In the language of the collective unconscious, before Jesus lived was not the Holy Spirit generally suppressed into the unconscious, because generally men and women were enslaved by the spirit of the times, and dared not live a life that challenged this? But by his example Jesus gave us the audacity to challenge this, though he warned that if anyone did persecution would be their lot? What is the truth?
Sadly he gave no guidance to his disciples on how to behave when his Gospel became the official religion; and in fact his disciples immediately began persecuting others, just as previously they had been persecuted themselves. So if Jesus introduced the Holy Spirit into this world, His arrival did not make a significant difference for long. In Western Christendom the world has gone bloodily on during the last 2000 years, with continual conflict between Church and State, and with the kingdom of heaven no more evident now than it was at the beginning. All this makes sense if Jesus only released something already present in the psyche, which opened up the almost limitless development of the human spirit; it makes none if he introduced something entirely new, which was intended to change human nature.
Professor Whitehead, the Cambridge philosopher who wrote in the 1920s, suggested that Capernaum was a Greek town; Greek in its architecture, its dress, its manners and possibly its language. But if it was, Jesus turned his back on all that. He spoke Aramaic so far as we can tell, preached in parables to simple country people, and steeped his Ministry in the religion of his forefathers. It had to wait until Augustine before Greek thought was seriously introduced into the thinking of the early Church. But you cannot turn your back on modern knowledge, whatever era you live in. You have to accept the knowledge that your era knows about, and view the past in its light. And the most obvious reflection on the religion that Jesus inaugurated is that today it is in serious disarray, due in my opinion to Religion’s inability to talk in any language but its own, now that the symbolism of the past has ceased to mean anything to ordinary people. Jesus may have shown us the Father; he may have shown us the relationship of the soul to God, in its perfection. But what about the running of a decent just society? Jesus never had to consider this, because the Romans could be relied on to run society, and woe betide anyone who interfered with their doing so. Do we say that the Christian life today can ignore the problems of running society; or do we say that we have to tackle the problems, which Jesus never faced, because he never had to? It depends whether you think that Jesus by his cross and passion saved the world, and all we need do is cling to his cross and believe in him; or whether you think he showed us how to save the world, and following his example we should do our best to save our world, in the narrow sphere in which we have some small expertise?