To browse Academia. I sometimes marvel at the texts that are posted on this site, which by name suggests that these are texts that live up to some minimum content requirements. Time after time, the Knights Templar appear in texts that are anything but objectively well-founded. Studies in Sweden and Denmark have shown, that the idea came from Poland, and that erection of the first round churches probably happened in the first third of the 12th century.
You can read and see it here: academia. Immer wieder erscheinen die Tempelritter in Texten, die alles andere als objektiv begrΓΌndet sind. English and German version of the chapter "Aflivning af en myte". Myth, the stories of gods and heroes,s tories understood to hover somewhere in the grey area between the whiteblaze of truth and the black hole of falsehood,was omnipresent in the visual world of the laterR oman Empire. In its ubiquity myth wasu nremarkable; except,that is, for the earliest Christian apologists who used it as the centerpieceintheir arguments against polytheistic belief and practice.
Fors econd-a nd third-century commentators such as Tatian c. Thus,a ccording to Tertullian,w ho himselfl ookedt ot he authorityo f Varro B. Ina like vein Tatian observed that tales of divine metamorphoses, such as that of theaquiline Zeus in pursuit of thec omelyG anymede, simply beggared imagination.
As such it stands in contrast to history. Inthe fourth century Sallustius, De disetmundo On the gods and the world ,3states unequivocallyt hat myth treats of the divine. On the problems of modernd efinitions and terminologywith respect to the classical world see F. Graf, "Myth" in DNP 9. See in this same article for an overview of Greek and Roman definitions as they developed between the sixth century B. G rafd efines myth as "at raditional narrative of collective significance".
This essaylayers this basic definition with the ancient understanding of myth as story that is fictitious and implausible. As such it is associated with poetry and seen as distinct from history. S ee Graf: Section 2. Tertullian argues that the approachi sweakasp hilosophy deals onlyw ith speculation and poetry with foolish ideas.
