Transcript

There are weird conspiracy theories and then there are bonker crazy ones.

Today we're gonna refute one such conspiracy about Jesus that even fringe atheist scholars think is insane.

But documentaries supporting this theory get over a million views on YouTube, so it counts as extremely popular, low-hanging fruit to rebut; namely, the claim that Jesus Christ never existed because he was invented by the Roman Empire.

The main book peddling this theory is Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus.

According to Atwill, Christianity was invented by Emperor Titus sometime after the Jewish revolt that took place between AD 66 and 73.

Jesus was invented in order to promote a pro-Roman, peaceful, Jewish messiah who would suppress further revolts against Rome.

In order to accomplish this goal, the Romans had Flavius Josephus, a former Jewish freedom fighter who defected and became an advisor to Titus, create what we now know as the New Testament.

There's a lot wrong with this argument, so let's go through the key parts of the documentary that try to support it.

It's during this period that a new literature enters history which describes a peace-loving, turn-the-other-cheek preaching Jewish messiah named Jesus Christ.

But if the Flavians wrote the Gospels, how could a Roman family know how to write Jewish literature that refers to Jewish prophecy?

The answer lies in the Flavians' collaborations with a number of Jewish intellectuals, beginning with their own court historian, Josephus.

No, Josephus did not write the Gospels.

You can tell they're written by different authors.

Mark is not Luke, is not John, is not Matthew, et cetera, and Mark wrote before the temple was even destroyed.

But even if, per impossible, Josephus did write the gospels, that still doesn't explain the Jesus story, because the documentary never mentions the writings of Saint Paul.

Paul says that he saw the risen Lord and he knew Peter, the other apostles, and James, one of the Lord's relatives.

If Jesus Christ never existed, then who were these people?

Even Jesus mythicists, like Richard Carrier, agree Paul existed, and other skeptics agree with the historical consensus about Saint Paul.

In almost 2,000 years of intense scholarly scrutiny, seven of these 13 letters have withstood and emerged virtually unanimously as all being by the same author, whom historians pragmatically identify as the Apostle Paul.

These so-called undisputed letters are Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon.

So while scholars disagree about some of Saint Paul's letters, they agree the major letters were written by him and that he knew the apostles.

The documentary simply ignores this massive problem with their thesis that Jesus was invented by the Roman Empire.

So the Roman plot to invent Christianity is just so clever when you think about it.

Through the pope, who was God's representative on Earth, they no longer needed expensive standing armies, wars and punishment of disobedient peasants.

They could, through religion, rule their subjects.

Okay.

So, the Romans create Christianity in the first century so they can better rule their subjects.

But if that's true, why did they kill people for belonging to the religion that they wanted them to belong to, like the persecutions that took place under Emperor Nero?

In Emperor Trajan's letter to the Roman governor Pliny the Younger, written around the year 112, he doesn't say anything about this plot or that Christianity was something the Roman Empire invented.

Instead, he writes the following.

These people are not to be sought for, but if they be accused and convicted, they are to be punished, but with this caution: that he who denies himself to be a Christian and makes it plain that he is not so by supplicating to our gods, although he had been so formerly, may be allowed pardon upon his repentance.

So the only reason Christian literature existed during this time period was because the Roman government allowed it to exist as part of a grand conspiracy.

This reminds me of the South Park episode which said that the ultimate 9/11 conspiracy theory was that the government created all the 9/11 conspiracy theories in order to make people think the government was in control of everything.

However, as Dirk Roman notes in his article, Book Burning As Conflict Management In The Roman Empire, book burning in the early imperial period was rare, generally despised, and inefficient.

The New Testament doesn't take an overtly anti-Roman position, and this isn't due to it being created by Rome.

Jesus and his followers simply worked within Roman rule to change society from within.

But the bigger mistake, which many conspiracy theories make about Christianity, is the assumption that Christianity only came into existence through people reading the Bible.

As I noted in a previous episode on a neglected argument for sola scriptura, the primary way people learned about Christianity in the early Church was through preaching, oral tradition, and obedience to the priests and bishops of their local church.

During this period, the New Testament documents were authoritative, but they had not reached the level of esteem given to the Old Testament's scriptures, which is why the earliest apostolic fathers usually did not cite them as scripture.

Instead, you have people like Ignatius of Antioch and Clement of Rome commanding Christians to follow their bishops and elders.

So in order for Christianity to be a Roman invention, the Roman government would had to have enlisted untold numbers of people to pretend to be Christians and start this myth and then be willing to die for it in the coming persecutions.

I call that unlikely, to say the least.

Further, there had never been any archaeological evidence of Jesus Christ that had ever been discovered.

So what?There isn't archaeological evidence for 99.9% of people who have ever lived, and yet they lived.

The lack of archaeological evidence is concerning if we're talking about something like the supposed existence of huge civilizations in the New World as described in the Book of Mormon, but this is typical for single individuals who are not famous rulers.

