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This article was published exclusively online in the Christian Research Journal, Volume 48, number 01 (2025).
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Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox alike acknowledge the vital distinction between general revelation (the way God speaks to all people through creation, conscience, and reason) and special revelation (the way God speaks through the Bible, the prophets, and Christ). Because of this distinction, pagan writers who lived before Christ were able to glimpse truths that, though not salvific in themselves, pointed forward to the full and complete revelation of Jesus and the New Testament. Apologists today who wish to reach a postmodern generation who hunger for stories more than facts, metanarratives more than scientific systems, personal meaning more than abstract logic would do well to study the work of Homer, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, and Aristotle. In this essay, I will consider how Greek myth, tragedy, and philosophy contain deeply-planted seeds of truth that reached their full flowering only in the sun of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ.
HESIOD, OVID, AND HOMER ON MYTH
Somewhere around 700 BC, the Greek poet Hesiod wrote two mini-epics, Theogony (“birth of the gods”) and Works and Days. One of the recurring themes in Hesiod, as in all ancient writers who focus on myth, is etiology: the study of why things are the way they are. Two examples of Hesiod’s etiological vision — the first taken from Theogony; the second from Works and Days — are his memorable myths of Prometheus and Pandora.
Prometheus and the Two Adams
Prometheus was a Titan who helped Zeus and the Olympian gods to defeat the Titans and become the rulers of earth, sea, and sky. Prometheus did this because he believed Zeus was a more just and civilized god than his father, the Titan Cronos. Sadly, after Zeus took control and chained the rebellious Titans below hades in the pit of Tartarus, he became as tyrannical as his father, even mistreating the newborn race of men.1
To help the weak and vulnerable humans, Prometheus stole the secret of fire from Zeus and gave it to man. With that fire, man not only protected himself from wild animals, heated and lit his home, and cooked his food, but invented the arts of pottery, woodworking, metallurgy, and glass blowing. Zeus, however, was not pleased by what Prometheus had done, and he punished him by hanging him naked from a cliff. Every morning a terrifying eagle tore out and devoured Prometheus’s liver; every night the liver grew back, only to be devoured again when the eagle returned to indulge his bloody, unquenchable appetite. Eventually, Zeus and Prometheus reconciled, and Zeus sent his son Hercules to kill the eagle and break the chain.
The Christian apologist who reads this myth in search of intimations of the gospel will discover something peculiar: Prometheus is a type of Christ (for he suffers a kind of crucifixion on behalf of man) and of Satan (for he rebels against the supreme God). But that is what we should expect of pagans piecing together great truths on the basis of general revelation. The original spinner of this myth saw both problem and solution. Perhaps led by the true God he saw in the Prometheus who rebels a type of fallen Adam and in the Prometheus who suffers a type of Christ, who is the second (or last) Adam, the one who restores man to his proper relationship with his Creator.
Pandora and the Fall
In the second myth, that of Pandora, we learn more about the Fall of Man, but focusing this time on a female figure who uncannily resembles Eve. Pandora is the first woman, created by the gods and endowed with all beauty, grace, and skill (Pandora means “all gifts” in Greek). The gods married her to the brother of Prometheus, giving her on her wedding day an ornate box which she was warned never to open. But curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she cracked open the lid to peer inside. Immediately, all the evils of life — war, poverty, disease, famine, death — flew out of the box and spread across the earth. She quickly shut the lid, but it was too late. In despair, she bowed her head, only to hear a still small voice calling to her from the bottom of the box. She opened it once again, and hope flew out on fragile wings.
Like Pandora, Eve’s fatal curiosity led her to disobey God and pluck the forbidden fruit. Nevertheless, hope remained. In Genesis 3:15, God prophesies that one day the seed of the snake (Satan) will bite the heel of the seed of Eve (Christ), but that He will, in return, crush his head. Such is the drama of Holy Week, during which God used Satan’s victory at the cross to be the engine by which Satan was crushed under the foot of the risen Christ. And yet, how much more real and tangible is the hope promised in Genesis than the delicate hope that drifted out of Pandora’s Box, but which was finally powerless to defeat the evils of Satan, sin, and death.
