The Odyssey Is Hidden Inside the Bible

What do you want with me? Jesus, son of the most high God. In God’s name, don’t torture me. What is your name? My name is Legion, for we are many. What is your name, stranger? My name? My name is Nobody. That is what my parents called me. That is what my friends call me, nobody. This demon episode with Jesus is in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, written somewhere around the year 70 of the common era. The Cyclops episode is in Homer’s Odyssey, book 9, written somewhere around the year 700 before the common era. Eight hundred years apart. Same Greek language yet different hero. Look at what they share. For thirty years, classical scholars at Cambridge, Yale, Oxford, and the Sorbonne have been documenting what your pastor never told you. The Bible, the most influential book in human history, was built on top of the most popular book in the ancient world. Homer, the Odyssey and the Iliad. This summer, Christopher Nolan releases his Odyssey, two hundred and fifty million dollars, the first film ever shot entirely on IMAX 70mm cameras, three hours long. Millions of people are going to sit in those theaters. They are going to watch a story that shaped their religion, and they will not know it. You will. To understand what happened to the Bible, we have to go back further than the Bible, further than even Homer. Four thousand years ago in southern Mesopotamia, a scribe pressed wedge-shaped marks into wet clay. He was writing down the oldest story humans had managed to preserve. A king named Gilgamesh, two-thirds god, one-third mortal, king of the city of Uruk. His best friend dies and the king of Uruk cannot accept it.

He sets out alone. He wanders the wilderness. He becomes a beggar in his own kingdom. He goes to find the one man who has ever escaped death, a flood survivor named Utnapishtim, who lives at the edge of the world. On his way there, Gilgamesh crosses an ocean. He arrives at the edge of the world and there at the threshold, he meets a woman. Her name is Siduri. She is described as an alewife, the keeper of a tavern at the rim of the inhabited world. She lives at the threshold between the living and the dead. She tries to keep Gilgamesh with her. She begs him not to go further. He refuses. He wants the secret of immortality. He crosses the waters of death. He finds Utnapishtim and Utnapishtim tells him, “There is no immortality. Go home.” In December of 1872, a young assistant at the British Museum named George Smith was sitting at a table covered in shattered clay tablets that had been dug up from a buried library in northern Iraq. He was the first person in two thousand years who could read them. And on one of those tablets, Smith found a flood, a man named Utnapishtim building a boat, surviving the wrath of the gods, sending out a bird to find dry land. He had found Noah’s ark written in Babylonian a thousand years before the book of Genesis. Smith reportedly ran around the British Museum reading room shouting, tearing off his clothes from excitement. He had no idea that was only the beginning of what those tablets contained. Eight hundred years after Gilgamesh, on a different shore in a different language, another scribe wrote down another story. A king, he has been at war for ten years. His best friend is dead. He cannot get home. He has lost everything he came with. His ships, his men, his crew. He crosses an ocean. He arrives at the edge of the world. And there at the threshold, he meets a woman.

Her name is Calypso. She lives at the threshold of immortality. She offers it to him. She tries to keep him with her. He refuses. Same story. In 1902, a German assyriologist named Peter Jensen published a paper in the Journal of Assyriology. He argued based on the parallel I just walked you through and twenty more like it that Homer’s Odyssey was built on the epic of Gilgamesh. For most of the twentieth century, the field said Jensen was wrong. The idea that a Babylonian poem from the time of Hammurabi could have traveled across cultures and across a thousand years and shaped a Greek epic, it seemed impossible. And then in 1992, Walter Burket, one of the most respected classicists alive, published The Orientalizing Revolution. And in 1997, Sir Martin West at Oxford published a seven hundred-page book called The East Face of Helicon. The field changed. West argued with a level of linguistic detail that simply cannot be summarized. That Gilgamesh ran like an underground river beneath the Homeric epic. The parallels were too dense. They were too specific. They appeared in the right order. Homer knew Gilgamesh or knew traditions deeply shaped by Gilgamesh. So the line runs like this. Babylon four thousand years ago writes Gilgamesh. Greek-speaking poets twelve hundred years later absorb that material and shape it into Homer’s Odyssey. And then hundreds of years after that, Jewish and early Christian writers absorb Homer and shaped that material into stories that ended up in your Bible. Babylon to Athens to Jerusalem, three thousand years, one literary river. The Odyssey sits right in the middle of it. Now, before we walk through the twelve trials of Odysseus, before I show you what each one did to the Bible, I have to give you one more piece of context, because without it, what you are about to see is going to sound like coincidence. It is not coincidence. In the ancient world, there was no such thing as plagiarism. The whole educational system was built on imitation.

