This new reality rests on the incomparable claim of the man Jesus of Nazareth to be able to speak and act with the authority of the God of Israel and the Creator of the world, the claim to be the conclusively valid Word of God to Israel and the whole world, as a human being and not as a hero or demigod as the pagan religions imagined them. This unsurpassable claim, which also demands an unconditional “following”, is presented with incomparable humility, naturalness and closeness to the poor and despised and also always as a fulfillment and yet unexpected surpassing of Old Testament prophecy.
Hans Urs von Balthasar, A Short Primer for Unsettled Laymen (1980) - in chapter titled The Incomparable
This is a small point, but one that never occurred to me specifically, although it certainly should have at some point in my getting a bachelor's degree in Classics. Experts in mythology often point to the parallels between Jesus and the heroes of various mythological systems (e.g. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces), but miss the huge divergence—that is, Jesus's humility. In His humanity, he is presented as merely human, with all the weaknesses that entails. In addition, He insists on identifying with the lowest and weakest among us—the poor, the sick, criminals, the possessed. Then in contrast to this, we have His miracles and claims to divinity. The two together place him both below and above any mythological hero—humanly lower but divinely infinitely higher. He is truly Man and truly God, not a third thing that somewhere between the two. This is the paradox of the Incarnation, and it has no parallel anywhere in mythology. It is, as C.S. Lewis says, the True Myth.