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Titus and his father, Vespasian, were associated with another man-god, the benevolent and bearded Serapis. Serapis is represented by his dual identity, Aesclepius, the son of a god and a mortal woman who suffered on earth only to be martyred for resurrecting the dead and experience his own apotheosis.

Like Jesus, Serapis also ascended into heaven, according to Ptolemy’s vision of his state-crafted god. As generals of Alexander the Great, both Ptolemy in his conquest of Egypt and Seleucus in his conquest of his territory were doubtlessly models for the Romans on how to manage newly-conquered foreign territories. Like Jesus and Serapis, Titus had his own apotheosis after his death, as depicted in this architectural detail from his triumphal arch in Rome:

Both 2nd Century Roman historians Tacitus and Suetonius identify Titus and his father Vespasian as the “messiahs” of Jewish prophecy. In a work composed before the ascension of Titus, the historian Josephus specifically acknowledges Vespasian to be the Jewish Messiah. According to the Talmud, even a contemporary rabbi agreed that Vespasian was the prophesied Jewish Messiah. And he fits the description: a ruler of the world who hailed from Judea. This aspect of Vespasian’s imperial cult should not to be dismissed today as merely an amusing example of ancient quackery. These were the claims of the Emperor of Rome. As such, propaganda of this sort carried great weight across the Empire.

In those Gospels, Jesus is a healer, like the first Flavian emperors and the gods and man-gods with whom they associated themselves— even though this is not a feature normally associated with Jewish messiahs. And Jesus’s healing miracles exactly mirror Vespasian’s healing miracles.

Representations of Serapis, the god Ptolemy created, strikingly resemble Jesus Christ. Simultaneously, some of the first portraits of Jesus from the 3rd Century show him as a beardless solar deity like Sol Invictus or Apollo. All were pagan gods that Vespasian and Titus associated with themselves.

In the New Testament, Jesus is proclaimed to be “the light of the world” and was resurrected at dawn, a seeming parallel to solar deities, like his date of birth. Notice that only from a Roman perspective could there be a rising Jewish “deity” linked to the east or the dawn. Only to Rome is Judea “east.” In Judea there would be no reason to associate Jesus with the east, or the dawn, at all.

And, of course, Titus’s siege of Jerusalem and its famous Temple are precisely what Jesus describes as he enters the city and predicts the Temple’s destruction within the lifetime of some listening to him. Astonishingly, Jesus connects this act of destruction with his triumphant Second Coming and the final arrival of the Christian millennium. From the Gospel of Mark, chapter 13:

As he [Jesus] came out of the Temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the Temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and they will lead many astray. When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

“As for yourselves, beware; for they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues; and you will stand before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them. And the good news must first be proclaimed to all nations. When they bring you to trial and hand you over, do not worry beforehand about what you are to say; but say whatever is given you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Holy Spirit. Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.

“But when you see the desolating sacrilege set up where it ought not to be (let the reader understand), then those in Judea must flee to the mountains; the one on the housetop must not go down or enter the house to take anything away; the one in the field must not turn back to get a coat. Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, no, and never will be. And if the Lord had not cut short those days, no one would be saved; but for the sake of the elect, whom he chose, he has cut short those days. And if anyone says to you at that time, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘Look! There he is!’—do not believe it. False messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, the elect. But be alert; I have already told you everything.

“From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its leaves, you know that summer is near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that he is near, at the very gates . Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place . Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.

“But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and puts his slaves in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to be on the watch. Therefore, keep awake—for you do not know when the master of the house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or at cockcrow, or at dawn, or else he may find you asleep when he comes suddenly. And what I say to you I say to all: Keep awake.” (Emphasis added.) 1

The urgency of Jesus’s warning is unmistakable. The meaning is clear. The “coming” of the “Son of Man” in his “power and glory” will be accomplished before the current generation “passes away.” This event will coincide with the destruction of the Temple and, indeed, the Jewish Revolt itself, which is fairly well described in Jesus’s apocalyptic prophecy, including the calamitous misery, hardships, famine and tribulations that war would bring.

All of these events happened within the lifetime of people from Jesus’s time just as predicted. The Flavian historian Josephus was recording his history of those same events, which he had personally witnessed at Titus’s side, during approximately the same time Jesus’s prophecies were being written down in the Gospels.

W as Jesus’s prediction meant to apply to the current events at the time it was written instead of the current events of our time? Could the bloody campaign of a future Roman emperor have been the fulfillment, and the explanation, of Jesus Christ’s prophecy?

This is yet another reason why references to Vespasian as the messiah of Jewish prophesy—even by Jewish priestly figures such as Josephus and the rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai—are so striking. The Flavian father and his son were “messiahs” who did destroy the Temple in a “glorious” triumph. They did rise in Judea to rule the world exactly when Jesus predicted his return.

Allegedly predicted some 40 years before the event, though written down only afterwards, Christ’s prophecy of the Temple’s destruction would certainly be miraculous if true, even though predicting the rebellion, and the Jews’ defeat at the hands of the Roman military machine, might have been possible for a truly foresighted individual in Christ’s time. Even then, events were pointing, at least, in that inevitable direction.

But there is a problem. Jesus describes the war with details so remarkably similar to Flavius Josephus’s contemporaneous historical account—including the appearance of “false messiahs” and a portentous vision of a battle seen in the clouds before the siege—that one must conclude that Jesus’s prophecy was probably composed after the event with the benefit of hindsight, unless Jesus had genuinely divine foresight of this event and his words were simply not written down until 40 years later, by pure coincidence, when Josephus was writing his historical account.

For these obvious reasons, most scholars point to Jesus’s prophecy as the primary evidence (though by no means the only evidence) that the Gospels must have been written after (or perhaps even during) the Jewish War, since the actual events as recorded by historians mirror what Jesus predicted in such precise factual and literary detail.

In either case, through his prophecy Jesus is put on record as warning Jews in the 1st Century against rebelling from Rome. His divine proscription against war is not only consistent with his own teachings concerning peace, obedience to Roman authority, paying taxes, and even his extravagant praise of a Roman centurion, it is also consistent with the teachings of the earliest contributor to the New Testament itself, St. Paul. We have already noted that Christ’s rejection of the Jewish purity laws that alienated the Jewish population from the wider Hellenistic world, along with his rejection of key aspects of the Mosaic Law, are perfectly consistent with Paul’s rejection of the Kosher lifestyle.

Notably, Jesus predicts a total Jewish defeat—one that will entail the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. And yet, paradoxically, he proposes that this military catastrophe will signal the Glorious Second Coming of the Son of Man. Simultaneously, Jesus identifies the leaders of the coming Jewish rebellion as “false messiahs.”

The historian Flavius Josephus’s description of the cultural ferment before the war dovetails with Jesus’s predictions that these “false messiahs” were to blame for leading Jews astray. Josephus’s own writings suggest that these Jewish rebel leaders presented themselves as the prophesied messiah, and he describes how they lead their people to disaster. Knowing they were written concurrently, one must wonder whether Josephus’s history is supporting Jesus’s prophecy or Jesus’s prophecy is supporting Josephus’s history.

Most Jews would naturally see these rebel leaders as far more credible Jewish messiahs than the Jesus of the Gospels. What a Jewish “messiah” meant to Jews at the time was a warrior and a champion, something completely different from the Jesus depicted in the Gospels. Jews anticipated the arrival of a military leader, like Joshua (Yeshu’a, itself meaning “God saves,” rendered via the Greek as “Jesus”). They were awaiting a new King, like David, or a rebel priest, like Judas Maccabeus—in other words, a perfectly human and never a divine political leader who would lead them to military victory and national and cultural independence. This did not preclude divine assistance, but it certainly precluded the messiah himself being divine.

