This personal reflection is part of a series called The Big Ideas, in which writers respond to a single question: What is history? You can read more by visiting The Big Ideas series page.
We in the modern world tend to understand the word “myth” as a synonym for “falsehood.” But that is not how our ancestors understood it. Indeed, the ancient mind did not draw the same line between myth and fact that we do.
Whether we are speaking of Zeus forcing his father to vomit up his siblings or Jesus being born in a manger, these tales were never meant to be read as factual reports. They were meant to fire the imagination, to illuminate hidden truths and, most of all, to bring about transformation. The power of myth lies in its capacity to move a listener from one state of being to another — from confusion to clarity, from despair to hope, from disorientation to meaning.
Myths are the packaging for truth. They are the language of religion.
Scripture deals in what might be called “sacred history,” a narrative realm that blends fact and fiction to convey timeless truths. The authors and transmitters of these sacred texts were not seeking facts; they were seeking meaning.
Our modern conception of history — the critical analysis of observable and verifiable past events — is only a handful of centuries old. It arose alongside the Enlightenment and the scientific method in the 1600s, and while immensely valuable, it is not the lens through which sacred texts were written.
To read the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem or Muhammad’s revelation in the cave of Hira as if they were modern biographies is not only to misunderstand them, it is to rob them of their purpose. For the writers of the Gospels or the early Islamic tradition, the question was never, “Did this story happen exactly as described?” but “What does this story mean for us now?”
And herein lies the real power of myth: its ability to express a singular truth that continues to be true in all times and in all places. Put simply, when it comes to sacred history, the myth itself is the message. Myth does more than just point to a deeper truth — it embodies that truth, making meaning accessible through the act of storytelling itself.
So, why do so many of us insist on reading our sacred texts as if they were investigative reports? Why do we have this impulse to impose modern categories of evidence and objectivity onto ancient spiritual narratives?
Part of the answer may lie in the Enlightenment legacy itself, which instilled in us the belief that truth must be measurable to be meaningful. But another part may reflect our discomfort with ambiguity. We tend to like our truths clean and categorical — historical or fictional, real or imagined. Sacred history defies such binaries. Living with paradox is hard, but myth demands it.
Admittedly, this can be incredibly frustrating both to modern historians seeking to reconstruct religious history and to people of faith wanting to validate their beliefs through the authority of fact. How are we to disentangle the real Jesus, Moses, Muhammad or Buddha from the myths written about them years — sometimes centuries — after their deaths?
Perhaps, instead of trying to extract the historical figure from the myth, we ask, “What was the myth trying to accomplish?” This leads us to another question: Did ancient storytellers intend their myths to reveal hidden truths? Or have these stories simply evolved over time into something we now recognize as myth?
The honest answer is: both. There were likely moments when these stories were told as literal accounts and others when they were meant to be understood metaphorically. The important thing to remember is that in premodern societies, the line between sacred memory and historical record was not just blurry — it did not yet exist.
In modern times, this distinction matters, because the way we view history affects the way we live today. If we read sacred stories with the wrong expectations, we not only risk misunderstanding them — we risk misunderstanding the people who live by them. We wonder how anyone can “believe” something that “is not true” without realizing that truth, in the sacred sense, was never meant to reside in facts. It resided in meaning, in community, in the shaping of identity and purpose.
But there is also danger in taking these stories too literally, in forcing our modern conception of history onto ancient ideas of sacred history. Myths mistaken for facts can be used to try to justify violence, exclusion and the suppression of dissent. When metaphors harden into dogma, the sacred loses its power to inspire and begins instead to coerce. That is not only a religious problem, but also a historical one. Our own concept of history has, in some ways, become its own kind of dogma: skeptical, rigid, fact-bound and suspicious of ambiguity.
To fully appreciate religion’s power, we must learn to see with both eyes: one trained on the demands of evidence, the other on the pull of meaning. Sacred history does not ask us to abandon facts. It asks us to recognize that not all truth is factual.
It reminds us that the stories we tell about where we come from are never just about the past. They are also — always — about who we are now.
Reza Aslan is an Iranian American author and scholar of religions.
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