Ovid on Adonis
In imitation of Hesiod, the Roman Ovid gathered together the stories of gods and men in his epic Metamorphoses, which he wrote simultaneously with the boyhood years of Christ. The parallels between his myths and the truths of Christianity are numerous, but the one parallel that is most powerful, and most disturbing, concerns a princess named Myrrha, who falls in lust with her father and tricks him into lying with her. When she conceives, she is driven, weeping, from the palace and is transformed into a tree that, like the tears from her eyes, oozes sap.
Out of the tree, the handsome Adonis is born and wins the love of Venus. The lovers live together in peace until the restless Adonis insists on leaving to hunt. Venus begs him to stay lest he be killed by a wild animal — which, tragically, is what happens. Venus holds the dead body of Adonis in her arms and weeps, teaching her devotees henceforth to weep annually for the dead Adonis. But all is not lost, for every spring, Adonis returns to life as a flower — only to die again.
In his myth, Ovid presents Adonis as the offspring of a woman impregnated by her father. This unsettling story reads like a perverse and twisted pagan “prophecy” of Jesus, who was the offspring of a mortal woman (Mary) and God, the Creator, and thus father, of us all. Ovid and Hesiod tell numerous tales of heroes born of human women ravished by Zeus or Poseidon or Apollo. What a difference between these myths of divine rape and the conception of Jesus by which the Holy Spirit placed the seed of Christ in the virgin womb of Mary.
Two more notes about this strange tale. First, the image of Venus holding the dead Adonis in her arms was the model for Michelangelo’s Pietà, and all other paintings or sculptures of Mary’s grief. Second, when the Magi laid their gifts before the true Adonis, one of them gave myrrh, a precious oil taken from the sap of that very tree into which Myrrha was transformed.
The Dying and Rising God
Adonis is one of many dying and rising gods from the ancient world — others include Osiris, Dionysius, Tammuz, Mithras, and Balder — whom C. S. Lewis argued represent pagan foreshadowings of the true myth of Jesus Christ, who died and rose again in a real time and place. “The heart of Christianity,” Lewis explains in his essay “Myth Became Fact,” “is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens — at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle”2 (emphasis in original).
Many atheists use pagan stories of dying and rising gods as proof that Christianity is nothing more than a myth. On the contrary, these stories provide proof that Jesus was not only the Jewish Messiah prophesied in the Old Testament, but the Savior of the world who fulfilled the highest yearnings of the Gentiles. Were those dying and rising god stories not there, it would seem as if a foreign god had invaded the earth. In fact, Jesus, the historical dying and rising god, fulfills both the prophecies of Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53, and the human longings expressed in the myths.
There is a difference, we must remember, between data and the interpretation of data. Data tells us that nearly all ancient cultures preserved a myth of a global flood. Critics of the Bible use that data as proof that the story of Noah is nothing more than a myth, but the data also supports a different reading. If ancient nations around the world all preserved a tale of a global flood, then that strongly suggests that there was a flood. And if that is the case, it is a reasonable inference that whereas the flood was only remembered mythically among the Gentile nations, in the Bible, God inspired Moses to give a historical account of the event.
Just as the existence of numerous flood myths supports rather than deconstructs a biblical faith in a historical flood, so the many myths of dying and rising gods confirm the Bible’s claim that an actual, historical dying and rising God (Jesus) was sent by our Creator to effect in real time and space a real salvation that pagans could only dream of in their myths.