It came to pass, while Cuspius Fadus was [Roman] procurator of Judea, that a certain charlatan, whose name was Theudas, persuaded a great part of the people to take their effects with them, and follow him to the Jordan River: for he told them he was a prophet, and that he would, by his own command, divide the river, and afford them an easy passage over it. Many were deluded by his words. However, Fadus did not permit them to make any advantage of his wild attempt, but sent a troop of horsemen out against them. After falling upon them unexpectedly, they slew many of them, and took many of them alive. They also took Theudas alive, cut off his head, and carried it to Jerusalem. 3

False though these messiahs Josephus mentions invariably turn out to be, each leading the Jewish people to apocalypse at the hands of the Romans, they at least fulfilled the expectations of monotheistic Jews that are so vividly expressed in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Josephus, the Jewish priest, general and scholar who became the Flavian court historian after he was captured by the Romans, confirms that the main motivations for Jews to revolt against Rome were the same messianic prophecies that led to their ruin. Exactly as Jesus warned.

There was no reason for the Jewish people to have expected a divine man, a kind of demigod, in any of their messiahs. It was a pagan idea. They had already experienced a number of messiahs—and they had rigid religious reasons to strenuously deny the very possibility of their divinity. As one might expect, the early Jewish response to Pauline Christianity was to parody the Gospel narratives, especially accounts of Jesus’s virgin birth, healing miracles, and the claims of Jesus’s divinity. 5

According to the Christian Gospels, the messiah who actually came was a surprise to his contemporary Jews. He was neither a military nor a political leader of any kind, but a humble peace lover and an advocate not of Jewish exceptionalism (almost the entire job description of the messiah up to that point) but a proponent of transnationalism . Indeed, he was a passionate ambassador of the same universal peace desired by the Roman Empire.

Insofar as the messiah anticipated by the Jews was a world leader, it was in connection with the sectarian triumph of Israel over its foreign enemies, i.e. the restoration of Jewish independence or the establishment of Jewish domination over the whole earth. The prophetic victory of the messiah over “the nations” never entailed including Gentiles and embracing their Torah-violating practices.

As the Romans had done with respect to Hellenism, it was their standing policy to plunder, absorb and adopt what they saw as the best parts of the foreign cultures they conquered. Politically, they followed a complimentary policy of slowly expanding citizenship and potential senate membership to eventually include those from once-conquered alien nations. This promise of inclusion was an important key to Rome’s success, stability, and longevity as an empire.

The 1st Century Jewish rebels’ outright xenophobia, the violent extremes to which many contemporary Hebrews were willing to take their purity laws, and the sharp contrast revealed in the Dead Sea Scrolls to the Gospels’ and the Romans’ ideology of peace and pluralism, all suggest that a radically different approach would have been followed by Jews had they succeeded in their revolt against Rome—that is, had the Jewish messiah they anticipated actually arrived.

Instead, in this era of virulent Jewish rebellion against Rome, Jesus Christ is portrayed declaring a Roman centurion’s faith in the God of Abraham as exceeding that of any Jew. Such a statement is tantamount to a Muslim claiming that an infidel American GI exceeds the faith in Allah of any contemporary Muslim. It is, quite frankly, unbelievable, and it is no wonder that such a thing was not published until after the Romans had won the Jewish War.

At the time in which he allegedly made it, consider how confidently Jesus utters such a shockingly controversial claim in the Gospels. Never mind the fear of Roman authorities—saying such a thing in Jewish company would be unthinkably provocative. It could be argued, therefore, that such confidence could only come after the Romans’ had utterly defeated and enslaved the Jewish rebels.

“… Lord, I do not deserve to have you come under my roof. But just say the word, and my servant will be healed. For I myself am a man under authority, with soldiers under me. I tell this one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and that one, ‘Come,’ and he comes. I say to my servant, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”

When Jesus heard this, he was amazed and said to those following him, “Truly I tell you, I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith. I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven. But the subjects of the kingdom will be thrown outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Emphasis added.) 6

Jesus is genuinely impressed by the Roman’s military position in this passage. This is simply extraordinary. Again we must remember that the two Gospels in which we find this story were written during the Flavians’ reign following their brutal military conquest of Judea.

In this and so many other ways, Jesus could not be more “pro-Roman,” even as he opposes Jewish exceptionalism in any form. His final entreaty to the disciples before ascending into heaven at the end of Matthew’s Gospel is to “go and make disciples of all the nations.” 7

All of this seems to indicate that Jesus was not advocating peace as a form of “passive” or “nonviolent resistance” to the Romans in order to subversively overthrow their empire, like an ancient world Gandhi—but as a means of accepting and even accommodating Rome’s imperialist ambitions over the Jews, and, indeed, over all the nations.

T he Roman Empire required locals to support its army within the marked boundaries of the “milestones” within which they lived. Milestones set along Roman roads served the dual purpose of measuring these taxes. Jesus advocates going “the extra mile,” thus providing the Romans additional assistance. 8

Jesus praises the blessings of meekness 9 , of making peace 10 , and of “loving one’s enemies.” 11 In contrast, the Qumran sectarians who authored the Dead Sea Scrolls required “everlasting hatred” for their enemies, whom they branded the “Sons of the Pit.” 12

To his followers, Jesus commanded “turning the other cheek” to aggression 13 and explicitly child-like acceptance, in general. 14 In the Gospels, Jesus advocates universal peace and his very birth is heralded by angels presaging peace on earth 15 —the same hope churned out on Roman coins while the Gospels were being composed. Meanwhile, Jewish hardliners were committed to an “eye for an eye,” rebellion against foreign pollution, and national sovereignty brought about by a warrior messiah.

The transnational scope of Jesus’s words is in perfect harmony with the imperial agenda of Rome at the time they were written. Jesus shares the same “political theology” Paul expresses in his letter to the Romans, which is probably one of the three or four oldest parts of the New Testament and one of seven letters attributed to Paul that are considered by most scholars to have been authentically composed by him:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves . For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience. This is also why you pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s servants , who give their full time to governing. Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor. (Emphasis added.) 16

Many Christians today do not realize that according to the New Testament obedience to the state is a moral and religious obligation—or that the government, even the Roman government that enforced slavery, crucified tens of thousands, and fed slaves and criminals to lions in their infamous arenas, must be recognized as God’s appointed agent on earth. The New Testament makes political rebellion a sin. Commandments and proclamations to this effect are repeated for emphasis in several places in the New Testament.

Submit yourselves for the Lord’s sake to every human authority: whether to the emperor, as the supreme authority, or to governors, who are sent by him to punish those who do wrong and to commend those who do right. For it is God’s will that by doing good you should silence the ignorant talk of foolish people. Live as free people, but do not use your freedom as a cover-up for evil; live as God’s slaves. Show proper respect to everyone, love the family of believers, fear God, honor the emperor.

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is commendable if someone bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. (Emphasis added.) 17

Slavery was another Roman institution, as Jews would soon experience in the aftermath of the Jewish War when tens of thousands of them were enslaved, as the Judea Capta coins of Vespasian and Titus amply bear witness. The New Testament provides instructions to the slaves of early slave-owning Christians, some of whom were no doubt high-ranking or aristocratic Romans. In 1 Timothy 6:1-2, slaves are advised thusly:

All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of their slaves.

Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. 18

Many Jews who were not enslaved must have been dispossessed of their property following the conquest. In this context, Christ’s famous congratulations of the poor, assuring them that they are the “blessed” or the fortunate ones, is alarming when stripped of modern embellishments. 19 In the Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus states, “Many who are the first will be last, and the last first.” 20 In order to emphasize this idea, Jesus himself in the Gospel of John washes the disciples’ feet at the Last Supper—like a slave. 21

When he had finished washing their feet, he put on his clothes and returned to his place. “Do you understand what I have done for you?” he asked them. “You call me ‘Teacher’ and ‘Lord,’ and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you. Very truly I tell you, no servant is greater than his master, nor is a messenger greater than the one who sent him. Now that you know these things, you will be blessed if you do them. 22

The master, curiously, is still “greater” than the servant, yet Jesus is modeling the role he wants to see his Jewish disciples accept. In Matthew, Jesus is explicitly asked by his disciples, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus straightforwardly tells the disciples that they must dramatically change their current expectations:

He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Emphasis added) 23

The messianic prophecies found in Hebrew literature unmistakably promise that a savior will come to lead the Israelites to victory and even rule over their oppressors. The conquests of Joshua, the later elimination of their regional rivals, the famous victories of David over the Philistines, the Maccabean revolt—all are events in their history and heritage that confirm the nature of what we might call “Jewish exceptionalism” throughout their ancient literature. All such anticipations of the Messiah express the same martial values and political hopes that inspired the Jewish revolts under the Romans in the 1st and 2nd Centuries.

