ricardienne | (no subject)

So the YA fantasy novel of my last post brings up a periodic issue for me: how exactly does Christianity (or any other actual religion, I suppose) work in a fantasy world? For Catherine Branner's "Malonia", like a few other made up places (Katherine Kurtz's Gwynnedd comes to mind, where there are also equally mysterious Muslims and Jews), is Christian. This doesn't bother me too much: that is to say, it doesn't come across as proselyizing. But I always wonder how the geography works. Because the Abrahamic religions are quite geographically and historically grounded. Their texts involve places that their believers know and historical figures and places and entities who are attested, and who have identities outside the religious texts. But what does Jerusalem have to do with fantasyland, so to speak? Where is it? What about the Babylonians, or Egypt, or the Romans?

I suppose, (I am thinking of Christianity in particular here) that from a religious point of view, the geography and history could be seen as accidental to the religion: the events of Jesus' life and the early church could have played out anywhere. The whole theology gets transported somewhere else, and instead of Jesus of Nazareth he's Jesus of Someplace Else. Probably, the reader is not supposed to take this so far, but am I supposed to imagine these characters reading a Bible in which Paul writes Epistles to the Gna'ashites?