The Heroes of Homer
Though Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey focus on legends — stories that, like those of King Arthur, probably have some basis in history — rather than myths — stories that do not take place in historical time and space — they also explore the struggles of humanity in a world governed by gods. Achilles, the hero of the Iliad, was destined to be the immortal son of Zeus and a sea goddess named Thetis, but Zeus, hearing a prophecy that Thetis would give birth to a son stronger than his father, forced her to marry a mortal man, Peleus. As the son of Peleus, Achilles knows he will die and spends most of the epic raging against his own mortality, leaving death and destruction in his wake. Readers of the Iliad who have the courage to identify with Achilles and his rage will learn much about what it means to be mortal and how best we may live, wrestle, and grieve in a broken world of death.
Odysseus, the protagonist of Homer’s second epic, is a different kind of hero, one who accepts his mortality yet must overcome great odds to return to Ithaca and reclaim his family and his kingdom. To follow Odysseus on his long journey home and to fight alongside him as he defeats the evil men who have been devouring his world is to gain insight into both the first and second coming of Christ. When Odysseus, the messianic king, lands on Ithaca, he must disguise himself as a beggar and endure the jeers and blows of his enemies so that he may save his family. In this, he resembles the humble Messiah who assumed our flesh, lived in humble poverty, and submitted Himself to a painful and humiliating death by crucifixion. But when Odysseys throws off his disguise and kills his enemies, he becomes the reigning Christ who will return in triumph on a white horse, defeat the forces of evil at the battle of Armageddon, and be united to His bride.
AESCHYLUS, SOPHOCLES, AND EURIPIDES ON SCAPEGOATS
It was the Greeks of fifth-century BC Athens who invented the genre of tragedy and linked it to an annual festival held in honor of Dionysus. Dionysus was a dying and rising god in the tradition of Adonis, Osiris, and Tammuz. He was the offspring of a “divine rape,” when Zeus impregnated a mortal woman named Semele. When Zeus’s wife Hera found out, she went to Semele disguised as an old woman and told her that the man who came to her every night claiming to be Zeus was a mortal deceiver. To uncover his deception, Hera whispered in her ear, “make him swear that the next time he comes to you in love he will reveal to you his full glory.”
Zeus begged Semele not to hold him to the oath he had taken to heed her request, but she stubbornly refused. Bound by the oath he had sworn, Zeus revealed to her the fullness of his divine power, and she was consumed in flames. Before she died, however, Zeus removed the unborn child from her womb and sewed it into his thigh. Several months later, Dionysus was born from the thigh of Zeus, not as a mortal hero like Achilles or Hercules but as an immortal god. The dying and rising Dionysus would become the divine keeper of the cycle of the grape: the god of wine, revelry, and ecstatic passion. When his devotees drank his wine, it was as if they were taking the god into themselves. The link to the Lord’s Supper is uncanny!
Scapegoats in Israel and Greece
The dying and rising of Dionysus carried with it a theme that is common to all stories of dying and rising gods: that of the scapegoat. In the Old Testament, God instructed the people of Israel to sacrifice animals as an atonement for sin. Once a year, at Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, the high priest would place his hands upon the head of a goat and ritually pass on to its head the sins of all the people. Then it would be driven into exile, carrying away with it the community’s sins (Leviticus 16:7–10); thus was it called the escape-goat or scapegoat.
In the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, we meet numerous mythic scapegoat figures who point forward to the historical Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world. In one of his earlier tragedies, Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus presents his audience with a tormented Prometheus who remains chained to his rocky cross throughout the length of the play. He takes upon himself, and himself alone, the full wrath of Zeus — who torments him, not only because he stole fire for man, but because he refuses to divulge to Zeus the name of the goddess who will give birth to a son that will be stronger than his father. (In the end, when the two are reconciled, Prometheus tells Zeus that the goddess is Thetis, whereupon, as noted above, Zeus marries her to Peleus, and she becomes the mother of Achilles.)
