Reply #51: Lord Raglan's Hero Scale

[okasha]

LORD RAGLAN'S SCALE

Here's something I used to use in my Brit and World lit survey classes. It's a set of archetypes developed by Lord Raglan in his book The Hero, to describe the career of the epic/mythic/romantic hero. (I used it in conjuction with The Lion King, which drove one of my departmental colleagues batshit with the vulgarity of it all, but the students loved it.) It fits Jesus rather neatly, as it also does Oedipus, Moses, King Arthur, Percival and any number of others. Supposedly if a figure scores above 6 or 7, his historicity should be considered in doubt. Unfortunately for His Lordship, though, I get a score of 20 for Richard III--so much for the cut-off percentile.

Now the point here is not that this scale proves that Jesus was not an historical figure; it doesn't. What it does make plain is that the gospel writers followed a well-known archetypal model in telling the story of their hero-king, one that also fits, to varying degrees, such clearly mythical personages as Zeus, Krishna, and others.

1. The hero's mother is a royal virgin
2. His father is a king and
3. often a near relative of the mother, but
4. the circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. he is also reputed to be the son of a god
6. at birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or maternal
7. grandfather, to kill him, but
8. He is spirited away, and
9. Reared by foster-parents in a far country
10.We are told nothing of his childhood, but
11.On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future kingdom.
12.After a victory over the king and or giant, dragon, or wild beast
13.He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and
14.becomes king
15.For a time he reigns uneventfully and
16.Prescribes laws but
17.later loses favor with the gods and or his people and
18.Is driven from from the throne and the city after which
19.He meets with a mysterious death
20.often at the top of a hill.
21.his children, if any, do not succeed him.
22.his body is not buried, but nevertheless
23.he has one or more holy sepulchres.

I prefer this sort of analysis to the star-cult theory, in no small part because the latter has to reach past obvious correlations to others that are much less likely, eg., equating the twelve apostles with the twelve signs of the Zodiac rather than the twelve tribes of Israel. There's also some real problems with the site's assertion that OT and NT were both written in Egypt around 300 BCE. We have OT texts that are clearly older than that, and there are historical details in the NT that would require some real precognitive ability to get into the narrative 350 years before they occurred.