, 11 January 2007 (UTC) 

 Jung has an interesting theory on this. He says that whether there was a real historical figure called Christ is not the point. The point is what we have made of Christ. If we stay neutral on which religion is best and see Christ as the highest ideal mankind has before him/her of what humanity can be - ie a God-Man or God and Man partaking of each others' nature then that is all we need to know about what Jesus represents. We know that Christianity was hugely influenced by the Greek mind of the Byzantine Empire and we can see today how Christianity is adopted by different cultures in subtly different ways. We shouldn't feel uncomfortable about the idea that Christ might have grown out of ideas of Orisis, Orpheus, Apollo etc any more than the idea that Christianity itself grew out of Judaism. Perhaps as humanity grows spiritually its idea of what men and Gods can be grows. In this sense we can say that Christ grows out of but transcends those earlier expressions of spirituality. Jung saw Christ and Buddha as the highest expressions of what humanity can be in human culture so far. You would proabably want to add Krishna if you were a Hindu (Krishna being the most human avatar of Brahman and in many ways parallel to Christ in his message. A lot of what he says in the Bagavad Gita is very similar to the Gospels. Also his name is clearly etymologically linked to Christ, surely? Christ wasn't purply-blue though) and Mohammed if you were a Muslim. In a similar way the Virgin Mary can be seen to have grown out of figures such as Hathor, Isis, Astarte, Artemis etc. I find the idea of a continuity in the development of human spirituality hugely moving and reassuring. It shows we are evolving in our knowledge of the divine. I wonder what the next phase is going to be?  17:14