Hi, Dr. Craig, I have read your hermeneutics in Old Testament and they are unbelievable good.

In Chapter 2, you list 10 family resemblances among

myths and Genesis 1 to 11. That lead you conclude myths are sacred narratives. When it comes for the

New Testament, specifically the four Gospels, which family resemblances do they share with other ancient

biographies?

And which kind of attitude the Orthodox Christian should have when approaching these texts as historical documents?

Thank you, Rodrigo, Brazil.

I'm so grateful, Rodrigo, that you have evidently taken the time and effort to read my book in quest of the historical atom, even though it is not yet

available in Portuguese, and so has become the victim of misrepresentation in Brazil.

A small correction to your question.

I argue not that myths are sacred narratives, which is the standard

characterization of myths among folklorists, but rather that Genesis 1 to 11 exhibits a striking

number of the family resemblances of myth and are therefore quasi-mythical in their descriptions of historical events.

The contrast of these narratives with the Gospels is striking. On the basis of family resemblances among

ancient biographies, Richard Burrage demonstrated that the

gospels most closely resemble the genre of ancient biography, or lives in Greek, Beoy, of famous Greeks and Romans.

He lists quite a number of both external, structural, and formal, and internal, content-related

features.

He compares the Gospels with ancient biographies in terms of external features like size,

structure, scale, literary units, use of sources, and so on, and internal features like topics,

style, atmosphere, quality of characterization, social setting, and so on.

Rather than delve into all of these, which would take too long, let me simply quote his

...