Please help me spread this urban legend

Every bit of research I do into the theory that Jesus Christ was a purely mythological, invented character--and not a real historical figure in any way--confirms for me that indeed, it appears Jesus was entirely a legend, with no real human as the basis for the storytelling.

But often when I tell people this, their response is befuddlement. How could a story so specific a) have been made up, and b) spread far and wide?

As if truth has anything to do with the formation and dissemination of stories. This particular resistance to Jesus-as-legend flies in the face of everything we know about legends, but I've been surprised by the number of smart people for whom this is the instinctive reaction.

There are, of course, no contemporary accounts of Jesus by any of the historians writing at the time. That would make anyone suspicious of his historical status.

But the interesting thing about the development of the Jesus myth is that at its start, those who promoted it virtually said it was a legend. As Earl Doherty points out in the Jesus Puzzle, Paul, responsible for the first several decades of Christianity, never places his Christ on earth. His Christ is in an entirely supernatural realm, and communicates with Paul via revelations/visions.

Paul didn't know anything about Bethlehem, John the Baptist, miracles, Pilate--basically nothing about the story of Jesus of Nazareth as you and I know it. That stuff was all invented much later (and probably as allegory--not history). If you had told Paul the story of Jesus as you know it, he would have looked at you like you were crazy. Which would have been ironic in more ways than I can count.

So...is it plausible that Jesus never lived, Paul made him up ("received" him in visions), others later made up earthly stories about the supernatural Jesus that they labeled as fiction, and then somehow the notion that it was all history came about at a later point?

Can a story be made up, identified as made up, and then later become accepted by many people as fact?

The answer, obviously, is yes. But I am conducting an experiment anyway.

I'm trying to start an urban legend from scratch, to see if it can be done. Following guidance gleaned from the wise folks at snopes.com, I have included elements that I hope make it more likely to spread.

Please feel free to copy the story below in its entirety and spread it far and wide. Depending on what happens, the development of this story, and the blogs and websites involved in spreading it, may be featured in a documentary about the Jesus legend. If you put this story on your blog, please let me know via trackback, comment or email. (UPDATE--had to close comments as the MT system all of a sudden decided not to work.)

Here is a .txt version.

THIS STORY IS FICTION

Death of a Spammer, in a Place Called Hope

By Todd F. Bryant
Staff Writer

HOPE, CA -- In this dusty Mojave town, pop. 5000, which averages roughly one murder per decade, Sheriff James Wilcox recently encountered the first serious crime he was unable to solve in his 25-year law enforcement career.

"Incidents like this don't happen here," said the 50-year-old Wilcox, who has one deputy, his daughter, and operates out of a converted construction trailer with a single makeshift cell, which is rarely occupied. "We're not exactly Crime City, U.S.A."

The crime was murder. The victim was a local resident, a white male, 42, shot six times in the chest and arms. The time was roughly 4 p.m. The location was the post office. There were no witnesses. The Hope post office is staffed only 4 hours a day, but the lobby doors are unlocked around the clock so that residents can access their post-office boxes. The victim, Keith James Lawrence, unmarried, was gunned down in the post-office-box area.

"Heidi [his daughter] and I knew this was going to be a tough one," said Wilcox. "Nobody around to see it. Nobody even heard any shots. Not even a suspicious vehicle seen in the area. Just bad luck for us. It happens."

It was during the autopsy that things took a turn for the weird. The medical examiner noticed an obstruction lodged deep in the victim's throat. He reached in and pulled out the object–a can of Spam. "I knew then that we had something that was maybe out of our league," said the examiner, Dr. Anu Ram, a surgeon at Mojave County Hospital. "I mean, we don't know anything about serial killers here, and I told Jim [Wilcox], 'This is really scary. It's probably some guy traveling around killing random people, and this is his signature.'"

It is perhaps only in small rural towns like Hope that a can of Spam and murder wouldn't immediately conjure up an obvious hypothesis. Wilcox, while not oblivious to the existence of the World Wide Web and email, did not have an Internet connection and hadn't heard the word "spam" used in the context of junk mail. It was only when Wilcox talked to his daughter on the phone two days after the crime (she had gone out of town for a scheduled visit with her husband's relatives), that the pieces began to fit together.

"I told her the victim had a post-office box there, that it had letters in it, with money in the form of money orders and cash, generally five dollars each, and it appeared he was running some kind of a business selling information for a few bucks a pop. It looked legitimate to me, so I wasn't focusing on that. And then I told her about the can of Spam."

"I knew right then, or at least I thought I did, what the motive was," says Heidi Jensen, 29, who has worked with her father since she was 17. "I said, 'Daddy, this guy is a spammer.' And he goes, 'A what?' And I'm like, 'A spammer, he sends out those messages, you know, "make money fast" and "get a new mortgage" and stuff.' He had no idea what I was talking about. He refused to believe that spam could be a motive for murder. I'm like, 'Daddy, you're not on AOL, you don't understand.'"

But Wilcox was not one to ignore what he calls his daughter's "intuition." He acquired an expert in computers--by calling the local computer store, and securing the services of a clerk for $10 an hour--and examined Lawrence's Dell computer hard drive and dozens of CD-ROMs. "It was true, this guy was a spammer," said Wilcox, who is now well-versed in Internet lingo. "He had literally millions of e-mail addresses, and lots of bills from different ISPs, and we determined he'd been doing this for about two years. He grossed about $5,000 a year from it."

At that point, Wilcox called the FBI, who sent an agent to help him scan Lawrence's email and snail-mail records for any particularly hostile messages. Not surprisingly, they found quite a few. In fact, they found so many that they stopped cataloguing them when they reached 200.

"This case is impossible," said Wilcox, shaking his head. "I mean, if you add up all the spam recipients who threatened his life directly, that's probably ten thousand right there, probably more. And really, it's the ones that don't make overt threats who are usually the perpetrators in grudge cases like this, because the folks who write the poison-pen letters get it out of their system. So now you've got to add all of the other people on those CD-ROMs to the list. There's roughly 20 or 30 million suspects in this case, all over the world."

Wilcox tracked down a few more manageable leads. "I thought maybe one of Lawrence's acquaintances might have killed him, knowing he was a spammer, and made it look like a grudge crime. But, no, that didn't really pan out. I couldn't find anything substantial there."

Both the Mojave Sheriff's department and the FBI classify the case as open. At this writing, ten weeks after the murder, no suspects have been interviewed.

"Will [the killer] do it again?" Wilcox asks. "I don't know. But I don't think he was mad at Stanley Lawrence the person. I think he was mad at spammers. And there are a lot of spammers out there.

"And I'll tell you this much: I wouldn't want to be one."

THIS STORY IS FICTION