The Greeks called it mimesis. The Romans called it imitatio. Every educated person on the Mediterranean had spent years of childhood copying Homer, rewriting Homer in prose, telling Homer’s stories from different characters’ perspectives. Homer was the textbook. Homer was the curriculum. Homer was the heir. And when the Roman Emperor Augustus wanted a national epic for Rome, he commissioned a poet named Virgil to write one. Virgil wrote the Aeneid. The first half of the Aeneid is a deliberate rewrite of the Odyssey. The second half is a deliberate rewrite of the Iliad. Virgil did not hide this. He signaled it on every page. He wanted his audience to catch the references. Recognition was the point. So the question is not whether ancient writers borrowed Homer. They all borrowed Homer. The question is when biblical writers borrowed Homer, where did they borrow him? That is the question this documentary answers. Twelve trials, twelve obstacles on the hero’s journey home, twelve fingerprints inside the Bible. One honest note before we start. Homer never calls them trials. Homer never says twelve. He tells the wandering straight. Three episodes in book nine. Three in book ten. The descent to the dead in book eleven. Three more in book twelve. Calypso comes earlier in book five. The return to Ithaca runs across the entire back half of the poem. I am grouping it as twelve because that shape, twelve trials, is the shape your mind already knows from the twelve labors of Heracles, the twelve tribes of Israel, and twelve disciples of Jesus. It just gives us a clean map. But the number is mine. The episodes are Homer’s. The story is real. The count is a choice. The first trial begins before Odysseus has even left the war. Troy has fallen. The Trojan horse worked. The city is in flames. Odysseus and his men set sail for home. Twelve ships, six hundred men, ten years of accumulated battle rage, looking for an outlet. And they find one quickly. They land on the coast of Thrace in the country of a people called the Cicones, allies of Troy. Odysseus and his men sacked the city. They take the women. They take the wine. The crew refuses to leave. I sacked the city, killed the men, and shared their wives among us. I told my men should be quick and go away, but they were fools. They would not listen. They drink a lot of wine. And on the beach, they killed off many sheep and many shambling, twisty-horned, hardworking cattle. While the crew is drunk on the beach, the Cicones gathered reinforcements. They counterattack at dawn. Seventy-two of Odysseus’s men are killed before he can get them back to the ships. This is the first trial. It tells you what the Odyssey is going to be about. Odysseus is a man of cunning, a man of restraint, a man who knows when to leave. His crew is not. Again and again, his men will be the thing that destroys him. They are greedy. They are shortsighted. They are cowardly. They are stupid. By the time the Odyssey is finished, every single one of them will be dead. If you have read the Gospel of Mark, this pattern is going to start feeling familiar. Because Mark’s Jesus is constantly surrounded by twelve men who do not understand him, who cannot stay awake when he needs them, who deny him at the critical moment, who when the soldiers come, every single one of them runs.

