I’ve been crouching here in the cold night time air on this roof for the last fifteen minutes, beginning to cramp up. But I’m used to it. If my source was correct, those lowlifes will arrive any minute. Well, Commissioner Gordon hasn’t been wrong yet. There they are now. Three of them, dressed in clothes that are far too baggy. What are they called? ‘Gangstas’. Huh, what would they know about organized crime? And why do they always conduct their business in a building with a skylight? I never new there were so many abandoned warehouses in Gotham. Looks like your standard illicit drug trade, third this week. My work is never done. I plunge through the glass and land between them. I swear one of them wet himself, and to be honest, dropping in like this gives me a thrill. Alfred would disapprove my acrobatics. I’m still healing from my last encounter with Bane and I wince as a stabbing pain lances through my chest. But I push it aside.

So far as I can tell, this notion is never closely examined by those who hold it. It is assumed and not questioned. It is not closely examined because if it were it would be revealed to be what it is: a mirage. It is a convenient fiction. But I am not interested in attacking it directly here. Others who are far smarter and historically knowledgeable than I have already done this, sometimes extremely well; see, e.g., David Bentley Hart‘s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies. Today I’d like to simply propose an alternative model, thought of just a few minutes ago, and at least as plausible as the Bronze Age Goat Herder Conceit. My point is not that this alternative is right and the Goat Herder is incorrect. My point is that it’s really easy to come up with interpretations of human history that seem on face value to be compelling, especially to those who already believe it.

ADAM WEST!…a little bit softer now… XD