A dispute also arose among them as to which of them was considered to be greatest. Jesus said to them, “The kings of the Gentiles lord it over them; and those who exercise authority over them call themselves Benefactors. But you are not to be like that. Instead, the greatest among you should be like the youngest, and the one who rules like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves. 24

In light of the praise Jesus lavished on the Roman centurion, and the regard he has for his own authority, it is not clear that Jesus is condemning the Gentiles, or even disputing that their rulers can be “benefactors,” and he readily concedes that the one sitting “at the table” is greater than the one “who serves.” Jesus is merely asserting that his followers must embrace not just service, but servitude and humility. Like the Jewish priests and Levites of old, they have a distinct assignment, and like the Messiah himself they are to be the servants, not the served, but this will result in a special reward for them in the afterlife. However, they must let go of any expectation of earthly rule or reward.

Jesus called them together and said, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their officials exercise authority over them. Not so with you. Instead, whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever want to be first must be your slave—just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” 25

Nothing could have been more amenable to the 1st Century Roman state in the aftermath of the war with Judea than to redefine the mission of the Jewish Messiah as one of servitude and sacrifice rather than conquest and rule—or, indeed, to redefine the special role of the Chosen People themselves as one of humble subjugation. The message could not be more ironic if George Orwell had written it himself: the voice of totalitarian power invokes surrender as the ultimate victory for the conquered. Meanwhile, Vespasian was constructing the Colosseum as a not-so-subtle alternative.

Questioned about paying taxes to Romans, Jesus himself explicitly endorses “rendering unto Caesar” the things that are Caesar’s, implying that there exists no conflict between the dictates of God and the requirements of Rome’s ruler. It is sometimes asserted that this is an ambiguous instruction on the part of Jesus, but, in fact, the meaning could not be more plain: “And Jesus said to them, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.’ And they were amazed at him.” 26

The accusation later brought against Jesus, that he refused to pay the Roman tax 27 , is pointedly untrue. It is shown to be something concocted by his conniving accusers, who know it to be false. According to Matthew, the accusations against Jesus were “false witness.” We are thus assured that Jesus pays his taxes. 28 Notice, too, that Christ’s earthly parents dutifully show up to be counted for the Roman census in the Gospel of Luke’s nativity account. Jesus obeys the Roman rules.

Not only is the Roman governor Pilate unable to find any fault in Jesus but, in all four Gospels, Pilate actually announces Christ’s innocence. The Roman governor is elaborately portrayed, again, in all four of the Gospels, as being compelled by the Jewish crowd t o order Jesus’s crucifixion. 29 Famously, no less than three times must the crowd demand Jesus’s death before Pilate reluctantly yields, according to all four Gospels. In the notorious scene from Matthew, often credited among the origins of the tradition known as the “blood libel” against Jews and Christian anti-Semitism generally, the crowd assumes full responsibility for the Crucifixion, shouting in unison: “His blood is on us and on our children.” 30

The original intention of the story is obvious even without the assumption of collective guilt by the crowd in Matthew. It is meant to exonerate the Roman government of any responsibility for the death of Jesus so that the responsibility and the consequences may be assigned exclusively to the Jews.

Just as Jesus had issued an unmistakable warning against rebellion, predicting complete destruction of Jerusalem and its famous Temple, so the Gospels provide a theological explanation for the Jewish defeat in that war: they misconstrued the nature of their own savior and killed him. The crowd takes full responsibility, even including their own children—the very generation who would suffer ignominious defeat at the hands of the Flavians as Christ had foreseen. This was certainly how the first Christian writers who discussed the Jewish War, such as Origen and Eusebius, regarded that defeat—as the deserved punishment of the Jewish people for the murder of Christ.

To fix blame on Jews it wasn’t really necessary to exonerate Pilate. The Roman governor could have also been shown to be culpable even as he admitted the charges to be false, thus indicting all mankind in a universal and broadly philosophical statement. Pilate could have even consulted the crowd as a means of helping to cravenly cover his own shared guilt in the terrible deed.

Instead, Pilate is specifically depicted as exceptionally, even inordinately hesitant to order the death of Jesus, and it is only the crowd’s repeated demands that finally cause him to relent to their bloodlust. He immediately orders a basin of water and melodramatically washes his hands to illustrate his innocence of their crime in a demonstration as exaggerated as a political cartoon.

The exoneration of Pilate himself was not necessary even to appease Rome. The 1 st Century historian Josephus, almost certainly reflecting the official imperial position of his Flavian patrons, was a critic of Pontius Pilate’s administration of Judea, repeatedly describing how he provoked Jewish anger and near-insurrection by an insensitivity to Jewish customs that was not shared by other Roman governors.

W hen the Apostle Peter (Cephas), according to the Book of Acts, addresses his “fellow Israelites,” as he puts it, he summarizes the death of Jesus thusly: “You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he [Pilate] had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you.” 32

According to Josephus, early in the 1st Century the first author of the rebel “philosophy” was named “Judas the Galilean.” It was this Judas who founded the “Zealot” sect of insurrectionists. Jesus and many of his disciples are explicitly identified as “Galileans” of the early 1st Century in the Gospels.

Curiously, the title of this same Judas, Iscariot , also suggests he was a rebel, a member of the militant sect known as the “Sicarii,” who had caused so much trouble for Rome. Judas Iscariot is almost synonymous, therefore, with “Jewish Rebel.” 33

Simon (not Peter, we are reassured, but another one of Jesus’s disciples who is called by that name) is referred to as “the Zealot.” Another disciple is named “Thaddeus,” a name resembling that of a person called “Theudas,” which itself may be a corruption of the name “Judas,” but who is also described by Flavius Josephus as a troublesome Jewish rebel figure. 34

And yet the Gospels show these disciples, who seem to echo notorious figures of the Jewish rebellion, repeatedly failing to grasp their master’s message, lacking sufficient faith, denying their relationship with Jesus, doubting his resurrection, betraying him with a kiss, and exchanging his life for the amount of silver the Temple charged for a sacrificial lamb. 36 The very name of Christ’s betrayer is, at least in part, symbolic of his whole people.

The Gospels even tell us that Jesus was rejected by his hometown and his own family. 37 (This may be referencing an older tradition, for those who joined militant or separatist Jewish sects may also have faced rejection by their own families.) In John, we are told that some of Jesus’s own disciples abandoned him. 38

Although executed by the Romans in a manner common to them, crucifixion, Jesus was actually convicted by Jewish officials for violating Jewish law, according to the Gospels. His trial and execution are the climax of Jesus’s rhetorical jousts with Jewish authorities, from the scribes to the priests to the Pharisees, and punishment for his own attack on the Jewish Temple as a “den of thieves.” 39 The charges that condemn him confound the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate.

In attacking the “money changers” at the Temple, Jesus enacts another criticism of Mosaic Law. To Gentiles, the merchants who exchanged pagan coins displaying forbidden graven images of gods and emperors for currency that was religiously acceptable to Jews must have seemed like “thieves” charging the poor money in the name of an empty symbolism, even as Romans might have taken offense to images of their gods and rulers being condemned as blasphemous.

First, if it is interpreted in this way, this assertion does stand out against all of Jesus’s other pleas for universal peace and brotherhood. However, Jesus also refers to some Israelites as “lost sheep.” Also, Jesus’s definition of his own mission here seems to anticipate Paul’s later claim to being the first missionary to convert the Gentiles. And finally, we see that after Jesus’s objections he nevertheless agrees to heal the woman’s daughter, after all, even in the face of his own disciples’ opposition.

