Interesting. Thanks for your reply.
Someone finally took the time to explain to me what it meant for an ancient writing to be in mythological form. I always fought against this notion because the atheists always said genesis was mythological, but they meant it as in a complete fabrication or fairy tale.
You know, I remember when I was told the exact same thing. I was taking a freshman-level course on Greek mythology, and I remember the professor telling us that "mythical" didn't mean "made-up" or "nonsense"; mythology means illustrating what is
true by way of a story. It really opened mythology up to me, and made me think about art and stories in a new kind of way.
Romeo and Juliet is a kind of mythology, in that it tells us something true about love without being a literally true story. Indeed, you're right to note that ancient peoples would have been very mythologically-oriented; certainly they had a concept of "truth" and "lies", but the idea that history would be something for which there would be "true" or "false" versions of is an idea they would find very alien. (It's also an idea a lot of modern historians find alien.) They would be more inclined to view history as something in terms of
our version and
theirs; that is, they would in part define their communities in terms of being all of the people who tell the same stories about what happened in the past.
Two separate phenomena that could not possibly influence one another were in such PRECISE agreement, I could not possibly maintain my position any further without a total denial of reality.
Well-put.
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