Jesus and the Trojan War

This book explores the parallels between four well-known stories – the Trojan War, Moses, King Arthur and Jesus. In each case it show how our view of the past is shaped by the storytellers. The author examines how the stories are presented and understood, looking at their sources and the subsequent development of our understanding about them. The book does not set out to debunk stories but rather to understand them a deeper level in terms of their myth and meaning – one particular pattern is the quest. Horan does not regard the gospels as biographies or histories, seeing their meaning in their mythic nature, by which he means 'sacred narrative which explains how or why things are as they are.' It is the meaning of what Jesus said and did that is significant. Towards the end he devotes part of a chapter to the rise of religion in Victorian Britain, and its gradual decline from the second half of the 19th century with the advent of science in general and Darwinism in particular. Although he quotes the results of the 2001 census showing that 72% of people regarded themselves as Christian, he does not seem aware of the work of David Hay about spiritual experience. Many of these nominal Christians would regard themselves as spiritual rather than religious and would most probably tick a box labelled holism if it existed (William Bloom is working on this for 2011 – see www. holism.info). The author's own instincts tend towards universalism, drawing out the mythic meaning of the stories as they point towards transformation and renewal.