Beauty and the Beast — Older Than The Bible?

Jesus & the Tale as Old as Time

Researchers have traced the origin of some of our most iconic fairy tales, also known as folktales or folklore, to between 2,500 and 6,000 years old. “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin”, while written down in the 17th and 18th centuries, can be traced back to the emergence of the western Indo-European subfamilies of languages. Some think that the origin of these tales could go back even further.

Flood myths are common throughout many cultures. Some speculate that they date to the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,700 years ago. This makes speculative sense, and means that the flood myths are older then when they were written in the Christian Bible, which is a collection of books written from about 3,500 BC to 95 AD.

What does this mean?

Folk tales, which are stories created by people who live in community with each other and the land, were once (and possibly still are) vessels of information, passed orally from generation to generation, transmitting the subjective knowledge of a cumulative lifetime.

Before science, we created stories to explain the world. After science, we still wrote stories, but they began to be supported by objective facts. Now, science tells brief, dry stories with a surplus of facts…