part0016

I n the New Testament we read exhortations to obey the Roman government as the appointed agents of God, to pay one’s taxes, and even to honor the emperor himself. We also see the earliest Christian leaders laying the foundations for the authority structure of the Church, with an endorsement of Church hierarchy coming even from Jesus long before such developments seem credible. We are presented with benevolent Roman centurions, even as Paul’s mission uniformly receives official protection from Roman governors, clerks and officials—including sympathy from the Praetorian Guard of Caesar himself.

According to Christ, the faith of one centurion exceeded that of any contemporary Jew. Paul refers to his contacts as those in “Caesar’s household” so casually in his correspondence to the Philippians it must have some basis in fact. Indeed, Paul’s contacts reach the highest level of imperial servants and Roman aristocrats, including associates of Vespasian and Titus who had achieved their imperial office by conquering the messianic Jews and becoming Jewish messiahs and Roman man-gods.

This same family of Roman emperors produced a 1st Century “pope.” Most of the New Testament was composed during their reign. Their family tomb became the first Christian catacomb. Their family symbol was Christianity’s first icon: the anchor.

The founder of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian, presented himself as “the New Serapis” and performed healing miracles identical to Christ’s, syncretizing pagan elements of a mystery religion with his own status as the Jewish Messiah. Vespasian advertised himself as the father of universal peace, a new Pax Romana. And he was a monarch born to humble circumstances. Both his ascension to the throne and his death were portended by a star .

Jesus, too, was a Jewish messiah, a divine “monarch” born into humble circumstances, and his birth was heralded by a star.

Both Vespasian and his son, Titus, were worshiped as savior gods in the East while they lived , and they were worshiped as official state gods in the city of Rome itself long after their deaths. The Gospels, no matter who wrote them, would have been ideal prophetic demonstrations of their divinity and messianic status as Roman Jewish Messiahs.

The cult of Emperor Titus praised his beneficence with propaganda extolling his charity and fatherly love for the masses. Within only a few decades of his death, after his brother Domitian was assassinated, his dolphin-and-anchor motif became the predominant symbol of Christianity.

The Gospels systematically, even melodramatically, absolve the Roman Empire of any culpability for the death of Jesus, laying the blame exclusively on the Jewish people with such a heavy hand that it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic retribution.

The Flavians’ own historian, Josephus, favorably portrays New Testament protagonists who are associated with the Flavians. The New Testament expresses inordinate sympathy for Titus’s own Jewish friends. Though he became an object of shame to his own people, Christians to this day enthusiastically cite Josephus as frequently as any Church father.

As Jesus explains in the Gospels, he is himself the replacement of the Temple that Titus would destroy: he was the ultimate sacrifice, the complete Atonement for the sins of the People, and the final reconciliation of man with God.

If Christianity was an organic development from Judaism, the product of an evolutionary process, one would expect that the most culturally alienating aspects of the mother religion, such as male circumcision, strict Sabbath observance and Kosher diet, would have disappeared slowly, one-by-one, over a period of time. We have seen how fiercely the first Christians fought for these traditions against Paul. It was those very aspects of Judaism for which the rebels were fighting, the features of their culture that created problems of intermarriage, inter-employment, and even made having lunch with Gentiles a source of heated conflict. In the work of Paul and the authors of the Gospels, however, we see all of these aspects of Judaism swept aside suddenly, stridently, simultaneously . And we see it all happening among a group of messianic Jews, the group least amenable to any modifications of the Torah. More than that: they were done away with at the same time pagan elements and ideas were introduced, transforming the faith into a kind of Mystery Cult that worshiped a man-god.

And all of this radical revision is done all at once in the work of Paul on the eve of the Jewish War and in the Gospels immediately after that war.

Again, if the New Testament is Flavian propaganda, what would the evidence look like other than what we have? It is remarkable just how much evidence still exists, from such a wide spectrum of sources, to support this revolutionary conclusion.

The first Gospels were written during the Flavian era by authors familiar with Jewish religion and history, just like the people who happened to surround the “Messiah” Titus. This same group included Titus’s second-in-command, Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of the Jewish Platonist philosopher, Philo; also, the historian Flavius Josephus, who produced a history of the Hebrews from the Creation to their war with the Romans and who received the holy Jewish texts from the Temple after it was sacked; also the long-serving imperial Secretary of Letters, Epaphroditus, who assisted Paul and Josephus; also Pliny the Elder, who endorsed the divinity of helping others, praised as divine this quality in the Flavians, and dedicated his own works to Titus; and even the Jewish royals Agrippa II and Bernice (Titus’s one-time fiancée), who appear in the Bible itself.

