{"id":28505,"date":"2015-02-24T11:29:07","date_gmt":"2015-02-24T16:29:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=28505"},"modified":"2015-02-24T11:29:07","modified_gmt":"2015-02-24T16:29:07","slug":"myth-and-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/02\/myth-and-memory.html","title":{"rendered":"Myth and Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

On his blog\u00a0Genealogy of Religion<\/a>, Cris Campbell\u00a0talks about reading Colin Calloway\u2019s book One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark<\/a>\"\". <\/i>The crux of the post can be summed up by quoting Campbell:<\/p>\n

I have no doubt that indigenous oral traditions are remarkable repositories of deep history and ancient knowledge. They are not just, and never were, \u201cmyths.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fields like Biblical studies, the polarization that we often see is detrimental to getting at the truth that lies somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n

Those who insist that the Bible is entirely factual are not being realistic or honest. But those who insist that, because it contains material that is legendary and mythological, it cannot have useful historical information embedded in those same traditions, are being every bit as unrealistic and dishonest, ignoring the evidence of analysis of oral traditions.<\/p>\n

From the Americas to Australia, oral traditions include details that reflect different water levels\u00a0and other weather and climate related details<\/a> which reflect realities as they existed thousands of years ago. See the paper<\/a> that sparked recent articles in The Conversation<\/em><\/a> and The Daily Mail<\/em><\/a> \u2013 the presentation is online on the University of New England website<\/a>.<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t justify the conservative attempts to say \u201cSee, oral tradition preserves accurate information, therefore the Bible is entirely factual.\u201d The same\u00a0oral traditions include details that\u00a0are patently unhistorical. But the other extreme of dismissiveness is also unjustified.<\/p>\n

Accepting that there can be fiction\u00a0and deep history in the same body of stories can be challenging for those who like all-or-nothing answers. But the reality is that the truth, when it comes to the stories that a people group tells, is regularly in between the extremes.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On his blog\u00a0Genealogy of Religion, Cris Campbell\u00a0talks about reading Colin Calloway\u2019s book One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis and Clark. The crux of the post can be summed up by quoting Campbell: I have no doubt that indigenous oral traditions are remarkable repositories of deep history and ancient knowledge. They are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":28763,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[550,898,1140,1947,3339,4646,4660,5141,6452,6559,7261,7845,7857,8451,12954,13600],"class_list":["post-28505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-america","tag-australia","tag-bible","tag-climate","tag-false","tag-historical","tag-history","tag-indigenous","tag-legend","tag-lies","tag-memory","tag-myth","tag-mythology","tag-oral-tradition","tag-true","tag-weather"],"yoast_head":"\nMyth and Memory<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"On his blog\u00a0Genealogy of Religion, Cris Campbell\u00a0talks about reading Colin Calloway's book One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/02\/myth-and-memory.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Myth and Memory\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"On his blog\u00a0Genealogy of Religion, Cris Campbell\u00a0talks about reading Colin Calloway's book One Vast Winter Count: The Native American West before Lewis\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2015\/02\/myth-and-memory.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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