A Ramble About Percy Jackson

I have a confession to make. I've read every book published by Rick Riordan, and so have my wife and children. It's something of an addiction with us. The Percy Jackson series in particular, both the original “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” and the “Heroes of Olympus” series. The latest book, “The House of Hades” was devoured by my whole family in about a week's time give or take a couple of days.

When I first saw them on the shelf several years ago, I didn't think much of them. I thought they were cheap Harry Potter imitations (yet another literary obsession in our family). But when we were living in Tennessee, and shortly after the “Lightning Thief” movie came out I decided to buy one and give it a read. It didn't take long for my wife and daughters to follow suit. My son, initially believing “reading for pleasure” to be an oxymoron, took a little more time, but he eventually got into it as well.

You really have to hand it to Rick Riordan, he does his research on the mythologies he writes about and sets his characters in. From what I've seen in his books, the man must have the equivalent of a Master's Degree in Ancient Religious Studies from the amount of time and research he's put in to write his stories with not only Greek, but Roman and Egyptian mythologies and cultures as well.

One aspectof these mythologies which he illustrates clearly and frequently is the afterlife. This shouldn't be surprising because the afterlife plays a major role in all of the mythologies he sets his characters in. As a student of mythologies and religious studies, and of the New Testament and the Greek language it was written in, seeing these things illustrated in his stories has helped me understand some things about the afterlife as far as the Scriptures are concerned.

The first thing it has helped me to really grasp, is that the afterlife and underworld pictured in the Greek New Testament is in fact the afterlife and underworld understood from Greek mythology. This really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, though I know it might even be considered offensive to some. But, like in Greek mythology, you have the underworld, Hades, and it is divided into different sections. You have the place of paradise, Abraham's Bosom in the New Testament and the Elysian Fields in Greek mythology; you have the place of torment, which in Greek mythology was the fields of asphodel, and you have the lake of fire, abyss, and Gehenna which are all referred to in the New Testament and Greek mythology as Tartaros. Further you have the mention of both Hades and Death being thrown into the lake of fire (Tartaros) in the Book of Revelation. In Greek mythology these are the names of the two gods who control and oversee the underworld, Hades and Thanatos.

The truth is that the view which the New Testament and Jesus in particular takes when talking about the underworld and the afterlife is a very Hellenistic view with which all of his listeners would have been very familiar. And this only makes sense because of the culture in which He taught. People in his day weren't merely concerned with death, but with the judgment which followed.

The view of the afterlife in the Old Testament however is almost non-existent. The only word in the Hebrew that you normally get is “she'ol”, meaning “the grave”. You get few if any descriptions of it. And this was probably also descriptive of the worldview of the Hebrew people to whom the Old Testament was largely written where the afterlife was concerned. The problem they were mostly concerned about was death itself, not what happened afterwards. Death was bad enough. This is interesting because you don't see the cultural preoccupation with the afterlife that the Egyptians held, even though the Hebrews spent four hundred years in Egypt and probably adopted at least some of their cultural worldview.

Salvation for them came to mean resurrection and rescue from death, and this carried into the Hellenistic period and became mixed with the understanding of an afterlife that saw people punished or rewarded based on how they lived their lives in this world.

When He teaches, Jesus does little to alter their understanding of the afterlife. He doesn't try to correct them to the absolutely accurate version. Instead He uses their conception and works within it to get His points across. In the end, it doesn't seem to matter what their idea of the afterlife is. He takes it and shapes it so that they are able to understand the truths He is trying to get across.

I think this is a lesson in and of itself that He left for us. More than anyone else alive, Jesus knew what lay in store for us after death and He could have corrected everyone's notions. But that would have required a massive amount of reteaching that would have been resisted, time-consuming and counter-productive. Instead He adapted His teaching, working within the cultural world-view, so that He could get across what needed to be understood, and not a detailed floorplan of the underworld which was, after all, immaterial to the Gospel itself.

When we are teaching and preaching to Gospel to others, we need to keep in mind what is important in our listeners' worldview and what isn't, and adapt our Gospel instruction accordingly. Jesus did so, and so did His Apostles and they were able to spread the Gospel of a resurrected Hellenistic Jewish Messiah crucified for treason from India to Spain, and from Egypt to Rome and beyond.