PART I: AGAINST MYTHICISM
Besides other authors who dispute the existence of the historical Jesus, I have read the following books by so-called mythicists:
- Earl Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle (1999);
- Robert M. Price, Deconstructing Jesus (2000);
- Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus (2014).
I found those books challenging, and for some time, I held the theory as plausible. However, major objections gradually came to my mind, which I will share here.
In Doherty’s words, “Jesus mythicism”, or the “Christ myth theory”, claims that Paul and the earliest Christians regarded Jesus as “an entirely spiritual figure who operated only in the supernatural/mythical part of the universe,” and knew nothing of the earthly Jesus of the Gospels. Likewise, according to Carrier, “the Jesus we know originated as a mythical character,” and only “later, this myth was mistaken for history (or deliberately repackaged that way).”
The academic consensus is that Jesus was a man who was turned into a divine being after his death by his followers, and, at a later stage, into God himself. The mythicists make the opposite claim that Christ was first worshipped as a divine entity, before being assigned a human biography: he is a god turned into a man.
Interestingly, their claim resembles the Christology crafted by the early Fathers: the Son of Man came down from heaven to be incarnated in the flesh. In other words, by inverting the scholarly consensus, the mythicists end up saying the same thing as Christian theology, on a different level.
Paul’s Christ
In addition to the extreme rarity of non-Christian sources mentioning the man Jesus before the middle of the second century (Tacitus and Flavius Josephus), in which Christian interpolations are suspected, the starting point of the mythicists is the observation that Paul shows very little knowledge and/or interest in the earthly life of Jesus. “Not once does Paul or any other first century epistle writer identify their divine Christ Jesus with the recent historical man known from the Gospels. Nor do they attribute
the ethical teachings they put forward to such a man” (Doherty). That Paul received his faith “not from man,” but “through a revelation” (Galatians 1:12) does not fully explain why, after meeting Jesus’ brother James and Jesus’ first apostle Peter in Jerusalem, he still makes no mention of Jesus’ life and never quotes Jesus’ words. The mythicists do not deny that Paul speaks of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, burial and “resurrection from the dead” (Galatian 2:20; 1Corinthian 15:3-20), but they argue that, in ancient times, gods could be thought to undergo such a process. So according to Doherty, Christ is for Paul a celestial deity who has endured an ordeal of incarnation, death and resurrection, and who communicates to his devotees through dreams, visions and prophecies. What mythicists have more difficulty explaining away is that Paul also calls Jesus a “man”, “descended from David according to the flesh,” and “born from a woman, under the law” (Romans 1:4 and 5:15-19; Galatians 4:4). Paul also mentions James, “the brother of the Lord” (Galatians 1:19), but mythicists interpret “brother” (adelphos) as a codeword for a special category of devotees. Despite these difficulties, let’s concede that, on the sole basis of Paul’s relative silence on Jesus’ life, mythicism is not an absurd hypothesis.It is consistent with the standard chronology. In fact, it rests entirely on it. It is because Paul’s letters predate the earliest Gospels that it is possible to claim that Paul’s perception of Christ as a divine being preceded the invention of the human Jesus in the Gospels. Since Paul wrote between 58 and 63, less than thirty years after Jesus’s alleged death, it is hard to explain, the mythicists argue, how a human Jesus could have been transformed into a divine Christ in such a short time, during the lifetime of those who knew him in the flesh.
If it could be proven that Paul’s letters were in fact written after the Gospels, then the mythicist theory would collapse entirely. And so it is worth mentioning that the opinion that Paul’s letters, as we have them, date from the second century is not uncommon. The strongest argument is that no quotation of Paul is found anywhere before the beginning of the second century. Some scholars think that Paul’s letters were not only collected by Marcion in the second century, as generally accepted, but actually written in the second century.
But let’s assume that the mythicists get the chronology right. What needs to be explained, then, is, first, why Paul shows so little interest in the human Jesus, and second, how a human Jesus could be divinized so quickly after his death. As we will see, the second point is easy to explain, as the examples abound of the same process: it is called heroization. In the Hellenistic world, heroization, turning a dead man into an immortal demi-god, can be almost instantaneous.
The Gospel tradition: from man to Son of God
According to Lewis Farnell’s definition: “The hero in the Greek religious sense is a person whose virtue, influence, or personality was so powerful in his lifetime or through the peculiar circumstances of his death that his spirit after death is regarded as of supernatural power, claiming to be reverenced and propitiated.”[1] Heroization implies mythization, and most typically the introduction of two standard mythemes into the hero’s developing legend: first, the special immortality ascribed to the dead hero is turned into the claim that he escaped death, becoming immortal like the gods (let’s call this the Immortality mytheme); second, his quasi-divine nature is projected back to his birth, by the claim that he was fathered by a god, being therefore a son of god (let’s call it the Nativity mytheme).
This process has been evidenced in the case of Jesus, by what used to be called “form criticism” and “source criticism”, the scientific study of the redactional history of the Gospels, from the oral tradition to the final canon. Let’s first see how Jesus became the Son of God.