In his Oresteia, a trilogy of three linked plays, Aeschylus tells how the Trojan War hero Agamemnon was killed by his wife, Clytemnestra, when he arrived back home. In return, Orestes, commanded by Apollo, kills her, his mother. The taboo crime of matricide stains Orestes, and he must flee. After suffering a long penance, Orestes is healed from the religious blood guilt of his crime, only to stand trial before a judge of Athenian citizens led by the goddess Athena herself. In the end, Orestes is acquitted, and vendetta-vengeance gives way to justice and mercy. To crown the victory, the avenging Furies who have spent the last several years chasing down Orestes agree to surrender their wrath in exchange for a new role as guardians of marriage and childbirth. Though Aeschylus had no knowledge of the Old Testament, the reconciliation toward which he moves in his trilogy is profoundly biblical, with iron law losing itself in holy grace.
Oedipus as Supreme Tragic Scapegoat
The Prometheus and Orestes of Aeschylus are timeless scapegoats whose power is still felt today, but it would be Sophocles who would give to the world the greatest scapegoat in all literature: Oedipus. Doomed by fate to commit the two worst taboos, patricide and incest, Oedipus hardly seems a candidate for the role of enduring tragic hero. The fact that he remains so powerful a figure is due to the artistry that Sophocles put into his play, Oedipus the King. What Sophocles does is keep the breaking of the taboos — the killing of his father Laius and the marriage to his mother Jocasta — outside of the play. During the course of the action on stage, Oedipus does not commit the acts but discovers that he has committed them. The distinction is vital, for it transforms a horrible and pathetic story into a celebration of man’s struggle to understand and accept both his dignity and his depravity.
Oedipus’s sins, like those of Adam and Eve, form the backstory to the tragedy. Oedipus can no more escape what he has done than we can escape the original sin we inherited from our first parents. Still, that sin does not obliterate his (or our) inherent value or snuff out the breath of God that gave us life. In the play, we watch with pity and fear as Oedipus overcomes all obstacles to reveal the truth about his birth and his crimes. No one can stop him from his single-minded pursuit of truth: not his brother-in-law Creon, nor his wife-mother Jocasta, nor the blind prophet Tiresias. He will uncover the truth no matter the danger or destruction to himself.
The reason that Oedipus presses so hard to learn the truth is that he takes upon himself the responsibility of healing the plague that has fallen on his beloved city of Thebes. In the end, he takes the full fury of the plague upon himself, choosing, against fate and destiny, to put out his own eyes as a self-punishment for his moral blindness. He literally becomes a scapegoat, to the point of calling on the citizens of Thebes to come forward and touch him — just as the high priest put his hands on the goat’s head in order to transfer on to it the guilt of the community.
Dionysus as Cruel Savior
I said a moment ago that all the tragedies performed in Athens were staged in honor of Dionysus. In his Bacchae, Euripides dramatizes the tragic fate of a scapegoat king named Pentheus whose crime is to resist the ecstatic rites of Dionysus (aka Bacchus) and his wild female followers, who are known variably as bacchae, bacchants, and maenads. Because he will not accept what might be called the “charismatic” ministry of Dionysus, because he scorns the physical and emotional side of life in favor of the spiritual and rational, he ends up, literally, being torn apart by a group of bacchae led by his own mother and aunts.
During the play, Pentheus rejects the sacred wine used to honor Dionysus, blasphemes the godhead of Bacchus, puts a messenger of Dionysus — who, in some strange way, also is Dionysus — in prison, chases down and incarcerates the bacchae as disturbers of the peace, and refuses to allow his citizens to put aside their work so that they might celebrate the gifts of Dionysus. But he cannot stop the person or message of Dionysus. Just as happens in Acts 12:7 and 16:26, the shackles and prison doors Pentheus uses to lock up Bacchus’s followers are shattered. He cannot chain the power of Dionysus’s gospel of love, joy, and freedom.
Dionysus is a savior, but he is a cruel one who drives his enemies mad and then destroys them. Bacchus wins over Thebes, but at the expense of Pentheus’s suffering, humiliation, and death. The parallels between Bacchae and the Gospels are fascinating, but how are we to interpret that data? Some would dismiss the parallels as coincidental; others would decry Euripides’s play as a demonic deception; still others would say the Gospels are nothing more than sophisticated myths. But I would say that the first is the product of general revelation and so catches a real, if distorted glimpse of the truth to come: a pagan shadow of the glory to be revealed in Christ.
