Oedipus Rex – a Christ Figure Sophocles' famous tragedy, Oedipus Rex, perhaps “the most important and influential drama ever written” (“Sophocles” 717), appears in the person of Oedipus the model of a good ruler, a humanly intelligent and vigorously active leader, a man who had previously saved his adopted city Thebes from disaster. Is Oedipus then an alter Christus? The numerous parallels between the figure of King Oedipus and the figure of Christ in the Scriptures push the reader to ask the above question. For example, in the opening lines of the play, Oedipus greets the crowd of supplicants (including old men, boys and children) waiting at the gates of his palace with the words: "My children, last born of old Cadmus, / Why do you sit here like supplicants , in your hands / Olive branches threaded with wool"? The king's second speech to the crowd then begins: “Ah! my poor children, known, ah, known too well, / The search that brings you here and your need. Other speeches to the people by the king call them “children”. There are many parallels to this in the Bible when Jesus addressed the people. In the Gospel of Matthew alone the word children is used 20 times, for example 3:9: “. . .and do not dare say to yourselves: "We have Abraham for our father"; for I tell you that God is able to raise up children for Abraham from these stones." Jesus also said in Matthew 18:3, “Truly I say to you, unless you repent and become like little children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven.” In the same book (23:37) Jesus said: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her...... in the center of one sheet ...... says "I thank my God through Jesus Christ", thus associating the two very closely sees that there are many parallels between Sophocles' play, the Oedipus Rex, in the way which it treats the king, and the Bible in the way it treats Jesus, even though the latter was written some 400 years after the former. WORKS CITED Oedipus Rex. Translated by Stephen Berg and Diskin Clay. In Literature of the Western World, ed by Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. NewYork: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984. “Sophocles” In Literature of the Western World, edited by Brian Wilkie and James Hurt. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1984. Sophocles. Trans. by F. Storr.http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/browse-mixed new?tag=public&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&part=0&id=SopOedi