Mythoi, Monomyth, and a Missing Mother: The Archetypal Significance of the Prodigal’s Quest in Luke 15:11–24
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15 elicits profound responses and emotions in various times, places, and cultures. Why has it stood the test of time as one of Jesus’ most famous parables? One possible answer is that the story carries enduring appeal because of the underlying structure of the parable, a recurring pattern in literature called the monomyth. Peeling back the layers of the parable, one may uncover the foundational archetypes of the parable that make it timeless. Hidden significance of the parable may be illuminated by comparing its narrative to the hero quest of Joseph Campbell and the monomyth archetypes of Northrop Frye and Leland Ryken, both of which emphasize a cyclical movement that unifies all of literature. Also important are the specific archetypes within the general monomyth archetype, such as father and mother, bread and water. The parable also contains the four elements (mythoi) of the circular monomyth: romance, tragedy, anti-romance, and comedy. Using archetypal and myth criticism, this article demonstrates that the parable has enduring attraction because its underlying archetypes appeal to a deep layer of the human psyche and to what is elemental to the human experience.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".