///The same could be said of Moby Dick of course...///

But Melville's ststement of the book being the gospels of the 19th century intrigue me. He was friends with Hawthorne who was supposedly quite interested in TM and he and Melville once talked long into the night about things. After this discussion, Melville completely rewrote the manuscript. Now why did he do that and what did they talk about?

As for Lovecraft, the weird parallels between his fiction and the real world concerning things neither he nor anyone in his time or at least his culture could have known is perplexing. Being an atheist and rationalist, he laughed such things off but he never lived long enough to hear of some of the weirdest parallels.

The only thing the bible is good for is that it preserves in some form much older strains of thought and mystical poetry that is completely gone today. For example, whenever the angels in the gospels speak, it is always in verse leading many scholars to believe that the words attributed to them were much older poetry appropriated by the author(s). The same with the opening of John, it is a poem although the original text is now long gone. It proves that the ideas put forth as original to Christianity were, not surprisingly, borrowed from older religions and mystical traditions.