Caesar's Messiah ; a Summary of Findings

CAESAR'S MESSIAH ; A SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

Our understanding of Jewish and Christian history has changed dramatically with the publication of Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill (Ulysses Press), which had previously been privately published under the title The Roman Origins of Christianity. According to Atwill, the Gospels are not accounts of the ministry of a historical Jewish Jesus compiled by his followers sixty years after his death. They are texts deliberately created to trick Messianic Jews into worshipping the Roman Emperor 'in disguise'. The essence of Atwill's discovery is that the majority of the key events in the life of Jesus are in fact satirical: each is an elegant literary play on a military battle in which the Jewish armies had been defeated by the Romans. This is an extraordinary claim-but supported by all the necessary evidence.

Why would the Romans go to the trouble of writing and disseminating such a text? The Jewish War, culminating in the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, had devastated the Mediterranean economy, and the Romans were anxious to prevent another messianic outbreak, which could easily lead to another 500,000 deaths-as the Bar Kochba revolt would demonstrate a generation later. In order to make any reconstruction of the country lasting, the Romans needed to offer the Jews alternative stories that would distract them from the messianic messages inherent in the Torah, and persuade them to accept Roman values.

Titus Flavius Vespasianus 39-81

According to Atwill, the Romans' solution to these problems was to create a special kind of post-war propaganda. They called it in Greek evangelion, a technical term meaning "good news of military victory." In English, it is translated as "gospel." The name is in fact ironic humor: the Romans were amusing themselves with the notion of making the Jews accept, as the actions of the Messiah Jesus, what were in fact literary echoes of the very battles in which the Romans had defeated the Jews' armies. A further joke was buried in unmistakable parallels between the life of Jesus and that of Titus: in worshiping Jesus, the Jews who adopted Christianity, as it came to be called, were in fact hailing the Emperor of their conquerors as god.

To replace the Torah, then, the Romans created a literary equivalent, the gospel of Matthew (and shortly thereafter the Hellenistic and Roman versions known as Luke and Mark). The central literary character, called Jesus (or Joshua) inhabits a plot with various peculiar features: he begins his efforts by the Lake of Galilee; sends a legion of devils out of a demon-possessed man and into pigs; offers his flesh to be eaten; mentions signs of the destruction of Jerusalem; in Gethsemane a naked man escapes; Jesus is captured at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives; Simon denies knowing him; he is crucified with two other men and only he survives; he is taken down from the cross by a man called Joseph of Arimathea; his disciple John survives but his disciple Simon is sent off to die in Rome; after his death his disciple Judas dies by eviscerating himself.

Flavius Josephus 37-98?

Each of these peculiar events has a parallel in the writings of Josephus, our main record of the military encounter between the Judeans and their Roman conquerors-even to the unusual crucifixion in which three men are crucified, and a man named Joseph takes one, who survives, down. To give a flavor of the humor buried in this grand Roman joke, we see that where, in Josephus, the crucifixions take place at Thecoe, which translates as the "Village of the Inquiring Mind," the gospel's satiric version takes place at Golgotha, or the "Hill of the Empty Skull."

Events at the Lake of Galilee launch the Judean careers of both Titus and Jesus. There Jesus called his disciples to be 'fishers of men'. There the Roman battle took place in which Titus attacked a band of Jewish rebels led by a leader named Jesus. The rebels fell into the water and those who were not killed by darts "attempted to swim to their enemies, the Romans cut off either their heads or their hands" (Jewish War III, 10). Men were indeed pulled out of the water like fish.

As for the episode of the Gadarene swine-in which demons leave a Gadara demoniac at Jesus' bidding and then enter into a herd of 2,000 swine, which rush wildly into the lake and drown-Josephus recounts the Roman campaign in which Vespasian marched against Gadara. In the same way that the demons were concentrated in one demoniac, Josephus describes the faults of all the rebels being concentrated in the one head of the rebel leader John. Then, rushing about "like the wildest of wild beasts," the 2000 rebels rushed over the cliff and drowned.

To take a third example, Josephus describes how Titus went out without his armor (and therefore to a soldier metaphorically naked) in the garden of Gethsemane, was nearly caught and had to flee. The parallel in the gospel of Mark is a naked young man who appears from nowhere in the Garden of Gethsemane and flees.

So far over dozen of these parallels have been identified -many of which had already been discovered by other scholars. But Atwill is the first researcher to have identified the overall pattern. The pattern in each case is the same. This fulfills the criterion for 'good' parallels set out by James R. Davila in his paper 'The Perils of Parallels', University of St Andrews Divinity School, (April 2001), which states that "patterns of parallels are more important than individual parallels" and "the larger and more complex the pattern of parallels, the more we should take them seriously."

Since the events occur in Josephus in exactly the same order as their counterpart events in the Gospels, probability theory can then be used to assess the likelihood that this might be due simply to chance, or instead, that one source copied the other. The calculation shows that it is over 99.9999% certain that one account was written based upon the other. This calculation takes a conservative approach that assumes that, once used, each of the eleven items could not be used again. The probability is thus calculated as 11 factorial, or 11x10x9x8x7x6x5x4x3x2x1 .This would equal 1 chance in 39,916,800. Expressed as a percentage, this means that it is 99.999997% certain that one account influenced the other. In other words, the likelihood that these parallel sequences occurred by chance is less than 0.000003%--effectively zero. (The alternative approach would assign truly random possibilities for each of the