The Trojan Horse in Nolan’s Odyssey: Christianity Hidden in Zeus’s Law

Certainly, Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey this past summer has been a triumph—both critically and financially, far surpassing the $1 billion threshold. Yet it has also engendered much reflection, particularly concerning its contrasts with Homer’s original poem and Nolan’s attempts to modernize and contextualize it for contemporary audiences living in a demythologized age. (For examples, see: demythologizing it toward a materialist worldview, introducing mythology.) 

One such contrast is the paramount importance Nolan gives to what he calls Zeus’s law (xenia). In doing so, Nolan takes what is certainly a major key in Homer’s epic (e.g., the suitors violating hospitality, the Laestrygonians attacking Odysseus’s men instead of offering them food) and elevates it into something like the melody and moral center of the story.

He leans into this theme so much that the climax of the movie is tantamount to a confession one might find in one’s local Catholic parish. Penelope sits behind a mesh divider, receiving the words of her long-lost husband. There Odysseus confesses to what Nolan uniquely presents as his ultimate crime—the crime which has beset him with rampant guilt in the form of flashbacks and appearances by the goddess Athena throughout the film. His crime is that he violated the law of Zeus. 

The infamous Trojan horse, the idea created by Odysseus, had been presented as a gift to the goddess Athena, but concealed within the gift was not an offering, but death—an army that would lay waste to the city. As Odysseus recalls—"ten years of rage pour out in one night.” 

“One man’s trick,” he confesses bitterly to Penelope, “to break Zeus’s law forever.”

The consequences of that violation reverberate throughout the film, particularly in the rise of the “Sea Peoples,” the nebulous name given to the maritime raiders who haunted the eastern Mediterranean as the Bronze Age gave way. In Nolan’s telling, the term eventually comes to implicate Odysseus and his own men. The man who violated the law of hospitality has himself become one of the uncivilized marauders from whom civilized people need protection.

The breaking of the law leads to the breakdown of society.

In this, Nolan unmistakenly transforms what is often seen as a story of Odysseus’s hubris, the gods, and the long journey home, into a story centered on Zeus and his law. And this “trick” of Nolan has not gone unnoticed—not only Nolan’s emphasis on xenia, but also the way he defines it.

For instance, shortly after the film’s release, the liberal NYT commentator and podcaster, Ezra Klein, compellingly argued that Nolan’s use of xenia in his film adaptation is something of a Trojan Horse for a contemporary and incisive political message against what he sees as the uncivilized and xenophobic ethos represented in the Trump era. 

While the political question remains, Nolan himself made the contemporary relevance explicit. In an interview with the New York Times in late June, he said:

The greatness of the poem is such that you approach these things as if they’re foreign and ancient, then as you explore them, they suddenly become stunningly relevant. Zeus’s law, it’s the Golden Rule — treat as you would be treated — and with a theological underpinning in their world, that you might be a god in disguise … It’s the only way society can function … That’s everything in terms of holding civilization together or even defining civilization.

Note within Nolan’s telling, Zeus’s law (xenia) is more than a mere archaic custom. It is what holds civilization together. But curiously, Nolan calls Zeus’s law “the Golden Rule” and situates it as a “theological underpinning of the world.” The ethical practice is fixed to a transcendent law. 

Whose Golden Rule? 

The identification of Zeus’s law as the Golden Rule sounds natural to our modern ears, but it may sound natural because we are not ancient Greeks. To them, Nolan’s description might sound entirely foreign. 

Laure Puckett-Pope explored this question in an article for Elle, reaching out to two classics professors to ask whether they recognized in Homer the concept of xenia Nolan describes.

“In short, no—there was no conception of a ‘Zeus’s law’ in the sense that Nolan seems to present it.” Jim Crozier, professor and director of undergraduate studies in the Department of Classics, Archaeology, and Religion at the University of Missouri.

Suzanne Lye, professor in the Department of Classics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, agreed. “‘Zeus’s law’ isn’t a thing,” she explained. “In Ancient Greece … there were human laws and expectations for behavior related to certain areas … but there was no singular set of codified laws from the gods or even one master law that applied across the Greek world.”

