Note: This article is part of a series that will explore the useful concept of frameworks and their applications. Throughout the series, we'll examine how these frameworks influence our understanding of the world, our roles within it, and how they guide our actions and decisions.
In the previous articles in this series, we delved into the immense utility of frameworks in our exploration and understanding of reality and our roles within it. By examining how these frameworks shape our perception and guide our views and actions, we established a foundation for exploring some of the deeper narratives. As we delve deeper into the biblical corpus, my approach is to employ a structured methodology that transcends tribalism, bypassing debates over literal minutiae and sectarian dogma. This aims to foster meaningful dialogue across a broad audience, free from denominational conflicts.
My goal is to highlight the profound meanings within the biblical narrative and attempt to reclaim the essential values that have been discarded, often due to the trivial doctrinal "vanity of small differences," while abandoning the actual deep and eternal meanings, thus cheapening the overall message. This story is the epic of all humanity, and it has largely been commandeered by those who would use a Stradivarius as a doorstop. These values are crucial for the proper functioning of Western society, informing our individual values, making voluntarily better societal ingredients per capita, and undergirding our culture in ways that may not be fully understood until it’s too late.
In exploring stories, we encounter multiple variations on a theme across cultures and within them. The former might be dismissed out of hand as mere adaptation through cross-cultural exposure, but there is importance in the lasting, iterative nature of particular figures, archetypes, and themes in the time-tested story. The stories that made the first century what it was, both Jewish and pagan alike, were the cultural and linguistic bricks used to build a further refined continuation of the refined story – the story of all stories.
Consider that when John the Baptist told of the coming of Christ, he was borrowing from the culture and philosophy of his day. He states in each of the synoptic gospels, as if to convey the importance of the scene, "I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming…He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire" (Luke 3:16). Here, the literal translations of “Holy Spirit” and “fire” from the Greek are pneuma (πνεῦμα) and pur (πῦρ), respectively, meaning breath and fire, as we get the word pneumonia and pneumatic from the former and purify and pyrotechnic from the latter.
In the first century, Stoicism was culturally popular among many, as Zeno of Citium had founded the Stoic school three centuries prior. Its popularity was in peak effect during the events of the story - Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a notable Stoic well after the time of John the Baptist, demonstrating its influence in the 1st and 2nd century AD. The Stoics believed the Cosmos was a living entity, and that what gave it life was pneuma, the breath, and pur, the fire. When John the Baptist made this claim, per the story, the cultural implication to the first century listener was that Christ would baptize with something akin to life at the cosmic scale.
Having established the importance of deep meanings and methods for exploring them, let’s explore the idea that these stories have counterparts in other cultures, reinforcing their archetypal nature.
More than just linguistic exchange across mythos, there is significant repeating of imagery, figures and themes, across differing cultures, across biblical epochs, and within each. An example of the cross-cultural parallels can be found in the story of Perseus. If you have seen the 1981 film “Clash of the Titans”, you’ve seen the particular scene in question, all in stunning Dynamation, by producer Ray Harryhousen.
In this scene, virgin-born Perseus returns from defeating Medusa, the mythical chimera of the serpent and the woman (reminiscent of Genesis 3), by beheading her with a magic sword bestowed to him by the gods. Riding Pegasus, the white winged horse, he arrives on the scene in which princess Andromeda, his betrothed, has been bound to an island rock, having been ceremonially bathed and dressed in white to be offered as a sacrifice to Cetus, the sea monster. The hero removes from a bag the head of Medusa and uses it to defeat the beast by turning it to stone.
Does any of that sound remotely familiar outside the Hellenic context? It should.
In Revelation 19, Christ is depicted riding out of Heaven on a white horse, with eyes like flames of fire (unlike Perseus, who used Medusa's eyes to petrify the beast). He wields a sharp sword coming out of His mouth. He rides to defeat the beast that rises out of the sea, or abyss, to attack the betrothed, or the church, who has been washed in water and been arrayed in robes of white. The church that in chains, is offered as a sacrifice and bound to the rock, Christ himself in betrothal.
