I’m not sure I get your point. Euhemerus never “espoused” a position. This wasn’t some doctrine he wrote a treatise on. It’s just something he did, which later authors copied and made popular.

And what was practiced by Euhemerus (what he “did”) was invent historical people to be the backstory for persons (gods) who never were historical. That’s Euhemerism—the phenomenon that results from Euhemerizing.

One could then infer from this practice a doctrine of one’s own. But Euhemerus himself never says what doctrine one is supposed to infer. So one could infer that Euhemerus really did find this source that really did establish Zeus and Uranus were once historical and thus the lesson really is that this tends to be the case. But that would then never generate any Euhemerization, and thus no Euhemerism. It would only generate a history of deifification.

Think about it.

Suppose you were someone in the 1st century AD reading Euhemerus. Your takeaway is that what he wrote is all true; and therefore you embrace the doctrine “if we check we’ll find lots of celestial gods used to be real past persons deified.” And accordingly, you go looking, doing research to find more examples. You don’t really find any other than deified kings already otherwise well-attested, so you publish your research documenting real cases of deified persons (note: no such book exists or is attested from antiquity). What you just did is write a history of deification. You didn’t do what Euhemerus did. And thus it isn’t Euhemerism you are instantiating; it’s just history, of deification.

The only way you can get a trend to name after what Euhemerus did (and not just histories of deification) is if that isn’t the doctrine people inferred or picked up from what Euhemerus did, but that rather they assumed what he did was indeed false, and concluded that this should be done for many more gods: invent histories for them, and turn them into historical persons that they never were. And so many did just that. The result is a distinct trend matching what Euhemrus did. Thus, Euhemerism, which is the phenomenon that results from Euhemerizing; and Euhemerizing is only so-called because it is distinct from deification—and thus it requires a distinct name.

At most you can get a middle case, of persons who watch all this lying happen, are duped by it, and thus call it Euhemerism: the discovery of the real historical origins of celestial gods. But that of course cannot be what any of the Euhemerizers were doing (because they were all making this stuff up, as was Euhemerus). So we can talk about “Euhemerism” in a special sense as also a theory some later dupes proposed: a theory about discovering historical origins for gods. But that isn’t what any of the creators of this stuff were doing; and it is certainly, absolutely, not at all what Euhemerus did.

So there is no way to say “Euhemerism” isn’t making up historical origins for mythical gods. At most you can say that in the hands of a few foolish third party observers, sometimes Euhemerism is used as a word to refer to discovering real historical origins for mythical gods. Even though no such literature or phenomenon actually exists.

This is of course useless for describing the actual trend itself: the actual doing of the thing, that would generate a fictional history for mythical beings like Osiris or Quirinus or Dionysus or Jesus. If you want to talk about how a story came to be, you can only talk about the actual Euhemerism, the only trend that actually existed: invention. Only if you want to talk about later idiots who were duped by that trend would the other notion come up. And that wouldn’t have anything to do with the production of texts, nor anything to do with what actually happened (in the hands of Euhemerus and many other authors) that actually has any relevant connection to producing the Gospels.

‘A less familiar term, euhemerism, from time to time suffers similar misuse. How should we define this word? We might explain it, following Dr. Richard Carrier, as “doing what Euhemerus did.”’

But that’s already a false premise. You don’t define euhemerism as “doing what Euhemerus did” – you define euhemerisation as that. Widowfield seems to use the terms interchangeably, but I think you’re fairly careful not to.

Which leads me to risk further flogging of this particular horse by asking if it would be consistent with your use of the terms to say that:

“Euhemerism” is the assertion – as espoused by Euhemerus – that gods are a cultural artifact resulting from the accretion of myth onto stories of real historical people (and hence connoting a man-to-god transformation);

whereas

“Euhemerisation” is the activity – as practised by Euheremus – of inventing the very stories about these purportedly real people whom the gods are supposed to derive from (and hence connoting a god-to-man transformation).

(The harsh implication being, of course, that Euhemerisation is essentially the dishonest reverse-engineering of fake evidence in support of Euhemerism. But perhaps that’s too crude an interpretation.)

Yes.

Not all gods start out celestial (there are subterranean, nature-inhabiting, and mythic-realm deities as well). Nor do all historicizations of them map their celestial myths. Any god who is worshipped before being distinctly placed in human history, and then is placed in history, as a human later deified, has undergone the process Euhemerus used, and has therefore been Euhemerized.

You mean apart from Mark Goodacre?

Rom. 9:5 is most likely a scribal error. And even if not, it’s no different from when Paul calls Satan a god.

You shouldn’t believe fundamentalist scholarship.

You need to follow mainstream scholarship.

Every reference to Jesus in Paul is to God’s agent and proxy. Not to God himself. As Paul explains, God assigned Jesus that role. Thus finding examples of Jesus taking that role does not show he is regarded as the same as God. Paul is very explicit that that is not what those passages mean. And the passages showing Paul saying this are numerous. I list them in a whole section in this very point in OHJ (Chapter 4, Element 10; n. 69 on Rom. 9:5). Bibliography to mainstream scholarship concurring included.

Note also though that Euhemerus did not invent this. His name is attached to it only because his instance of doing it made it popular.

(His motives are also difficult to ascertain. But his motives are still a different thing from what he was motivated to do.)

What I was trying to establish was if the nature of the historical invention matters. Is Euhemerization *any* invention of a historical person from a pre-existing god? Or is it a specific type of invented pseudo history?

This is what I was trying to get at with my Clark Kent analogy.

Is the invention that a god and their associated stories were actually mythologised from a ‘real’ person and here’s his more mundane life story, Euhemerization?

If you take a pre-existing god belief and make up a normal human life for them in a specific time and place before they died and achieved godhood, is that Euhemerization?

Or is it just taking a god with stories about him occurring in the heavens and then recasting those stories as taking place on earth and the god as human at a specific point in history?

To booker:

That’s really interesting! Expecially nr. 12, Stilling the storm. That has so obvious connections to tale of Jonah. I have to check what more MacDonald has to say about that.

Has anybody written analysis about Matthew’s copyist fatigue?