The Golden Fleece has frequently been compared to the ram sacrifice substituted for Isaac in Genesis 22:9-18, as detailed on my page about the Golden Fleece as a divine covenant. Similarly, some have thought that the ship Argo was in fact a garbled recollection of Noah's Ark.

But these are hardly the only places where the Argonaut myth has been thought to cross paths with the Bible. In the field of "alternative" history, there is no end to such comparisons. The Russian Anatoly Fomenko, who believes that the Middle Ages were a British invention designed to deny Russia her true glory, believes the Argonauts' story was a virtually scene-by-scene replay of the Bible, including elements of Exodus and Genesis, and much more:

The legends [of the Argonauts] resemble the accounts of wars and campaigns of both Joshua and Alexander the Great to a great extent. The myth of the Argonauts might be yet another duplicate of medieval chronicles describing the wars of the [12th to 14th] centuries [...]

Fomenko also thinks Jason, Medea, and the snake parallel Adam, Eve, and the serpent, a suggestion made long before by Edward Burnaby-Greene in his 1780 translation of the Argonautica of Apollonius. Greene thought the lovers' escape from Colchis paralleled the expulsion from Eden in Milton's Paradise Lost (p. 147). Hope this helps! ~ Autumn :)

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3 years ago