Mark scholar Dennis R. MacDonald of the Claremont School of Theology has pointed out Odysseus’s crew and Jesus’s disciples serve the same function in their stories. They exist to make the hero look better. By contrast, they exist to fail. They exist because the hero is trying to teach them something they cannot yet understand. Hold on to that. We get to see that again later. Odysseus loses seventy-two men at the Cicones. He has not even left the coast of Asia. The real journey has not yet begun. Nine days of storm. Nine days the crew is lost. On the tenth day, the wind drops them on a quiet shore. The people there are not hostile. They are not warriors. They eat a flower and the flower changes them. Whoever ate the honey-sweet fruit of the lotus had no longing to return to give us news or sail back to his country. Sweet lotus-eating made them want to stay forever, never come back, lose their memory. Three of Odysseus’s men go ashore. They eat the lotus. They forget who they are. They forget why they were ever trying to go home. Odysseus has to drag them back to the ships in chains. This is what the Odyssey is about. It is not really about adventure. It is not really about heroism. It is about memory. It is about the danger of a paradise that makes you forget where you came from. Odysseus refuses to forget. Every time he is offered an easier life, every time someone says, “Stay here. Eat the fruit. Take the pleasure.” Forget the journey. He refuses. Now ask yourself something. What is the very first story in the Bible about? A garden where there is no labor, no death, no shame. A fruit you are told not to eat. And the moment you eat it, something happens to you that you cannot undo. You are not just guilty. You are awake. You see what you could not see before. And you can never go back. This is not a one-to-one rewrite. The lotus eaters are not Eden. Not yet. But the pattern is there. The hero arrives at a place where the people have forgotten their origins. He either resists the forgetting or he does not. Hold that in your head. In ten trials, when we get to Calypso’s Island, this pattern is going to return. And the parallel to Eden is going to be obvious. For now, Odysseus drags his men back to the ships. He sails on. The next island is the one that changes everything. They see the island from the ship. It is uninhabited or it seems uninhabited. They go ashore. They find a cave. The cave is full of cheese, full of milk, full of sheep. They light a fire and they begin to eat. And the owner of the cave comes home. He was a savage, lawless creature, no farmer, no shepherd. He was huge and strange. Not a man who eats bread. He was like a wooded mountain peak high above the others. The Cyclops, a giant, one eye in the middle of his forehead. He herds his sheep into the cave. He rolls a stone across the entrance, a stone so large that no human strength could move it. He sees that there are men in his cave. He picks two of them up by their feet. He smashes their heads against the floor. He eats them raw. Odysseus’s men are trapped. They cannot move the stone. They cannot kill the Cyclops. If they kill him, they will be sealed inside the cave forever.

So Odysseus does what Odysseus does. He uses his mind. He offers the Cyclops wine. The wine is dark and strong and a gift from the priest of Apollo. The Cyclops drinks. He drinks more. He gets drunk. And then the Cyclops asks Odysseus his name. Listen very carefully because what Odysseus says next is going to matter in just a minute. Cyclops, you asked my name. I will tell you, but you must give the gift you promised me. My name is Nobody. Father, mother, friends, they all call me Nobody. The Cyclops passes out from the wine. Odysseus and his men take a sharpened wooden stake. They heat the point in the fire until it glows. And they drive it into the giant’s single eye. The Cyclops screams. He thrashes. He calls for help. The other Cyclopes come running. They shout through the entrance, “Polyphemus, who is hurting you?” And the blinded giant cries out, “Nobody is killing me. Nobody is hurting me.” And the other Cyclopes hear him and they shrug and they walk away because if nobody is hurting him, there is no one to fight. It is one of the greatest jokes in world literature. Three thousand years old and still funny. Odysseus and his men hide under the bellies of the sheep. When the Cyclops opens the cave at dawn, they escape. They sprint to the ship. They sail away. And then Odysseus, when he is far enough out at sea that he thinks he is safe, does the one thing that destroys the rest of his life. He stands up at the stern of his ship and he yells back at the blinded giant on the beach. He yells his real name, Odysseus, son of Laertes, king of Ithaca. Because Polyphemus is the son of Poseidon, god of the sea. And now the giant knows the real name of the man who blinded him. And the giant calls down to his father, and Poseidon hears. Every storm Odysseus suffers from this point forward. Every shipwreck, every loss, every death traces back to this moment to Odysseus’s one moment of pride. That is the Cyclops story. Now, I need you to listen very carefully because I am about to tell you the single most disturbing parallel in this documentary. If you grew up Christian, you already know this story. Gospel of Mark, chapter 5, the Gerasene Demoniac. Many Christians call it the single most dramatic exorcism in the entire Bible. Jesus and his disciples cross the Sea of Galilee in a boat. They land on the other side in a region called the country of the Gerasenes. And the moment Jesus steps out of the boat, a man comes running at him from the tombs. The man is naked. He has been screaming day and night. He has been cutting himself with stones.