There wasn't even archaeological evidence for Pontius Pilate until the Pilate Stone, which bears his name, was discovered in Caesarea Maritima in 1961.

Next, the document claims Jesus was simply copied from earlier Jewish and pagan themes.

A lot of the ethics of Christianity actually were around before Christianity.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you is in fact from the Old Testament.

It's- uh, Jesus didn't make that up.

That's true.

Leviticus 19:18 says, You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

I am the Lord.

But Jesus' teaching fulfilled the Old Testament law by expanding the definition of neighbor to include every single human being, because God loves and wants to save every single human being.

This is why the parable of the good Samaritan was such a powerful teaching.

The neighbor was the man who loved his neighbor.

The sublime beauty of this story smashes the idea some Roman propagandist wrote the gospels and it fits nicely within the idea that this is simply divine wisdom incarnate.

Also, I want to point out a double standard in hyper-critical scholarship.

If Jesus says something in the gospels that sounds Jewish, it must have been taken from the Old Testament.

But if Jesus says something that sounds Christian, then the early church must have put those words in Jesus's mouth.

And if it doesn't sound like the Old Testament or the early church, then he must be a pagan rip-off.

This is yet another example of heads I win, tails you lose.

If you look at the, the elements which we found in the pagan mystery school myths, you find the story of a dying and resurrecting son of God, who's born of a virgin, has 12 disciples, turns water into wine at a wedding, uh, he brings a new religion of love, uh, is, uh, accused of heresy or of, of provocation by the authorities, is put to death, sometimes by crucifixion.

And then if you want to commune with the god-man, you take bread and wine, and then you can come to eternal life.

So this is basically the zeitgeist argument, that the story of Jesus was stolen from paganism.

I've already debunked that in a previous episode on Zeitgeist, which shows that many of these parallels are either trivial or the pagan god didn't actually do what Jesus did, or it was the pagans who stole elements of Christianity centuries later.

So check out that episode if you want to get the full rebuttal.

I will say that I'm really amused Timothy Freke is in this documentary because he co-wrote an awful book on the subject called The Jesus Mysteries, which features an amulet on the cover called the Orpheus amulet that he and his co-author claim is an image from late antiquity of a pagan deity being crucified just like Jesus.

The men write, As the final pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, we came across a small picture tucked away in the appendices of an old academic book.

It was a drawing of a third century CE amulet.

We have used it as the cover of this book.

It shows a crucified figure which most people would immediately recognize as Jesus, yet the Greek words name the figure Orpheus Bacchus, one of the pseudonyms of Osiris/Dionysus.

The chance discovery of this amulet made us feel as though the universe itself was encouraging us to make our findings public.

However, James Hannam, author of God's Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science, went to the original source material of the old book these authors cite, and it provides evidence that the amulet is a fake.

You can also see this because the figure has bent legs, popular in medieval depictions of crucifixion, not straight legs that were popular in ancient depictions.

Richard Carrier, who remember doesn't even believe Jesus existed, even says The Jesus Mysteries, quote, will disease your mind with rampant, unsourced falsehoods and completely miseducate you about the ancient world and ancient religion.

The final connecting point between the Flavian family and Christianity is that in the fourth century, Flavius Constantine made Christianity the state religion of Rome.

When you hear a supposed academic or expert on Christianity say that Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, that's a sign they are anything but an expert on the faith.

That's because Constantine only granted toleration to Christianity in the Western Roman Empire through the Edict of Milan in 313.

Christianity did not become the religion of the empire until Emperor Theodosius' Edict of Thessalonica in the year 380.

Next, Atwill claims that one of the early popes, Clement of Rome, actually belonged to the Roman Flavian family.

The Flavian family is connected to early Christianity in a number of unusual ways.

So many members of the family were recorded as having been among the first Roman Catholic saints, and these include Flavia Domitilla, who was either Titus' sister or his niece.

And there is an inscription honoring Flavia for donating the land that became the first Christian catacomb.

And Flavia Domitilla was the first Christian saint.Her son, Clement, is recorded as having been the first Roman Catholic pope after the Apostle Simon.

There were some converts to Christianity among Roman elite, but that does not prove the Roman elite invented Christianity.

But the more egregious error is that Clement of Rome is not the son of Flavia Domitilla.

Little is known about his life except that he was the fourth pope, not Peter's immediate successor, who was called Peter, not Simon at this time.

Later legends give his parents the names Faustinianus and Macedena.

The Catholic Encyclopedia gives an explanation that probably explains Atwill's slipup in confusing two Clemens.

In the middle of the 19th century, it was the custom to identify the pope, Clement of Rome, with the Consul of 95, T. Flavius Clemens, who I'll add was Domitilla's husband, not her son, who was martyred by his first cousin, the Emperor Domitian at the end of his consulship.

But the ancients never suggest this, and the pope is said to have lived on till the reign of Trajan.

