Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [12]
The Evemerists
It is because of such irrational beliefs and prejudicial demands that many people have rejected Christian claims as being incredible and unappealing. Nevertheless, numerous such dissidents have maintained that behind the fabulous fairytales found in the gospels there was a historical Jesus Christ somewhere, an opinion usually based on the fact that it is commonly held, not because its proponents have studied the matter or seen clear evidence to that effect. This "meme" or mental programming of a historical Jesus has been pounded into the heads of billions of people for nearly 2,000 years, such that it is assumed a priori by many, including "scholars" who have put forth an array of clearly speculative hypotheses hung on highly tenuous threads regarding the "life of Jesus." Such speculators often claim that a historical Jewish master named Jesus was deified or "evemerized" by his zealous followers, who added to his mundane "history" a plethora of supernatural qualities and aspects widely found in more ancient myths and mystery religions.
This school of thought, called "Evemerism" or "Euhemerism," is named after Evemeras, or Euhemeros, a Greek philosopher of the 4th century BCE who developed the idea that, rather than being mythical creatures, as was accepted by the reigning intellectuals, the gods of old were in fact historical characters, kings, emperors and heroes whose exploits were later deified. Of these various evemerist "biographies," the most popular are that Jesus was a compassionate teacher who irritated the Romans with his goodness, or a political rebel who annoyed the Romans with his incitement of discord, for which he was executed. Wells comments upon the theory du jour:
As political activism is today a la mode, it is widely felt that a revolutionary Jesus is more "relevant" than the Jesus of the nineteenth century liberal theologians who "went about doing good" (Acts, 10:38). Both these Jesuses simply reflect what in each case the commentators value most highly rather than the burden of the texts. If Jesus had been politically troublesome, his supporters would have been arrested with him. But there is no suggestion of this in any of the gospels.3
He further states:
There are . . . three obvious difficulties against the supposition that a historical Jesus was actually executed as a rebel:
(ii) All Christian documents earlier than the gospels portray him in a way hardly compatible with the view that he was a political agitator ...
(ii) If his activities had been primarily political, and the evangelists were not interested in-or deemed it inexpedient to mention-his politics, then what was the motive for their strong interest in him? How did they come to suppose that a rebel, whose revolutionary views they tried to suppress in their gospels, was the universal saviour?
(iii) If such an episode as the cleansing of the temple was not a religious act (as the gospels allege) but an armed attempt to capture the building and to precipitate a general insurrection, then why does Josephus say nothing of it? As Trocme has observed a military attack on the temple would not have been ignored by this writer who was so concerned to show the dangers of revolt and violence. Josephus' silence is corroborated by the positive affirmation of Tacitus that there was no disturbance in Palestine under Tiberius (AD 14-37), whereas the preceding and following reigns were characterized by rebellion and unrest there ... 4
Of these various "lives of Jesus," Wells also says:
It is now customary to dismiss with contempt many nineteenthcentury lives of Jesus on the grounds that their authors simply found in him all the qualities which