In the opening words of his Epistle to the Romans, Paul writes that, according to the evangelion (“good news”) that he received, Jesus “was designated Son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). Scholars are of the opinion that Paul is not making up this creed, but repeating a formula known to him and the community he is addressing. The same idea appears in a speech attributed to Paul in Acts 13:32-33.
In the earliest Gospel, the Gospel according to Mark, Jesus is made son “son of God” by “adoption”, when during his baptism by John-the-Baptist, the Holy Spirit descends on him and a voice from heaven declares: “You are my beloved son” (Mark 1:11). The episode of the Transfiguration, when the same voice said to the apostles, of the “transfigured,” “brilliantly white” Jesus, “This is my beloved son” (Mark 9:7), is probably a Resurrection episode that has been displaced by a secondary editor, and therefore reflects the earlier stage.
Mark knows nothing of any alleged supernatural conception of Jesus. It was only the Nativity stories of Matthew and Luke, written after Mark, that made Jesus a “son of God” by “conception”, when the Holy Spirit descends on the virgin Mary. While until now being a son of God had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with spirit, Jesus is now the Son of God because he is not the son of Joseph.
Later still, in the fourth Gospel (John), Jesus was Son of God (and Logos) before being “sent into the world” (3:17). He did not become the Son of God when Mary conceived him, but had been the Son of God from all eternity. The Nicene creed will set in dogma the notion that Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, is as old as God himself, and created all things.
We can sum up this process of mythization in four stages:
- Jesus became the Son of God by his resurrection, that is, by his posthumous appearances (Romans 1:4);
- Jesus became the Son of God by his baptism (Mark 1:9-11);
- Jesus is the Son of God by his conception (Matthew and Luke’s Nativities);
- Jesus was the Son/Logos of God before the creation of the world (John), “consubstantial” to God (Nicaea)
In this sequence, we have the clearest evidence of a mythization process by which Jesus was transformed from a man into a god by stages. We have also found the best explanation for Paul’s lack of interest for the earthly Jesus: Christians today believe that Jesus was the Son of God from the moment of his conception, or from eternity. But Paul and the first Christians communities with whom he was in contact did not share that view: they considered that the Son of God appeared only after Jesus’ death, by a special grace of God who raised Jesus from the dead (in spirit, not in body). They worshipped the risen Jesus, not the earthly Jesus. Christianity, for them, started with the Resurrection, not with the Nativity. So they were not even that interested by Jesus’ words (and in fact, there are doubts whether Q is originally a collection of Jesus’ words: some logia at least appear to have been attributed to John the Baptist before being reattributing to Jesus).
Finally, we also gain a clue about the reason why James, who apparently thought his brother was crazy during his Galilean ministry (Mark 3:21), became a leading figure of the Jerusalem church after receiving a vision of the risen Jesus (1Cor 15:7). Like Paul, James had a relationship with the risen Jesus, no matter what his relationship to the walking Jesus had been like.
The Passion narrative as a ghost story
After the Nativity mytheme, let’s turn to the Immortality mytheme.
The Greek word translated as “resurrection” is anastasis, meaning “rising up” or “getting up from sleep”. It does not imply necessarily the resuscitation of a corpse. Paul’s experience and understanding of the “resurrected” or “risen” Jesus is of Jesus “appearing”; the verb Paul uses for “appear” in 1Cor 15:3-8 is ôphthê, meaning “to be seen”, clearing referring to a “vision”:
The tradition I handed on to you in the first place, a tradition which I had myself received, was that Christ died for our sins, in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried; and that on the third day, he was raised to life, in accordance with the scriptures; and that he appeared to Cephas; and later to the Twelve; and next he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still with us, though some have fallen asleep; then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles. Last of all he appeared to me too…
Paul’s letters never mention an empty tomb, and never imply that Jesus was “raised up” physically. The same goes for the original version of Mark (called Ur-Markus or Proto-Mark), as it can be hypothetically reconstructed by peeling off the later editorial layers. In Mark 16:9–14, Jesus simply “appeared” after his death and burial to Mary Magdalene—romantically enough. She goes to tell Jesus’s companions, but they don’t believe her.
After this, he showed himself under another form to two of them as they were on their way into the country. These went back and told the others, who did not believe them either. Lastly, he showed himself to the eleven themselves while they were at table. He reproached them for their incredulity and obstinacy, because they had refused to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.
The motif of the empty tomb appears in the preceding verses, 16:1-8, but, in the form we have it, this passage was written after the composition of Matthew, as an attempt to harmonize Mark with Matthew (a few other passages fall into this category). And even in the corresponding verses in Matthew 28:1-10, we can find probable traces of some editorial work: near Jesus’ tomb, first Mary Magdalene and one other woman see the “angel of the Lord”, with “his face like lightning, his robe white as snow”, who gives them a message for the disciples, and just as they are leaving, they see Jesus, who gives them the exact same message for the same disciples. An editor seems to have duplicated the supernatural being, probably to blur the idea that the risen Jesus was an “angel” (angelos). One strong indication that the “angel of the Lord” meant the spirit of Jesus in the original redaction is that it fits exactly Jesus’ own understanding of resurrection (anastasis) according to Mark 12:18-27: “For when they rise from the dead, […] they are like the angels in heaven”—which, by the way, means that the Christian dogma of physical resurrection is in contradiction to Jesus’ teaching.
