Quote:
Originally posted by Fugee
No, we didn't invent the concept of Christ figures. We just follow Christ who was on earth as a real historical person, referred to in accepted historical secular writings of the era. You may not believe what the disciples wrote about him in the New Testament, but 10 of the 11 remaining disciples were willing to die for what they wrote and believed, which would be pretty stupid if they knew it was all a made-up archetype.
And even before Christ, the Old Testament is full of foreshadowing of what Christ would be like.
I think the archetype exists because people have always had a God-shaped hole in their lives and have looked for ways to fill it.
End of sermon.
Fu(Christianity Timmy)fee
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Fugee, dearest, think of a Venn diagram. The biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig circle is the archetype. A
smaller circle inside the big circle is a Christ figure. I am not saying by this that Christ is teeny or unimportant or should be either. I'm commenting that having Christ as the prototype of this archetype is limiting when doing analysis because it tends to force people into either finding a resurrection (or other Christ-specific detail) aspect or explaining why that is not needed.
But you may feel early-Christian-martyed if you like. I only just started reading the Gospel of Thomas (Pagels) last night but you might want to ponder reading some of that stuff, where people look at the versions of Christ's story that were written contemporaneously with the Gospels that were included in the New Testament but then were suppressed a few centuries later. It appears that they have some differing versions of things. Which is not incredibly important if you are dealing with the archetype, but may be incredibly important if one is required to believe that certain specific things happened to a particular person a really really long time ago.
And what PLF said.