In comparing the two deeply iconic stories, it is important to note that the Hellenic myth predates John’s writing of Revelation on the island of Patmos under exile, though the beast rising from the sea is depicted earlier in Daniel 7. This imagery was first found, however, in the Enuma Elish, the ancient Mesopotamian creation myth in which the sea serpent Tiamat’s defeat at the hands of Marduk subsequently creates our world.
What should we make of this? Did John borrow from Hellenic and ancient Mesopotamian concepts in his painting of the end of time? Do each of these stories share other influences lost to antiquity? I don’t presently have an answer to this question. However, given the previous use of Stoic story by John the Baptist to make the point about the nature of metaphoric baptism of life, I take no issue with the notion that John at Patmos might have borrowed from known imagery to paint his own tapestry. I have for many years viewed the book of Revelation not as a predictor of specific literal things to come in a specific time, but of the pattern of the rise and fall of human civilizations for having been corrupted, and the nature of that corruption as a warning to future readers. Revelation also serves as a sort of answer key to the imagery and symbolism in both biblical epochs in a similar algebraic fashion (e.g. stars = angels = lamps) as we have explored in this and previous articles in the series. It is a key that unlocks the mystery.
But within these two stories of Christ and Perseus, all the parallels, the white horse, the magic eyes, the divine sword, the beast rising from the waters, the bride in white offered as a sacrifice having been washed in water and bound to the rock, echo across time and culture. Each of these images has deeper meaning within the biblical context.
The Sword of Truth
There are multiple references to this concept in the biblical text. But like many of the concepts we’ve explored to date, there are often multiple references that combine to paint a larger picture. You’ll recall in the previous installment of this series in which the concept of the Holy Spirit is a representative figure for objective truth, through Christ’s reference to it as, “…even the Spirit of Truth” (Read: Truth=Spirit). This prerequisite is built upon through Paul’s words to the Ephesians to enhance this picture when he refers to “the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God.”
Christ affirms the interchangeability of the words Word, Truth, and Spirit in John’s Gospel, especially during His prayers in the garden before His arrest, following Judas Iscariot's betrayal. In His prayer for His disciples, He says, "Sanctify them through thy truth: thy word is truth." Now Spirit, Truth, and the Word are interchangeable as representatives of objective truth. And Christ himself is included into the equation as, per John 1, “And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.” Christ both references and is referenced as wielding this sword of Truth. The latter, previously referenced, depicts the imagery of the sword coming out of Christ’s mouth. This is confirmation of the nature of the sword, as truth is spoken from the mouth.
The former, Christ’s own reference to the sword with himself as the icon of truth, is found in Matthew 10 when he plainly states,
“Therefore whoever confesses Me before men,him I will also confess before My Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies Me before men, him I will also deny before My Father who is in heaven. Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come toseta man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; anda man’s enemieswill bethose of hisownhousehold. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it.”
Christ introduces the notion that allegiance to Him equates to allegiance to the truth, creating a dynamic where even relatives within a household are set against one another based on their commitment to truth. In the current American era, one cannot help but see this play out when, of all things, the definition of ‘woman’ is broached. The sword separates those willing to twist the language from those who will not.
This conceptual tapestry has many Western derivatives, from Arthurian legend to Harry Potter, though one of the most prominent and explicit forms can be found in Disney’s 1959 classic retelling of Sleeping Beauty. In it, the hero, Prince Philip in his battle with Maleficent is bestowed by the woodland fairies with a shield bearing the symbol of the cross and the sword of truth, with which he ultimately slays the antagonist in her draconic form as the woodland fairy casts the spell, “Sword of Truth, fly swift and sure, that evil die and good endure.” There is no denying the foundations on which this story has been built.
Again, what we are after here is the deep meaning and a refined notion of “how to be” in a given context. Adherence to the truth, as best one can recognize it, above all else, is the injunction from this deep conceptual tapestry as it is your only defense against the dragon, serpent, or beast.
