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Rating: Summary: Powerful prose and vivid images Review: Bravo! The organization of powerful text together with beautiful images, draws clear, thoughtfully orchestrated parallels between two fascinating religions.
Rating: Summary: A commendable effort, but not close to the Holy Grail. Review: I had a chance to thumb through the book on a recent trip to a bookstore. Having devoted a considerable time towards the study of religion, theology, and theosophy, I was pleased to see a worthwhile endeavor by Robert Elinor. In the end I came away with mixed feelings. Visually the book has an academic appeal, and certainly it betrays the labor that has gone into it. Illustrated books like "Buddha & Christ" have a way of sparking off the latent curiosity in the free thinker as only visual aids can do. Unfortunately, I was not much impressed by the text, not because it was not written clearly, or that it flouts the rules of grammer, but because it misses the organizing principle that could have shed a bright light on such a topic. I am confident that such a work is on the horizon. Often, mainstraem biblical historians, and scholars of religion are leery to admit that there was a common nursery for Judiasim, Chrisianity, Islam, Buddhism, Gnosticism, and Zorasterianism, to mention a few. In many cases, the leeriness comes from unwillingness to admit that Judaism predates Moses, Chrisianity predates Jesus, and Buddhism predates Gautama Sakayamuni by millennia. This is to say that much as they strive to show us the conspicuous parallels that exist between the various religious traditions or philospophical/theosophical traditions, scholars fall short of describing the elephant in toto. This, in my opinion, is the least forceful aspect of the text. Yet, overall, I believe Mr. Elinor's effort moves the quest forward, however slightly.
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