He is so violent that nobody has been able to bind him. They had tried chains. He had broken the chains. The man falls down in front of Jesus. He cries out, “What do you want with me, Jesus, son of the most high God?” And Jesus asks him a question, “What is your name?” And the demon answers, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” And then there is a herd of pigs, two thousand pigs, feeding on a hillside near the sea. The demons beg Jesus, “Send us into the pigs.” He does. The demons leave the man and enter the pigs. And the pigs, all two thousand of them, rush down the hillside into the sea and drown. Stop. We just heard two stories. Let me show them to you side by side. Eight elements in sequence, same order, same narrative function. The man who first laid this out in book form is Dennis R. MacDonald, Yale University Press. The book is called The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark, the year 2000. MacDonald walks through this scene in granular detail. He looks at the Greek vocabulary, the narrative structure, the sequence. What is his conclusion? Mark wrote this story knowing the Cyclops story. He expected his Greek-literate audience to recognize the connection. He was doing a kind of literary inversion, taking a famous pagan scene and rewriting it with Jesus as a hero who is the opposite of Odysseus. Odysseus blinds and curses. Jesus heals and frees. Odysseus drives sheep onto his ship. Jesus drives demons into pigs. Odysseus gives a false name and runs. Jesus gives no name. He commands. Same scene, inverted theology. The author of the earliest gospel was not writing history, nor was he merely recording tradition. Close reading and careful analysis show that Mark borrowed extensively from the Odyssey and the Iliad that he wanted his readers to recognize the Homeric antecedents in Mark’s story of Jesus. So, here is the test. Here is how you know this is not coincidence. Mark’s story has features that make no sense unless he is imitating Homer. Why does Jesus cross the sea to a Gentile region for one exorcism and then immediately leave? Why are there pigs? Pigs in a Jewish text in a region near Galilee. Why does Jesus refuse to let the healed man come with him, sending him back to his people instead? None of that fits a Jewish exorcism story. All of it fits a rewrite of Odyssey 9 where Odysseus visits a foreign island, has a brief violent encounter, refuses companionship, and leaves. The Cyclops episode is in MacDonald’s judgment the strongest single case for Homeric imitation in the Gospel of Mark. It is also the easiest one to verify yourself. Read Odyssey 9, then read Mark 5.

Read them back to back. You cannot unsee it. And once you have seen it, you start to see it everywhere. After they escape the Cyclops, the shift drifts to a floating island made of bronze. This is the home of Aeolus, keeper of the winds. He welcomes them. He feeds them for a month. He treats them like royalty. And when Odysseus is ready to leave, Aeolus gives him a gift. A leather bag tied with silver thread. Inside the bag, every wind in the world, except the one favorable wind that will blow Odysseus straight home to Ithaca. All Odysseus has to do is keep the bag closed. Keep his hand on the rudder. Let the favorable wind do the work. For nine days he sails. He does not sleep. He does not trust the crew. He holds the bag close. On the tenth day, he can see Ithaca. He can see the cooking fires on his own island. Smoke rising in the distance. And after nine days of holding the wheel, finally, finally, he closes his eyes and his men, convinced that the bag is full of gold their captain is hiding from them, untie the silver thread. They opened the bag. The winds rushed out at once and seized the ship and bore them out to sea, away from their homeland. They were weeping. Every wind in the world released at the same time. The ship is blown all the way back to Aeolus’s island. And this time, Aeolus refuses to help them. He says, “Any man whom the gods hate this much. Any man whom the favorable winds themselves abandon is not a man I will welcome again. Get off my island.” This is one of the most painful moments in the Odyssey. The hero can see home. He can almost touch it and his own men ruin it because they did not trust him. Because they thought he was holding out on them. The pattern of the leader almost reaching the goal undone by the people he is supposed to be leading runs through the Hebrew Bible too. Moses sees the promised land. He does not enter it. David wants to build the temple. He is not allowed. Every patriarch, every prophet, the goal is visible. The arrival is delayed. The Odyssey makes it about a leather bag. The Hebrew Bible makes it about disobedience to a covenant. The shape is the same. Aeolus throws them off the island. Odysseus has to start over with no help. The next stop is worse than anything yet. Twelve ships left Troy with Odysseus. By the end of trial five, he has one. The Laestrygonians are giants. Cannibal giants. They live on an island with a harbor shaped like a horseshoe. Narrow opening, deep water, sheer cliffs all the way around. Odysseus, in a moment of caution, anchors his own ship outside the harbor. He sends his men’s ships inside. The giants spot the ships in the still water. They run to the cliffs above and they begin hurling boulders down, splintering the hulls, crushing them in. They spear the survivors in the water like fish. They drag the corpses home for dinner. Eleven ships destroyed. Hundreds of men dead in minutes. Odysseus on his single anchored ship outside the harbor watches the slaughter. He cuts the rope.

