The Holy Bible is naturally one of the most read, discussed, criticized and interpreted documents throughout the humankind culture. Today, there are numerous approaches of understanding and interpreting this controversial source, and without any doubt, it has affected the Western culture in many views. In particular, it has become tightly bounded with psychoanalysis in the face of Freud and analytical psychology in the face of Jung.

To start with, the biography and heritage of Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961) manifest a close familiarity with and brilliant knowledge of the Bible and the biblical overview on the whole. If we get acquainted with his life and work, we will see that the Bible has received the ubiquitous presence there, “literary from cradle to grave” (Rollins 46). First of all, Jung was raised in a reformed protestant family and thus since the early childhood his relationships with the Bible were prospected. The prospects, however, were to raise a conflict between the principles brought up in young Jung and the advanced acceleration of thought he was gaining with age. In particular, Jung worked out his own authentic hermeneutical methods, “with implications for interpretation” (Kille 10). The problem was even worsened by the turn of new biblical criticism to rationalistic historicism at the end of the 19^th century and what is more, by the personal faith crisis of Jung’s preacher father.

Hereby, the Bible is the most often and persistently cited source in Jung’s writings and “no cast of characters from any tradition is summoned to the stage of his discourse with greater regularity than biblical figures such as Adam and Abraham, Melchizedek and Moses, Peter and Paul” (Rollins 46).

The worldview, the sources and authors, symbols and patterns of the Bible as well as modern interpretation of all that content has become one of the crucial subjects for Jung’s critical interest. No other psychologist is known for such a degree of attention to this subject. Trying to find out the very origin of the Holy Writ, Jung came to the conclusion that “man has, always and everywhere, spontaneously developed a religious function, and … the human psyche from time immemorial has been shot through with religious feelings and ideas” (Rollins 46).

Being armed with that evidence, Jung criticized the Reformed mindset for creating an example of a Christian who “puts his Church and his Bible between himself and his unconscious” (Rollins 47). Besides, the Church tended to protect its own institutions and authority much more actively than to care about the spiritual content of the religion it was representing. Thus, the Reformed contemporaries were criticized by Jung for ignoring “the mystery that symbols present, having stripped all things of heir mystery and numinosity, including the Bible” (Rollins 47). Later, demythologization and rationalistic positivism were depriving the symbolic system of the Bible of its archetypical sense. Speaking of Jesus Christ, he supposed that “no rational biography could explain one of the most ‘irrational’ effects ever observed in the history of man” (Rollins 48). Only history and comparative psychology of symbols, in his view, could provide enough data for appropriate interpretation. Departing from these assertions, Jung devoted his essay Answer to Job (1951) explicitly to the biblical theme. There he wrote:

“Although out whole world of religious ideas consists f anthropomorphic images that could never stand up to rational criticism, we should never forget that they are based on numinous archetypes… unassailable by reason. We are dealing with psychic facts which logic can overlook but not eliminate” (Rollins 50).

Jung understood that there could be numerous ways to interpret the Bible, but he also recognized the need for psychological analysis of it, as D. Andrew Kille admits, “his was one of the voices raised in concern at the state of biblical criticism” (Rollins 35). Such a concern is first and foremost reasoned by keen understanding of religion on the whole. For instance, Jung stated that “through ceremonial ritual, initiation, rites, and ascetic practices, humankind has aimed at reconciling itself to the forces of psychic life and at finding an equal balance of the flesh and the spirit” (Rollins 46). In this view, Christian religion (developing in touch with the Judaism) have received a special sound, as, by Cahill, “Hebrew God wanted something new. He wanted what was invisible. He wanted their hearts – not the outside, but the inside” (Cahill 33). This internal need typical for complex psyche of a human being has become one of the strongest motives in Jung’s theory. One of the basic maxims he expressed concludes that “We must read our Bible or we shall not understand psychology, whole lives, our language and imagery are built upon the Bible” (Rollins and Kille 40).

Jung confirmed that “religious symbols, not to mention everyday language, are the bearers not only of simple and univocal meanings, but also of a complex of meanings drawn from the psychic and linguistic context of speaker and audience of writer and reader” (Ellens and Rollins 9). In his research, Jung relied upon his own experience affected by the well-known Biblical images including the expel of Adam from the Eden, the pearl of great price and the buried treasure in the field, the grain of mustard seed and the house built on sand, let alone a long list of other names and themes. As Cahill asserted, “the Bible was the first work of literature to feature full dimensional characters, and therefore, the first religion where people, especially women, could flower into full individuals” (238).

With all those projections, Jung inevitably made a profound impact on further Biblical criticism. The essential contribution is recognized in the interpretative comments to the Biblical texts. As for structural changes, Jung laid the groundwork for psychological analysis of biblical ethics and biblical religious phenomena, for revising unconscious as a core factor in working between the reader and writer; he introduced such hermeneutical models as amplification and active imagination and showed the compensatory function of archetypical myths, symbols and images. Besides, Jung maintained that “religions are psychotherapeutic systems in the truest sense of the world whose literature provides a description of the individuation process” (Rollins and Kille 20). All those considerations have inspired a number of scholars to continue the research in the field of both psychology and theology; these are Eugen Drewermann, David Cox, Edward Edinger, Peter Himans, to name only few.

In this way, Carl Jung brought some new light into the conflict that is “within the hearts and minds of a vast number of people who sense an “either/or” conflict between the religion they believe and the science they see, hear, and experience” (Blackard and Mitchell 118).