>>14994514Yes.
You've hit two excellent points but let me be clear. I am very much saying that Christ was a real human who walked among us, and the shroud of turin in my post is evidence I am posting for that claim.
So I'm not downplaying material reality in reference to Christ. I am rather upplaying spiritual reality, in relation to those other similar Gods.
Carl Jung said that the presence of other myth that matches the Christ story rather supports Christ's veracity rather than debunks it as a plagiarism, especially when we see humans re-experience the same myth in cultures widely displaced across space and time, and in no way in contact.
A God that undergoes a punishment, which is present in those other gods i mentioned. which heretofore has been a mythological (not the same as fictional, which is creative) is rather proof of an archetype entering reality in the Christ phenomenon. Christ represents a descension of a spiritual truth that had been in those "other fictional figures" with the "same story", now entering the real world and acting it self out.
Another example of a "myth" acting itself out in reality is marriage. It is a spiritual image that men and women are drawn to act out through psychological and spiritual forces.
In Neoplatonism, the cosmic ideals are repeated at every layer of reality. Jesus Christ is unprecedented in that it is the first time a previously cosmic-only image acted itself out in real life with a real man. Rudolf Steiner was of the same opinion, and he references the magian sages that foretold the coming of Christ. "One is coming that is too high for us to see".
The Word becoming Flesh.
Christian apologetics says that Christ was present in pre-christian tradition. If he was the Word that was there in the beginning, he necessarily has manifested throughout every religion and philosophical tradition, so someone like Socrates was an adherent of a spiritual force identified as Christ.
But it was the first time he entered our plane.
