While Aslan flat-out IS Jesus Christ, many other characters in the Narnian stories can be called _analogies_ to something in the Bible. However far his inventiveness ranged, Mr. Lewis did not forget about Scripture. I was almost finished writing a fairly detailed article on this topic, when my treacherous computer chose to delete all my work for no reason. (Maybe Mr. Lewis and his brother weren’t so bad off using a manual typewriter after all.) Now it’s late at night and I’m tired; so I’ll shortcut salvaging the article by a minimal restatement of the correlations I’d listed.
1) Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel: parallel to Jadis, sharing the Witch’s willingness to murder children for the sake of power.
2) Balaam, the dubious prophet whose donkey was the only ordinary animal in the Bible that spoke: some parallel to Uncle Andrew, since Uncle Andrew’s contact with talking animals was part of the sequence of events which offered him s chance of redemption.
3) The Apostle Thomas: Puddleglum. Neither of them _wanted_ an unhappy outcome, even though both _expected_ one, and both were loyal at heart.
4) Nehemiah, a man who was not granted explicit miracles but set an example of integrity as he came from far away to clean up Jerusalem: parallel to King Caspian arriving at the Lone Islands and cleaning up the government there.
5) The spoiled, selfish sons of the mediocre priest Eli in First Samuel: parallel to the ape Shift, who only grew more selfish the more the donkey Puzzle gave in to his demands.
Joseph Richard Ravitts (pronounced RAY-vitts)
http://ut-fidem-praestem.blogspot.com
