Christ Conspiracy_ The Greatest Story Ever Sold - Acharya S [13]
Evemerist scholar Shaye Cohen, professor of Judaic and Religion Studies at Brown University, admits the desperate situation of trying to find this "historical" reformer/rebel under the accreted layers of miracles:
Modern scholars have routinely reinvented Jesus or have routinely rediscovered in Jesus that which they want to find, be it rationalist, liberal Christianity of the 19th century, be it apocalyptic miracle workers in the 20th, be it revolutionaries, or be it whatever it is that they're looking for, scholars have been able to find in Jesus almost anything that they want to find. Even in our own age scholars are still doing this. People are still trying to figure out the authentic sayings of Jesus. . ., all our middle class liberal Protestant scholars. . . will take a vote and decide what Jesus should have said, or might have said. And no doubt their votes reflect their own deep-seated, very sincere, very authentic Christian values, which I don't gainsay for a moment. But their product is, of course, bedeviled by the problem that we are unable to have any secure criteria by which to distinguish the real from the mythic or what we want to be so from what actually was so....
These various theories in the end constitute wheel-spinning in a futile effort to rescue historicity, any historicity, in the gospel tale. Because of the dearth of personality in the gospels and the irrationality of the tale, historicizers must imbue the character with their own personalities and interpretations of reality, such as: "When Jesus said, `Blessed are the poor,' he surely didn't mean that poverty is a blessing but that those who lived with poverty are good, because they are not resorting to robbery." 6 And in order to pad out the "real" Jesus after most of his "life" is removed, scholars must resort to reasoning of the most tortured kind:
While the miracles of Jesus could easily be created and multiplied by the credulity of His followers, [the followers] could never have devised ethical, speculative, or soteriological doctrines, which, although in no instance original, presented new combinations of established religious concepts and ethical principles.?
Thus, we have an admission that Jesus brought nothing new, but an insistence nevertheless that Jesus deserved merit because he novelly combined his unoriginal concepts. In reality, this type of eclecticism also was not new but quite common long before the Christ character arose. In The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ, Gerald Massey says of these scholars' efforts:
It is pitiful to track the poor faithful gleaners who picked up every fallen fragment or scattered waif and stray of the mythos, and to watch how they treasured every trait and tint of the ideal Christ to make up the personal portrait of their own supposed real one.8
In Ancient History of the God Jesus, Edouard Dujardin remarks of Evemerism:
This doctrine is nowadays discredited except in the case of Jesus. No scholar believes that Osiris or Jupiter or Dionysus was an historical person promoted to the rank of a god, but exception is made only in favour of Jesus.... It is impossible to rest the colossal work of Christianity on Jesus, if he was a man.
Indeed, evemerist scholars will admit that this humanized Jesus stripped of all miracles would not have "made a blip on Pilate's radar screen," being insignificant as one of the innumerable rabblerousers running about Palestine during this time. If we were to take away all the miraculous events surrounding the story of Jesus to reveal a human, we would certainly find no one who could have garnered huge crowds around him because of his preaching. And the fact is that this crowd-drawing preacher finds his place in "history" only in the New Testament, completely overlooked by the dozens of historians of his day, an era considered one of the best documented in history. Such an invisible character, then,