The tendency to transform the angelic or ghostly appearances of Christ into a physical resuscitation of his corpse was further strengthened by Luke, in which the resurrected Christ himself undertakes to combat what is now heresy: “Touch me and see for yourselves; a ghost has no flesh and bones as you can see I have” (Luke 24:39).
The takeaway is that, if we follow the evolution of Jesus’ “resurrection” from the letters of Paul to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, through Ur-Markus, we see a clear evolution from the vision of a spirit to the resuscitation of a corpse—from a ghost story to a walking dead story, if you like.
That the disciples of a charismatic preacher would see visions of their beloved master after he was brutally executed, and that these visions would have some kind of contagious effect and be claimed by hundreds, even that five hundred people saw the risen Jesus “at the same time” (1Corinthians 15:6), are all in the realm of the possible, no matter how you want to explain it (William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience can help). I take these visions, perhaps accompanied by ecstatic transes (Acts 2), as the most likely starting point of the Christian movement. On this point, I agree with the Christian narrative.
The Jesus-Romulus parallel
In On the Historicity of Jesus, mythycist Richard Carrier dwells at some length on the similarities between Jesus and Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, who was murdered by a conspiracy of the Senate, and then, after his body vanished, turned into the eponymous god of Rome. Carrier writes:
In Plutarch’s biography of Romulus, the founder of Rome, we are told he was the son of god, born of a lowly shepherd; then as a man he becomes beloved by the people, hailed as king, and killed by the conniving elite; then he rises from the dead, appears to a friend to tell the good news to his people, and ascends to heaven to rule from on high. Just like Jesus. […] Plutarch also tells us about annual public ceremonies that were still being performed, which celebrated the day Romulus ascended to heaven.
From Titus Livy’s History (1.16), Carrier draws more parallel motifs to the Gospels, such as the supernatural vanishing of Romulus’s body.
Livy’s account, just like Mark’s, emphasizes that “fear and bereavement” kept the people “silent for a long time”, and only later did they proclaim Romulus “God, Son of God, King, and Father”, thus matching Mark’s “they said nothing to anyone”, yet obviously assuming that somehow word got out.[2]
Carrier concludes: “It certainly seems as if Mark is fashioning Jesus into the new Romulus, with a new, superior message, establishing a new, superior kingdom.” If true, does that prove that Jesus’s life is a complete fabrication, as Carrier claims? No. First, the parallels apply only to the final part of the Gospels, the Passion narrative. Second, as Bart D. Ehrman explained in his criticism of the mythicists, Did Jesus Exist? (2012): “The fact that stories are molded in certain ways does not necessarily mean that there is no historical information to be found in the stories.” Ehrman takes as example the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, written in the third century CE. Apollonius is presented as a son of God who did many miracles, including raising the dead, and who at the end of his life ascended to heaven and appeared to his followers. This text quite possibly imitated the Gospels. Does that prove that Apollonius is fictitious? No: he was a real Pythagorean philosopher living some fifty years after Jesus. Likewise, I will add, it has been shown that Eginhard borrowed 112 narrative motifs from Suetonius’ Life of Augustus to write his Life of Charlemagne. Louis Halphen, editor of this text, writes that Eginhard wanted to “give us, as much as possible, feature for feature, a replica of the details of the Roman historian,” only improved at Charlemagne’s advantage.[3] Does that prove that Charlemagne didn’t exist? No. Such parallels simply prove that ancient biographers were not writing biographies in the modern sense, but recycled established patterns, and borrowed from a lexicon of preexisting narrative motifs. The stereotypic nature of some motifs of the Gospels is no evidence that Jesus did not exist.
The same objection goes against the theory put forward by Francesco Carotta in Jesus was Caesar: On the Julian Origin of Christianity (it can be read partially online). Carotta highlights the parallels between the Passion narrative of the Gospels and what may be termed the Passion of Cesar, as told in Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and other sources: just like Romulus, Cesar was murdered by a conspiracy of senators and turned into a god by his supporters. Claiming that “the Christian liturgy follows the ritual of Caesar’s funeral,” he speculates that the worship of Cesar simply morphed into the worship of Jesus.
