The Bishop

Erm, no. I imagine that a protestant Evangelist might well argue that way against the Catholic concept of the Immaculate Conception, but I am an atheist who was raised a Catholic.

No, my reason for stopping at the Bible is that surely extra-biblical stories about Jesus (the Infancy Gospels for instance, and this concept of how his mother came into the world - though that's just an article of faith rather than a story) can already be counted as myth.

Even if I accept that Jesus's life was not significant in drawing up the Raglan list, one major problem with it is its predilection for dealing with the royal aspects of royal heroes. The trouble with this is that kings in real life frequently had many of those attributes, including being either descended from previous Kings or having overthrown the predecessor King themselves - which is pretty much par for the course for any monarch. The incestuous stories of the lives of the Gods were derived from the incestuous antics of real life Kings (the pharaohs of Egypt being an obvious example). And as I said, royalty accounted for 9 out of 22 of the list items!

Chris Weimer

Er, not necessarily. But even so, are they not also to be analyzed in the heroic sense? What's the point of the list if we don't actually utilize it?

And once again, Jesus was literally a king. He was, if you recall, a descendant of David. And as far as incest goes, I repeated a bajillion times how not every hero had incest. Either there's incest, or there's "familial problems" - you can't have it both ways.

The Bishop

After long thought, I've decided to concede your point.

Chris Weimer

I'm not sure if that's good or bad, considering how much talking out of my ass I've been doing in this thread, but I guess I'll take it.

Also, here's an interesting thread at SVR on heroes.

lpetrich

This makes me wonder how different Xian apologists have taken comparisons to Lord Raglan's Mythic-Hero profile. C.S. Lewis has the odd argument that such similarities indicate that pagan ones are foreshadowings of Jesus Christ, while Justin Martyr had claimed that such similarities were set up by the Devil to keep people from converting to Xianity ("diabolic mimicry").

The Catholic Church has laid down (First Vatican Council Canon 3.4 here) that

If anyone says that all miracles are impossible, and that therefore all reports of them, even those contained in sacred scripture, are to be set aside as fables or myths; or that miracles can never be known with certainty, nor can the divine origin of the Christian religion be proved from them: let him be anathema.

thus claiming the historicity of some of the stuff that gives Jesus Christ a high Lord Raglan score.

J.P. Holding says in Some notes on alleged parallels between Christianity and pagan religion:
Making it much less out of date than the Bible.

Which ones and how do they improve on Lord Raglan's profile?

This is absolutely laughable. Neither leader fits Lord Raglan's profile very well, though they both fit it a bit better than many well-documented people.

He also says,
However, divine biological paternity is a shared element in those stories, even if the mechanisms differ.

Although some heroes do indeed kill their fathers or other such relatives (Oedipus, Perseus, Romulus, Krishna), some don't (Hercules, Moses). Incest is also less-than-universal.

I don't see how that that is cheating, since these profiles are overall averages, and should not be taken absolutely literally. Thus, being a great leader could fit the "king" part. Even so, there's a clear connection between Jesus Christ and literal kingship in the Gospels; Jesus Christ is presented as a successor of King David, and he allegedly claimed to be the king of the Jews.

Most other mythic heroes do not have 100% fits either, and Romulus and Moses depart from this part of the profile by marrying commoners.

lpetrich

Now for Winston Churchill, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Adolf Hitler.

J.P. Holding claimed that WC fit very well, though he did not try to calculate WC's score. I will use his biographical details to calculate it.