This passage actually implies that Jewish bigotry toward Gentiles was so undeniable in the 1st Century that even the Gospels could not avoid acknowledging it. The best a Roman innovator of Jewish religion could do and still be somewhat credible was to “soften” this xenophobia and then countermand it by example.

In any event, the entire point of the story seems to be Jesus’s correction of his disciples’ opposition to healing a Gentile’s daughter. One can only surmise that the Jewish-Christian rebel leaders, like James, so prominently exhibited this kind of anti-Gentile attitude that it required addressing with a demonstration of why it was “un-Christian.” This “teachable moment,” therefore, shows the very process by which Jewish-Christian ideology was being systematically turned upside-down in the writing of the Gospels.

A s a divine being, Jesus Christ is sacrilegious to the Jewish nation and tradition. As early as the authentic Pauline epistles, Christianity would celebrate a man-god who brings to all humanity the Hope of Resurrection and Eternal Happiness in the Afterlife—just like a Mystery Cult demigod of the Suffering Savior archetype common in Hellenistic paganism.

The Sadducees, one of the three great sects of Jews of the 1st Century, denied the existence of an afterlife or an immortal soul, altogether. 41 While the Pharisees and the Qumran sectarians both seem to have shared a belief in the Resurrection of the Dead and a Final Judgment, their conception of the messiah was never equated with God himself.

Meanwhile Jesus himself suggests that Christianity contains a “secret knowledge” revealed only to initiates—a signature of so many pagan “mystery” cults. When he teaches the crowd by the Sea of Galilee, according to Mark, Jesus uses parables, “but when he was alone with his own disciples, he explained everything.” 42 And the first epistle to Timothy explicitly refers to “the Mystery of Faith.” As many others have observed, Christianity’s parallels with pagan mystery cults are plentiful. 43

Celsus was a famous critic of Christianity, and he was surely mocking the notion of a virgin birth, but he added the coded insinuation that the true “lineage” of this messiah was Roman—indeed, that he was born of the Roman war effort. Fascinatingly, this same caricature of Jesus is repeated in the Jewish Talmud, as well. 45

Obviously, Pauline Christianity is more than a form of Judaism—it is a blend of Jewish and pagan elements. The transreligious and transnational nature of the New Testament that stands in stark contrast to Jewish exceptionalism is visible in its holy scriptures in many ways.

For instance, take the famous Christmas visit of three “Magi” 46 , who are said to observe the astrological portent of a rising star that led them to the very spot where the baby Jesus was born. Magi, of course, are priests of the religion of Zoroastrianism. Although popularly referred to as either “wise men” or “kings,” Matthew calls them magi , which identifies them as Zoroastrian. They came “from the East” according to standard translations, though that phrase (ἀπὸ ἀνατολῶν) may literally mean “from the rising [of the sun],” a synonym for the east. Zoroastrians lived to the east of Israel. They invented the Zodiac familiar to us today and their famous reputation for interpreting the stars is being invoked here—something that no Jewish scripture would ever do.

Relating a pagan, Zoroastrian source for one of its star symbols, the Gospels here do something impossible in Jewish religion. The religion of the Hebrews was itself deeply influenced by the religious ideas of their neighbors, but it never credited those polytheistic, idol-worshiping faiths directly for obvious reasons.

The Jews had, however, represented the messiah with a star in Hebrew literature and coins, as in the name given to the 2nd Century messianic rebel leader Bar Kokhba (whose name literally means “son of the Star”). And, alone among Roman emperors, Vespasian and Titus employed this same distinctive eight-pointed star image on coins commemorating their eastern navy.

While Jesus’s birth is heralded by a star, one of the portents of Vespasian’s death was a comet, according to the ancient historian Suetonius. The ancient historian Tacitus tells us that Vespasian’s ascension to the throne was prefigured in the stars. 47

One Vespasian coin depicts both a ship’s prow symbolic of the 10th Legion, which helped quell the Jewish revolt—and a star. This remarkable star on Vespasian’s coin is the same kind of messianic star used on Jewish coins to represent their messiah. Notice how the unique eight-pointed star also forms an Ichthys Wheel of the type used as an early Christian symbol that we have previously noted:

Though somewhat related to the comet-symbol of Julius Caesar, the specific star on the Flavian coins of Vespasian and Titus is obviously more like the Jewish messianic star, complete with the points in between. Such a star does not appear on any other Roman emperors’ coins.

A s we have seen, Jesus’s similarities to Serapis and Aesclepius, and his very nature as a man-god, were alien to Judaism in the same way that Roman emperor worship was alienating, indicating a profound influence of Hellenistic and Roman ideas on the Gospels.

While it is certainly true that radical Jewish sectarians like those in the Dead Sea Scrolls community believed in the righteousness of personal poverty—and the poor and disaffected were no doubt drawn to the rebel cause—scholars widely agree that Jesus’s advocacy of storing one’s “treasures” in the Kingdom of Heaven rather than on the perishable earth 48 is more readily founded in the Greek philosopher Plato. That ancient philosopher’s dualism had in the pagan mind already ideologically severed the universe into two opposed dimensions: the spiritual and material.

All of the transnational and transreligious elements in the New Testament suggest a transnational and transreligious agenda—i.e., an imperial one. The very phrase in the New Testament, “Kingdom of Heaven,” as properly translated from the Greek by the Jesus Seminar, should read: “God’s imperial rule.”

R eligions before Rome (and, to some extent, before Alexander) were largely matters of one’s ethnicity and nationality in an age when the distinction between religion, politics and science was blurry and parochialism sharply defined. Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, however, imperialistic motives began to inspire transnational religious syncretism like that we have seen in order to melt down regional and sectarian divisions into an enduring imperial alloy.

The Romans shared the same methods and motives of these first Hellenistic imperialists. Indeed, they were avid students of their methods. Over time, Romans developed this kind of statecraft into an elaborately sophisticated adjunct of warfare. They employed the Greeks’ own tactics against them when they conquered Greek territories, incorporating Greek religion and matching Greek gods to their own gods almost one-for-one. When it came to religion the Romans were creative, pragmatic and political.

With the political propaganda employed by the Emperor Vespasian, however, this universalizing syncretism for political purposes soared to new heights. We have already seen that his Jewish supporters acknowledged him as the Messiah of prophecy and how he performed healing miracles at the Serapeum in Alexandria in perhaps the most cynical show of political propaganda by any Roman emperor. Our ancient sources tell us that Vespasian also received portents by traditional Roman gods back in his Italian homeland, as well, even as his son Titus received favorable prophecies from the priests of the Greek goddess of Love, Aphrodite, on the island of Cyprus.

It was, after all, the Roman government that was striving, quite brutally, to unify all nations under one emperor—a mission that would, arguably, culminate in the official unification of the Empire under the Roman-friendly monotheism of Christianity by the 4th Century.

Jesus challenges the entire Mosaic purity code that helped ignite the conflict with Rome. 49 He obviates the need for strict Sabbath observance by letting his disciples work on the Sabbath. He rejects or transforms nearly everything distinctively Jewish in the Gospels, which were written while the Flavians ruled.

While most Christians today retain some form of Sabbath observance, the Christian “Sabbath” is no longer even celebrated on the seventh day, as God commanded the Jews. Except for a small minority of Christians, their Sabbath is observed on the first day of the week: the day of the Sun (Sunday), in accordance with the worship of Sol Invictus, as decreed by Emperor Constantine, who was originally a devotee of Sol Invictus.