Mythicism and “Comparative Mythology”
But there is a more important objection to Carrier’s use of Romulus: how is a parallel between the Gospels and the legend of Romulus supposed to prove that Jesus was a god turned into a man, when Romulus is clearly portrayed as a man turned into a god? For the parallel to support the mythicist theory, it would be necessary to claim that Romulus was originally a god before being transformed into a man in the first place—and then back into a god. This happens to have been the belief of the French scholar George Dumézil, the last representative of the old-school of “comparative mythology” started in Germany by Max Müller (1823-1900). In works such as From Myth to Fiction, Dumézil claimed, with no evidence, that ancient legends and epics of heroes are “the transposition into the human world of a vast system of mythical representations”; in other words, that legendary men like Romulus are downgraded gods.[4]
Anthropological studies has shown that the opposite process—transforming the great dead into gods—is more prevalent, and the funerary origin of many religious cults (which historians like Fustel de Coulanges had long defended) is emphasized again. So for example, when the medieval Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241) explains that the god Freyr was a king who was deified by the Swedes because the harvests were good for three years following his death (History of the Kings of Norway, I, 10), he was doing serious anthropology of religion based on his investigation of ancient traditions, and not arbitrarily inventing a fictitious human life to a god, as comparative mythologists used to say.
Whether they are aware of it or not, the mythicists who claim that Jesus is a humanized god rather than a deified man, think within a paradigm that is now abandoned, almost unanimously, by anthropologists and historians of religion.
Transforming extraordinary humans into gods posthumously, whether by popular acclaim or by senatorial decree (apotheosis), was common religious practice during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, and it could happen very quickly. It didn’t take decades after his death to turn Antinous into a god, worshipped throughout the Empire as a new Osiris.[5] During the time the Gospels were written, Carla Antonaccio writes, the Hellenistic world was “saturated with heroes.”[6]
That the Gospels belong to the genre of heroic legends was plain enough to the critics of Christianity, and Christian apologists actually had to answer the accusation of plagiarism. Justin Martyr, a second-century Christian intellectual from a pagan family, conceded that, by saying that Jesus “was begotten without any carnal act, that he was crucified, that he died, and that after rising from the dead he ascended to heaven, we admit nothing stranger than the history of those beings whom you call sons of Zeus” (First Apology V). The difference, Justin insists, is that the story of Jesus is true, while those of the pagan demigods are lies invented by demons to “sow in the minds of men the suspicion that the things predicted of Christ were a fable like those related by the poets.” To set Jesus apart from the heroes by placing him in a different league was a major concern of the first apologists.
Conclusion
As soon as we understand heroization, we understand that the deification of Jesus fits perfectly that pattern. Surely, Jesus’ heroic status comes with some distinctively Jewish attributes; he was Israel’s messiah—which meant “king” in that context. But the heroic pattern of his legend is not Jewish; it is Hellenistic and Roman. That Paul, who never met the earthly Jesus, was nevertheless convinced of the divinity of the posthumous Jesus, is certainly remarkable, and there are many theories about his “conversion” (Thijs Voskuilen and Rose Mary Sheldon present an interesting one in Operation Messiah: St. Paul, Roman Intelligence and the Birth of Christianity, 2008), but the mythicist theory has too many objections against it.
The major difficulty is that the Gospels tell the story of a man, not of a god. Jesus’ teaching can be compared to the wisdom of other philosophers or wisemen. One prominent mythicist of the 1970s, George Albert Wells, has changed his mind in the 1990s, and adopted a middle-ground position to make room for Jesus’ human wisdom:
Some elements of the ministry of the gospel Jesus are arguably traceable to the activity of a Galilean preacher of the early first century, who figures in what is known as Q [the hypothetical source of Jesus’ sayings added to Mark’s Gospel to produce Matthew’s and Luke’s] […] In the gospels, the two Jesus figures—the human preacher of Q and the supernatural personage of the early epistles who sojourned briefly on Earth as a man and then, rejected, returned to heaven—have been fused into one.[7]
There are many elements of the Gospels that cannot be accounted for by the Christ myth theory, because they are best explained as genuine memories of a remarkable Galilean man. Bart D. Ehrman mentions some of them in Did Jesus Exist? (2012), such as a few memorable phrases reported directly in Aramaic in Mark (5:41, 7:34, 15:34), or those which betray translation from Aramaic (Mark 2:27-28).
As I hinted earlier, there is also evidence that many aspects of Jesus’ human life told in Mark became an embarrassment when Jesus was later declared divine. Scholars use the “criterion of embarrassment” to try to sort what may be historical in Jesus’ life and words from what may be Christian invention. The rationale is that “a historical account is deemed more likely to be true if the authors would have no reason to invent a historical account which might embarrass them.” The numerous episodes that pass the test can be used against the mythicist theory. Let me give you two examples:
1. Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist, the subject of the first chapter of Mark, is deemed historical because it puts John in a superior position to Jesus and the Gospel writers had to go out of their way to reverse that position. Similar embarrassment is caused by the mention that Jesus’ early disciples came from the movement of John, and that the disciples of John who did not follow Jesus had arguments with those who did (Mark 2:18). I wrote a book in French on these topics, a long time ago, and three articles in English for the Catholic Downside Review.
2. The repeated mention of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the Gospels (Mark 3:31-35 and 6:3) has caused considerable embarrassment to the Church, when the virginity of Mary was declared perpetual. The general cop out has been to say that adelphoi means here “cousins”, but linguists find that unlikely. It is impossible to explain, within the mythicist theory, why the god Jesus would have been given brothers if that created a problem for his divinity.
