The Chinese proverb signaling failure as begetting success finds application in biblical stories of immanent destruction to triumph over the enemy, sterility to fecundity, death to resurrection, all the while creating within such stories a feel of other-worldly causality. It may be the overarching message in the biblical stories that adversity is a feature of the profane, triumph of the sacred, surely a mythopoetic faith statement. While the Chinese proverb may have been more pragmatic, less driven by the personal causality of biblical belief, the two notions reflect a motivational optimism, the Chinese to performance, the biblical to honoring and pledging loyalty to the one who brings about the benefit.
The patron-client social model within the biblical sphere enjoins a frame for establishing a relationship with the power that protects with unassailable dominion, calling in return for acknowledgement and loyalty. Personal causality likens the patronage to relationships within the social order, gaining favor and channeling benefits.
Exemplifying these biblical qualities, the following studies spell out dimensions of the biblical mythos and concomitant ethos.
Johnny Miles, in “Reading Esther as Heroine: Persian Banquets, Ethnic Cleansing, and Identity Crisis” displays the decadence of Persian banquets while associating such decadence with a murderous intent toward the Jews. Esther, lowly in status as a Jew, with no special skills or power other than her wit, rises to the occasion to save her people from destruction. The story reflects the plight of Diaspora Jews rendered vulnerable in alien lands, saved from disaster by an unlikely hero, reflecting the pattern of resilience.
Esther Miquel's study “The Impatient Jesus and the Fig Tree: Marcan Disguised Discourse against the Temple,” interprets a troubling story about Jesus as a resistance discourse, following James C. Scott's work on resistance. The story of the fruitless fig tree is a negative counterpart of the pervading metaphor of Israel as God's chosen plantation.
Simon J. Joseph, in “Re-describing the Resurrection: Beyond the Methodological Impasse?” engages the issue of the historical and the faith-based rendering of the resurrection accounts, each at an impasse with the other. In reviewing the various approaches, Joseph observes that “It is possible to affirm the resurrection of Jesus without affirming” various dogmatic references often associated with it, which make it more mythological and less believable.
Fergus J. King explores the likelihood of a utopian prototype of a “pleasant place,” a mixture of the real and unreal, natural and unnatural. In “Revelation 21:1–22:5. An Early Christian Locus Amoenus?” he demonstrates how the passages in Revelation, like the locus amoenus of Greek and Latin literature, may be used to signify the encounter between the human and the supernatural or divine, further developed by a motif of intimacy and relationship.