He screams at his crew to row. They row faster than they have ever rowed in their lives. They get away, but everyone else is dead. The Laestrygonians do not have a single clean biblical parallel. What they have is a function in the poem. They are the moment Odysseus realizes the world is not on his side. The gods do not protect him. His crew does not protect him. He is alone in a universe that wants him dead. That feeling, the hero alone against a hostile cosmos, is going to show up in the Bible, not in any one episode, as a structural filling. Jacob wrestling the stranger at the river Jabbok. David hunted by Saul through the wilderness. Elijah running from Jezebel into the desert. Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, his disciples asleep, asking the cup to pass from him. Paul shipwrecked three times. The Odyssey gives Western literature the archetype of the man who has lost everything except himself, who has to keep going anyway, who survives because the gods will not let him die. But they will not let him rest either. Odysseus puts the Laestrygonians behind him. One ship now, about fifty men, and on the next island, a witch is waiting. The island of Aeaea, home of the witch goddess Circe, daughter of the sun god Helios. Odysseus sends half his remaining men ashore to scout. They find Circe’s palace in the clearing in the forest. Around the palace, wolves and lions roam. Animals that should be killing them. And the animals walk up to the men and fawn like trained dogs. Circe invites the men inside. She gives them food. She gives them drink. And the moment they swallow her wine, she touches them with her wand. And they are not men anymore. She struck them with her wand and shut them up inside the pig’s sties. Now they had the heads and grunts and bristles of pigs, but their minds were just the same as they had been before. They wept as they were locked inside the pen. This is Circe’s craft. She takes men and turns them into the animals they secretly are. Greedy men become pigs. The wolves and lions around her palace, they were men once, too. One member of the scouting party escapes. Eurylochus, Odysseus’s second in command, who is suspicious enough to stay outside the palace and watch. He runs back to the ship. He tells Odysseus, and Odysseus does what Odysseus does. He goes to confront Circe himself. On the way, the god Hermes meets him on the path. Hermes gives him a magical herb called Moly. As long as Odysseus carries it, Circe’s magic will not work on him. Odysseus confronts Circe. She tries her trick. It fails. He pulls his sword. She submits. And then the movies always cut this part. Odysseus and Circe become lovers. For a year, he and his remaining crew live in her palace. They feast. They drink. They sleep with the women of her household for an entire year. Eventually, his men remind him we should be going home. He agrees. And Circe, before she lets him leave, tells him there is one more thing he has to do. He has to go to the land of the dead. Now, Bible parallels for Circe. Two worth flagging. The first one is the pigs. Remember Mark 5, two thousand pigs driven from the demoniac into the sea where they drown?