PART II: AGAINST ATWILL’S THEORY
Here is my critical assessment of the theory presented by Joseph Atwill in his book Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (first edition, 2005), illustrated in a 2012 documentary that totals millions of views, and recently summarized by the author for the Unz Review.
Atwill’s theory is that Jesus and Christianity were invented by the imperial Flavian dynasty (Vespasian, Titus, Domitian), with the help of Jewish friends who crafted the Gospels. Their main purpose was “to promote a more pro-Roman version of the messianic Judaism that constantly rebelled against Rome.” On the face of it, the theory is plausible and fits the historical context. The birth of Christianity is intimately connected to the events leading to and following immediately the Jewish War of 66-74 AD, and these events are the background for the emergence of the Flavian dynasty, which “lasted from 69 to 96 C.E., the period when most scholars believe the Gospels were written” (Atwill, Caesar’s Messiah, p. 10). Vespasian was the first emperor who was not from the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and the first military general to ascend to the throne, through what amounted to a military coup. The Flavians were therefore in need of legitimacy, and for that reason had an interest in religious propaganda. Moreover, the Roman Empire had a major “Jewish problem” that culminated under the Flavians. It was more than just a problem with Jadaea: Seneca, tutor and confidant of Nero, is quoted by saint Augustine as charging that: “the customs of that most accursed nation have gained such strength that they have been now received in all lands, the conquered have given laws to the conqueror” (City of God, VI, 11).
Two centuries from Vespasian to Constantine
The “Flavian hypothesis” raises two major objections. The first problem is with the chronology. Atwill’s theory would begin to make sense if the historical record could document that the Flavians, rather than the Constantinians, were the first promoters of Christianity, or if the two dynasties were not separated by two centuries—roughly eight generations—of imperial hostility to Christianity.
The bottom line is that there is no record of any Roman emperor supporting Christianity before Constantine the Great (the subject of this post of mine). Before Constantine, Roman administration consistently judged Christianity a problem, not a solution—although Christian tales of martyrdom are now deemed widely exaggerated.[8] The Antonine emperors (from 96 to 192 C.E.) intensely disliked Christianity, and Diocletian (284-305) tried to eradicate it.[9] There exist hints of sympathies toward Judaism from members of the imperial court (women, often), but no clear trace of sympathy toward Christianity.
The hostility was reciprocal. Despite the fact that Jesus expressed neutrality toward Rome in the midst of the explosive tensions in the Judaea of his lifetime, Christians’ attitude to the Roman Empire before Constantine cannot be characterized as friendly. In the Book of Revelation (chapters 17 and 18), Rome is cryptically called “Babylon the Great, the mother of all the prostitutes,” and doomed to end up in disease, famine, and fire.
Not all Church fathers, it is true, held such a dim view of the empire. In the first half of the third century, Origen saw the Empire as good for Christianity , since the Pax Romana made it easier for the apostles to “go and teach all nations” (Contra Celsus II.30). But not before Eusebius of Caesarea do we find the idea that Christianity was good for the Empire. In the words of Richard Fletcher, “Eusebius brought the Roman empire within the divine providential scheme for the world. It was an astonishing feat of intellectual acrobatics,” given that pre-Eusebian Christianity was mostly a world-denying, end-of-world-heralding religion.[10] Eusebius, of course, was Constantine’s religious adviser—or so he claimed.
Anyone claiming that some emperors before Constantine created, promoted, or just appreciated Christianity, has to assert that they did so in secret. This is not totally impossible, since, in Peter Heather’s opinion, Constantine himself had been a closet Christian long before he became emperor, having been secretly raised in the faith by his father and mother.[11] Although the Constantinians are not related to the Flavians, a spiritual filiation is not out of question, since members of the Constantinian dynasty, starting with Constantine’s father, consistently bear the nomen Flavius; but that is a very small nail on which to hang the extraordinary claim of some Christian initiation secretly passed on for two centuries among crypto-Christians Romans within imperial families.
A religion for the Jews, of for the Romans?
The second problem with Atwill’s Flavian hypothesis is the contradiction between the claim that Christianity was meant to convert the Jews, and the reality that it ultimately converted the Romans. The Gospels’ storyline, Atwill writes in his recent article, was created mainly to “pacify Jews with a peaceful Messiah”. He insists on that motive in his book: Christianity was meant “to replace the xenophobic Jewish Messianism that waged war against the Roman Empire with a version of Judaism that would be obedient to Rome” (p. 21). The Flavians “created the religion to serve as a theological barrier to prevent messianic Judaism from again erupting against the empire” (p. 387) The imperial family “created the Gospels to initiate a version of Judaism more acceptable to the Empire, a religion that instead of waging war against its enemies would ‘turn the other cheek’” (p. 42). Christianity “was designed to replace the nationalistic and militaristic messianic movement in Judea with a religion that was pacifistic and would accept Roman rule” (p. 19).
