| A | B |
|---|
| Abraham and Isaac | He was willing to kill his only son for God |
| Absalom | David’s third son, stuck in a tree and died but was mourned by his father. |
| Atlas | Primordial Titan who, as a punishment by Zeus for helping the Titans in the Clash of the Titans, was made to forever hold up the earth. |
| Daedalus and Icarus | Escaped the Minotaur’s maze by making their own wings, but when Icarus failed to listen to his father, his wings melted and he died. |
| Dionysus or Bacchus | Son of Zeus and Semele, God of wine, revelry, wild abandon; sex |
| Four horsemen of the apocalypse | personify pestilence, war, famine, and death. |
| Jezebel | Daughter of Ethbaal , King of the Phoenicians. She was “killing off the lord’s Prophets”; after she was killed, her body was thrown to the dogs. Due to her love of finery and painted face, she is associated with lose women or prostitutes. She is also considered a false prophet. |
| Lazarus | Died of an illness but rose from the dead due to his faith in Jesus; it is considered one of Jesus’s miracles. |
| Prometheus | Titan god of forethought and crafty counsel. He created man out of clay and gave man fire, thus angering Zeus. |
| Sisyphus | A king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down |
| Solomon | Biblical king known for wealth, wisdom, and findings. |
| Styx/Charon | River a soul must pass to reach the Underworld. Souls must give Carron, the ferryman a silver coin to cross the river. |
| Achilles | Greatest Greek hero of the Trojan War who could only be injured with a blow to his achilles. |
| Cain and Abel | Two brothers; Cain killed Abel because of jealousy (lamb & straw) |
| Cast the first stone | Meant that the congregation was only in a place to condemn a sinner only if they were without sin. |
| Garden of Gethsemane | Jesus went to go pray and took his 3 of his disciples and wanted to keep them from temptation. This happened the night before his crucifixion. |
| Gorgons | Monstrous feminine creature whose appearance would turn anyone who laid eyes upon it to stone. Medusa is the most famous of the Gorgons. |
| Holy Grail | Chalice used by Christ at the Last Supper. Lost in the Crusades. |
| John the Baptist | Baptized Christ. Son of Elizabeth and Zacharias. Thought of as a prophet. |
| Judas Iscariot | Disciple who betrayed Jesus and sold him for thirty coins – killed innocent blood. |
| Lot’s wife | She is described as turning into a pillar of salt for failing to heed the orders of the angels of deliverance while fleeing from the city of Sodom. |
| Mary | Mother of Jesus; Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who then became a follower of Jesus; Lourdes is a possible sighting place of the Virgin Mary; Guadalupe is another possible site of the seeing of the Virgin Mary |
| Noah and the flood | Noah was instructed by God to build an ark that would save him from the 40 day flood that would wipe away the human race. God later promised never to do this again and created the rainbow. |
| Pandora | The first mortal woman created by Zeus. Wife of Epimetheus. She was given a box by Prometheus to hold and told not to open it. She did and thus unleashed evil into the world. |
| Persephone | Queen of the Underworld; wife of the God Hades. When kidnapped by Hade, her mother, Demeter, refused to allow grain to grown on earth. Persephone fasted during kidnapping. Hades returned her to her mother but he she would annually return to him six months out of the year, one month for every pomegranate seed she snuck while supposedly fasting. |
| Philistines | Inhabitants of Philistia who appeared in the southern coastal area of Canaan at the beginning of the Iron Age and ruled the five city-states of Gaza. Considered enemies of Israel. |
| Prodigal son | Wasted his inheritance but came back to his father who received him with open arms. |
| Prometheus | Titan god of forethought and crafty counsel. He created man out of clay and gave man fire, thus angering Zeus. |
| Sodom and Gomorrah | cities destined to be destroyed for their sins |
| Tower of Babel | A tower built in an attempt to reach heaven and to talk to God. |
| Utopia | An imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect. |
| Apocalypse/Judgment Day/Day of Reconing/Second comming/Rapture | Terms for the last day of humanity's stay on earth when God will judge mankind, sending souls to Heaven or Hell for all eternity |
| Crown of Thorns | Jesus wore this as mocking of him as a King by Pontius Pilate. ruler of Judea |
| Exodus | The departure of the Israelites, under Moses, from Egypt; a book of the old testament telling this story |