Dennis MacDonald argues, and the evidence is hard to dispute, that Mark is folding two Odyssey episodes together. The arrival at a foreign shore, the savage encounter, the boat departure, that is Polyphemus, book nine. The driving of animals by demonic force. Well, that is Circe, book ten. Mark welded two famous Odyssey scenes into one Gerasene exorcism. The second parallel is bigger. It runs through the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature. Circe is the dangerous female figure who feeds you, beds you, and transforms you. The seductive force that takes a man and ruins him. Open the book of Proverbs chapter 7. Many a victim has she laid low. Yea, all her slain are a mighty host. Her house is the way to Sheol, going down to the chambers of death. The strange woman whose house is the way to death. The wisdom literature of Israel knows Circe not by name. The type is the same. And here is something most Christians do not realize. By the time the New Testament was being written, Greek philosophers had reread the Sirens and Circe episodes as allegories of false philosophy.

The seductive voice, the temptation away from wisdom, the bound Odysseus as the wise man resisting bad teaching. When the Apostle Paul warns the Corinthians about false teachers, when he warns about smooth words and seductive doctrines, he is participating in a literary world where the metaphor of the dangerous alluring voice is already fully formed. Circe is part of that world. The strange woman of Proverbs is part of that world. They are cousins. Odysseus survives Circe. He survives a year of luxury that would have made any other man stay forever. Now Circe has told him what comes next. He has to sail to the edge of the world. He has to perform a ritual. He has to summon the dead. And what happens in that scene shaped the Bible more than almost any other in this documentary. There is a Greek word you need to know. Nekyia from the Greek word for corpse. It is the name of a specific kind of ritual in a specific kind of literary scene. The hero goes to the edge of the world. He performs a ritual. The dead come to him. They reveal his future. Then he leaves. Book eleven of the Odyssey is a Nekyia. It is the most famous Nekyia in world literature and it shaped the Bible in ways that are hard to overstate. Here is what happens. Circe has given Odysseus sailing directions. He sails to the very edge of the world to a place where the river of Ocean meets the rim of darkness. A place no living man should go. He gets out of the ship. He digs a pit in the ground. He pours libations into the pit. Milk, honey, wine, water. He sprinkles barley over them. He cuts the throats of two sheep. The blood pours into the pit. And the dead come. And out of Erebus they swarmed. The souls of those who had died. Brides, young unmarried men, old men who had suffered greatly. Tender girls new to their grief and many warriors killed by bronze-tipped spears, still wearing armor, soaked in blood. They came from every side with eerie cries and pale fear took hold of me. Odysseus is standing in the presence of the dead. He has crossed the threshold. He holds his sword over the pit. Only the shades he allows can drink the blood and speak. He talks to the prophet Tiresias who tells him what he must do to get home. He talks to his own mother. He did not know she was dead. She tries three times to embrace him.

Three times she passes through him like air. He talks to Agamemnon, his fellow king from the Trojan War. Agamemnon was murdered by his own wife when he returned home. Agamemnon warns him, “Be careful when you reach Ithaca. Do not trust your own household.” And he talks to Achilles, the greatest warrior of the Greek army, the hero of the Iliad, the man who in life chose glory over a long, quiet existence. And Achilles in the underworld says something that has haunted Western literature for three thousand years. “I would rather work the soil as a serf on hire to some other landless peasant than be a king of all these lifeless dead.” Achilles in the underworld says it would be better to be a slave on earth than the king of all the dead. The greatest hero of the Iliad looking back telling Odysseus, “Do not do what I did. Stay alive.” Skip forward hundreds of years. Different country, different language. There is a king. His country is being invaded. He has tried prayer. He has tried prophets. He has tried casting lots. And no answer comes from the God he serves. So the king does something forbidden. He disguises himself. He goes at night to a woman who knows how to talk to the dead. A woman whose practice he himself has outlawed in his kingdom. He asks her to summon a specific dead man. A prophet. A prophet whose advice he had ignored when the prophet was alive. The woman performs a ritual. She speaks the right words. From the ground, a figure rises. The dead man speaks. He prophesies the king’s defeat. He tells the king, “Tomorrow you will be with me in the place of the dead.” That is not a story from Homer. That is 1st Samuel chapter 28. King Saul and the witch of Endor. The classicist Bruce Louden at the University of Texas has written about this parallel at length. Cambridge University Press peer-reviewed. Look at what these two stories share. Both have a hero on the eve of catastrophe. Both have him consulting the dead through a forbidden ritual. Both have a female necromantic figure presiding over the rite. Both summon a specific named recently dead prophet. Both prophets predict the hero’s death. And in both, listen to this part. The language gives away the foreign substrate. The Hebrew text of 1st Samuel uses a word for what comes up from the ground. The woman sees Elohim coming up from the earth. Elohim, gods, plural. The woman of Endor sees gods rising from the dead. The redactor left the polytheistic substrate showing through the monotheistic frame. The story originally imagined the dead as Elohim, divine beings. Exactly the way the Greeks imagined the shades as low-level deities. Saul at Endor is a Hebrew Nekyia. But the connection does not stop with Saul because there is one more Nekyia in the Bible and it is the most important scene in the Christian religion. The Gospel of Mark 16. Three women approach a tomb. They are bringing spices to anoint a corpse. They are walking at dawn. They are afraid. They arrive. The stone has been rolled away.

