jjramsey

The problem I see in Raglan's work is this. He does see some genuine repeating patterns. Many of these are by-products of adding drama and trying to make the hero larger-than-life. For example, having a hero descended from royalty or descended from gods are a couple ways to make him larger-than-life. Point 6 of Raglan's criteria, "at birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or maternal grandfather, to kill him" suggests court intrigue, which fits right into the royalty motif and adds drama. There are of course other ways of making a birth or infancy "special," such as dedicating him to be a nazirite (a la Samson) or making him precocious. Some patterns are somewhat banal and more related to being a royal than a hero, such as point 12, "marries a princess." Point 15, "prescribes laws" is also not unusual for a royal. A royal marrying a princess is hardly unusual. At least one repeating pattern is simply the natural consequence of being a hero, namely point 11, "a victory over the king and or giant, dragon, or wild beast." Heroes, by virtue of being heroes, can be expected to do derring-do, and fighting beasts is hardly unexpected. Going back to point 12, "getting the girl" is not that unusual for a hero, either. However, he then tries to fit these genuine patterns into an overarching pattern, and here is where problems occur. Some heroes have a throne to lose, some don't. Some prescribe laws, some don't. Some are demigods, while others are mortals. Many are merely leaders rather than royals, and some not even that. In some cases, this is resolved by conceding that a point on the Raglan scale doesn't fit. In other cases, this is resolved by interpreting the points loosely, making "royal virgin," "king," "kingdom," and "marriage" into elastic terms.

I've said this before on the thread, but I don't think anyone got it. The problem with mythicists using Raglan's criteria is that the parts of Jesus' purported life that fit it the best are either tacked on or superposed. The virgin birth establishes Jesus as "special," but it is an obvious legendary development. While Jesus is called a king, his actual activities are those of an itinerant prophet. I would not say though that Jesus's life was embellished and reinterpreted to fit the hero archetype as Raglan saw it, but rather that his life was embellished and reinterpreted to make it a cleaner fit to the messianic pattern--which is a hero pattern of sorts.

Amaleq13

None of the above changes the apparent fact that you were reading far too much into the quote to obtain the conclusion. That you appear to be reading too much into this particular criterion as well changes nothing. The fact that Jesus is not the only figure who obtains a score on this criterion as well as the fact that some "stretching" is required to meet the qualification of "royal" argue against your interpretation of the reason for its creation.

jjramsey

Really? Tell me, then, why bother with the "virgin" bit at all when the "royal" part is much more of a common factor while "virgin" fits all the other heroes so badly? (Sorry, lpetrich, but being the firstborn son does not make one born of a virgin.) Actually, the criterion "on a hill" is suspicious as well, since that is suggestive of Golgotha, while the other heroes have their ends on mountains or plains. That is also an iffy criterion that could easily have been left out. Given those criteria, and also that he was working roughly around the same and along the same lines of "myth-ritual" theory as James Frazer, who explicitly did make parallels between pagan myth and Christianity, it is highly unlikely that his scale was constructed without Jesus in mind.

Clivedurdle

I think the evolution is different than itinerant preacher legendary accretion becomes hero.

The starting point is a heavenly Christ who becomes flesh, and this pebble in the pond causes all the accretions of virgin birth, itinerant preacher, hero stuff (is there anything actually original? - love your neighbour is from the pentateuch for example).

The starting point is the hero - the psychological need to have a saviour.

Amaleq13

Yes. I think your specific accusation is not sufficiently supported by the available evidence. Your more general criticism of Raglan, OTOH, appears to me to be directly on target.

I don't know why "virgin" is specified but it fits Romulus quite well and I think it can be assumed for every instance of the child depicted as the first product of a first marriage. I also think "miraculous birth/conception" would collapse three of the categories into one.

jjramsey

I simply don't buy a first-time mother as a "virgin." If this is all Raglan meant, then he chose his words very poorly. If he is trying to use his "royal virgin" criterion to cover both first-time mothers who did not choose celibacy as a vocation and one Vestal virgin who failed to keep her celibacy (namely Romulus' mother), then he is stretching the word "virgin" to cover distinct concepts, which is not good methodology.