Some of these figures in the New Testament stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Titus during the Siege of Jerusalem and witnessed the central prophecy of Jesus being fulfilled: the same events recorded by Josephus in terms that match the Gospels’ prophecies down to the last visual detail. And both Jesus’s prophecies and Josephus’s histories were written concurrently, after the events had taken place and during the rule of the Flavians.

The unique combination of means, motive and opportunity, of time, place and people, surrounding the Flavians perfectly coincides with the origins of the New Testament. The oddly organized and widespread administration of early Christianity so unaccountable to scholars implies a top-down governmental hand in its creation. Moreover, that such a widespread effort could have been mounted so publicly in the wake of the Jewish War without Roman sanction is impossible to believe.

The idea that Christians would be so favorable to the Romans, by praising a centurion’s faith so extravagantly in the New Testament or adopting an emperor’s seal as their own at their gravesites, simply in order to avoid persecution contradicts the entire story of Christian martyrdom and their refusal to appease pagans. Occam’s razor hovers over all efforts to explain away these facts, which collectively and effortlessly conform with this theory.

At the crossroads of Western history, the great Jewish War with the Romans was a conflict of two diametrically opposed views of civilization: one that was exclusive vs. one that was universal. Their epic collision created an urgent need for the exclusive side to protect its heritage against invasion from outside pollution (as evidenced even in the last ditch depositing of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and the Romans’ need to defeat the militant exclusivity that opposed their comparatively pluralistic empire.

The Jews’ rebellion from Rome sealed their fate. After their brutal treatment by the Romans, theirs was a culture in Diaspora for another two millennia. The Jewish people had already spread far and wide across the Middle East following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the late 6th Century BCE and, later, in response to the Mediterranean-wide trade opened up by the Pax Romana . The final legal exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem would be ordered by Hadrian in the 2nd Century, following the Bar Kochba revolt, thus making permanent their status as global exiles until the creation of the state of Israel in the 20th Century.

As we have seen from reports of 1st Century disturbances in the city of Rome, messianic Judaism posed a serious problem not just in Judea but throughout the Empire, including at its very heart. The Romans realized that a military opposition to the Jewish conflict would not be enough. They would need an ideological campaign, as well.

With Christianity, the Romans engineered what they must have thought was the perfect strategy—a demonstration that the Jewish “messiah” did not embody the national or cultural independence of the Jews at all, but was, in fact, a pro-Roman, peace-loving, tax-paying, transnational Hellenistic philosopher of the Platonic and Stoic schools who offered a mystery cult-like salvation to all people of all nations.

A s radical and new as this hypothesis may seem, it actually reflects insights as old as New Testament scholarship itself. Though there were previous translations of Josephus's writings, when William Whiston, in the 17th Century, first translated the collected works of Josephus into English he set the standard, until recent decades. Whiston was a famous man. He had succeeded his mentor, Sir Isaac Newton, as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, though he later lost this position because of his theological views. Whiston thought Flavius Josephus to be a secret Christian.

Whiston did not think Josephus was a Trinitarian Christian, however, as were most Christians in Whiston’s day. Instead, he believed Josephus must have been a Christian like himself: that is, one who denied that Jesus was one aspect of a single pre-existent divine Trinity. Rather, he believed that Jesus was merely a divine human being created by and subordinate to God the Father. And he, to be sure, did not question the authenticity of Flavius Josephus’s Testimonium.

Still, Whiston believed that Josephus, the in-house historian of the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, was a Christian .

In addition, Bruno Bauer, a student of the 19th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and a teacher of Karl Marx, also recognized that most of the New Testament embodied a Hellenized and Roman worldview instead of a Jewish one. Bruno Bauer was an anti-Semite, to be sure, revealing the dark side of acknowledging the intrinsic anti-Semitism in the New Testament. 1 Well known in his lifetime but almost completely forgotten today, Bauer had debated one of the fathers of critical Bible studies, David Strauss, who helped shape the entire field of Bible scholarship with his book, Life of Jesus. 2

Strauss’s book has been available in English editions since 1846. As a result, in so many ways, Strauss set the stage for all Biblical scholarship since. However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer wrote that:

[Bruno] Bauer's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found. 3

Bauer’s work on Christianity is no longer in print like Strauss’s, and it has never been translated into English. The famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once called Bauer "my entire reading public." 4

Nietzsche himself, of course, a notoriously harsh critic of Christian morality, derided the doctrine of Jesus as a “slave morality” that appeals to weakness, cowardice, and submissiveness in contrast to the life-affirming virtues of the pagans. 5 Whether the consistent Christian advice of submission to authority is a virtue or not on a philosophical level, Nietzsche’s insight can now be seen in a new light. And by this same light, even critics of Marxism can re-evaluate the assertion of Bauer’s other student, Karl Marx, who famously called religion “the opium of the people.” 6

We must imagine the historical reality that after winning their war with the Jews, a conflict that may have taken more than a million lives, the Romans found themselves the owners of tens of thousands of Jewish slaves. Many if not most of these slaves were messianic Jews. Titus alone took many thousands of his own Jewish slaves to Rome to build his triumphal arch, his famous baths, and the Colosseum itself, where so many of their countrymen would later be sacrificed for entertainment.