1. A slight stretch: 1
2. A slight stretch: 1
3. 0
4. 0
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. Was sent to boarding schools and did a lot of traveling: 1
9. 0
10. 1
11. No triumph over a reigning leader: 0
12. 1
13. 1
14. A bit of a stretch, given the tumult of his career: 1
15. 1
16. 1
17. 1
18. 0
19. 0
20. 1
21. 0
22. 0
His score: 11

Napoleon Bonaparte:

1. A minor aristocrat: 1/2
2. A minor aristocrat: 1/2
3. 0
4. 0
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. He went to military boarding school: 0
10. He moves to France: 1
11. He overthrows the Directorate: 1
12. Josephine certainly qualifies: 1
13. 1
14. His career is one war after another after another: 0
15. The Napoleonic Code: 1
16. Defeats by opponent nations I don't think would count: 0
17. Yes, twice: 1
18. Although the cause of his death is obscure, he had been sick for a few years before: 0
19. 0
20. His children did not succeed him, though a nephew eventually become ruler of France as Napoleon III: 0
21. He was buried, though his remains were moved around: 0
22. 0
Score: 7

Adolf Hitler:

1. Undistinguished ancestry: 0
2. Undistinguished ancestry: 0
3. 0
4. 0
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. 0
10. Goes to Germany after WWI: 1
11. He came to power by first getting some seats in the Reichstag, then exploiting its infamous 1933 fire to get himself additional power: 0
12. He never married, and his longtime girlfriend, Eva Braun, had undistinguished ancestry: 0
13. 1
14. True of the mid-1930's perhaps: 0
15. The Nuremberg Laws: 1
16. His followers stay by his side until overrun by opponent armies: 0
17. He stubbornly holds on to his position to the bitter end: 0
18. He commits suicide: 0
19. In his Berlin bunker: 0
20. He was childless: 1
21. His friends cremated him: 1
22. He has no tombs: 0
Score: 5

lpetrich

Some more scores:

President Abraham Lincoln:

1. Undistinguished ancestry: 0
2. Undistinguished ancestry: 0
3. 0
4. 0
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. We do learn a bit about that: 0
10. He started his political career where his family had moved to (Illinois): 0
11. He beat Democrat Stephen Douglas in 1860, though Stephen Douglas was not James Buchanan's choice as successor: 0
12. His wife Mary Todd came from a slaveowning family: 1
13. 1
14. The Civil War dominated his Presidency: 0
15. The Emancipation Proclamation among others: 1
16. 0
17. 0
18. He was assassinated: 0
19. His theater box was likely elevated: 1
20. 1
21. 0
22. 0
Score: 5

This is a serious version; there is a facetious version which makes him score much higher, but I've been unable to find it online.

President John Fitzgerald Kennedy:

1. Rose Fitzgerald was the daughter of a prominent Boston politician, "Honey Fitz", but JFK was her second child: 1/2
2. Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Sr. was a prominent businessman and political figure: 1
3. 0
4. 0
5. 0
6. 0
7. 0
8. 0
9. 0
10. He started politics in his home town of Boston, Massachusetts: 0
11. He defeated Richard Nixon in 1960; Nixon had been President Dwight Eisenhower's Vice President for his two terms: 1
12. His wife Jacqueline Lee Bouvier came from a rich family with a long history: 1
13. 1
14. His Presidency was rather tumultuous: 0
15. Though he had some ambitious "New Frontier" and civil-rights plans, he had little success in getting them passed: 1/2
16. 0
17. 0
18. He was assassinated by a lone lunatic: 0
19. In his parade car: 0
20. His children were not quite as successful as he had been: 1
21. 0
22. 0
Score: 6

If one takes into account the controversies about his death, that changes (18) from 0 to 1, increasing his total score to 7.

Chris Weimer

What about Caesar Augustus?

Rick Sumner

His biggest problem is that it's arbitrary, how representative of an actual archetype they are depends on how archetypal one views the traits as being.

I could put together another "hero's scale" without much trouble. One that included Luke Skywalker, Dorothy Gale, Superman and Spiderman as high scorers, for example, would be pretty easy to do, and they're pretty diverse characters. For the icing on the cake, one could get George Washington almost as high a score, as long as one compiled the list with Washington in mind.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Rick Sumner

Exactly.

Regards,
Rick Sumner