Talk:Christian mythology

Conflation of myth with literal untruth
"As examples of Biblical myths, Every cites the creation account in Genesis 1 and 2 and the story of Eve's temptation. Many Christians believe parts of the Bible to be symbolic or metaphorical (such as the Creation in Genesis)."

I think that the second of these two sentences doesn't belong here. As far as I can tell, the second sentence's purpose is to reinforce the point (suggested in the first sentence) that some Christians categorize some biblical stories as "myths." The second sentence works for this purpose only if one assumes that myths are symbolically or metaphorically true as opposed to literally true. But this assumption contradicts one of the major points that Wikipedia editors have tried to make in "[insert religion here] mythology" articles, namely that (in the relevant academic fields) calling a story "myth" has nothing to do with the story's truth or falsity, that a myth is a traditional story, not (as in popular speech) a falsehood. Also, many myths are regarded as literally true by their tellers, so the fact that many Christians regard their stories as symbolically or metaphorically true is irrelevant to whether to classify those stories as myths. --Phatius McBluff (talk) Phatius McBluff (talk) 15:00, 10 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Since no one has objected to my argument above, I will remove the second of the two sentences quoted above. --Phatius McBluff (talk)

Celestial spheres sentence doesn't belong here
Even in the New Testament Paul the Apostle is said to have visited the third heaven, and Jesus was portrayed in several books as going to return from Heaven on a cloud, in the same way he ascended thereto. The official text repeated by the attendees during Roman Catholic mass (the Apostles' Creed) contains the words "He ascended into Heaven, and is Seated at the Right Hand of God, The Father. From thence He will come again to judge the living and the dead". Medieval cosmology adapted its view of the Cosmos to conform with these scriptures, in the concept of celestial spheres.

The last sentence quoted above is problematic for several reasons:
 * It says that the medieval concept of the celestial spheres derives from Christian scripture. This is false. The concept comes from Aristotle and is not mentioned in the Bible.
 * Situated where it is in the article, it implies that the Apostles' Creed is "scripture." Although the Apostles' Creed might function as scripture (by various social-scientific definitions of "scripture") within more traditional forms of Christianity, Christians don't include the Creed among the canonical scriptures.
 * By being included in this article, it implies that the concept of the celestial spheres is a myth. As the article itself explains, a myth (in the sense used here) is a traditional narrative. The theoretical concept, such as that of the celestial spheres, is not a narrative and therefore can't be a myth.

I suggest that the last sentence quoted above be removed from this article. --Phatius McBluff (talk) Phatius McBluff (talk) 15:10, 10 October 2022 (UTC)


 * Since no one has objected to my argument above, I will remove the second of the two sentences quoted above. --Phatius McBluff (talk)

Deletion of "Abrahamic Mythology"
At some point, the article Abrahamic Mythology was deleted and redirected to "Abrahamic religions", which covers an entirely different topic than the prior article did -- the "unofficial" folk myths that sprung up *around* Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, such as the story of the Golem, the Lesser Key of Solomon, or 1001 nights. This article talks about the Christian facet of that to some degree, but mostly seems to talk about the mythological flavor of canonical Christian beliefs and doctrine. Islamic mythology and Jewish mythology also seem to mostly focus on the mythological flavor of "official" beliefs, rather than what the old Abrahamic mythology article spoke about, although Jewish folklore does seem to at least exist.

Am I looking in the wrong places? Is there a better target (or targets) to point people toward to explain the concept of non-scriptural Abrahamic stories? (To be clear, I cannot WP:BOLD on this -- I'm working on a different site where we had been linking to the old wikipedia article to explain a concept outside of the scope of our coverage, and recently learned it had been removed due to someone raising a fuss at us calling characters like Barbatos mythological). Not even Mr. Lister's Koromon survived intact. 01:59, 13 July 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure what you're talking about. As far as I can tell, the Abrahamic mythology page was redirected back in 2009, basically because it was unsourced WP:OR. You might be interested in looking through some categories like Religion in popular culture and Religious folklore   Pepper Beast    (talk)  13:39, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Edited with more detail
I edited the article, adding more detail and explanation of the religion, as this article seems to focus alot on calling it a myth rather than going into detail about Christianity. The edit was reverted though, bc of “POV and original research.” Research is fine on an article, but considering this is Wikipedia, you can’t make a biased article centered around perspective. Sbtoast (talk) 02:09, 25 April 2024 (UTC)


 * The text you added was just generic text about Christianity, not addressing the topic of the article. It was mostly unsourced personal opinion with no citations. Most importantly, the first few paragraphs of an article are supposed to summarise the rest of the article; they shouldn't be an essay on a different topic. "Considering this is Wikipedia" is a good idea: learn about the type of writing required for Wikipedia (using the links that have been posted on your Talk page) and consider that whenever making an edit. Wikipedia isn't for repeatedly publishing your own personal essay on a topic; there are lots of places around the Internet for that. Cheers, MartinPoulter (talk) 18:53, 25 April 2024 (UTC)