Episode Details

Literary scholars such as JR Tolkien and CS Lewis see Christianity as not only the fulfillment of ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the deep-seated yearnings of the human heart, expressed through a multitude of myths and religions.

[this is a re-release from our Archive; Scott was not part of the team at that time]

In previous episodes, we looked at hominids a few hundred thousand years ago acquiring cognitive abilities which equipped them to think abstractly, symbolically, and religiously (episodes #75, #76, #77, and #78 ), which they [we] used to create a long list of religions. We also looked specifically at the evolution of two particular world religions: Judaism (episode #80) and Christianity (episodes #81, #82, and #83).

That sequence of episodes might have misled some listeners to conclude (or think that we ourselves have concluded) that Judaism and Christianity are no different from the many other religions that humans have concocted from large collections of myths. However, some modern literary scholars — including JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis — have concluded that Christianity is separate from all those other myths: in fact, they described it as “True Myth” which not only fulfills ancient Hebrew prophecies, but also the inner yearnings of humans going back tens of millennia, expressed through mythic tales that go back to the dawn of recorded history.

In this episode, we talked to Dr. Louis Markos about what myths are, and how we modern humans in the