They go inside the tomb and there sitting on the right side is a young man. Mark calls him a neaniskos, the Greek word for a young man, dressed in a white robe. But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side and they were alarmed. Look at what is happening here. Three women at dawn come to a place of the dead. They expect to find a body. They expect to perform a ritual on that body, anointing with spices. Instead, they find a young man in white. The young man speaks. He delivers a prophecy. He tells them what is going to happen next. This is structurally a Nekyia. The seekers come to the threshold of the dead. They expect to find a corpse. Instead, they find a messenger. The messenger speaks. He gives them the divine word about the future. But notice what Mark has done. He has inverted the Nekyia. In Homer, the seeker brings the ritual implements. In Mark, the implements are useless. The body they wanted to anoint is gone. In Homer, the dead rise up to drink the blood. In Mark, the dead one has already risen and left. In Homer, the messenger is a ghost from below. In Mark, the messenger is a young man in white sitting where the body should have been. Dennis MacDonald argues and I think he is right. Mark is writing a deliberately Christian transformation of the Nekyia where Odysseus’s underworld scene ends with Achilles saying it is better to be a slave on earth than a king of all the dead. Mark’s empty tomb scene answers. There is no king of the dead because the dead one is not here. He has been raised. It is the same scene. It is the same literary form. Mark is reaching for the most powerful Greek scene about death and inverting it to make it a Christian theological point. And listen, I want to be careful here. I am not telling you the resurrection of Jesus did not happen because Mark wrote a Nekyia. I am telling you that when Mark sat down to craft the most important story in his theology, he did not reach for a blank page. He reached for Homer. He knew the Nekyia, he knew the conventions of the underworld, he knew the hero’s journey, and he deliberately modeled his climax on the greatest literature of his time. He was, as the Greeks would say, engaging in a dialogue with the past. And this is not limited to Mark. The entire New Testament is saturated with these kinds of structural echoes. The way characters move, the way they talk, the way they face temptation, the way they encounter the divine—it is all shaped by the cultural air they breathed, and that air was overwhelmingly Hellenistic. The Bible is a product of its time. It is a product of a world where Homer was the essential curriculum for anyone who wanted to be considered educated. When we see these parallels, we are not looking at a conspiracy or a trick. We are looking at the way storytelling worked in the ancient world.