The Beast
In the Old Testament, God sends judgements in the form the sword (war), famine, and pestilence (disease). He continually iterates these judgments, primarily against the children of Israel, though not exclusively. A fourth judgment that is sent is that of the beast. In some iterations, as with the other three, these are literal beasts, as in the story involving the prophet Elisha, where mocking children are attacked by bears as a form of divine judgment. As we have explored previously, the notion that these literal totems or artifacts found in the Hebrew texts have metaphoric counterparts is primarily found in the New Testament. However, metaphor is introduced within the former, serving as an accepted precedent on which the New Testament builds, continuing this established process rather than introducing a wholly foreign concept to the texts. Among the shifts to metaphor in the Old Testament regarding these judgments, famine in particular, the minor prophet Amos provides a precedent for the literal becoming metaphor,
“Behold, the days are coming,” says the Lord God,
“That I will send a famine on the land,
Not a famine of bread,
Nor a thirst for water,
But of hearing the words of the Lord.
They shall wander from sea to sea,
And from north to east;
They shall run to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord,
But shall not find it.”
So too, with the beast as judgment, there is a metaphoric precedent in Daniel, in which the captivity of Israel by a succession of conquering empires is compared to individual beasts. Babylon is represented as a lion, Persia as a bear, Greece as a leopard, and Rome as an altogether different kind of beast with iron teeth. This metaphoric judgment is resumed in Revelation with the notion of the beast as an iteratively sophisticated successor to the previous empires as a “beast of beasts” in the ”king of kings” sense. There is an all-encompassing nature to its rule as “authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation.” This implies influence over the known world in any given era. This implies a sort of tyranny at scale. This beast rises out of the sea, as the four beasts in Daniel were described as doing. John does a little bit of metaphoric decoding for us regarding the meaning of the sea, or waters, "And he saith unto me, ‘The waters which thou sawest, where the whor* sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.’"
So the picture in the biblical version of this shared imagery is a sophisticated telling of the story of tyranny that arises out of the peoples of the world to attack those who value objective truth over all other values. This strikes me profoundly as it tells the story of humanity and human systems. Power is gained, power is then protected, and anyone with the courage to call out the truth in opposition to that power when they see it is to be attacked by that system, from Christ, to Socrates, to Galileo.
Additionally, the imagery of the betrothed having been washed in water and arrayed in white, having been made a sacrifice is a distinct parallel to the metaphors used to describe the Ecclesia, “those called out” (out of what will be explored in future content), described as the bride of Christ by both Paul and John.
This imagery is often used to promote the notion of a literal end of time in a single iteration. To this I invoke the mechanism in the story of the first century Pharisees’ reading of the prophets and their misapprehension of what Christ would be versus the Christ they encountered. I tend to read this as a metaphor about human systems, tyranny, truth, and the catastrophic end to civilizations due to a departure from truth, perhaps repeated ad infinitum, rather than a single end of time. To the spectator on the ground in such tumult, it may as well be the end of time. These stories are rich, complex tapestries that, particularly in the biblical context, provide a roadmap of frameworks for “how to be” in a given context, to include adhering to objective truth in the face of death at the hands of tyranny. This exercise is meant to illustrate the thematic and iconic symbols that are deep in the human psyche and experience. Again, I am writing about this because I fear our departure from them means losing the deeper truth handed to us across time. I fear we will lose some of the better sets of frameworks for navigating reality.
In the next installment in the series, we will explore instances of story that rhyme within the biblical set and further explore the deep meaning these iterative echoes provide. How does the story of Cain and Abel echo in the New Testament to further confirm the picture being painted by reality? Thanks for reading.
Brooks Crenshaw is a writer, columnist, and speaker who focuses primarily on philosophy, economics, and policy while serving as a manufacturing and technology consultant. With a background as a Naval Special Warfare intelligence professional and an economic advisor and Director of Research for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, he holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University.