PLATO AND ARISTOTLE ON THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH
Of all the pagan writers that God used to prepare the Greco-Roman world for the coming of Christ and the New Testament, the greatest and most influential was Plato. Plato taught his followers to look beyond our shadowy World of Becoming to contemplate the unchanging World of Being. Only in the heavenly realm can one find goodness, truth, and beauty in their absolute and perfect form. In our earthly realm, goodness, truth, and beauty are broken, fragmented into a hundred imitations of the true Forms of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty that exist above. If we are to gain a vision of those Forms, then we must learn to see through the imitations that cloud our eyes and our mind. Heaven, we must come to learn, is more, not less, real than the earth.
Although Plato discusses these two worlds in his philosophical dialogues, it is in his myths, which usually come at the end of his dialogues, that he brings them to life. Indeed, it is when Plato turns from philosophizing to myth-making that he comes closest to the special revelation of Christ and the Bible. For it is in his myths that he sets his psyche (his mind/soul) free to explore truths that lie on the threshold of general and special revelation.
The Allegory of the Cave
The best-known of his myths is the Allegory of the Cave. As Plato explains in Republic VII, we are like prisoners chained to chairs, looking forever forward at the back wall of a cave. Behind us a fire rages, while between the fire and our backs, puppeteers move cutout figures of all the things that exist in the real world outside the cave. The fire casts the shadows of the cutouts onto the back wall, and we, who have been prisoners all our lives, take them for reality.
And then something happens. One of the prisoners is set free from his chains and turns around to see the fire. Though temporarily blinded by the light, his eyes slowly adjust, and he comes to understand the true nature of his captivity. Eventually, he makes his way out of the cave and learns, by slow and painful steps, that the cutouts are themselves shadows of the real things of the world and that the fire is only an imitation of that mighty sun that illumines all. He enjoys the freedom afforded him in the real world outside of the cave, but he also knows that he is dutybound to return and attempt to convince his fellow prisoners of the truth. That he does, but they refuse to listen. Instead, they shout him down, declare him mad, and put him to death.
Plato based his depiction of the man who escapes the cave only to return and be killed on Socrates, his teacher who was put to death by an Athenian jury on the false charges of blasphemy and corruption of the youth. And yet, without knowing it, Plato, I would argue, saw forward to another Man who would bring divine truth to a fallen world, only to be condemned and killed by His own people. Jesus is the supreme Platonic philosopher, for His knowledge rests, not on a journey He made from the World of Becoming (the cave) to the World of Being (the earth outside the cave), but on a much greater journey that He made from the World of Being (the eternal Empyrean, where Jesus was one in nature with God) to the World of Becoming (our earth, where He incarnated Himself as a mortal man confined by time and space and the limits of His body).
What Augustine Learned from Plato
The Western church’s greatest theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo, made his own journey from Plato’s philosopher to the divine Philosopher, Christ, a journey in which the teachings of Plato’s followers represented a real and necessary stage on his road to salvation. In “the books of the Platonists,” Augustine explains in Book VII, chapter 9 of Confessions, “I read…that at the beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God”; however, he “did not read in them that the Word was made flesh and came to dwell among us.”3 To learn that great truth, Augustine had to turn from the general revelation of the Platonists to the specially revealed prologue of John’s Gospel (1:1–18).
As for Plato’s theory of the Forms, Augustine the converted Platonist would find the solution. Plato’s Forms do exist, but they exist, not in the World of Being, but in the Mind of God. That Augustine was correct to find a truth in Plato’s Forms compatible with Christianity is verified by this remarkable passage from the New Testament: “They [the priests in the Jewish temple] serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly things. For when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain’” (Hebrews 8:5 ESV). The pattern is above; the imitation below. Surely Christ, like Plato, calls His followers to lift up their eyes from the copy to the original.
