It has been assumed that Christ is nothing but a Myth but Myth is not Fiction
…
[It has been assumed that Christ is nothing but a Myth but Myth is not Fiction. Men have Mythical Fates just as Greek Heroes do.]
In view of these portentous impossibilities, it has been assumed, perhaps as the result of a growing impatience with the difficult factual material, that Christ was nothing but a myth, in this case no more than a fiction.
But myth is not fiction: it consists of facts that are continually repeated and can be observed over and over again. It is something that happens to man, and men have mythical fates just as much as the Greek heroes do.
The fact that the life of Christ is largely myth does absolutely nothing to disprove its factual truth quite the contrary. I would even go so far as to say that the mythical character of a life is just what expresses its universal human validity.
It is perfectly possible, psychologically, for the unconscious or an archetype to take complete possession of a man and to determine his fate down to the smallest detail. At the same time objective, non-psychic parallel phenomena can occur which also represent the archetype.
It not only seems so, it simply is so, that the archetype fulfills itself not only psychically in the individual, but objectively outside the individual. My own conjecture is that Christ was such a personality.
The life of Christ is just what it had to be if it is the life of a god and a man at the same time. It is a symbolum, a bringing together of heterogeneous natures, rather as if Job and Yahweh were combined in a single personality.
Yahweh’s intention to become man, which resulted from his collision with Job, is fulfilled in Christ’s life and suffering. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Answer to Job, Page 409. Paragraph 648.