In other words, Nolan’s presentation of the universality and uniformity of xenia is not true to antiquity. That does not mean that xenia was unreal or unimportant per se.

As Puckett-Pope explains, xenia governed hospitality and “guest friendship.” Hosts had obligations toward their guests, and guests had obligations toward their hosts. Crozier notes that hosts were not to steal from, exploit, or harm a guest, while guests were expected to honor their hosts. As Nolan’s interview already indicated, in a world without hotels, Buc-ee’s, or interstates, where travel was genuinely dangerous, the ability to trust strangers mattered enormously.

Yet Lye cautions against identifying this ancient practice with the Golden Rule. As she explains to Elle, “For [xenia] specifically, it was more of an ‘if you don’t act in certain ritual ways around being a host and guest, then you might offend Zeus Xenios and either you, your family, or your community will be in big trouble.” That is why Penelope and Telemachus could not expel the suitors, who were their guests, from their home. 

The God Who Loves the Stranger

This contrast becomes clearer when one examines the biblical vision of neighbor-love which undergirds Jesus’s presentation of the famed Golden Rule in Matthew 7:12. 

The imperative to love one’s neighbor originally found in Leviticus 19:18 is one of the most influential texts in early Christian literature and is directly cited or alluded to by numerous New Testament writers (Matt 22:37-40; Mark 12:28-31; Rom 13:9-10; Gal 5:14; Jas 2:8). 

Yet the first command to “love your neighbor as yourself” does not appear as an isolated ethical maxim.  In the verses prior, we find a list of prohibitions that culminates in the preeminent command to love in verse 18 (Lev 19:12-13, 15-16, 18a). Love is not simply another command, but functions as the foundation and unifying principle of these commands and the whole law.  

And importantly, the chapter eventually extends and apply this language explicitly to the stranger: 

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God. (Lev 19:33-34)

The word “stranger” here should not be reduced to humanity in the abstract, or at a distance. The Hebrew gēr refers to the outsider who has come near—a non-Israelite living among Israel and particularly vulnerable to exploitation. The culturally distinct outsider dwelling in Israel’s midst is not to be wronged but treated “as the native among you” and loved “as yourself.” This is more than a command designed to make travel possible in the Ancient Near East.

Biblical hospitality is not preeminently grounded in a system of reciprocity either—"I welcome you because someday I may need you to welcome me.”  Nor is the deepest motivation the avoidance of divine punishment, the possibility that one might accidentally turn away an angel or Nolan’s “gods” in disguise (though it’s true; cf. Heb 13:2), or even the preservation of civilization against a descent into something resembling Nolan’s “Sea Peoples.” 

Those all may provide good and even biblical rationales for hospitality. But they are not its foundation. 

A parallel passage makes this foundation a bit clearer—the Lord himself “loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing,” and on that basis commands Israel, “Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt” (Deut 10:18-19). 

Israel must love the stranger because God himself redemptively loves the stranger. Hospitality, then, is not so much a system of reciprocity necessary for survival, but an invitation to response. It is act by which one responds to and imitates God’s character. 

This is why neighbor love belongs within Leviticus’s larger concern for holiness. “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” frames the chapter (Lev. 19:2). The repeated refrain “I am the LORD” ties Israel’s seemingly disparate ethical obligations back to the character of the God whose people they are. Ritual purity cannot be separated from ethical purity. 

So, the law of hospitality does not merely keep the “Sea Peoples” at bay. It bears witness to a holy and loving God.

A Trojan Horse from Jerusalem 

This helps explain what is so revealing about Nolan’s identification of xenia with the Golden Rule.

Nolan is putting his finger on the pulse of a moral intuition that appears self-evident to modern Western audiences: “Of course we should treat the stranger as we ourselves would wish to be treated.” But self-evident to us does not mean self-evident everywhere and always. 

