I've been reading - well, listening to the audiobook of while commuting - The Iliad this week. The Biblical parallels are striking, and I'm wondering whether there's really a distinction here at all. Dig it:
* Zeus, son of Cronos, "keeps his gifts to men in two great barrels, one for miseries, one for blessings", and hands them out in response to prayers. Obvious Jehovah/Jesus parallel. When Zeus is in a cranky mood, watch out, he's going to stomp you like the OT Jehovah. Murder In Peckham stuff. But when he's feeling loving, hoo-boy, it's new testament time!
This is an over-simplification of the character of the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible does not relate to people based on just responding to their actions - prayers and sacrifices. The God of the Bible relates to people on His own terms not ours.
* Zeus/Cronos has a whole bunch of lesser deities in wings and flowing robes wandering around doing his bidding. Now I know you're going to quibble and tell me angels aren't "lesser deities", but if you can distinguish the difference you're doing better than me. Heck, Wtf Are Angels?
Angels are not deities. They are not gods. They do God's bidding. His messengers. They are spirits...not ghosts, but an entirely different class of being. Equating angels to lesser deities like the Olympian gods shows he knows nothing about what the Bible teaches about angels.
* If you want to receive favors from Zeus, you have to show up to the usual rituals. Sure, they sacrificed goats and bulls rather than donating pocket change, but the priest game is exactly the same.
In the Bible, sacrifices are offered to God to worship Him for who he is not to get anything from Him. He deserves our worship. No way to equate the two.
* Mortals have free will right up until the time Zeus and friends decide to screw around with fate, whereupon the usual gaggle of miracles and melodramas beset the puny humans. As per any other religion it looks a lot more like humans using gods as excuses for natural disasters and diplomatic lapses than it does the deep planning of superhuman intelligences.
The Bible does not teach that we have free will or that God has to do anything we want the way we want Him to do it. The Bible teaches that God has intervened in time to put every human being who has ever lived and will ever lived in the context that will accomplish the purpose He has...not what we want.
More to come, but you get the point. The game's the same, only the players change.
I sure hope he does better than this.
There's an analogy with the Hindu patheon, too, I think (my ignorance shames me). My limted understanding of the Hindu faith(s) is that there is the cosmic soap-opera style stuff with the extra arms and suprising skin colours and so on, much in the style of the Iliad, but that's really incidental to the serious business of God who is one supereme deity.
I think that is dangerous to think that you can draw really close parallels with classical Hinduism. From what I've studied it just doesn't measure up well. I think you can make a case for Olympian gods paralleling the gods of Egypt because the Greek stole much of their ideas, science, and technology from Egypt. And the Romans got much of their culture from the Greeks.
Interestingly, some classical Greek writers distinguish between the gods and God, too. -- I asked my Latin teacher about this one, and she had said the distinction is something translators typically introduce, but not one present in the original writing. Also note that Zeus is not actually in charge, beyond being the strongest and so first among equals. There are a few powerful Gods - Zeus, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo - who are comparable in strength and so will not go up against each other directly, but instead act through deception.
There is no analogy to this in Christianity. God is one being and alone. No one is greater than He. No one can challenge Him.
Contention alert: I'd also suggest that they way many Catholics behave towards the Saints is very similar to the treatment that "minor deities" get in other systems. In fact, some 'local saints' are actually older gods.
I agree with this statement because I know that is how Voodoo and Catholicism coexist in a lot of cultures as well as some South American cultures. This is how a lot cultures were Christianized but that's not how Christianity as we know it developed but how it has affected other cultures.
Does anyone know how the various Norse gods were supposed to relate to one another? Is Odin (after whom the farm upon which I grew up was named, insignificantly enough) God, while Thor and the rest are merely gods, or what?
Odin and Thor's relationship is close to the relationship of Zeus and say like Apollo - father and son - same as on human standards.
In a nutshell, the ancient greek and ancient norse mythoses are so similar there's no question of their having a common origin. The basic layout of gods is extremely similar - Zeus/Odin, Prometheus/Loki, Apollo/Balder, Hermes/Hermod, and so on. Both explain the origin of the Gods through the lineage of still more fantastic creatures - Gaia and her Titans for the Greeks, and Ymir and his Frost Giants for the Norse.
I don't see how they can be completely common. Norse gods come from the northern Europe and the Olympians from the Mediterranean.
Odin/Zeus aren't necessarily capital-G God to the lesser gods, but they're certainly the fathers and kings of their respective pantheons. Both are the offspring of the elder Gods, who are themselves the result of intercourse between heaven and earth. Mortals are created by miscegenation, and generally considered either recreational fun or an unfortunate nuisance depending on the gods' moods.
Completely unlike the Bible.
The apparent distinction between these mythoses and the judaic God(s) is the notion that the original creator of the universe, rather than her/his creatures, constructs and is vitally concerned with the affairs of humans. In other words, monotheism. But then we have angels and seraphim and messiahs and devils and so on from the woodwork, and it gets higgledy-piggledy again. --Peter Merel
This is a major distinction. And the Judeo-Christian God is one god - not several - angels and seraphim and messiahs and devils are no where on the same level and they are completely subservient to God. He calls the shots.
Actually gods mucking around with people's fates isn't really the way Greeks looked at things. Give me some time to come back to this, because there's a very interesting parallel to be made there.
The Bible does say that God is in control of all's fate. There is nothing that He doesn't know. There is a predetermination before the universe is even created. It's not mucking around....He is the source and deserves all praise and worship.
Iliad Vs Bible
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