Jesus’s disciples also ignore the contemporary Jewish practice of fasting, or so we are told at Mark 2:18. And, as if following up on Jesus’s suggestion that a presumably uncircumcised centurion could exceed every Jew in his faith, St. Paul explicitly does away with the need for circumcision altogether, which is a Jewish practice dating back to Abraham himself and, as the symbol of the Covenant with God’s Chosen People, is one of God’s earliest commands. Unsurprisingly, circumcision was also one of the chief obstacles for eager Roman initiates wishing to adopt Jewish ways. 51

It seems that “Gospel” Christians of the Pauline variety had no use for any of the traditional Jewish holy days, either, from Yom Kippur to Passover or any of the others. Christian holy days such as Christmas and Easter are not even calculated on a Hebrew calendar but on a Roman one. Even where the events that inspired them can be lined up with the Gospels’ narrative, as in the case of the Crucifixion and Resurrection that should properly coincide with Passover, the celebration of the Resurrection coincides with pagan spring fertility festivals, instead. And the birth of Jesus is celebrated at around the same time as the birth of pagan solar deities (and the Emperor Titus).

While it is true that over time Christianity would grow increasingly un-Jewish and even anti-Jewish, the Gospels themselves—even the earliest, along with the letters of St. Paul—embody a fierce ongoing argument with Jews. The “heavies” in the New Testament are invariably the Jews. It is impossible to deny that this is partially responsible for the last two millennia of anti-Semitism. The origins of this “blood libel” against Jews began in the text of the most printed book on Earth.

The New Testament is anti-Semitic, not incidentally, not implicitly, but fundamentally and thematically. Anti-Semitism is its purpose. From its very origins, the New Testament is quite literally “anti- Semitism.” The “New Testament” is a rebuttal to the “Old Testament” written at a time of holy war between the Jews and Romans.

Once it is highlighted, the New Testament’s overtly Roman perspective explains an entire host of otherwise completely inexplicable issues. One of them is Paul’s reference to personal contacts inside the house of the emperor and also to a powerful secretary of Emperor Nero himself. Suddenly, such offhand mentions by St. Paul, puzzling, braggadocios, and usually overlooked for these reasons, become deeply meaningful simply by taking them literally. (51)

We will shortly see that this last person, Epaphroditus, one of the highest-ranking secretaries of the Emperor Nero, may actually be the confidant Paul is referring to in his letter to the Philippians, which he concluded with: “All God’s people here send you greetings, especially those who belong to Caesar’s household.” 52 Paul’s reference to being in custody 53 in that same letter suggests that he wrote this letter from Rome.

A lready we have seen that the religious and political goals in the Gospels track perfectly with the agenda of contemporary Romans while clashing with popular Jewish attitudes on the very grounds that instigated the Jewish War—a war that was won by the Romans just prior to the Gospels’ writing.

In the Gospels, Jesus condemns the things that brought Jews into conflict with the Romans even as he expresses themes of hope, peace, charity, eternal salvation, joy, universal brotherhood, and the proclamation of world peace to the whole of the human race. All of these are distinctly Roman goals that they were actively disseminating far and wide at the time, as evidenced in their coinage. Indeed, Jesus personified all the social virtues that were the very currency of Roman imperialism in the wake of the calamitous Jewish War.

However, while it is certainly true that Jesus is said by the Gospels to have fulfilled some of the basic Jewish messianic prophecies, such as being born of the line of King David, the authors of the Gospels themselves seem to employ the whole of Hebrew Scriptures, including parts that have nothing to do with the messiah, to a haphazard variety of literary ends that hardly seems Jewish.

Additionally, just as Pharaoh ordered male babies slaughtered at the time of Moses’s birth, so Herod orders the “Slaughter of the Innocents” in Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth, according to Matthew (though this is not backed up by the record of any contemporary historians or archeological evidence of any kind).

And there are other instances of this kind of holistic and theologically curious sourcing to the Old Testament in the New Testament’s depiction of Christ. For instance, just as the “Joseph” of Genesis interpreted prophetic dreams in Egypt so, too, does Joseph , the husband of Mary, have prophetic dreams that compel him to take his family to Egypt. Though the text of the original Joseph story seems to have no necessary relation to the coming of the messiah, the story is recycled anyway in the New Testament, which seems to treat the entire Old Testament as prophetic of the Messiah as if to give the Gospels a generalized “Jewish” patina. As St. Paul describes his own experiences, just reading the holy words from a sacred scripture could send an interpreter into a state of ecstasy—and prompt new visions of the Messiah.

As the object of centuries of prophetic hopes, the Messiah became seen as the embodiment and physical manifestation of the Word of God. Yet, so dramatically did the Gospels’ Jesus seem to reverse traditional messianic expectations that he had to be shown to embody the whole of Hebrew scripture itself, even material having little or nothing to do with the idea of the messiah.

Scholars have long observed many more examples of Hebrew literature being oddly recapitulated in the New Testament in this “prophecy-fulfilling” fashion. We can be sure, for this reason, that one of the primary sources for the late 1st Century Gospel authors who depicted Christ was ancient Hebrew scripture.

However, Jesus does not fulfill the predictions of glory and rule that qualified one as a Jewish messiah. Instead, he only predicts that such glory and rule will be fulfilled during his imminent and decisive second coming in yet another jarring innovation to the concept of the messiah that markedly deviates from Jewish religion—even while it seems to be based on the Old Testament prophecy of Isaiah.

It seems that in order to support the departure from the messianic archetype of the delivering warrior, the Gospel authors based their accounts of Jesus’s life, in part, on the “expiation” required before the actual coming of the messiah, which must include a human sacrifice, as related in the prophecies of Isaiah.

The prophet Isaiah envisions a time when the people’s sins have accumulated to such a point that, this time, the messiah’s arrival will be impossible. To become worthy of the messianic advent, Isaiah predicts that a propitiation of human blood will have to be made. An animal sacrifice, such as a mere “lamb,” will no longer do. According to Isaiah:

Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his life unto death , and was numbered with the transgressors . For he bore the sin of many , and made intercession for the transgressors. (Emphasis added.) 54

Notice how closely this Old Testament prophecy coincides with the account of Jesus’s life in the Gospels—especially the stories of his trial and execution. So closely, in fact, that most scholars now acknowledge that Isaiah was a primary source for the Gospels’ narrative about Jesus.

There can be no doubt that many contemporary Jews also believed that some form of human sacrifice was also required to achieve the expiation and purification required for the People of Israel to be worthy of the Messianic Advent, and martyred figures such as John the Baptist and James the Just may have been seen by rebellious Jews in just this way.

In order to flesh out the biography of Jesus, therefore, Gospel authors liberally mined ancient Hebrew scripture as a source of material about the life of Jesus rather than simply relating recent history. One might reasonably be entitled to ask why, if Jesus existed, did they feel free to do this?

Even if a historical Jesus really existed, so little was known about him at the end of the 1st Century that the authors of the Gospels have creatively inserted material that was centuries older in order to accomplish their theological purposes and flesh out the biography of Jesus.

Isaiah’s prophecy may have shaped the story of Jesus, but there remain important differences between Isaiah’s so-called “Suffering Servant” story and the story of Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus did not “prolong his days” nor did he “see his offspring,” for example, like Isaiah’s martyr. Most importantly, Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” is not a messiah.

Nevertheless, the one whose coming is predicted in Isaiah’s passage would certainly be a convenient reference for writers who wished to use Jewish texts in a propaganda war, especially one whose casus belli was the Jewish religion. Notice how Isaiah is predicting a generation of Jews who have gone astray—and who need redemption. He goes on to mention a messianic precursor who will be rejected by Jews. He will be peaceful, and he will be misunderstood by Jews and even despised by them. He will be martyred, as a result. Never mind that Isaiah does not predict that he will be a healer, his poetry is still an elegant foreshadowing of Jesus that compliments the pagan idea of a healer God: “by his wounds we are healed. ” 55

Again, neither this “Suffering Servant” nor the prophecy of the messiah whose glorious coming and world rule was also predicted by Isaiah suggest the arrival of a pagan man-god, healer god, or mystery cult god. Yet such a prophecy of a sacrificial precursor to the conquering messiah could quite easily be seen as convenient to Roman emperors who had just conquered Judea in a holy war. The Jewish messiah of prophecy is converted by Paul and the Gospel authors into a “suffering” mystery cult savior modeled after healer gods like Aesclepius and Serapis while retaining parts of Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” as a premonition of the Flavians. It is hard to imagine what could have accommodated the Romans more in their conflict with fundamentalist Jews than the kind of cultural syncretism exhibited in the person of Jesus Christ.

