In response to a caller’s question on today’s show, Greg refers to C.S. Lewis’s observation that the Gospels’ literary genre is not myth. Lewis—a medieval and Renaissance literature scholar who was quite familiar with myths, legends, allegories, romances, etc.—explains his conviction about the Gospels’ genre in an essay in Christian Reflections titled “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism”:

The undermining of the old orthodoxy has been mainly the work of divines engaged in New Testament criticism…. I want to explain what it is that makes me sceptical about [their] authority….

First then, whatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people’s studies of them, whose literary experiences of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious things about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel….

Turn to John. Read the dialogues: that with the Samaritan woman at the well, or that which follows the healing of the man born blind. Look at its pictures: Jesus (if I may use the word) doodling with his finger in the dust; the unforgettable ἦν δὲ νύξ [“and it was night”] (xiii, 30). I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage—though it may no doubt contain errors—pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn’t see this has simply not learned to read.

This observation ended up playing a part in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity, as he explains in Surprised by Joy, saying, “I was by now too experienced in literary criticism to regard the Gospels as myths. They had not the mythical taste.” What struck him was that though they were not myths, yet what they contained “was precisely the matter of the great myths.” Lewis loved myths, but here was something greater:

If ever a myth had become fact, had been incarnated, it would be just like this. And nothing else in all literature was just like this. Myths were like it in one way. Histories were like it in another. But nothing was simply like it. And no person was like the Person it depicted; as real, as recognisable, through all that depth of time, as Plato’s Socrates or Boswell’s Johnson (ten times more so than Eckermann’s Goethe or Lockhart’s Scott), yet also numinous, lit by a light from beyond the world, a god. But if a god—we are no longer polytheists—then not a god, but God. Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not ‘a religion’, nor ‘a philosophy’. It is the summing up and actuality of them all.

The authors of the Gospels did not intend to communicate a mere story, but a true history that embodied the best of all great stories.