If that is the case, then the Flavians enterprise not only ended up in complete failure (few Jews were converted, and Jewish messianism erupted again in the second century), but it actually backfired, since the few Jewish converts ended up converting the Gentiles. Atwill would also need to explain why Christianity, instead of weakening Judaism, banned all Gentiles’ religions except Judaism.
The two problems I have just mentioned are interconnected. What needs to be explained is both the 200 years it took for the Roman-made Christianity to become publicly promoted, and the mystery of how, in that period, it switched from targeting the Jews to targeting the Romans.
What Christian Flavians?
Atwill relies heavily on dubious and inflated circumstantial evidence. For example, he claims that his theory would explain “why so many members of a Roman imperial family, the Flavians, were recorded as being among the first Christians. The Flavians would have been among the first Christians because, having invented the religion, they were, in fact, the first Christians” (p. 33).
The “so many” Christian members of the Flavian imperial family are hypothetical at best. They are Flavia Domitilla, grand-daughter of Vespasian, as well as her cousin and husband Titus Flavius Clemens. But the tradition that they were Christians appears only in the fourth century under the pen of Eusebius of Caesarea. In earlier non-Christian sources, they are said to have been charged of atheism, like many others who “drifted into Jewish ways” (Cassius Dio, Roman History, 67, 14). If we understand “Jewish” to mean “Christian”, there remains the problem that Clemens and Domitilla’s religious inclination was not in the taste of the emperor: Clement was executed, and Domitilla was exiled together with members of her entourage. In other words, if they were Christians, as Atwill assumes, then their story contradicts Atwill’s theory, and it takes a lot of nerves for him to pretend that it supports his theory.
Why another Pro-Roman Judaism?
The theory that the Flavians needed to create a pro-Roman version of Judaism supposes that such a thing didn’t exist. It did. We call it Hellenistic Judaism, and for the period we are discussing, we might just as well call it pro-Roman Judaism.
As far back as biblical history, and up to the present, we see the Jewish people divided between assimilationists and anti-assimilationists. At the end of the Hellenistic period, this tension led to the civil war documented in the Books of the Maccabees. Hellenistic or pro-Roman Judaism was dominant in the Diaspora, which accounted for two thirds of the approximately seven million Jews living within the Roman Empire (about 10 percent of the population). In broad strokes, the major inner tension within the Jewish community was between internationalist Jews and nationalist Jews, the former being well-disposed toward the Empire, while the latter were vehemently hostile to Roman rule. Internationalist Jews practiced proselytism, while nationalist Jewish believed in ethnic purity.
The most famous representative of Hellenistic Judaism is Philo of Alexandria, who died around 45 C.E. Jean Daniélou wrote about him:
The era to which he belongs is undoubtedly that in which Jewish proselytism was at its strongest. The Diaspora appears as the providential means by which Yahweh is announced to all nations. Now, in Philo, this attitude reaches its supreme expression. Judaism appears as the religion of the true God, which all men must adopt and which is detached from its national ties. This cosmopolitanism is very pronounced in Philo. He accepts the Roman Empire. His ambition is precisely to unite the religion of Israel, Greek culture, and the Roman city.[12]
Philo
belongs to the wealthy, pro-Roman family of the Alexanders, who were
related to the Herodian dynasty installed by the Romans as client kings
of Israel. Of those two families, Daniélou wrote, “the former
represented the great international Jewish bank; the latter a Jewish
aristocracy that was equally cosmopolitan.”[13]
The Alexanders supported of the Flavians: Philo’s nephew was the Roman
prefect of Alexandria who, on July 1 of the year 69, proclaimed
Vespasian Caesar. Such pro-Roman Jews did not necessarily reject the
messianic prophetic tradition, but reinterpreted it as referring to the
universal mission of Israel, in a way comparable to the anti-Zionist
position adopted by Reformed Judaism in its 1885 Pittsburgh Conference,
or to the belief of one of its spokesmen, rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, that
“Israel … shall at the end of days become the triumphant Messiah of the
nations.”[14]
The fact that most Reformed Jews ended up supporting Israel after 1967
shows that this structural dialectical opposition within the Jewish
community is a flexible and creative one.
Flavius Josephus’ pro-Roman messianism
Yosef ben Matityahu, better known as Flavius Josephus, embodies this flexibility, since after fighting the Romans, he betrayed the nationalist struggle and reinterpreted messianic prophecies as applying to the Roman emperor. In Book IV of the Jewish Wars, he recounts how, after being captured in Galilee, he was brought to Vespasian (the general sent by Nero to crush the Jewish revolt), and prophesied to him that Nero would soon die and Vespasian rise to imperial power. Vespasian kept Josephus with him and rewarded him when his prophecy came true. Josephus later explained to his Roman readers that the Jews who had revolted against the Romans had misinterpreted “an ambiguous prophecy from their Scripture that ‘one from their country should rule the entire world.’” The prophecy, Josephus now believed, applied in reality to Vespasian, who was “made emperor in Judea” (Jewish Wars VI, 5). Atwill correctly remarks (p. 34):
Josephus, in proclaiming himself God’s minister, also described an ending of God’s “contract” with Judaism that was quite similar to the position that the New Testament takes concerning Christianity—the only difference being that Josephus believed that God’s good fortune had gone over not to Christianity but to Rome and its imperial family, the Flavians.