GakuseiDon

Thanks for that, Ipetrich. Interesting!

youngalexander

I do not think that this is sufficiently important to get too excited about. For those interested read IQotH pg179-180, and maybe the relevant parts of the introduction. Just one small quote, this is Dundes speaking of Raglan

"Thus it was perfectly all right to argue that Old Testament or Jewish heroes were folkloristic rather than historical. But heaven forbid that a proper member of the British House of Lords should apply this line of reasoning to the life of Jesus! Moses might be folklore but Jesus was history or, to put it another way, Moses was 'false' while Jesus was 'true'."

The quote about Raglan avoiding mention of Jesus re Hero Pattern follows a little after this and was from 1958. Raglan wrote a paper "The Hero of Tradition" in 1934 and the book in 1936.

Then neither is it unreasonable to demand that genealogies be consistent, that the number of angels, or young men or women be the same, or that famous last words are identical. Otherwise there is no consistent 'Jesus Pattern' which is of course precisely what we find.
This is nice to know but irrelevant. The Jesus narratives are folklore. As previously discussed that does not preclude Jesus being an historical character, but it does raise the question as to why he fits the Hero Pattern so well. As Robert Price puts it in Deconstructing Jesus, pg15

"Jesus simply wears too many hats in the gospels - exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure. Today's historical Jesus theories agree in recognising that fact, but they part company on the question of which might be the original core, and which the secondary accretions."

Exegesis is fine, but the salient point as far as the OP is concerned, is that these characteristics of Jesus exist. I shall take this up with your subsequent post.

As a non Greek reader I shall let you take that up with Doherty.
It matters not from whence these 'parts that fit best' arose for the purpose of this discussion. Only that they did. Or, as Dundes says

"the folk repeatedly insist upon making their versions of the lives of heroes follow the lines of a specific series of incidents."

The question then becomes; what lies at the supposed historical core? Is it 'magician, revolutionary, Cynic sage, apocalyptic prophet', marginal Jew, etc, or is it time to recognise that this lack of consensus can only be resolved by myth.
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{'part' of above from DJ, pg 16}

jjramsey

If one is hearing arguments that Jesus is the Christ, the son of the living God, then yes, that is not too much to ask. However, if we are talking a figure on whom there had built up legendary accretions, it is reasonable to expect that those accretions wouldn't necessarily be consistent with each other.

The "hero pattern" has several problems which have been discussed on this thread, most notably ambiguity and circularity (that is, the stories about Jesus being an input to the pattern that fits him). That the stories of Jesus are suggestive of him being a hero at all owe to him being claimed as being a Messiah, which is a kind of hero.

As if any of these hats were contradictory? If anything, prophet and sage and rabbi overlap somewhat.

Actually, if one is using the "hero pattern" as an argument against historicity, it matters immensely. If the parts that fit a sort of "hero pattern" look like accretions, that suggests that people were adding onto a preexisting Jesus in order to make him into a hero.

I'd say that "apocalyptic prophet" works marvelously. It makes sense of broad swaths of evidence and doesn't require much speculation or explaining away of the evidence.

andrewcriddle

One problem IIUC with Raglan's Hero Scale is that Raglan saw Hero Myths as being ultimately about Divine Kingship and the items on his scale tend to be things which can (with some flexibility) be found in many Hero Myths and can (again with some flexibility) be linked to alleged rituals of Divine Kingship.

Hence finding that Jesus Christ, Hercules and Romulus score about the same on Raglan's scale amounts to claiming that they can all equally well be regarded as being about rituals of Divine Kingship.

However, without a prior committal to Frazer's ideas and/or the Myth and Ritual school of mythology one may suspect that none of the above are all that strongly related to Divine Kingship rituals and that Raglan's scale obscures the major differences between the Gospel narratives and Classical Mythology.

One major difference is the important role played by lurid familly drama in Hero stories in Classical Mythology.

Romulus' and Remus' great-uncle tries to kill them as babies and is killed by them later. Romulus then kills his brother Remus.

Hercules kills his children by Megara in a fit of insanity and is eventually inadvertently killed by his wife Deianeira.

This sort of stuff is IMO a central part of the flavour of the great Classical Hero Myths and there is nothing in the Gospel narratives corresponding to it.

Andrew Criddle