The Romans needed to opiate these former radicals and recondition them to life as Roman slaves in the wake of their defeat. And the New Testament was precise in this regard. This new form of Judaism repeatedly commands slaves to obey their masters—even cruel and harsh masters—just as it commands free men to obey the Roman state as God’s agent on earth.

So effective was this Roman formula it outlasted their empire, and it would supply kings with a divine right of absolute rule over their subjects for the next 16 centuries as well as conferring masters with a “right” to own their slaves. Europeans are not only still driving on roads Romans built, they are still worshipping a god Romans created in order to legitimize the rule of monarchs they are still honoring.

Romans were ruthless and pragmatic conquerors. They dealt with the Jews as they had dealt with other conquered foreigners—by absorbing elements of their culture and adapting it to their own practical purposes in service of the Empire. It was their instinct and custom to syncretize the religious source of conflict into a cultural justification for both their military incursion and their imperial rule. The Romans did it before with the Greeks—even as Alexander the Great’s generals had done it before them with conquered Egyptian and Persian nations.

It would be far more surprising had the Romans not attempted to do this in the aftermath of the Jewish War, especially considering how instrumental religion was in that particular conflict. If not for the existence of Christianity, we would need to ask where was the typical Roman response to cultural conflict during the Jewish War?

As its first symbols reveal, Christianity was already syncretizing with the ancient pagan world. The pagan iconography chosen by the Emperor Titus is reflected in Christian symbolism all the way to the Emperor Constantine more than two centuries later, when the prominent symbol of Christianity finally changed. Signaled by Constantine’s famous revelation in the sky over a desperate battle that led the way to his victory, the symbol for Christianity from that point forward would shift… to the Cross.

Flavian connections to Christianity became more and more awkward as time passed. By the 4th Century it became necessary to replace the old Flavian symbols entirely.

Dolphins would still adorn Christian sites for some time to come, including panels at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Among Constantine’s favorite gifts to churches were silver and gold ornaments in the shape of dolphins. But the dolphin-and-anchor motif coined by Titus was finally retired as Christianity was officially rebranded under the sign of the Cross.

None of the Flavian temples remain. Like most pagan temples, they have been ground to rubble and lost to history. And yet, though documents and monuments can be tampered with and destroyed, coins, minted in the millions by the Roman propaganda machine, have survived the last 19 centuries. The last links to that past, scattered and buried under layers of time, still bear witness to the truth.

Yet most of the evidence has been there all along. By merely taking at face value the New Testament, Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Dio Cassius and all the rest we have considered, we were able to predict what kind of symbol we would find on the other side of Titus’s coin and, conversely, whose face was behind the symbol of Jesus Christ.

The witnesses from this time speak a deafening truth in unison with no need for tortured interpretations or speculative somersaults. They tell us what Christianity was when it was invented through the events, politics, people and relationships they reveal.

There may have lived a man named Jesus, but there remains today no historical evidence that he did. And there need not have existed such a man in order to explain everything that has been passed down to us about him. There is no part of him that is not prophesied by others or prophetic of others, and no aspect of him that is not symbolic, political, syncretized or borrowed from other men or gods.

There is no doubt that the Romans had a motivation to create such a convenient “man-god” who would be scorned and mocked as a “King of the Jews” while predicting a glorious return when the Jews would be vanquished and their Temple destroyed, just as Titus would in fact do. Attempting to adapt and conform the hostile Jewish religion to Roman culture would have been their standard practice.

Thirty years ago, while researching the origins of Christianity, the possibility of a Roman provenance for the New Testament leaped out at us when we noticed that Jesus’s apocalyptic vision nearly quoted Josephus’s historical account of that prophecy’s fulfillment 40 years later. When we discovered that the Gospels and Josephus’s accounts were written during the same period of time, the possibilities became all the more compelling.

When this glaring coincidence was combined with the political implications of the Gospels’ ideology, the evidence quickly implied a revolutionary hypothesis about Christianity’s origin. Yet it took three decades of painstaking research to confirm it—in ways that were ever more predictable and increasingly astonishing.

