Herodotus wrote that when Hecataeus (Greek historian 550-476 BCE) was in Egypt told the priests there that he descended from the gods:
Hecataeus the historian was once at Thebes, where he made a genealogy for himself that had him descended from a god in the sixteenth generation. (II, 143)
A modern parallel would have been that of an Indian person claiming that in his family tree there was an Englishman.
The priests retorted that there had been no man who descendent directly from a god for the last 345 generations, but that the gods did indeed rule as kings in Egypt:
But the priests of Zeus did with him as they also did with me (who had not traced my own lineage). They brought me into the great inner court of the temple and showed me wooden figures there which they counted to the total they had already given, for every high priest sets up a statue of himself there during his lifetime; pointing to these and counting, the priests showed me that each succeeded his father; they went through the whole line of figures, back to the earliest from that of the man who had most recently died. Thus, when Hecataeus had traced his descent and claimed that his sixteenth forefather was a god, the priests too traced a line of descent according to the method of their counting; for they would not be persuaded by him that a man could be descended from a god; they traced descent through the whole line of three hundred and forty-five figures, not connecting it with any ancestral god or hero, but declaring each figure to be a “Piromis" the son of a “Piromis"; in Greek, one who is in all respects a good man.
[144] Thus they showed that all those whose statues stood there had been good men, but quite unlike gods. Before these men, they said, the rulers of Egypt were gods, but none had been contemporary with the human priests. (II, 143-144)
Herodotus computed the 345 statues to correspond to 11,340 years. By adding 2,450 years that have elapsed since the time of Herodotus, we get an estimated age for the Egyptian priesthood of 13,790 years, meaning that according to the priests there had been no gods in Egypt for the last 13,790 years.
According to Manetho the gods’ reigns began at approximately 30,000 BCE and lasted for 13,900 years, i.e, up to 16,100 BCE
If we take 15,000 BCE as an estimated average date for the transformation of the gods into priests, we realize that Herodotus’ estimation confirms the official information supplied by Manetho.
It is obvious that to the ancients the gods were real people. The Acadian poem “Atrahasis" opens with a verse reading “Inuma ilu awilu”, meaning “When the gods [were] men".
The theory proposing that the myths are distorted accounts of historical events and that the gods were men in fully human status, is known as Euhemerism, from the ancient Greek mythographer Euhemerus (330-260 BC) who maintained that the gods were distinguished men who had been relegated to divine status by a grateful populace. He is known mainly as the author of a book called “Sacred History", which outlines his theory.
Early Christians adopted Euhemerism in their attempt to discredit the old gods: “Those to whom you bow were once men like yourselves" cried Clement of Alexandria, but Christian writers continued embracing Euhemerism up to the 18th century.
In his 2011 book, “The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems", former Baptist pastor and double PhD in religious studies Robert M. Price supported the Christ myth theory when he wrote “the story of Jesus which we have, in every form, remains a redemption myth constructed along the lines of the universal mythic hero archetype, with no “secular,” biographical material left over. When we are done dismantling the records and we begin ghoulishly picking through the scanty remains for clues to an underlying “historical Jesus,” like people scavenging gold from the teeth and fingers of the battlefield dead, are we perhaps engaging in Euhemerism?”* (source Wikipedia)
Euhemerus’ proposition, that men of note were deified by a grateful populace, is false due to two reasons: firstly, due to the fact that the populace was not grateful towards the gods at all, since the gods were described as killers and rapists and, secondly, due to the fact that the notion of the divine cannot exist without the god idea preexisting. One has to discover how the idea of the heavenly gods (the divine) came to be, and then invoke deification of men and the famous “Apotheosis".
The information available to Euhemerus was scarce compared to the information available in our time and thus we can go a great deal further than he would have gone, actually further than he could have imagined.
Was Clement of Alexandria aware of the fact that his own god, Jesus Christ, was supposed to have been once a man like himself whose apotheosis was realized by his mere ascent to the heavens?
Was Clement, and the leaders of the various branches of the Christian religion, aware of the fact that the original apotheosis was accomplished when a joke was said that some men climbed ladders and went to live in the sky?
In my opinion they were, because they have managed to keep themselves well educated in religious matters. The ladder joining earth and sky (Jacob’s ladder) is mentioned in the Hebrew part of the Bible and it is implied in the Christian literature (John 1:51). In the cultures of the rest of the world it appears as a means joining earth and sky, and when Egyptologists managed to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphic we learned, from the oldest religious texts of humanity, that indeed the heavenly gods were created when they each climbed a ladder to the heavens.
When it comes to the judgment, the Egyptologists manipulate their translations so that no one would suspect that in the texts a judgment of living people is described. The passages, however, dealing with the ascent of the gods to the sky by ladder, cannot be mistranslated (as shown in the article above) and therefore the religious leaders did/do know all about the origins of religion.
Those who do not know are: the State, the Academy and the “atheist" scholars!!