Jonathan Bernier wrote a blog post about how people reacted to an instance of “Ebola-like symptoms” and their failure to recognize that such symptoms did not mean that this was a case of Ebola. He uses this as an illustration of parallelomania – the tendency of mythicists, but also an earlier generation of scholars, to assume that anything that is similar probably shares a genetic relationship.
Doctors know that many illnesses have similar symptoms and yet are not closely related. Scholars know that some elements pop up time and again in human storytelling and symbolism and yet do not depend on one another.
And so just because mythicism has spread virally, and causes some people to get feverish, does not make mythicism an Ebola-like virus.
Click through to read Bernier’s entire post, which offers a helpful treatment of syncretism in relation to ancient Judaism as well as Christianity.
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