T he New Testament does not present an anti-Roman message and then give the Roman government a couple of perfunctory nods of appeasement to earn forgiveness in treacherous times. Rather, the central, overriding and consistent theme propounded in the New Testament is one of peace, meekness, submission, obedience, mercy, and getting along with all of the people of the earth—and especially with Roman authority: i.e. it embodies the Romans’ central objectives in regards to rebellious Jews and their wider empire.

In a time of Jewish rebellion, 1st Century Christian literature is commanding its adherents to pay their taxes, honor the emperor and go the extra mile for Romans. It argues that existing governmental authorities are nothing less than the agents of God, appointed by God, and that all virtuous people have nothing to fear from Roman authority. Submission to them is itself a virtue, and the more subservient the submission, the greater that virtue. All this the New Testament instructs us.

Our inherited idea of the earliest Christians being driven underground by hostile Roman authorities because of their incompatible codes of ethics simply isn’t true. Christians were apparently devotees of precisely the same virtues embodied by the Flavians’ imperial cult even as their Gospels were being composed.

Not just Romans, but even Roman centurions are awarded highest praise in the New Testament in the aftermath of the bloody conquest of Judea. The greatest story ever told takes pains to completely exonerate Romans while exclusively blaming Jews for Christ’s death, three times, with a cartoonishly heavy hand. This theme is further confirmed in the betrayal of Judas and the accusations of the Jewish authorities as the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate washes his hands of all blame.

I f, as a thought experiment, one were to imagine what a sophisticated Roman propaganda war aimed at rebellious Jews in the 1st Century during their conflict with Nero and the Flavians might theoretically have looked like, the New Testament would match such a model in every imaginable respect.

The overtly Roman politics, the religious shape of its political propaganda, the commanded servile worship of a Caesar-like man-god in the place of a liberating Jewish Messiah, the sweeping rejection of the Kosher lifestyle and denial of Jewish exceptionalism, all of it leaves nothing off the Roman government’s check-list of 1st Century “corrections” to Jewish religion and culture. Christianity contains all of the revisions to Judaism that the Romans who conquered Judea could have possibly desired.

Where Jewish morality and Roman morality overlap, we can find Jewish doctrines favorably featured in the New Testament, such as Jesus’s adoption of the early rabbis’ Golden Rule. Obviously, the “mortal helping mortal” benevolence of the Flavians praised by the Emperor Titus’s personal friend, Pliny the Elder, parallels the Christian concept of charity. Even more famously, the altruism of Jesus is similarly advocated in the philosophical work of the 1st Century Roman Stoic writer Seneca, who was a tutor and assistant to the Emperor Nero.

Titus was educated along with the Emperor Claudius’s son, Britannicus, in the imperial palace, where Nero, who was only two years Titus’s senior, was being tutored by Seneca. It is therefore certainly possible that Titus himself knew the famous philosopher personally, as his father Vespasian must have known the man Nero later named an imperial advisor. St. Paul lived and wrote at precisely the same time as Seneca. Both were writing in Rome during the same years, and the two may have died at about the same time, as well. Seneca’s enduring influence as a philosopher can be felt even today.

Let us consider, most excellent Liberalis, what still remains of the earlier part of the subject; in what way a benefit should be bestowed. I think that I can point out the shortest way to this; let us give in the way in which we ourselves should like to receive. Above all we should give willingly, quickly, and without any hesitation; a benefit commands no gratitude if it has hung for a long time in the hands of the giver, if he seems unwilling to part with it, and gives it as though he were being robbed of it. 56

I do not wish to involve myself in too large a question, and to discuss the treatment of slaves, towards whom we Romans are excessively haughty, cruel, and insulting. But this is the kernel of my advice: Treat your inferiors as you would be treated by your betters. And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you. 57

Although we have already seen that the New Testament repeatedly commands slaves to obey their masters—even when their master isn’t looking, and even happily —the New Testament is also famous for a doctrine of benevolent treatment of slaves by their masters that echoes Seneca’s policy. Consider this New Testament passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians that reflects his position:

Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ. Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you know that the Lord will reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they are slave or free.

Roman emperors, especially the Flavians, were keen to advertise themselves as bringers of peace and saviors of the world. One might think there is a paradoxical element in a Roman general associating himself with peace. Yet Jesus, too, commanded peace even as he launched a physical attack on the Temple in Jerusalem. While advocating peace, Jesus states: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.” 60

He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one. It is written: “‘And he was numbered with the transgressors ’; and I tell you that this must be fulfilled in me, Yes, what is written about me is reaching its fulfillment.”

This is, of course, none other than Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant” prophecy. Here, Jesus draws a connection between himself and this passage from Hebrew prophecy—which was not a prophecy about the messiah himself but only about the sacrificial precursor to the messiah.

Also, Jesus tells his followers to carry swords in order to be “numbered with the transgressors.” They are to have swords, it seems, for the express purpose of getting Jesus into trouble, thus checking off another prophetic requirement we have observed in Isaiah’s suffering servant prophecy.

The same passage from Isaiah also implies that the accusations will be false and that the Suffering Servant is really a man of peace. So, far from justifying the use of weapons in self-defense as some have interpreted it today, this instruction by Jesus seems to rationalize the fact that the first (pre-Pauline) “Christians” were known for carrying weapons and were therefore “transgressors.” Notice how Jesus stresses limiting their weapons.

Finally, while justifying the prophetic consequences, none of this alters Jesus’s perfectly clear instructions to submit to aggressors, love one’s enemies, obey authorities, turn the other cheek, and foster peace. Indeed, Jesus reproves Peter on the only occasion where the disciples actually use their swords in the Gospels. ‘“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.”’ 62

If we take “all who draw the sword” to mean anyone who initiates violence, then Jesus’s prediction is obviously wrong. Of course, everyone knows that many violent killers die natural deaths long after their crimes, including a lot of victorious Roman centurions who killed Jews during the war. Taken in historical context during the late post-war 1st Century, therefore, the phrase would have been heard as a warning against rebellion, a dire prophecy aimed at those who “took up the sword” against the Roman Empire.

Christ’s ideas did not represent any pre-existing “pacifist” branch of 1st Century messianic Jews—no evidence for such a sect exists before the 1 st Century. Instead, he personifies the Roman Empire’s opposition to messianic Jews. If Christianity is not Roman propaganda, it must be an extremely strange coincidence that Christ’s story of Jewish guilt and message of transnational peace was written down during the Flavians’ reign in the years immediately after they had crushed that rebellion.

I n addition to all of the overlapping imperial and Christian values, the Flavian dynasty also appears to have introduced a more conservative sexual morality to Roman society that markedly contrasted with the notorious licentiousness of the Julio-Claudians. We generally equate ancient Romans with the famous debauchery of the previous dynasty. And, undoubtedly, most Roman emperors before the Flavians are renowned for their orgiastic excesses.

However, there is evidence that during the reign of the Flavians some of Pompeii’s pornographic murals were painted over, suggesting a more modest approach by Vespasian or possibly by Titus, who had taken the throne only two months before the eruption. 63

For his part, after Titus’s death, his younger brother Domitian would restore the traditional penalty of being buried alive for all Vestal Virgins who broke their vows of chastity. This may be attributed to the fact that Domitian took a more conservative approach to traditional Roman religion, in general, than his brother or father. But it also continues the more conservative sexual mores instituted by the Flavians after the sexual excesses of the Julio-Claudians. 64

So it seems that even the sexual modesty and chastity preached in the New Testament does not conflict with the theory of its Roman provenance. Apparently, the Flavian dynasty as a whole frowned on the sexual extravagance of their dynastic predecessors, another coincidence of Flavian and Jewish morality that is preserved in Christianity.

