Everyone's always like "mythology disproves Christianity." No!!!! Mythology proves that our God is a God of stories, of details, of intentionality. Everyone is so hung up on "every culture has a story of the dying and rising god/a virgin birth, etc. etc" but that's just it. Every culture has it, because somewhere, somewhen, it was true. Mythology is simply a reminder that God fashioned for us a language that we are all born knowing— a religious language, a language of the sacred. It's the reason so many cultures view bread as something sacred and use incense in their worship. Christ did not become man to unteach us "pagan" vocabulary. The vocabulary was never pagan to begin with! It was, and is, human. Christ became man, took on flesh, and spoke the language we were all born knowing: the language of mythos and sacred rituals, of prayers and of liturgy.
Do you think Jesus did not intimately know the world He entered? Do you think He didn't know the stories of Dionysus? Or the surprisingly Christocentric imagery associated with Apollo? Do you think He did not watch Virgil pen his fourth ecologue, in which he prophesies the coming of a baby, a redeemer? Do you think the all-knowing, all-powerful God who crafted Virgil's soul with his own hands didn't know that?
Mythology reminds us that God wrote the story. That He etched into the very marrow of our bones the language we need to know Him. When He came, He came in a way that was unexpected. But it was the way we would best recognize Him.
