Build a Myth Yourself — It Is the Only Way to Understand Myths

Arguments about the historicity of scripture follow a predictable shape. The sceptic says the story did not happen. The defender responds with corroboration: this city existed, that king is attested, this custom matches the period, that place name is correct for the era.

The corroboration is often genuine. And it establishes nothing. I want to give an exercise that makes this obvious in about twenty minutes, because I have found that no amount of argument does what the exercise does.

The Exercise

Write a myth of about three hundred words. Pack in as many true facts as you can, while making the story as a whole as false as you can manage.

That is the whole assignment. Here is my attempt.

Michael Jordan was elected to the presidency of Hungary in 1923, though not by popular vote. He won repeatedly, but the decisive victory was his sixth, achieved with only thirty per cent of the ballot, after which he had himself made prime minister. He launched a world war against the Poles, justified by the tenets of the Baha'i faith, from which he derived a doctrine concerning Hungary's strength and its special place in history. The great powers were drawn in on both sides — the Axis, which included Hungary and of course the Turks, against the Allies.

Now count what is true.

There was a world war. A party did take power in central Europe without winning a popular majority, and its leader did make himself head of government by manoeuvre — that is Germany rather than Hungary, and Hitler rather than Jordan, but the mechanism is exactly right. Michael Jordan really did win six championships. Hungary really was on the Axis side. Turkey's alignment is a real historical question. The Baha'i faith exists. The dates are in the right century.

An enthusiastic apologist could produce a respectable list of confirmations for that paragraph. Archaeology would support several claims. Contemporary documents would attest others.

And the story is complete nonsense.

What the Exercise Demonstrates

Finding true facts inside a narrative tells you nothing about whether the narrative is true.

This is not a subtle point, but it is startlingly hard to feel until you have done it yourself. Every individual element can check out while the whole remains fabricated, because the truth of the parts and the truth of the whole are simply different properties. A story is not a conjunction of its verifiable details; it is a claim about how those details relate, and that claim is exactly what the verification does not touch.

Worse, the presence of accurate detail is positively expected in a well-made fiction. Any competent storyteller anchors invention in the familiar, because that is what makes invention credible. So corroborated detail is evidence of craft at least as much as evidence of history — and in a story that has been polished by retelling over centuries, craft is guaranteed.

Where This Bites

This is precisely the move made in defence of the Exodus, and of scripture generally. Assemble the verified fragments — a place that existed, a practice that matches the period, a name in the right language — and let the reader infer the whole.

I spent a long argument with the editors of the Hebrew Wikipedia over whether the Exodus should be described as non-historical, and this pattern came up in every exchange. Nobody was lying. The individual claims being cited were often correct. The inference from them to the historicity of the narrative was the error, and it is an error that is extremely difficult to dislodge by argument alone.

Why the Exercise Works When Arguments Do Not

Because it is easy. That is the surprising part and the reason it changes minds.

You expect forging a myth to be hard, and it takes about five minutes. Once you have written a false story stuffed with true facts — once you have felt how little effort the packing required — the defensive move loses its force permanently. You cannot go back to being impressed by corroboration, because you know exactly how cheap corroboration is to manufacture.

Anyone arguing about the historicity of a scripture, on either side, should be made to do this first.