Theories about Jesus?

[Angrboda]

It sounds to me like some people followed a charismatic who made lots of promises, who was then done away with by the authorities of the time for being a bit of an inconvenience.

The followers can't admit they were wrong, so they concoct a cock and bull story to justify their stupid faith in someone who fed them a load of bollocks that they swallowed.

I have seen interviews with survivors of the Waco disaster doing exactly this about David koresh.

When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of a Modern Group That Predicted the Destruction of the World is a classic work of social psychology by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter which studied a small UFO cult called the Seekers that believed in an imminent Apocalypse and its coping mechanisms after the event did not occur. Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance can account for the psychological consequences of disconfirmed expectations. One of the first published cases of dissonance was reported in this book.

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Festinger and his associates read an interesting item in their local newspaper headlined "Prophecy from planet Clarion call to city: flee that flood."

The prophecy came from Dorothy Martin (1900–1992), a Chicago housewife who experimented with automatic writing. (In order to protect her privacy, the study gave her the alias of "Marian Keech" and relocated her group to Michigan.) She had previously been involved with L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics movement, and her cult incorporated ideas from what was to become Scientology.

The group of believers, headed by Keech, had taken strong behavioral steps to indicate their degree of commitment to the belief. They had left jobs, college, and spouses, and had given away money and possessions to prepare for their departure on a flying saucer which was to rescue the group of true believers. She claimed to have received a message from a fictional planet named Clarion. These messages revealed that the world would end in a great flood before dawn on December 21, 1954.

After the failure of the prediction, she left Chicago after being threatened with arrest and involuntary commitment. She later founded the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Under the name Sister Thedra, she continued to practice channeling and to participate in contactee groups until her death in 1992. The Association is active to this day.

See the book by Leon Festinger for more on this classic study in social psychology.