Cui bono?

 

Cui bono? (i.e. ‘Who benefits?’)

 

What would they have to gain by spreading tales of a persecuted man who came back from the dead, walked on water, turned water to wine, cured the lame, the sick, the lepers, fed the multitudes, while promising eternal life in paradise? I should hope that the reader would have leapt to several conclusions already.

 

How then could anyone take the stories of the Galilean as truth and the basis for religious faith? Walking on water and coming back from the dead are fantastical nonsense which should be thought of simply as preposterous myth and legend.  Who would accept such assertions without evidence? Just about anyone, actually. 

 

Returning to the question, ‘Cui bono?’, we refer back to considering the hypothetical conspiracy theorist of the first century; ignorant, uneducated, uninformed and subject to a strict social order that disallowed or prevented social advancement even if education, wealth, freedom or property were gained.  How would he have benefitted spreading the growing tale of the Man from Galilee? From a distance of 2000 yeas, it is perplexing to attempt to peer into the mind of our hypothetical gossip-monger. However, one can imagine the story-teller gaining by myriad ways; elevated social status, free comestibles, discounted items of necessity, etc. Additionally, spreading the ‘good news’ would have had little detrimental effect on the story-teller. 

 

If there hadn’t been other folks of G-zus ilk at the time, it might seem preposterous that anyone would fashion such a person as the Man from Galilee from whole cloth. However, there were other such people (i.e. miracle workers, healers, philosophers etc.) around at the turn of the millennium. Apollonius of Tyana, for one. Simon Magus for another and the enigmatic, ‘Egyptian’, for three. 

There were 15 according to David Fitzgerald! (Nailed, Jesus; Mything in Action)

 

Apollonius has been compared to G-zus many times particularly because his life may or may not have over-lapped with the Nazarene’s fabled life. The Christian historian, Eusebius, anathemized and discredited Apollonius’ miracles by claiming that Apollonius was only able to do his magic with the aid of demons! Demons! So there.

Nuff Said!

 

Biblical scholar, Bart D. Ehrman, says this about Apollonius of Tyana:

 

‘Even before he (Apollonius) was born, it was known that he would be someone special. A supernatural being - of some sort - informed his mother that the child she was to conceive would not be a mere mortal but would be divine. He was born miraculously, and he became an unusually precocious young man. As an adult, he left home and went on an itinerant preaching ministry, urging his listeners to live, not for the material things of this world, but for what is spiritual. He gathered a number of disciples around him, who became convinced that his teachings were divinely inspired, in no small part because he himself was divine. He proved it to them by doing many miracles, healing the sick, casting out demons, and raising the dead. But at the end of his life, he roused opposition, and his enemies delivered him over to the Roman authorities for judgment. Still, after he left this world, he returned to meet his followers in order to convince them that he was not really dead but lived on in the heavenly realm. Later some of his followers wrote books about him.’

 

Stop me if this sounds at all familiar… 

 

Not only were there a small host of messianic miracle workers to choose from, there were also a goodly number of virgin births of heroes as well, from which to glean material for gossip; Alexander the Great, Plato, Asclepius, Perseus, and so on. Mix and match the various heroes/messiahs/miracle-workers and the gossip-monger could have contrived a tale that could grow and grow to woo and entertain a growing audience.

 

The world of first century Judea was inundated with messianic figures who seemed poised to lead the Hebrews out of the subjugation of Rome. John the Baptist was one of these messianic preachers. The story of Jesus grew by purloining the tall tales of all of these players and incorporating them in the tale of the Nazarene. Some of the other tall tales going ‘round at the time were of Seven-headed beasts. Voices from the clouds, from burning shrubbery…

Schizotypal personalities might explain some of it. 

Magic mushrooms and spoiled rye ergot may rationalize another portion of it; the gullibility of people.

 

Another attenuating fact is that many, many people of the era accepted and insisted that the end-times were upon them. It was a basic trope and paradigm of the period. It was a basic teaching of G-zus and it is blathered about in the Bobble and in other holy tomes. 

 

Getting the ‘eternal life’ card from the zombie guy from Galilee would have seemed like a smart play back then to someone looking for a hedge against the end-times, a dead-end social situation, endless, un-abating poverty, early death and other social, emotional and existential realities of the era.

 

In that era, it seems that messianic apocryphal characters were as thick as midges in Scotland (to be hyperbolic). They all were reportedly persecuted, killed by authorities, and then ascended to heaven in a resurrection. ‘That’s the pattern; not the exception’, according to Dr. James Tabor (Biblical scholar and Professor of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte). Those who were expecting a messiah (an anointed one) were expecting a martial figure – a conquering king – to defeat the Roman occupiers. They were not, however, expecting the messiah to die. Even the Galilean purported pronounced that he had come with a sword; ‘“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” (Matthew 10:34-36)