Despite the remarkable overlap that we have been observing, the New Testament is not a perfect reflection of contemporary Roman ethics, of course. Most notably, the ancient Romans had rather liberal laws regarding divorce while the New Testament seems to forbid divorce entirely. And both Jesus and St. Paul appear to recommend (but not require) celibacy. 65

However, the doctrines expressed by Paul and the Gospel writers were not aimed at a general Roman audience but at those (both Jew and Gentile) who had been—or were “at risk” of being—influenced by messianic Judaism. The Gospels were not written for a general Jewish audience, either, for the Mosaic Law itself permitted divorce. 66 Instead, the sexual morality in the New Testament seems to reflect the far stricter regulations and mores of the radical Jewish groups of the era, such as the Essenes. In other words, these ideas were a reflection of the preexisting sexual morality of the Jewish-Christian rebel groups to whom the Romans were appealing. Rather than attempt to sell them yet another massive alteration of their ethics, this aspect of their morality was simply carried straight into Christianity.

Asceticism and chastity were not unknown to the ancient Roman religion, either, as the very existence of Vestal Virgins shows, and both Platonic and Stoic thought increasingly emphasized the virtue of sexual discipline. But Christian monasticism, surely, traces its roots back to the celibate ways of the Jewish radicals.

A dding to their own parallels with the New Testament’s Jesus, and their unique departures from previous emperors, Vespasian and Titus took special pride in their humble origins—something that scholar Barbara Levick calls Vespasian’s “ostentatious modesty.”

In fact, the small, dingy bedroom where the Nativity of Titus took place was actually opened to the viewing public, and it continued to be a tourist destination throughout the reign of Trajan, if not much longer. 67 The Flavians did not hesitate to advertise their beginnings in relative poverty, just as the Gospels stress the humble origins of Christ.

Both the father and the son, Vespasian and Titus, were Jewish messiahs of modest origin, like the ghost who preceded and predicted them, Jesus. As well as being healer gods, like Serapis and Jesus, as Roman emperors both father and son were deified men , like Serapis and Jesus.

The benevolence of the first two Flavian emperors was legendary. Their “common touch,” fostering of peace, and the loving compassion of Titus through Rome’s tribulations, made them models for future emperors. In fact, nearly every Roman emperor who was Christian following Constantine the Great would adopt the name “Flavius” among his imperial appellations. Even though none of the 2nd or 3rd Century pagan emperors of Rome would use this name, from the family of the first Christian Emperor Constantine all the way to the dynasty of Justinian only two out of 38 emperors did not use the name “Flavius.” (And one of these did not need to, since his mother was already named “Flavia.” The other holdout, Avitus, himself a Christian bishop, ruled only 15 months before he was removed by a coup.)

No emperors subsequent to the Flavians were actual members of the Flavian family. And yet these later Christian emperors did not utilize the family names “Julius,” “Claudius,” or “Aurelius” with anything like the same consistency. The name almost all of them chose, indeed their common denominator, was “Flavius.” Whether these Christian emperors were aware of a foundational connection between the Flavian family and Christianity we do not know. But it is a fact that nearly all of them selected the Flavians as both a moral model and a namesake.

It is remarkable how many prominent early Christians also bear the names of Flavian family members, close associates, or servants: names like Titus, Epaphroditus, Tertulla/Tertullian, Stephanus, Domitilla, and Clemens or Clement. There is the St. Clement of Alexandria, whose full name is “Titus Flavius Clemens” and whose recommendations for Christian symbols include Titus’s dolphin and anchor symbols. No fewer than 14 popes and three antipopes are named “Clement.”

There is no doubt that Christians admired the emperors Vespasian and Titus. St. Augustine, the most important Christian philosopher before Thomas Aquinas, described Vespasian as “a most agreeable emperor” in his famous work City of God , while to many medievals such as the poet Dante, author of The Divine Comedy , they enjoyed a “high” reputation as “scourges of the Jews.” 68 The mercy and compassion of Titus is the subject of one of Mozart’s last composed operas, which was one of the first to reach London, La Clemenza di Tito (The Mercy of Titus).

We have still only begun to outline the many links that connect the Flavians to Christianity. As we will see in Part II, their political and familial relationships are stunningly intertwined. Remember, the coin was the last thing we found, which dropped perfectly into place after decades of research had left only that space curiously unfilled. In Part II we will look behind these symbols at the personal connections the Flavians forged with the very first Christians and other historical figures, some of whom appear in the New Testament itself.

Even before we get to that evidence, however, the strength of the connection between early Christianity and the imperial cult of the Flavians that we have already seen suggests that a relationship vital to understanding the history of Western Civilization has been lost along with its forgotten and forbidden historical context. In the case of the dolphin-and-anchor motif, that connection is now literally visible.

The discovery of that physical evidence alone reveals that, almost simultaneously with the Flavian dynasty, the earliest Christians in Rome were using a deified Flavian emperor’s symbol to represent their own deity and religion. This iconographic overlap occurred while this symbol was circulating on Roman coins across the Empire even as the Gospels were being written and well after the first Christians began marking their oldest burial sites with the same iconography. Even at a public works in Herculaneum buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius during the reign of Titus a mosaic at their imperial baths displays identical symbolism to that found in the first catacombs.

This legacy of shared symbols between Flavians and Christians would persist until Christianity became the official state religion of the Roman Empire two centuries later, at which point Christians, around the time of Constantine the Great, replaced the Flavian-Christian symbol with the symbol of the Cross.

If we look at a Venn diagram of the worldviews of Flavian emperors and the earliest Christians, we see they substantially overlap in time and place and even in the specific symbols they used to identify themselves. The meaning of such symbols could not have been lost on these early Christians who nevertheless used them in the city of Rome itself. The ideology and symbology of the first Christians and contemporary Roman propaganda at this moment in time share too much to be mere coincidence. They are, indeed, two sides of the same coin. 69

In addition, the Gospel of Matthew’s attempt to ground the idea of a virgin birth in Hebrew prophecy has long been understood by scholars to be artificial. The cited prophecy (Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14) has no direct connection to the coming of the Messiah at all and was a “sign” to be associated with a specific event reported from Isaiah’s own time.

Finally, the word used by Isaiah originally meant only “young woman” and only took on the added meaning of “virgin” when Isaiah was later translated into the Greek language in the Septuagint.

Even virgin births can be found in pagan myth, as in the stories of Zeus’s matings with Io and Danaë, and, perhaps, in the accounts of the birth of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome and son of Mars, whose mother was a Vestal Virgin .

The story of Jesus’s “trial” before Pilate is fiction. The findings of scholars such as those of the Jesus Seminar reflect the widespread view among critical scholars: “…the Fellows were virtually unanimous in their judgment that the account of the Judean trial [of Jesus] was mostly a fabrication of the Christian imagination.” (Funk, Robert W., Hoover, Roy W., and the Jesus Seminar, The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: The Five Gospels , 1993, New York: Polebridge Press, p. 121) As these scholars observe, because there were no eyewitness accounts of this trial, and certainly none cited by the Gospels, the details of this episode must be regarded as later invention.

It must be added that certain details, such as the thrice-repeated demand of the crowd to crucify Jesus (reported in all four Gospels), seem entirely hatched. Just as Peter denied Jesus three times, so the crowd demands his death three times, and the number three is theologically suggestive throughout the New Testament, e.g. the Sign of Jonah, the three favored disciples at scenes such as the Transfiguration, etc.

But if this episode in the Gospels is necessarily fiction, then we must ask what motives shaped it and why its elements were inserted, removed or retained. If that thrice repeated demand to kill Jesus is a fabrication, for example, then what end does it serve—except to exonerate not just Romans, but the Roman government? Why does the crowd have to demand his death, at all? Only to overcome Pilate’s resistance . If that thrice-repeated demand by the crowd is fiction, then it was simply to explain how Pilate’s belief in Jesus’s innocence was overcome.

In fact, as we have seen, the whole underlying cause of Jesus’s enmity with Jewish religious authorities as presented in the Gospels, his opposition to the Mosaic Law, appears to have been a post-Pauline invention. This by itself undermines the historicity of the trial before the Sanhedrin, unless it was only an effort on their part to eliminate an advocate of violence and separatism, not a critic of the Mosaic Law, out of fear of the Romans.