The similarity is due to the fact that Josephus and early Jewish Christians (including the Gospel writers) adhered to the same broad paradigm of Hellenistic Judaism: they were pro-Roman “internationalist Jews”, who after 70 AD blamed the anti-Roman “nationalist Jews” for the catastrophe. Josephus and saint Paul’s neo-messianic religions are very comparable: each of them is seeking and finding a way to salvage the bedrock of Jewishness—Israel as God’s chosen people—while giving up on Israel as an independent state, and coming to term with the unavoidable conclusion that God must have chosen Rome too. Each in their own way, they wanted to graft Jewish chosenness into the Romans’ self-identity.
But the difference is no less evident. Josephus proclaims Vespasian as the Messiah, while Jewish Christians voted for Jesus. The two theories are incompatible. The first theory was music to the Roman ears, and we find it repeated almost verbatim by both Tacitus and Suetonius in the early second-century:
the majority [of the Jews] firmly believed that their ancient priestly writings contained the prophecy that this was the very time when the East should grow strong and that men starting from Judea should possess the world. This mysterious prophecy had in reality pointed to Vespasian and Titus, but the common people, as is the way of human ambition, interpreted these great destinies in their own favour, and could not be turned to the truth even by adversity. (Tacitus, Histories, V, 13)
There had spread over all the Orient an old and established belief, that it was fated at that time for men coming from Judaea to rule the world. This prediction, referring to the emperor of Rome, as afterwards appeared from the event, the people of Judaea took to themselves; accordingly they revolted… (Suetonius, Life of Vespasian, I, 5)
By contrast, the second theory, that the Messiah was a Jew crucified by Roman authorities under the charge of sedition, was not to the liking of Tacitus, Suetonius, or any other Roman author. Yet Atwill claims that Flavius Josephus, acting as religious propagandist for his Flavian benefactors, promoted simultaneously both theories, one openly in his Jewish Wars, and the other anonymously in the Gospels. Insisting on the similarity of those two theories instead of their incompatibility, he uses Josephus’ authorship of the first theory as an argument that Josephus also invented the second theory. Atwill justifies this by claiming that the two theories are in fact one and the same, since Josephus created the character Jesus as a cryptic reference to Titus, son of Vespasian.
The invisible Flavian signature
Atwill believes that he has found enough parallels between Josephus’ chronicle of Titus’s campaign in Judaea and the Gospel narrative of Jesus’s ministry, to prove that the second was written by Josephus on the pattern of the first. Atwill explains these parallels by claiming that the Gospels’ storyline was not only created to give the Jews a peaceful, crucified Messiah, but to “amuse a group by whom the grim joke would be understood,” in other words, “to be enjoyed by the Flavians and their inner circle” (p. 61). This makes the Gospels not only cryptic, but satirical. “Throughout this work I refer to Jesus’ ministry as a satire of Titus’ military campaign. I do so because the ministry was based on the campaign and was intended to be seen as blackly humorous when viewed from that perspective” (p. 44).
In his documentary (1:07:23), Atwill claims to have found over 40 typological parallels showing that “the ministry of Jesus Christ followed in exact sequence the military campaign of Titus Flavius.” These parallels are what he calls the “Flavian signature” of the Gospels. I will not discuss these parallels, which constitute the bulk of Atwill’s book and are summarized in his video and his article. I do not deny that such parallels exist. That the Gospel writers did draw some parallels between Jesus’s ministry in Jerusalem and the events that Jesus supposedly foresaw in Jerusalem some forty years later, is quite possible, but it is no proof that the Gospel writers were fashioning their fictional Jesus after the historical Titus.
Some of the parallels listed by Atwill are therefore acceptable. Others are non-existent or insignificant, in my opinion. But that is a subjective judgement, and everyone can make his own. What is, however, an objective fact is that no one, according to Atwill, has been able to see them before him. That’s how “hidden” and “entirely cryptic” they are (Atwill’s terms). No one before him had noticed that the Gospels were “identifying Titus as the Son of Man predicted in the Gospels” (which makes Titus the Second Coming of Christ). Only “an alert reader” could see that “the entire ministry of Jesus can be understood as having been based upon the Flavians’ campaign through Judea,” but no such “alert reader” can be documented before Atwill. “The satire they [the Flavian conspirators] created is difficult to see. If it were otherwise, it would not have remained unnoticed for two millennia” (p. 9). “Moreover, the satirical level of the Gospels has not been discovered because it was designed to be difficult to see” (p. 10). “The New Testament is designed as a sort of intelligence test, whose true meaning can be understood only by those possessing sufficient memory, logic, and irreverent humor” (p. 88).
