I didn’t think I’d live to see the day a nearly 3,000-year-old staple of Western civilization became the talk of every pop culture news outlet, but here we are!
Although there have been some controversies surrounding the new release of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, I consider Nolan’s willingness to revive this story in soul-sucking twenty-first-century Hollywood as a win. Anything to combat the tendency to push Westerners into shame for our roots and disdain of any story written by the privileged males of the ancient world.
These past few weeks leading up to the release of The Odyssey have revealed the lasting legacy ancient stories still possess in a culture increasingly skeptical of its own past. This is unsurprising, since the relevance of a truly great story never dies, no matter the time, place, or culture it’s written and retold in.
The legacy of Homer and his epic poems is undeniable. His work was preserved orally for tens of generations before eventually being recorded in ink around the sixth century B.C. Over a thousand manuscripts of the Iliad and Odyssey have survived since. And now, a quarter of a billion dollars was poured into adapting this story to IMAX screens for moviegoers to sip ICEEs and munch popcorn to.
Given this, can the Odyssey be considered the most important text from the ancient world? No.
If the Odyssey has been highly prized, the Bible is invaluable. Over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament exist today, with the earliest surviving one dated to within 100 to 150 years of the original text. And the Bible remains the best-selling book—or rather, collection of books—of all time.
I’m not aware of anyone who died preserving the poetry of Homer. I am aware of several martyrs who were killed for preserving the parables of Christ, even to this present day. The stories crafted by Homer are good and beautiful, but the story of Christ takes it up one notch by also being true.
There’s a chance Nolan’s Odyssey may outperform Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ at the box office. But the story of Odysseus’s journey home will never trump the story of God’s pursuit of man and the incarnation of Christ. That is the ultimate story worth captivating audiences worldwide.