Moreover, if, in fact, Jesus had been convicted of blasphemy by the Sanhedrin, as the Gospels assert, then that body could have executed Jesus themselves. That they did not appears to present a problem for which the Gospel of John attempts to provide an answer. According to John 18:31-32, when Pilate told the Jewish authorities to judge Jesus themselves, “the Jews,” collectively, replied that they had no legal authority to put “any man” to death. Yet, we know this was not the case: prior to the first Jewish War, the Jews routinely enforced their own law, including its various provisions for capital punishment. Among several other persuasive references, Josephus provides us with verbatim citations from multiple Roman imperial decrees commanding that the Jews be allowed to preserve and enforce their own laws (Josephus, Antiquities , Book XVI, chapter 6, sec. 1-8). And the New Testament itself provides us with evidence. For example, we are told that St. Stephen was stoned to death after being convicted by the Sanhedrin of blasphemy (Acts 6 and 7), which was precisely the same context Jesus faced, and Josephus reports the eerily similar stoning of James the Just at the command of the Jewish priesthood (Josephus, Antiquities , Book XX, chapter 9, sec. 1).

So why would the author of John’s Gospel need to mislead us like that—except in order to explain the unexplainable, namely, why Jesus was not executed by the Jews whom he had allegedly offended?

It is the nature of Jesus’s execution, crucifixion, that inescapably required an official Roman command. If Jesus really existed, then the manner of his execution is likely to have been the least flexible aspect of his tradition. If he did not really exist, then this aspect of his tradition seems to have been selected in order for Jesus to fulfill the “Suffering Servant” prophecy of Isaiah, chapter 53, regarding the messianic precursor who will be “pierced” for the “transgressions” of the Jews (Isaiah 53:5). In either case, the Crucifixion appears to have been an inescapable, and earlier, part of the Jesus tradition. Had a historical Jesus actually been executed in this fashion, it is far more likely that he was executed for advocating violence and rebellion against Rome, which would be consistent with what we have argued were the true politics of the Jewish-Christians. Whether this was the case, or whether the Suffering Servant prophecy was the source of this tradition—and even if the idea of the execution had been lifted from some other messianic personage of the period—the responsibility for the execution of Jesus would still have been laid at the feet of the Romans without the Gospel’s elaborate account.

Since there was no way to avoid a Roman trial, complex, repeated and unmistakable steps had to be taken to exonerate the Romans. Thus, the betrayal by Judas, the triple denial of Peter, the trial before the Sanhedrin, Pilate’s belief in Jesus’s innocence, the triple demand by the Jewish crowd for the Crucifixion, are all consistent with the motive to inculpate the Jews and exonerate the Roman state in the face of a method of execution that had in itself otherwise implied Jesus to have been a rebel. Matthew’s version, as we argue, simply makes this unified motivation explicit.

Finally, given the fact that the thrice-repeated demand of the Jewish crowd is found in all four of the Gospels, along with Pilate’s belief in Christ’s innocence, this motive of exonerating the Romans is inextricably linked with the original composition of the Gospel’s narrative.

The Book of Acts records that Paul was accused of being a leader of the “Nazarenes” and a “troublemaker” (Acts 24:5). The term in Hebrew (notzrim ) and Arabic (nasara) for Christian is based on this word.

This all suggests the “Jewish Christians” may have called themselves as a group “Nazarenes,” and that they were the “troublemakers.”

The Lord commanded Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh and preach against the wickedness there. But Jonah instead ran in the opposite direction and boarded a ship. A great storm arose and the ship nearly foundered until Jonah was thrown overboard at his own request.

God’s wrath at Jonah was the cause of the storm in response to his disobedience, as Jonah himself realized. After his three days and nights in the fish, Jonah was again commanded by God to go to Nineveh. This time he did so and saved the city from God’s wrath, telling the populace that if they did not clean up their act the city would be destroyed in 40 days . Led by a king who dons sackcloth and ashes, the people repented. (Jonah 1-3)

The elements that the Jesus narrative apparently adopted from this story are noteworthy. We have a storm at sea, a near shipwreck, and a miraculous salvation. A great fish is the means of salvation. We have a kind of rebirth after a three-day period of concealment symbolic of redemption. Another 40-day period associated with punishment and redemption is invoked.

The same three-day period appears in the life story of Flavius Josephus who, like Jesus, spent three days in a cave. Josephus may have seen himself as a new Jonah, bringing a message of redemption to a wicked generation.

Jesus himself, at Matthew 12:39-40, compares his upcoming resurrection experience to that of Jonah’s “three days” within the fish (cf. Matthew 16:4 and Luke 11:29-32). (Recent finds such as the “Gabriel inscription” may suggest that the three-day sign of Jonah was, in some fashion, already becoming associated with Jewish messianic and redemptive expectations at that time.)

The forged correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul is also very old, indeed, having been cited by both St. Jerome (de Viris Illustribus , 12) and St. Augustine (Epistle , 154.4).

The ancient Romans, like today’s Christians, believed in the existence of an immortal soul, its judgment following a person’s death, and resulting in eternal rewards or punishments.

But this will be a sectarian peace for the Jews: “He will reign on David’s throne/and over his kingdom/establishing and upholding it/with justice and righteousness/from that time on and forever.”

This suggests such millennial peace will come only after the defeat of Israel’s enemies in battle, for the people will “rejoice before you/as people rejoice at the harvest,/as warriors rejoice when dividing the plunder./For as in the day of Midian’s defeat,/you have shattered/the yoke that burdens them,/the bar across their shoulders,/the rod of their oppressor.” Isaiah 9:3-7.

It should be noted that the Medianites were slaughtered by the Hebrews. All the men, boys and women who had “slept with a man” were killed—only the virgins were spared. Numbers 31.

Jesus seems to bypass the part about Israel ’s military victory and he advocates peaceful submission to the “rod” of the “oppressors.” For Jesus to be urging peace at a stage when that “rod” (of the Romans) was still hammering the Hebrews is also a problematic contradiction of this prophecy.

The influence of Jewish religion and morality on Roman society would be dramatically felt, for example, in the area of sexual standards, especially after Christianity gained official status during the reign of Constantine the Great. It may be safely asserted that the monastic tradition among Christians has its roots in the radical Judaism of 2,000 years ago.

According to Suetonius, however, Domitian enjoyed it when the Roman populace shouted out to him and his wife, “Long live our Lord and Lady!” and during Domitian’s reign imperial agents referred to the emperor as “our Lord and God.” (Suetonius, Domitian , 13)

Moreover, Domitian seems to have continued his family’s association with Egyptian gods, since he rebuilt the Temple of Isis and Serapis in the city of Rome. It seems that it was specifically from his family’s Jewish connections that Domitian disassociated himself.

Domitian was particularly harsh in his collection of the new tax levied against all Jews in the wake of the Jewish War, and he may have even collected it against Pauline Christians or those who admitted any sympathy for Jewish ideas, even if they were not practicing adherents themselves. Our sources indicate that this ruler executed members of his own family who converted to some form of comparative atheism (monotheism) and adopted what were vaguely described as “Jewish ways.” The coinage struck by Domitian’s successor, Nerva, actually boasts of an easing of his tax:

It reads: “The calumny of the Jewish tax is removed by consent of the Senate.” This may have involved relieving Jewish apostates and Christians from the tax, and the harsh collection methods about which we also read, but not much more, as the tax seems to have been collected until the 4th Century.

Curiously, it was the non-Christian member from the family of Constantine the Great, Julian the Apostate, who may have finally ended the tax against the Jews. Among the harsh practices of this ongoing tax before that time we read that old men were physically inspected to see if they were circumcised. This would of course have exempted Gentile Christians of the Pauline variety.

While this would appear to be a coin struck by the 2nd Century Emperor Hadrian, careful observers have noted that this emperor never achieved an eighth consulship, as this coin seems to celebrate, there are no known bronze equivalents, and the die appears to be from a known fake.