Aristotle on Virtue
If Plato led philosophy upward from earth to heaven, his greatest pupil, Aristotle, brought it back to earth. While early and medieval theologians looked to Plato for wisdom about the true nature of reality, they looked to Aristotle for guidance in the practical realm of ethics. According to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics II, virtue marks the mean between the extremes. Thus, while courage lies midway between its deficiency (cowardice) and its excess (rashness), temperance lies midway between overindulgence (deficiency) and rigid asceticism (excess).
For Aristotle, one judges virtuous behavior, not by measuring it against a single, absolute standard, but by modeling one’s actions on that of a virtuous man who has shown himself able to live in the mean between the extremes. Although this may seem less Christian than Plato’s theory of the Forms, Paul encourages Christians to follow his example (1 Corinthians 4:16, Philippians 3:17, 2 Thessalonians 3:7) and instructs Timothy to be a role model for others (1 Timothy 4:12). The author of Hebrews calls on believers to imitate the faith of their leaders (13:7), while Peter calls on church elders to be worthy examples to those in their flock (1 Peter 5:3).
From Aristotle’s Ethics, by way of Aquinas’s Summa and Dante’s Inferno, Christians learned how to categorize both virtues and vices, including the difference between sins of the flesh (incontinence) and sins of the soul (pride, envy, deceit) — with the latter having a greater propensity to cut us off from God and our true selves. Aristotle initiated a dialogue continued by the church on how vice eats away at our reason and our humanity, while virtue brings true health and happiness. In this area, Aristotle helped correct a major error in Plato: the belief that virtue is knowledge and vice is ignorance. Vice, Aristotle correctly theorized, is vice only when it is committed from a position of knowledge. In fact, the difference between first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and manslaughter so central to Christian legal justice relies heavily on Aristotle’s musings on the link between motivation and guilt in criminal behavior.
From Classical to Christian Virtues
In his dialogue with the ethical thought of Plato’s Republic, Aristotle agreed that the four chief virtues were courage, temperance, wisdom (or prudence), and justice. Christians, accepting gladly the authority of Plato and Aristotle, adopted these four classical (or cardinal) virtues, and then contrasted them with the three Christian (or theological) virtues that Paul highlights in 1 Corinthians 13:13: faith, hope, and love (or charity).
What distinguishes the four cardinal virtues from the three theological ones is the same distinction that distinguishes general revelation from special revelation. Because of their access to the former four, higher pagans like Plato and Aristotle could understand and even practice the classical virtues. However, to understand and practice the latter three, the special revelation of Christ and the New Testament was needed. In his at once Platonic and Aristotelian Divine Comedy, Dante presents his first guide (the pagan Virgil) as an embodiment of the four and his second (the Christian Beatrice) as an embodiment of the three.
Louis Markos, Professor in English and Scholar in Residence at Houston Christian University, holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities; he discusses these issues in greater depth in From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics (IVP Academic, 2007), From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith (IVP Academic, 2021), The Myth Made Fact: Reading Greek and Roman Mythology Through Christian Eyes (Classical Academic Press, 2020), and (forthcoming) From Aristotle to Christ: How Aristotelian Thought Clarified the Christian Faith. His forthcoming Passing the Torch: An Apology for Classical Christian Education seeks to build a bridge between general and special revelation.
- When speaking of hell, the writers of the New Testament either use the word hades, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew Sheol, or the word Gehenna, the valley where the Jewish worshippers of Moloch/Baal sacrificed their own children by passing them through the fire. Only once in the New Testament is the word Tartarus used to describe hell: “God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell [Tartarus in Greek] and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment” (2 Peter 2:4 ESV). I consider this one of the most striking parallels between Greek mythology and the Bible: as if Hesiod, in retelling the myth of the overthrow and imprisonment of the Titans, reclaimed some dim pagan memory of the actual spiritual event referred to by Peter.
- C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), 66–67.
- Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 144–45.