Caesar's Messiah by Joseph Atwill

1850 Words4 Pages

CAESAR'S MESSIAH ; A SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

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

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

Titus Flavius Vespasianus 39-81

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

To replace the Torah, then, the Romans created a literary equivalent, the gospel of Matthew (and shortly thereafter the Hellenistic and Roman versions known as Luke and Mark). The central literary character, called Jesus

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