It is unlikely that he was a member of the imperial family.

The continual use of the Old Testament in his epistle, 1 Clement, has suggested to Lightfoot, Funk, Nestle, and others that he was of Jewish origin.

Finally, we get to the part of the documentary that claims to reveal the secret codes Josephus left in the gospels to prove he wrote it, and that the stories are actually allegories about Roman control of the empire.

According to Atwill's book, quote, What seems to have eluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus' ministry are more or less the same as the sequence of events and locations of the military campaign of Emperor Titus Flavius, as described by Josephus.

This is clear evidence of a deliberately constructed pattern.

So how do modern scholars miss all this?

Atwill writes the following.

Many of the parallels are conceptual or poetic, so they aren't all immediately obvious.

After all, the authors did not want the average believer to see what they were doing, but they did want the alert reader to see it.

An educated Roman in the ruling class would probably have recognized the literary game being played.

The Roman Caesars left us a kind of puzzle literature that was meant to be solved by future generations, and the solution to that puzzle is we invented Jesus Christ and we are proud of it.

Atwill offers many alleged parallels or secret codes, but here is a typical absolutely absurd one.

Jesus comes to the Sea of Galilee at the beginning of his ministry.

He gathers his disciples to him and he says, Do not be afraid.

Follow me and become fishers of men.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus actually says, Catchers of men.

Titus comes to the same location, to the Sea of Galilee.

He gathers his troops, his disciples together, and he says, Don't be afraid.

And then he leads them.

They follow him, and they attack a group of, of Jewish rebels.

They sink the Jews' boats.

The Jews attempt to swim to safety, and the Romans use their spears to catch them.

They become fishers of men.

You heard him right.

Atwill says that when Jesus calls the disciples to be fishers of men, this is a secret code written by the Roman authors of the gospels related to a scene in Josephus's History of the Jewish War Against Rome, which took place shortly before the destruction of the temple between AD 66 and AD 70.

Specifically, it's a scene describing how Emperor Titus's troops would kill Jews who would escape them in the Sea of Galilee by cutting off their hands or their heads and shooting them with darts or arrows.

Atwill says Jesus' call to become a fisher of men is a reference to when the Romans caught Jews like fish in the Battle of Lake Tiberias.

Now, this is a case of what the biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel called parallelomania, finding parallels where none actually exist.

It's also an example of the importance of following this age-old proverb: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses before unicorns.

If something sounds like a simple story without a crazy hidden meaning, then it probably is, unless evidence suggests otherwise, and really good evidence, I would say.

And even the scholars who believe Jesus never existed, even they think that Atwill's argument is terrible.

Robert Price, one of the only scholars in the world with a doctorate in New Testament studies who also denies Jesus existed, is sympathetic to Atwill but writes, One hates to be so severe in the analysis of the work of an innovative thinker who gives us the gift of a fresh reading of familiar text, but in the present case, it is hard to euphemize.

The reading given here is just ludicrous.

Ludicrous indeed, because if Atwill's thesis is right, then not only did Jesus never exist, neither did Peter, James, or Paul.

In fact, there would have been no Christians at all before the destruction of the temple in AD 70.

But we know this is not true, because the Roman historian Tacitus records in his Annals that Emperor Nero blamed the great fire in Rome, which took place three years before the Jewish revolt, on a group called Christians.

Even if Tacitus were in on the act, how could the Romans have fabricated the existence of churches, such as those in Corinth or Thessalonica, that were supposed to have existed, according to the Book of Acts, for decades before the Jewish revolt?

Wouldn't the first Jews who joined the Christian church realize something was not quite right about a movement that literally sprang up overnight that was supposed to have been around for decades?

Finally, the author of 1 Corinthians admits that the cross, a dying Messiah, represented a stumbling block for the Jews.

Now, Paul, the real author of 1 Corinthians, just had to accept that fact and preach it, because Jesus' crucifixion really did happen.

However, if the entire story was made up in order to appeal to Jews to get them to believe in Jesus, then why create a fake Messiah whose death would be so unique and unexpected it would be rejected by the Jewish elite, and instead be primarily embraced by the gentiles who weren't even a part of the conspiracy to begin with?

Why create lots of other contradictory apocryphal gospels, like the Gospel of Thomas, that compete with your fake religion that you hope the future church will not deem to be canonical?

None of it makes sense, which is why Richard Carrier writes, I gave him a fair shot, but Atwill never has any defensible examples, rarely knows what he is talking about, gets a lot wrong, makes stuff up, never admits an error, and is generally, in my experience, a frustrating, delusional fanatic.

So when even fringe scholarship rejects your view, to whom can you go?

By the way, if you wanna learn more about how to defend Jesus against similar conspiracies, as well as more substantive objections, check out my book, Counterfeit Christs: Finding the Real Jesus Among the Imposters, linked in the description below.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.