Charles Taylor, in his seminal work A Secular Age, describes a modern social order that initially understood human flourishing in explicitly theological terms but gradually came to imagine that same order without reference to God:

At first, the social order is seen as offering us a blueprint for how things, in the human realm, can hang together to our mutual benefit, and this is identified with the plan of Providence, what God asks us to realize. But it is in the nature of a self-sufficient immanent order that it can be envisaged without reference to God; and very soon the proper blueprint is attributed to Nature.

The blueprint remains, even when its theological origins are forgotten. The banquet hall remains full of ungrateful guests, even while the host of the feast is not remembered and the gratitude is assigned elsewhere. 

Historian Tom Holland (not to be confused with the actor playing Odysseus’s son, Telemachus), makes a similar argument in Dominion. Many values that modern Westerners, including Nolan, regard as simply humane or universal, Holland argues, bear the unmistakable imprint of Christianity:

Humanism derives ultimately from claims made in the Bible: that humans are made in God’s image; that his Son died equally for everyone; that there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female … that human beings have rights; that they are born equal … these were never self-evident truths.

And so, we see, Nolan’s xenia offers a small but illuminating example. 

Again, the claim is not that Christianity invented hospitality or concern for the stranger. The Greeks clearly valued both. Christians know well that the doctrine of common grace gives Christians every reason to expect genuine moral knowledge outside the covenant people of God (cf. Rom 2:15).

The more particular claim is that Nolan interprets the ancient institution of xenia through a universal moral category that belongs to the Christian of neighbor-love rather than to ancient Greek guest-friendship.

Crozier draws the same distinction: “Is that the same as the ‘Golden Rule’? I would say it is not—I think Nolan is clearly channeling that Christian concept into the film as an innovation of his own.” (emphasis mine) 

That is the striking thing about Nolan’s adaptation. Whether consciously or not, he takes something authentically Greek and makes it intelligible to us through a moral imagination profoundly indebted to and shaped by Christianity. 

As Odysseus cannot escape the judgment of the gods, so too can Nolan, and even we, cannot escape a gospel-shaped moral imagination.  

The God Who Became the Stranger

But wondrously, the biblical vision of hospitality rests not in a proposition or prescription, but in a person.

The God who commands his people to love the stranger is the same God who, in Christ, entered into the world as a stranger. “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him” (John 1:11).

And yet the rejected stranger becomes the gracious host. Not to friends and fellow residents, but to rebels and sojourners. The glorious truth is that Christ receives sinners. And through his death, those who were once “strangers to the covenants of promise” are “brought near by the blood of Christ” and made “members of the household of God” (Eph 2:12-13, 19).

This gives true hospitality its deepest and most abiding logic.

We do not welcome primarily because hospitality keeps civilization functioning, though it does. We do not welcome because the stranger may someday reciprocate, though she may. We do not welcome merely because refusing hospitality may bring the just judgement of God, though Scripture tells us it will (cf. Matt 25:44). 

Biblical hospitality at its core teaches that we welcome others because God has welcomed us in Christ Jesus (Rom 12:13; 1 Tim 3:2, 5:10; Titus 1:8; Heb 13:2; 1 Pet 4:9)  It is a way of life that “seeks to make strangers neighbors, and neighbors family of God,” as Rosaria Butterfield put it in The Gospel Comes with a House Key.

As Christian writer Christopher Watkin might say, this is not the logic of reciprocity but of mutuality and abundance. 

Nolan’s Odyssey sees something true: the violation of hospitality destroys both guest and host. In his retelling, when Odysseus turns a gift into a weapon, he participates in the undoing of the civilized world, and his end is exile. 

But though Nolan’s xenia is grammatically Greek, it is syntactically Christian. The vocabulary of xenia comes from Homer, but its moral logic goes beyond the reciprocal guest-friendship of the ancient world. Its accent sounds distinctly like the biblical command to love the stranger as oneself. 

Perhaps the Trojan Horse hidden inside Nolan’s Odyssey is not simply the political message some interpreters on both sides of the culture war have suspected. The more surprising passenger, perhaps even to Nolan himself, is a vision of hospitality that, while not fully Christian, bears the unmistakable shape of the gospel under the guise of Zeus’s law.