As traditional assumptions about Christian origins were challenged by impossible contradictions and coincidences at every turn, we never found any solid evidence to contradict the emerging theory we were testing. Pieces of the mosaic continued to fall into place as an entirely new picture was filled in.

If we were right, we assumed from the very beginning that at some point we would find a Flavian coin that would confirm our suspicions and complete that picture. We did not discover that final evidence until the very end of that long and thorough examination of the evidence, when the Internet finally made the scattered catalog of Roman coinage globally accessible for the first time since the 1st Century itself. And then the last piece fell into place.

During the course of our research, the works of Robert Eisenman, Francesco Carotta, Joseph Atwill, Rose Mary Sheldon and Thijs Voskuilen appeared, providing us with new details in support of the theory we were pursuing, and the reader will find in their books evidence and arguments on specialized aspects that offer further support to this revolutionary view of Christian origins.

This is the only theory that uniquely explains all of the evidence and solves all of the paradoxes that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What we have explored here hardly exhausts the evidence that is sure to confirm and illuminate it further. Much evidence no doubt already occupies a drawer or a shelf in a museum archive, unrecognized for what it is. And much more surely awaits discovery by archeologists.

The historical period that many think of today as an era in which miracles and mystical events frequently occurred was actually no different from today. Culture, politics, and even science took a religious form in that era, when gods like Serapis were nakedly created by rulers such as Ptolemy and worshiped for centuries. Ironically, it is we in the modern era who mystify such accounts that have become so distant from us we bestow on them a patina of supernatural authenticity. Likewise, the Flavians counted on the masses in their day to do the same when creating the biography of a Christ who had existed 40 years before their victory and who perfectly and prophetically justified their conquest of Judea.

Rather than adding any validation to other religions, this revelation should serve as a powerful admonishment that all ancient religions were a product of similar human creativity at a time when religious invention was readily employed and widely accepted as a tool of statecraft and conquest, as we have seen.

Certainly, while everything else in our knowledge has evolved—our science, our art, our technology, our forms of government—it is only the supernatural grip of these ancient philosophical artifacts that have kept the most lofty principles guiding our lives from also evolving, freezing them in place from an era of war and tyranny. In the West, science, art, and technological innovation have been liberated from the fetters of the past. Yet, in an age when we have created nuclear weapons, in the realm of philosophy we find ourselves still adhering to primitive agendas hatched during a distant, largely forgotten political war between what were, in fact, two forms of dictatorship.

One thing we can learn from this discovery is that our spiritual insights must be allowed to evolve along with the rest of our knowledge, unhindered by ancient expediencies inherited from long bygone times. If not, in the very pursuit of heaven or paradise, we may well bring about our apocalypse.

Demystifying Christianity will be seen by some as disarming Western Civilization in the face of a new barbaric assault like that faced by the Romans 2000 years ago. Instead, we believe this revelation will illuminate both sides and help prevent history from repeating itself. On one side of this ancient conflict was a religion of “peace” that bestowed divine authority upon a brutal dictator and upon centuries of kings to come, in the name of order. And on the other side was a religious fanaticism wreaking self-destructive violence to destroy that authority and achieve an even more monolithic domination over the human race.

Philosophy provides powerful answers to mankind’s deepest needs by providing a context for all of our knowledge and the nourishment of moral values, inspiration, and purpose. As purveyors of this vital need, religions have endured for millennia by adapting over time to accommodate different eras and cultures. Christianity has proven able to do so, resulting in sects as varied as Shakers and Mormons.

Christianity is interwoven into the very fabric of Western history. From the evolution of literature encompassing Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost , to the ethical arguments over slavery in antebellum America (on both sides of the argument) and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th Century, the influence of Christianity on Western Civilization is profound.

However, denying that Venus was actually born of the sea-foam does not diminish the beauty of Botticelli’s art. Disbelieving the gods of ancient Egypt does not demolish the power of the monumental architecture they inspired. To bathe in the glow of the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, to be transported by the immortal beauty of Schubert’s Ave Maria , or to be rendered speechless at the sight of Michelangelo’s Pieta will always be deeply moving experiences for the sensitive human being—just as the majesty of Luxor and Abu Simbel or the dramatic skills of Homer have not been injured by the passing of religions into myth. Indeed, as we have seen, though Christianity eradicated and replaced paganism, it carried forward a veritable ark of its cardinal virtues (and vices) into the modern world.

Whether there was a Jesus or not is still a question we cannot answer. The reality of the experience of Christianity for millions of people over thousands of years, on the other hand, is certain.

What is also certain is that other faiths now long gone were just as devoutly followed by billions who lived and died believing them—even as many of the moral teachings behind their religious trappings continue to endure and enrich us.