Myths and Legends: Does the Bible Tell the Original?

Introduction

In many ancient cultures, you find stories that look like the ones in the Bible. And a good share of our contemporaries conclude: "these Bible stories are myths." How do you answer that? This is the question a member of the Church put to Glenn, preacher at the Église Évangélique Baptiste de Strasbourg, for this message of October 18, 2026.

The Sunday before, he spoke about living by faith, with heart and soul. That morning, he addresses the mind: God also calls us to love him with all our intelligence, to "have a mind enlightened by him."

He takes four elements of the biblical story that many consider legendary: belief in a creator, the creation accounts, the flood and the story of a God who rose from the dead. Then he reflects on the nature of truth. His conviction fits in one sentence: many founding stories contain "a core of truth covered by a heap of rubbish," and the Bible tells the original version.

Outline of the Message

1. Human Beings Love Stories

We love stories: his daughter asks him for one on the tram when he forgets the books, and the family listened to the whole of The Lord of the Rings during the summer trips, 45 hours of recording. From a sermon, what people remember most are the anecdotes.
We also love far-fetched stories. This is the game of telephone: we inflate, we exaggerate, we add details. The older a story is, and the more it is repeated orally, the less we can rely on it.
Every culture has founding legends. Originally from Great Britain, the preacher mentions King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: probably not true, but these stories exalt courage, devotion and sacrifice.
Other stories, like that of Joan of Arc, have a solid core. The difficulty is knowing where the line falls between the legendary version and reality.

2. A Creator God Whom the Peoples Forgot

A theory born after Darwin says that religion evolved from animism to polytheism, then to monotheism. The preacher sees fiction in this: among many so-called primitive peoples, belief rather degenerated toward polytheism.
The Incas believed in a supreme creator, Viracocha, who was said to have entrusted the world to lesser deities. He had been forgotten; they had "lost the way." According to the legend, his last act before leaving this world was to raise a great cross on top of a mountain.
Among the ancient Chinese, some pictograms strikingly echo Genesis: "to covet" is written with two trees and a woman, "to forbid" with two trees and God. The emperor recited a text in which the spiritual sovereign separates chaos and makes the heavens, the earth and man.
In Eternity in Their Hearts, the anthropologist and missionary Don Richardson tells of peoples who were waiting for a lost book that would give access to the creator. A tribe in the Amazon maintained a royal-quality hut for six or seven generations for those who would come.
The Karen people, in Burma, believed in a supreme God named Yuwa and were waiting for a white brother with a book. After Adoniram Judson translated the Bible, the majority embraced the Christian faith, then went on to evangelize the neighboring peoples.
This is not universal; many also rejected the missionaries. But for the preacher, "God leaves traces of his presence in different cultures." Paul, after all, draws on a Greek poet when he speaks of the unknown god in Athens (Acts 17).

3. Darwinism, a Modern Founding Story

The preacher knows he is going to shock people, especially biology students: he places the theory of evolution, as it is told in textbooks, among the founding stories. According to him, our culture dismissed the creator as an outdated idea, "chronological snobbery," to replace him with "faith in blind chance."
Two facts are observable: random genetic mutations and natural selection. But, he says, we do not observe any mutation capable of creating new structures.
His image: we are a living encyclopedia. For scales to become feathers, whole chapters would have to be inserted, coordinated with the rest, by typing at random on a keyboard.
What we observe, according to him, is degradation. As in the breeding of dog breeds, you get more variety but more specialized and more fragile lines. He considers that chance is not enough to explain the variety and complexity of living things.

4. The Flood, an Almost Universal Story

Against a very coherent biblical account, more than 500 flood stories have been recorded on every continent.
The preacher also brings up geology. According to him, the Colorado River is "far too small" to have carved the Grand Canyon, and submarine canyons like the Capbreton canyon begin beyond the mouths of today's rivers, which therefore cannot have carved them. For him, the massive retreat of the waters at the end of the flood explains them better.
The accounts abound: Utnapishtim in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the city of Tiahuanaco built after a flood at 4,000 meters of altitude, the Aztec couple saved in a boat, the Choctaw prophet on his raft, the Aboriginal Australians and the origin of the rainbow, the Chinese brother and sister saved in a chest with a pair of every animal.
The Aztec account mixes the flood and the tower of Babel: "that's a game of telephone." It seems simpler to say that there is "a real core and plenty of variants."
Why would the Bible give the original? First its realism: next to the raft or the cube-shaped boat, only the ark, with its precise dimensions, holds up. Then its overall coherence: the tree of life at the beginning is found again in Revelation.

