Don, the old stories are allegories more than they are metaphors. Most people think of myth as falsehood or as some simplistic thing as how the camel got his hump. No, the old stories are not literal events. But it doesn't do any good to leave it at that. What then are they? Who wrote them and why?

Why is there a flood myth in cultures found all over the globe that could not have ever been in contact according to our histories? To say floods were global occurrences is only proof of the depth of our misunderstanding. The ancient peoples were well aware of what caused floods and hardly needed a myth to explain it. The annual flood of rivers or seasonal rainfalls revitalized the land. They saw it played out in the stars and so the Flood written of in scriptures or told in oral myths never occurred on earth; it occurred in the stars and that is why it needed explaining and coding so that it could be remembered and passed onto future generations. Earthly floods will always occur and this knowledge hardly needs to be preserved and passed on. But how it is found in the stars and why it is there did need preserving.

One popular form of coding such information was nursery rhymes and fairytales. If you are familiar with the accounts of shamans, for example, then "Jack and the Beanstalk" is immediately recognizable for what it truly is. If you know the old Sumerian story of the goddess Inanna then you know what "Little Miss Muffett" is about. The same is true of the Three Bears, Sleeping Beauty, Hickory Dickory Dock, Old Mother Hubbard, Rapunzel, etc.

Jesus walking on the water was not a literal event nor was it some stupid superstitious nonsense to be dismissed as mere myth. It is a myth but that makes it powerful but you have to understand the myth or it makes no difference whether you dismiss it as a dumb old story or as a literal event. In this way, the masses preserved it but only the initiated understood it.