Amythic
On These Stories
What you will find here are attempts to return these stories to the scale at which they first existed.
Before doctrine, before theology, before belief systems hardened around them, these were accounts of people — tired, frightened, impulsive, affectionate, defensive, loyal, confused. They happened in rooms, on roads, by fires, at tables. They included jokes, embarrassment, misjudgements, panic, silence, and failure, as well as courage and care.
They were written by people who assumed their listeners understood how bodies react under pressure — how shame works, how crowds behave, how loyalty fractures, how fear narrows the mind, how presence steadies it. Much of that understanding was shared and unspoken. It didn’t need explaining.
These retellings work at that level.
They slow the stories down and stay close to posture, breath, attention, and consequence. They resist turning lived moments into lessons or spectacles. Nothing is heightened to prove a point, and nothing is flattened into abstraction.
In the Gospels, what we later call miracles are often awkward, disruptive, and costly. They expose systems, rearrange relationships, and leave people with choices rather than conclusions. Sometimes bodies change. Sometimes nothing visible happens at all. Both are allowed to stand.
I’ve found it helpful to hold three things at once: what may have happened, what it was like for the people who were there, and the author’s attempt to make sense of that experience with the language available to them at the time. Sometimes that language illuminates. Sometimes it quietly marks the edge of what could not yet be understood.
These pieces begin from a simpler assumption: that these stories endured because they were accurate descriptions of human experience long before we had technical language for it. The encounters came first. The categories came later.
You don’t need to agree with what you read here. You’re not being asked to adopt a framework or reach a conclusion. You’re being invited to notice — where your own instincts tighten or relax, where you feel recognition, resistance, relief, or refusal.
Read them as scenes, not statements.
Let the silences do their work.
The essays begin below.
The Woman with the Issue of Blood