the structure of all myths is identical
with that of the human mind: human thought is a process of binary analysis;
so myth is a model whereby the binary divisions in society, the contradictions
in man’s view of the world (between village and jungle, male and
female, life and death, earth and sky, etc.) can be resolved and overcome. In
a phrase, myth reveals man striving to create order out of the contradictions
in which he finds himself involved.

(e) A fifth understanding of the truth of myth may be termed the poetic view – myth as the expression of a whole
area of human experience and awareness, of (universal) values and truths,
that can only be presented in symbolic language, what K. Jaspers calls “the
cipher language of myth” – myth as the poet’s awareness of a
“moreness” to life than eating, sleeping, working, loving, without wishing or
attempting to define that “moreness” except by means of evocative images
and symbols. (f) A sixth view is that at least some myth is the expression
of distinctively religious experience, that ultimately myth is not merely
man’s response to what he thinks of as divine, but is itself somehow
revelatory of the divine. Thus “stories about gods” may not always simply
be the expression of primitive, unscientific conceptualization but may rather
in the first instance be the product of religious consciousness, “the vestibule
at the threshold of the real religious feeling, an earliest stirring of the
numinous consciousness”.So too the “which came first?” controversy in
the myth-ritual debate may be wrongly conceived, since the roots of both
myth and ritual may lie in primitive man’s attempts to express an irreducibly
religious experience. Or in Jung’s words.

“No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any
science. For it is not that ‘God’ is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a
divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word
of God.”

The primary problem of myth is therefore the problem of definition. As
we narrow the focus of discussion to the NT, we must constantly ask of
those who postulate the presence of myth in the NT, What kind of myth?
Myth in what sense? Above all we must bear in mind that mythical thinking
can move on different levels: myths as consciously invented stories intended
merely to give pleasure or to serve a legitimation function; myths as
primitive conceptualizations of reality now wholly superseded by the advance
of scientific investigation, though perhaps still retaining a power to
evoke and move particularly by their repetition in the cult; 16 myth as a
veiled window into the reality of man, whether into the structure of his mind
or into the depths of his collective subconscious, or as an expression of his
values and aspirations; 1myth as man’s conscious or unconscious
perception of a “beyondness” in his experience of reality, which comes to
him with the force of inspiration or revelation, which can be expressed only
by means of symbol and image and analogy, and which may neither uncritically
nor unscientifically be taken as prima facie evidence of an ontological
reality which is “larger” and more complex than our scientific investigations
have so far recognized. If myth or mythological thinking is
present in the NT we must not assume that it moves only on one level and
not another, but must always ask, What is the function, what is the truth of
this myth? in each individual instance.