They didn’t have the modern obsession with originality that we do. They saw stories as a shared inheritance, a common language that you used to express your own truths. When Matthew or Luke or John wrote their Gospels, they were doing the same thing. They were taking the stories they knew—the stories of heroes, kings, and gods—and they were reshaping them to fit their new, urgent message. The tragedy, perhaps, is that we have lost the ability to read the Bible this way. We have turned it into a static, unchanging monument, disconnected from the vibrant, messy, creative world that birthed it. We have forgotten that it was written by people who were reading, thinking, and engaging with the great stories of their day. If we want to understand the Bible, we have to stop treating it as if it fell from the sky in a vacuum. We have to see it in its context, as a voice among voices, a participant in a long, ongoing conversation that stretches back through the Odyssey to Gilgamesh. The beauty of these parallels is not that they diminish the Bible, but that they humanize it. They show us the struggle of people trying to make sense of the world, trying to find hope in the face of death, and turning to the tools they had to build something that could carry their meaning across the centuries. We are all living in the shadow of these stories, whether we know it or not. Every time we grapple with the idea of a hero’s return, or the danger of paradise, or the mystery of the underworld, we are walking on paths that were carved out thousands of years ago. The journey of Odysseus is our journey, and the stories we tell about ourselves and our gods are forever linked to the echoes of that long, winding, treacherous trip home. It is a reminder that we are all, in our own way, seeking the secret of immortality, trying to find our way back to who we were before the world broke us, and hoping that someone will be there at the threshold to guide us, even if they are only a shadow of what we expected. So the next time you open a book, whether it is the Odyssey or the Bible or some modern epic, listen for the echoes. Listen for the way the stories talk to each other, the way they build upon one another, the way they carry the weight of everything that came before. That is where the real story lives. That is the river we are all swimming in. And if you are willing to look, if you are willing to listen, you will find that the story is much larger, much deeper, and much more human than you ever imagined. It is a story that refuses to die. It is a story that keeps coming back, in different languages, different lands, and different times, always reminding us that we are not alone in our search for home. We are the storytellers, and the story is ours to pass on.

In the heart of the ancient world, where the sun-drenched shores of the Mediterranean met the vast, unfolding mystery of the human spirit, a narrative tradition was born that would define the moral and existential contours of civilization. It was a world of oral poets, of bards who sang of gods and monsters under the cool shade of olive trees, and of scribes who committed these songs to clay and papyrus. It was a world that, despite its fragmented geography and linguistic diversity, was bound together by a common set of archetypes. The journey of the hero, the temptation of the flesh, the crossing of the threshold, the descent into the abyss—these were not just literary devices; they were the essential maps of the human condition. When we examine the parallels between the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, the Homeric epics of Greece, and the sacred texts of the Hebrew and Christian traditions, we are witnessing the grand evolution of human self-understanding. It is a testament to the power of the human imagination that these stories have survived, mutated, and thrived across millennia. They are the bedrock upon which our modern sense of self and community is constructed. To understand the Odyssey is to understand the foundational DNA of Western thought, and to understand its relationship to the Bible is to uncover the secret dialogue that has been taking place in the halls of history for ages. It is a journey of discovery that demands humility, for it forces us to confront the fact that our most cherished narratives are part of a much larger, more complex heritage than we often admit. It invites us to look past the boundaries of our own traditions and see the interconnectedness of all human storytelling. And in doing so, we might find that the ultimate truth of these stories lies not in their historical accuracy, but in their enduring ability to reflect the eternal struggles of the human heart. Whether we are reading the pages of the Odyssey, the scriptures of the Bible, or simply reflecting on the stories of our own lives, we are participating in a timeless ritual of meaning-making. We are the inheritors of a legacy that spans oceans and eras, a legacy that challenges us to look beyond the surface of things, to question the nature of heroism, and to seek the light of understanding in the darkest of places. The journey, as Odysseus learned, is never truly over. It is a constant unfolding, a perpetual search for truth that defines the very essence of what it means to be human. And in the final analysis, perhaps that is the greatest lesson of all—that we are all on our own odyssey, navigating the unpredictable currents of life, seeking our own version of home, and striving to make sense of the world, one story at a time. The echoes of the past are not ghosts; they are the living breath of our collective wisdom, guiding us forward even when the path is uncertain. So let us continue to read, to wonder, and to tell our stories, for in the act of sharing, we are weaving the fabric of the future, ensuring that the legacy of those who came before continues to inspire, to challenge, and to transform us for generations to come. The world may change, the languages may evolve, and the forms of our stories may shift, but the core of the human spirit—the insatiable hunger for meaning—remains the same. And as long as we have stories, we have a way to connect, to understand, and to endure. We are, all of us, part of the story, and the story is, above all, about us.