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In fact, the standard Christian response to the evemerists has been that no such Jesus, stripped of his miracles and other supernatural attributes, could ever "have been adored as a god or even been saluted as the Messiah of Israel." This response is quite accurate: No mere man could have caused such a hullabaloo and hellish fanaticism, the product of which has been the unending spilling of blood and the enslavement of the spirit. The crazed "inspiration" that has kept the Church afloat merely confirms the mythological origins of this tale. Furthermore, the theory of Evemerism has served the Catholic Church, as Higgins remarks:

... that the gods of the ancients were nothing but the heroes or benefactors of mankind, living in very illiterate and remote ages, to whom a grateful posterity paid divine honors . . . appears at first sight to be probable; and as it has served the purpose of the Christian priests, to enable them to run down the religion of the ancients, and, in exposing its absurdities, to contrast it disadvantageously with their own, [Evemerism) has been, and continues to be, sedulously inculcated, in every public and private seminary.... Although the pretended worship of Heroes appears at first sight plausible, very little depth of thought or learning is requisite to discover that it has not much foundation in truth .... 9

In Pagan Christs, JM Robertson states of Evemerism:

It is not the ascription of prodigies to some remarkable man that leads us to doubt his reality. Each case must be considered on its merits when we apply the tests of historical evidence. We must distinguish between what the imagination has added to a meager biography, and those cases in which the biography itself has been added to what has grown out of a ritual or doctrine.10

The bottom line is that when one removes all the elements of those preceding myths that contributed to the formation of the Jewish godman, there remains no one and nothing historical left to which to point. As Walker says, "Scholars' efforts to eliminate paganism from the Gospels in order to find a historical Jesus have proved as hopeless as searching for a core in an onion." Massey remarks, ". . . a composite likeness of twenty different persons merged in one ... is not anybody." And, it is clear that in their desperate attempts, evemerist scholars have added their own likenesses to the composite.

The Mythicists

This missing core to the onion has been recognized by many individuals over the centuries who have thus been unable to accept the historical nature of Jesus Christ, because not only is there no proof of his existence but virtually all evidence points to him being a mythological character. As stated, this "Mythicist School" began to flourish starting a few hundred years ago, propelled by archaeological and linguistical discoveries and studies, as well as by the reduction of the Church's power and vicious persecution of its critics. This group has consisted of a number of erudite and daring individuals who have overcome the conditioning of their culture to peer closely and with clear eyes into the murky origins of the Christian faith. Massey elucidates the mythicists' perspective:

The general assumption concerning the canonical gospels is that the historic element was the kernel of the whole, and that the fables accreted round it; whereas the mythos, being pre-extant, proves the core of the matter was mythical, and it follows that the history is incremental. . . . It was the human history that accreted round the divinity, and not a human being who became divine. 11

While the mythicist school has only made real inroads in the past couple of centuries, and even though its brilliant work and insight have been ignored by mainstream "experts" in both the believing and evemerist camps, the mythicist arguments have been built upon a long line of Bible criticism. Indeed, this controversy has existed from the very beginning as is evidenced by the writings of the Church fathers themselves, i.e., those who founded