08-08-2010, 04:50 PM
Oh don't get me wrong, there's a fair amount of that stuff in the Bible too. But the difference is, Greek popular religion never really got out of that "Old Testament" mindset, if you know what I mean. I don't mean to step on anyone's toes here, but even a lot of Biblical scholars will admit that the OT is the part of the Bible where most of the crazy/unbelievable stuff happens (consequently it is also apparently the only part of the Bible many modern Fundamentalist Christians even take a look at, but that's another topic :mrgreen: ). And that's what I mean when I make the comparison between the OT and Greek religion. Both spring from oral story telling traditions which were integral to the tribes which originally made the stories up, but once they began to be written down and read by other people who may not have had the same attachment to them, it could become silly. Romans seem to have really looked down their noses at the Jews for their crazy mythology (among other things), and vice-versa, and even European Christians in the Middle Ages (and even today) had to use some inventive reasoning to account for some of the more bizarre stories that became part of Christian canon via the Old Testament.
Greek popular religion was similar. One mistake that I think people make though is in assuming that at some point the Greeks and Romans "wisened up" and stopped believing in tales about heroes riding flying horses, gigantic dragon-monsters that breathed fire, a pantheon of gods living on Mt Olympos, etc etc. I mean, you can definitely get that impression from later philosophers, but mind you they were the only ones who wrote treatises down that we still have. In my opinion, the common folk would have believed all the crazy stuff just as readily as Medieval people did the lore about dragons, or modern Christians' clinging to Medieval interpretations of ancient Hebrew lore found in the OT (like say, the Noah story). And besides, the point wasn't that this stuff was still going on; the general belief tended to be that it all happened back in the "Golden Age" which was long past. It is much easier to believe zany stories your grandparents tell you about the distant past than would be if they were purporting to tell the same things as current events
Greek popular religion was similar. One mistake that I think people make though is in assuming that at some point the Greeks and Romans "wisened up" and stopped believing in tales about heroes riding flying horses, gigantic dragon-monsters that breathed fire, a pantheon of gods living on Mt Olympos, etc etc. I mean, you can definitely get that impression from later philosophers, but mind you they were the only ones who wrote treatises down that we still have. In my opinion, the common folk would have believed all the crazy stuff just as readily as Medieval people did the lore about dragons, or modern Christians' clinging to Medieval interpretations of ancient Hebrew lore found in the OT (like say, the Noah story). And besides, the point wasn't that this stuff was still going on; the general belief tended to be that it all happened back in the "Golden Age" which was long past. It is much easier to believe zany stories your grandparents tell you about the distant past than would be if they were purporting to tell the same things as current events
"...atque ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant."
????? ???? ?\' ?????...(J. Feicht)
????? ???? ?\' ?????...(J. Feicht)
