Classic

The Odyssey, by Mike Mahle

Pastor’s Epistle—September 2026

My high-school curriculum did not require Latin in order to graduate—I’m not quite so old as that—but I am old enough that it offered Latin as an elective. To be honest, it was an easy A, especially as I’d already taken a few semesters of Spanish, itself a Latin derivative. With its low level of stress and heavy dosage of Roman history, Latin class soon became a favorite of mine. We even took a bus-trip to Broadway, in order to see A Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Forum, which tickles me to this day. I try to watch the DVD on every Saturnalia.

This youthful dalliance with the Classics continued into my undergraduate matriculation, where I signed up for further Latin courses, a minor focusing on Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, and even a few graduate-level Imperial Roman history classes. I met one of my best friends there; upon graduation, we were invited to join an international dead languages honors society. I pursued this path into seminary, focused as theological education is on the Koine Greek of the New Testament, and the historical context of first-century Roman Judea.

Safe to say, then, that I love the Classics and have for most of my life—even earlier than that first Latin class, come to think of it; perhaps as far back as reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology in junior-high English. Imagine my delight, then, to see The Odyssey front and center in our summer headlines. Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s second epic broke box-office records to become the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time. No less than five English translations of the original Greek subsequently hit the bestseller list.

The goss just got hotter when Nolan credited Emily Wilson’s 2017 Odyssey—the first full English-language translation published by a female scholar—as the inspiration for his film. And Wilson, in return, utterly panned the movie. She judged it darkest drek, and Nolan a hack. Her article, impressively, crashed The London Review of Books online. I found the film to be pretty decent, myself: moments of brilliance mixed in with some ham-handedness. But how wonderful that Grecian epics and Classicists were lighting up the internet in the Year of Our Lord 2026! There just might be hope for us yet.

Christians, historically, adore the Classics. Church theologians drink deeply of Plato and Aristotle. St Paul quotes lines from Greek plays at least three times between Acts and the Epistles. John’s Gospel makes strong allusion to Graeco-Roman Mystery Cults. Mark’s Passion account mirrors a Roman Triumph; for him, Jesus is the true, triumphant, and alternate Emperor. Even Christ’s Ascension brings to mind the vanishing of Romulus in a storm-cloud. Indeed, the Classical flavor of the Gospels has led to periodic (if wingnut) accusations of Jesus being a pagan invention.

Such Jesus mythicism never cuts the mustard. No serious scholar doubts the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth, and everything from His miracles to His messianism remain firmly rooted in Second-Temple Judaism. All those early Jewish-Christian believers were at pains to stress how Christ fulfills the hopes and prophecies of His home faith. But does that mean that He doesn’t fulfill pagan hopes and dreams as well? The Romans, after all, also had prophecies of a world-spanning Savior arising from the East.

On that note, I recently picked up a book which argued that the Gospel tales of Christ and His Apostles were modeled entirely upon the life and teachings of the Buddha—Buddhism having been brought to the Ancient Near East by missionaries from Mauryan India. The wild thing is how convincing so much of it sounded. I could see how one might read the Gospels as meeting Graeco-Buddhist expectations.

… just like Christ met Jewish expectations. And Roman expectations. And how even the myths of the Northern Barbarians—such as Odin sacrificing himself to himself by hanging upon a tree, pierced by a spear—mirrored the story of Jesus. The Hindu Trimurti looks like the Trinity. The Celtic Saints sound suspiciously similar to their gods. So many cultures and religions have claimed that Christianity stole our best and brightest ideas from them—for how else to account for all of these uncanny similarities, for Jesus seeming to be Jewish and Roman and Buddhist and barbarian all at the same time?

Well, from the perspective of faith, it might be rather readily explicable. Jesus is Jewish, yes; He was born, raised, died, and rose under the yoke of the Roman Empire. But He is not and never was the Christ for just one people, one story, one set of apocalyptic prophecies. Christ is the Savior of the world, of all worlds! To paraphrase a Church Father, as the Lord prepared Jews for Christ by the Law, and Greeks by philosophy, so He prepared the rest of us by myth and song and science and a thousand other whisperings of His Spirit. At this stage, I’d be surprised to find any culture or religion that didn’t have some parallel with the Church, some human expectation Christ more wonderfully fulfills.

All of which is to say that a mature Christian gleans glimpses of Jesus just about everywhere: in other peoples, other faiths, other times, other lands. We see Him—some hope of Him, some glimmer or reflection—in Homer and in Hollywood, in Siddhartha and the Sybils. Most importantly, we come to recognize Christ within our neighbors, within all of those around us, and particularly in their needs. For when we start to see Him everywhere, then we start to love them all. And isn’t that eternally the point?

In Jesus. Amen.