Kimpatsu

That's not surprising. The SW mythos is deliberately based on classical legend (hence Luke and Anakin/Vader, for example). Even the characters in SW have classical names (Lady Jocasta Nu, for example).
And Gilgamesh IS a classical legend.

lpetrich

It's true that there are some differences, like all the soap opera in Greek mythology and the (Greek-inspired?) Romulus and Remus story, soap opera lacking from the Gospels. Let's see about various heroes and family members who try to kill them:

Zeus - his father Kronos
Oedipus - his father Laius
Perseus - his grandfather Acrisius
Hercules - his aunt and mother-in-law Hera
Romulus - his mother's uncle Amulius

But:

Moses - Pharaoh
Jesus Christ - Herod

aren't closely related.

We may also mention

Krishna - his uncle Kamsa

Could that aspect of the Krishna story be inspired by Greek mythology, imported courtesy of Alexander the Great's armies? The way that the Romulus and Remus story may have been?

The story of Siddhartha Gautama, a.k.a. the Buddha, has a curious twist on the murderous-authority-figure motif; instead of trying to kill him, his father King Suddhodana tries to raise him to be his heir, not a great religious leader. And in the Buddha's canonical biography, Suddhodana kept him from being exposed to pain and suffering and misery and death, so he would not stray from the path that Suddhodana had intended for him. But according to that biography, he nevertheless got an eyeful of those no-no sights and he sneaked away to become a great religious leader.

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This brings to mind another aspect of hero stories: prophecy fulfillment.

That is well-known from the Gospels, whose authors try to present Jesus Christ as the prophesied Jewish Messiah. But the Gospels' writers are not exactly alone in that.

When he was born, an oracle revealed that Oedipus would some day kill his father and marry his mother.

King Kamsa learned of a prophecy that stated that his sister Devaki's eighth son (Krishna) will someday kill him.

When the Buddha was born, some prophets revealed that he would either become a great king or a great religious leader.

lpetrich

So what? I don't see how that would detract from Lord Raglan's mythic-hero profile. In fact, that may explain much of LR's profile.

I find it instructive to score well-documented high achievers. I've done that myself with Charles Darwin and JFK, and even under generous interpretations, they do not score very high.

But trying to kill someone as a baby is a rather drastic step, not very typical of court politics.

Again, so what? I don't see how that is a serious detraction.

Yet again, so what?

And yet again, so what? Try looking at the overall profile, and not just individual items; they occur in a sequence.

And as to laws, some of LR's examples had been *big* lawgivers: Romulus and Moses.

The profile is supposed to be somewhat loose, since it is meant to be a sort of "average" mythical hero. Each individual hero will likely be an imperfect fit in some ways.

How do you conclude that such parts were "tacked on" or "superposed"? Is it stylistic evidence?

I don't see how being a wandering prophet distracts from the hero profile, since he was considered a leader by his followers -- and he was supposedly followed around by big crowds.

Except that he was NOT the main input into LR's profile.

And how does that work out?

jjramsey

Killing one's rivals is drastic, but it has been a part of both fictional and real court intrigue for some time. Killing someone as a baby is an exaggerated version of this.

The point is that these things are commonplace enough that they can apply to stories about royals that are otherwise not related.

The overall sequence looks like the events of a generic royal doing generic hero things, plus an indication that this hero was "special" from birth. That is a story sequence that unrelated authors could easily come up with independently.

It's one thing for the profile to be a little loose. It's another thing for the profile to be such that "virgin" and "marriage" and "subjects" to be interpreted so elastically as to be worthless.

The giveaway that the virgin birth was tacked on is that Jesus was Jesus of Nazareth rather than Jesus of Bethlehem. Both virgin birth stories have plot devices to explain how Jesus could be born in Bethlehem but have a hometown of Nazareth. This points to Nazareth being a "fixed point" that predates the birth narratives, which Matthew and Luke are forced to accomodate in their own ways.

I already pointed out that Jesus' royalty is superimposed because while he is called a king, the role that his actions play out is quite different.

But this is the sort of slippery ambiguity that makes the Raglan criteria problematic. You've interpreted "king" so broadly that it can cover a popular itinerant peasant rabbi.

It was enough of an input to introduce two criteria (the "royal virgin" and the "death on a hill") that fit the Jesus of the Gospels well but everyone else dodgily.

It ties together John the Baptist, the parables about the final judgment, his enigmatic use of the "Son of Man" title which looks like an oblique reference to the book of Daniel, and the implications by Jesus and others that the world was expected to end soon.

Kimpatsu

And the big joke is that he wasn't "Jesus of Nazareth", he was Jesus the Nazarene. He belonged to a Rabbinnic sect called the Nazarenes; his birthplace was irrelevant to that.