| Guy Fawkes | Revolutionist in France; was a member of a group of provincial English Catholics who planned the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605; killed on November 5th during the uprising; "Remember, Remember, the 5th of November!" |
| Holy Trinity | The representation of God as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - all three in one - under the Christian faith |
| Jacob's Ladder | is a pathway to heaven that the biblical Patriarch Jacob dreams about during his flight from his brother Esau. It is described in the Book of Genesis. |
| Jephthah's daughter | The Book of Judges describes Jephthah as leading the Israelites in battle against Ammon and, as the result of a rash vow, he sacrificed his daughter after defeating the Ammonites. An alternative interpretation of the story is that his daughter was subject to a chastity vow as a sacrifice. |
| Lamb of God | a title for Jesus that appears in the Gospel of John; Jesus is referred to a the shepherd of his people |
| Lethe River | Forgetfulness - passed through on the way to the Greek underworld |
| Lord's prayer | a central prayer in Christianity also commonly known as the Our Father and in Latin as the Pater Noster. In the New Testament, it appears in two forms: a longer form in the Gospel of Matthew[6:9–13] as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter form in the Gospel of Luke,[11:1–4] as a response by Jesus to a request by "one of his disciples" to teach them "to pray as John taught his disciples". |
| Odysseus/Ulysses/Trojan Horse/Telemachus | Odysseus(greek name)/Ulysses(roman name) fought in the Trojan War and brought about the defeat of the Trojans through his invention, the Trojan horse, which allowed soldiers to hide inside, and allowed him to return, after a 10 year voyage, to his wife, Penelope, and to his son, Telemachus |
| Plague of Locusts | The Plagues of Egypt (Hebrew: מכות מצרים, Makot Mitzrayim), also called the Ten Plagues (Hebrew: עשר המכות, Eser HaMakot) or the Biblical Plagues, were ten calamities that, according to the biblical Book of Exodus, Israel's God, Yahweh, inflicted upon Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to release the ill-treated Israelites from slavery. Pharaoh capitulated after the tenth plague, triggering the Exodus of the Jewish people; The eighth plague of Egypt was locusts. Before the plague, God informed Moses that from that point on He would "harden Pharaoh's heart," (as promised earlier in 4:21) so that Pharaoh would not give in, and the remaining miracles (the final plagues and the splitting of the sea) would play out. |
| Primordial Soup | a term introduced by the Soviet biologist Alexander Oparin. In 1924, he proposed the theory of the origin of life on Earth through the transformation, during the gradual chemical evolution of molecules that contain carbon in the primordial soup. |
| Psalm 23:4 | "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." |
| Saul and David | (Hebrew = asked for, prayed for"; was the first king of the united Kingdom of Israel. He was anointed by the prophet Samuel and reigned from Gibeah. He fell on his sword to avoid capture in the battle against the Philistines at Mount Gilboa, during which three of his sons were also killed. The succession to his throne was contested by Ish-bosheth, his only surviving son, and his son-in-law David, who eventually prevailed; The main challenge Saul encounters is his lack of divine approval; he is portrayed negatively as soon as David is added to the narrative.[9] At this point Saul is rejected and the Spirit of the Lord is replaced by an "evil spirit" explained in 1 Samuel 16:14. In contrast, once David is anointed, "the spirit of the Lord comes upon [him]." |
| Shepherd (Christ) | Christ is often called the shepherd of his people, or his flock, leading them to safety. |
| Sphinx | a mythical creature with, as a minimum, the body of a lion and a human head; In Greek tradition, it has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless. Those who cannot answer her riddle suffer a fate typical in such mythological stories, as they are killed and eaten by this ravenous monster.[1] Unlike the Greek sphinx which was a woman, the Egyptian sphinx is typically shown as a man (an androsphinx). In addition, the Egyptian sphinx was viewed as benevolent in contrast to the malevolent Greek version and was thought of as a guardian often flanking the entrances to temples. |
| Tempest | violent storm; Shakespeare play where It is set on a remote island, where Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skillful manipulation. He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island; "tempest in a teacup" = making a big deal out of nothing |
| Troy | City of the 10 year Trojan War - see "Odysseus" |
