It's the old blonde and blue-eyed Jesus story: An aryan living among the black-skinned people of the Nazarenes? Yet the icon of the Herculean Jesus is ubiquitous because the intent of the story is that he's "just like us, no one special because we are all special to God" and an Ethiopian-looking Jesus would have had adoption problems in zenophobic medieval Europe (and probably still today in many parts of the world).

people take stories to heart, but they don't remember the details, they only remember the intent and over time, they fill in details from their own experience. I will wager this principle, which is a pretty pithy sentiment, is common across many cultures and it's not unreasonable that many authors said something similar enough.

Similar enough. That's apropos too: In looking at the total knowledge across blogs, don't we look for patterns rather than facts, for principles and ideas rather than specific prose? We also, as you've noted before, repurpose one statement to another concept if it takes our fancy to do so, as the I Ching says, if we see good we imitate it.

As for A-Listers, as I noted in my Blogs Know, they are only 'special' by accident of their birth coupled with a bit of impetus and skill; time and chance happeneth to them all. We as associative-computer users (humans with brains) distill central thoughts as nodes in our own neural frameworks and those nodes become the foci of things we later (operative word, 'later') decide to call abstractions. Jung's archetypes are not off existing in space, they are off existing in the wiring of our neural networks and the perceptive among us recognize this aggregating and give them names.

A-listers, like pop stars, are a cognitive scaffold on which we hang our own identities, we 'identify' with them and imbue them with our own thoughts as a convenient associative relation that helps us re-locate that web of associations when we later need them. They did not create their communities, their communities create them out of a necessity to have a common foci for these particular sets of ideas, and because we are networked and culturally very similar, we find we can share pop idols, and we reward them (lucratively) for their donating their persona to becoming ourselfs extended. A-listers are us.

Returning to the issue of who's idea it was, is it unreasonable to believe that we can draw a distinct line of books-read between those authors such that they each had opportunity to learn that meme from one or more of the others? Getting back to the roots of Christianity, and especially the odd details such as the almost exact parallels between the birth of Christ and the birth of Krishna, is it not possible that the story emerges out of Asia Minor because it was, at the time, a hotbed of trade and interaction that most certainly had opportunity to absorb the stories from many diverse religions and anneal them together into the Jesus story?

Maybe worth noting that David Reynolds, a leading western supporter of the early 20th century Japanese psychiatry of Morita Shoma, recommends a path to community in the instruction to sweep our neighbour's path ... and to do so secretly and anonymously.

See also Jim McGee's response at:
http://www.mcgeesmusings.net/2003/06/26.html#a3434

I hate to contradict my new friend Lilia, but I have visited Goethe's house in Weimar (highly recommended) and http://www.ag.wastholm.net/aphorism/A-1509
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

http://www.jimpoz.com/quotes/speaker.asp?speaker=Goethe
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.

Goethe

http://www.dailycelebrations.com/goethe.htm
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door and the whole world will be clean.

Goethe

http://centre.telemanage.ca/quotes.nsf/quotes/52a00adf496ae87185256b920048eee6
"Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean."

Goethe

Not that I am a Goethe scholar. I didn't know he'd said these until I grabbed the references above:

"In art the best is good enough."

"All our knowledge is symbolic."

"The deed is all, the glory nothing."