5. 2 Peter 3: A Deliberate Forgetting

In the translation read that morning, Peter announces that in the last days scoffers will come "who will live according to their own desires." For the preacher, we are there: "everyone does what they want, when they want, with whom they want."
They will say: "Our ancestors have died, and since the world began, nothing has changed." He sees in this the mindset that science calls gradualism, the opposite of catastrophism.
Peter adds that they deliberately forget that God created by his word, that he destroyed the world of that time by the waters of the flood, and that the present earth and heavens are reserved for fire, for the day of judgment.
Believing that everything comes from chance is, for him, being "deliberately blind to a reality." Why do people not want to talk about the flood? Because it is the story of God's judgment on the earth. "Man prefers to be his own judge. But he is not capable of it."
The flood indirectly points to the final judgment to come: we will have to give an account to the creator.

6. The God Who Rose Again: The Original and Its Pale Copies

Some skeptics accuse the Christian faith of borrowing the resurrection from other religions: Dionysus, the phoenix, the Gallic gods who are reborn at the solstice, or Baal, the storm god, whom the Israelites ended up worshiping.
These deities follow the cycle of nature; they die and are reborn every year. The resurrection of Jesus is "a unique, one-time event, impossible to reproduce": a man who passes from a physical body to an immortal body.
For the mystery religions like Mithraism, "the inspiration goes the other way": there is an original, the cross of Jesus, and pale copies that came after. None exists today, because they lacked the power of truth. And truth, Jesus says, sets us free.
C. S. Lewis spoke of the resurrection as a "true myth": a form that seems mythical, but a fact that really happened. For the preacher, the master of the story came "on an undercover infiltration mission among us."
The story of Jesus also joins that of the scapegoat, on whom the fault of others is made to fall: the Dreyfus affair, Oedipus sacrificed to save a city, the mechanism described by René Girard. The expression comes from the Hebrew law. Jesus embodies this universal principle "in a perfect and unique way," and for Christians, something can be both symbolic and historically true.

7. Truth Is Exclusive, and Your Story Matters to God

Behind the question asked hides the idea that all religions say the same thing. But truth is by nature exclusive: something cannot be both true and false. "I really got married. I really have a ring to prove it."
The resurrection is binary: a truth or a lie. Apart from a few eccentric historians, nobody disputes that Jesus existed.
We can never prove everything, but God has revealed enough for us to trust him. "For me, it gives oxygen to my faith." Faith combines the decision to trust with an intelligence that sees it is not incoherent.
To those who do not believe, he asks the question: what if this word were truly for all humanity, "including you"? Faith in man or in chance is not enough.
The Bible contains about 3,000 names, about which we know almost nothing. They are there because they matter to God. Your name too. God's invitation: "write these few lines that make up your life with me." Jesus stretched out his arms on the cross as a sign of total welcome: "it would be madness on our part to reject this creator."

Key Takeaways

The similarities between the myths and the Bible do not prove that the Bible is a myth: they may be the damaged traces of an original truth.
Many peoples kept the memory of a single creator God, whose way they had lost. God left traces of his presence in the cultures.
According to 2 Peter 3, forgetting creation and the flood is a deliberate forgetting, that of a man who prefers to be his own judge.
The resurrection of Jesus is not a cycle of nature but a unique event: the original, not the copy.
Truth is exclusive. God has revealed enough for us to trust him, and he invites you to write the story of your life with him.

Personal Application

Do you love God with all your mind too, or does your faith avoid the questions of the intellect?
Which stories, heard around you, ended up making you doubt the Bible? Have you checked them?
How do you react to the idea of having to give an account to your creator: with fear, with forgetfulness, or with trust in Jesus?
What gives "oxygen" to your faith today?
Are you ready to write the few lines of your life with God, within the great story he tells?

Verses Quoted

Frequently Asked Questions

Do the similarities between the myths and the Bible prove that the Bible is a myth?

For the preacher, it is the opposite. Many peoples keep the memory of a single creator God, and more than 500 flood stories exist on every continent. He sees in this a real core and many variants, corrupted forms of an original truth that the Bible preserved, like a story distorted by a game of telephone.

Why believe that the Bible tells the original version of the flood?

The preacher gives two reasons. First, the realism of the biblical account: next to the raft or the cube-shaped boat of other accounts, the ark has precise dimensions and is the only shape that holds up. Then the overall coherence of the Bible, a single story from beginning to end, in which the tree of life of Genesis is found again in Revelation.

Is the resurrection of Jesus copied from gods who are reborn?

No, answers the preacher. Deities like Baal or Dionysus die and are reborn every year, following the rhythm of nature. The resurrection of Jesus is a unique event, impossible to reproduce. The mystery religions like Mithraism are copies that came afterward, and none still exists today, because they lacked the power of truth.