Misconceptions Archives - Page 11 of 22 - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Are the Byzantines Significant?

At the time I started writing this article, the most upvoted answer to the question “Why was the Byzantine Empire important in world history?” on Quora was an answer by Bryden Walsh that basically says that the Byzantines aren’t important in world history and that the only reason why anyone imagines that the Byzantines have any historical relevance is because people have overromanticized them due to their association with the old Roman Empire.

Walsh bitterly insists at one point in his answer, “But unlike the neighbouring Islamic civilisations, or the Catholic societies of the west, Byzantium did nothing to move human civilisation forward.” Near the end of the article, he says that the modern world doesn’t owe “anything to Byzantium” at all and that the modern world is “the opposite of everything the Byzantines believed in.”

This is, unfortunately, a reflection of the view towards the Byzantine Empire that has dominated the west for centuries. Despite its perennial appeal, this view is also totally inaccurate; the Byzantine Empire has affected the modern world in ways that few people even realize and there is much to be gained from studying it.

How Old Was Mary When She Gave Birth to Jesus?

The ages of Mary and Joseph at the time of Jesus’s birth attracted a great deal of controversy in November 2017, after the Republican Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler defended the Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has been accused of pursuing a sexual relationship with a fourteen-year-old girl at a time when he was thirty-two. Ziegler said:

“…take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus… There’s just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.”

Ziegler claimed that this fact absolves Roy Moore from all blame for his alleged ephebophilia. This is, of course, preposterous. Even if what Ziegler says here were completely correct, that still would not mean it is excusable for men in their thirties today to have sexual relations with fourteen-year-olds. We live in a very different society from the one that existed in Galilee in the first century BC and, regardless of what people 2,000 years ago thought, in our society, it is completely unacceptable for a man in his early thirties to seek sexual relations with a fourteen-year-old.

If we leave aside the whole question of Roy Moore’s guilt, however, we must ask, “Is Ziegler correct about Mary’s age when she gave birth to Jesus?” In other words, was Mary really a teenager when she gave birth to Jesus? The truth is, we really do not know.

The Amazing Origin of the Story of Achilles’s Heel

We all know the story of “Achilles’s heel.” The story you probably learned in school goes like this: When Achilles was a baby, his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal and impervious to all wounds—except she held him by his heel, meaning his heel was the only part of him that was vulnerable. Many years later, near the end of the Trojan War, the Trojan prince Paris shot him in the heel with an arrow guided by the god Apollon and killed him.

This story is the source of our English phrase “Achilles’s heel,” which is often used to refer to a single fatal weakness in something that is otherwise seen as invincible. It may come as a surprise to some people that this story is not actually found in the Iliad or in any other work of classical Greek literature from before the Roman Era. In fact, in the Iliad, Achilles isn’t even invulnerable at all!

Did the Ancient Greeks Really Think Archers Were Cowards?

There is a popular misconception that the ancient Greeks believed that archers were all cowards because they attacked from a distance rather than from up close. What is often ignored is that some of the most revered heroes in Greek mythology, including Herakles, Philoktetes, Odysseus, and Teukros, were archers and so were the deities Artemis and Apollon. The Greeks also used archers extensively in warfare.

While there are a couple passages from surviving works of ancient Greek literature in which certain characters do condemn archers as cowards, these passages are usually taken out of context. One of these passages comes from a character who has just been shot in the foot by an archer. The other passage comes from a villain in a tragedy who is immediately refuted by one of the good characters. When read in context, it becomes clear that these passages do not demonstrate a general disdain for archers in ancient Greek culture.

What Did the Buddha Really Look Like?

In the western world, whenever someone hears the word “Buddha,” they virtually always immediately think of East Asian statues depicting a smiling obese man with a bald head and elongated earlobes dressed in a robe that displays his enormous belly. You can find these statues all over East Asia and miniature versions of them are often sold as souvenirs in gift shops. Because these statues are referred to as “Laughing Buddhas,” most westerners naturally assume that they depict Siddhārtha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism.

Contrary to popular belief, however, these statues do not, in fact, depict the Gautama Buddha, but rather a completely different figure from Chinese folklore. In this article, I want to talk about the real iconography of Siddhārtha Gautama. I also want to talk about the evidence in the surviving written sources for what the historical Buddha really looked like.

No, “Edelweiss” Is Not an Austrian Folk Song or a Nazi Song

There are a lot of popular misconceptions about the song “Edelweiss.” Many people think it is an age-old Austrian folk song. Many people even think that it is the national anthem of Austria. Other people have gotten the bizarre impression that it was composed as a Nazi song or even that it was the national anthem of Nazi Germany.

In reality, the song “Edelweiss” was composed by the American composing duo Oscar Hammerstein II and Richard Rodgers as an original song for the 1959 musical The Sound of Music. Although Hammerstein and Rodgers were trying to imitate the overall genre of folk music, they did not base their song on any preexisting lyrics or melody.

Were the Ancient Spartans Blond?

The ancient Spartans have been a subject of intense fascination and speculation for thousands of years. The Sparta that exists in the popular imagination is often quite different from the one that existed in historical reality. This phenomenon is so well established that it even has a name; historians have labelled the imaginary Sparta that has so intrigued people throughout history “the Spartan mirage.”

One very peculiar aspect of how Sparta has been imagined in modern times is the idea that the overwhelming majority of the ancient Spartans had blond hair. This idea was far more popular a century ago than it is today, but it still hasn’t entirely died out. The idea is especially prominent among white supremacists, who like to imagine the ancient Spartans as blond Aryans who defended Greece against the non-white barbarian hordes of the Persian Empire.

The idea of the “blond Spartans,” however, is based on very little evidence. People mostly only continued to believe in it because it supports their own mythology of racial superiority.

What Did People Really Think Was Causing the Black Death?

The name “Black Death” usually applies to a particular outbreak of the bubonic plague that seems to have begun in around 1338 in Central Asia. The outbreak arrived in Europe in 1346. The main outbreak in Europe lasted until 1353. Altogether, the Black Death is estimated to have killed somewhere between seventy-five million and two hundred million people across the Eurasian continent, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in all of human history.

Unfortunately, it has become fashionable for people to write articles making fun of how stupid and ignorant people who lived during the time of the Black Death supposedly were. There are people online making fun of how people supposedly did all sorts of dumb things that actually made the plague even worse and resulted in more people dying—because apparently that’s something that people these days find amusing.

In reality, many of the things that modern people claim medieval people did that supposedly just made the plague even worse are either things that never really happened at all or things that have been taken out of context and misrepresented to make medieval people look as stupid as possible.

How Do We Know Ancient Texts Are Really Ancient?

There seems to be a lot of people who think that, because we do not have the original manuscripts of ancient texts, that is somehow deeply suspicious. While it is certainly true that there are some places in some texts where we are not completely sure what the original text said, in the vast majority of cases, it is possible to reconstruct exactly or at least almost exactly what the original text said. Even when the exact original wording of a text is unclear, we usually have a pretty good idea of what the original author wrote.

No, Public Universities Aren’t Dominated by Evil Atheist Professors Seeking to Destroy Students’ Faith

The idea that evil, liberal, atheist professors are forcing their students to renounce their faith is an extremely longstanding and pervasive fear among conservative evangelical Christians here in the United States. Right-wing evangelicals have been blaming universities and their supposedly evil, liberal, atheist professors for increasing secularization in society since at least the late nineteenth century.

The trope of the atheist professor forcing his students to renounce God can be found in political speeches, cartoons, internet memes, and even films. Despite the longstanding prevalence of this idea, however, it is, for the most part, entirely unsupported by evidence.