I think that the idea of the Gospel as a satire or a joke on the Jews, and the idea that the joke was understood only by its authors (until Atwill got it), are both ludicrous.
Roman Conspiracy, or Jewish Conspiracy?
Because the core of his theory is that Jesus is a fictional avatar of Titus, Atwill stresses that Christianity is a Roman fabrication, and the title of his book mentions only a Roman conspiracy. But in the details, what he is envisioning is a Judeo-Roman conspiracy, that involves not only the Flavians, but the Alexanders and the Herods, three families that “shared a long-standing and intricate personal relationship that can be traced to the household of Antonia, the mother of the Emperor Claudius” (p. 13).
In a convergence unique in history, the Flavians, Herods, and Alexanders brought together the elements necessary for the creation and implementation of Christianity. … To produce the Gospels required a deep understanding of Judaic literature. The Gospels would not simply replace the literature of the old religion, but would be written in such a way as to demonstrate that Christianity was the fulfillment of the prophecies of Judaism and had therefore grown directly from it.
Atwill provides no evidence whatsoever of the participation of the Alexanders in the writing of the Gospels, other than their familiarity with the Roman imperial families. And I consider as highly unlikely the participation of the Herods in creating a text that displays them in a very unflattering light.
Let us, therefore, focus on the more intriguing case of Josephus. Atwill portrays him as a loyal agent of the Flavians, who on their demand invented a fiction to deceive his people. But all the works of Josephus are clearly written by proud and erudite Jew dedicated to enlighten Greek-speaking Romans about the greatness of his God-chosen nation. In his autobiography, Josephus asserts that he is working for God, and only went to the Romans’ side out of the conviction that Rome was God’s instrument. By claiming that Vespasian was the Messiah, that is, by turning Jewish messianic prophecy on its head, he was not giving up on the superior destiny of the Jews. Like Philo of Alexandria before him, he was still claiming a very special place for his nation in God’s providence.
A mort cynical reading could even suspect him of having given up the Jewish Plan A (Israel ruling directly the nations) only to fall back on a Jewish Plan B, one that relied on using (temporarily) the strength of the Roman Empire rather than opposing it. In other words, by recognizing Vespasian as the Messiah, he might have been thinking that Rome was God’s temporary vehicle given to the Jews for conquer the world. I would call this the PNAC strategy, in reference to today’s crypto-Zionist neocons singing the tune of “the American Century”—or “America First”—while subverting the Empire for the benefit of their nation’s imperial ambition.
In The Secret Society of Moses: The Mosaic Bloodline and a Conspiracy Spanning Three Millennia, 2010, a book that I mentioned in one section of my 2020 UR article, “How Yahweh Conquered Rome”, Flavio Barbiero also claims that Christianity was first fabricated in Rome under the Flavians, and that Flavius Josephus was involved in the writing of the Gospels. But whereas Atwill argues that it was fabricated by Gentiles for the Jews, Barbiero thinks it was fabricated by Jews for the Gentiles, as a kind of Trojan Horse. I find the logic of Barbiero’s theory much more attractive than Atwill’s, although I now doubt that Josephus was involved.
Barbiero’s theory fits the pattern of history: everybody today can see that the tail (Israel) is wagging the dog (the new Empire), not the other way round. The tail has actually hacked the dog’s brain.
I don’t need to explain to UR readers why Atwill’s theory is more widely known than Barberio’s: Atwill talks about a Roman conspiracy to fool the Jews, while Barbiero talks about a Jewish conspiracy to fool the Gentiles.
Conspiracy or not conspiracy, it was by Jews, not by Romans, that Christianity first spread like wildfire to all the big cities of the Roman Empire from Antioch to Rome. How did it happen? Acts 2:4-11 gives us a clue when we read that, by some miracle, the disciples spoke every language in the known world, so that they could start preaching to “Parthians, Medes and Elamites; people from Mesopotamia, Judaea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya round Cyrene, Cretans and Arabs” (2:9-11). Combine this with what geographer Strabo said a few decades earlier about the Jews: “This people has made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the habitable world that has not received [them]” (as reported by Josephus in Antiquities 14.115).
Notes
[1] Lewis Richard Farnell, Greek Hero Cults and Ideas of Immortality, Clarendon, 1921, p. 343.
[2] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014, p. 56.
[3] Eginhard, Vie de Charlemagne, Louis Halphen (ed.), Les Belles Lettres, 1938.
[4] Georges Dumézil, Mythe et épopée, Gallimard, « Quarto », 1995, p. 266.
[5] Christopher Jones, New Heroes in Antiquity: From Achilles to Antinoos, Harvard University Press, 2010.
[6] Carla Antonaccio, An Archaeology of Ancestors: Tomb Cult and Hero Cult in Early Greece, Rowman and Littlefield, 1995, p. 1 .
[7] George Albert Wells, Can We Trust the New Testament? Open Court, 2004, p. 43.
[8] Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, HarperOne, 2013.
[9] Diana Bowder, The Age of Constantine and Julian, Barnes & Noble, 1978, p. 10.
[10] Richard Fletcher, The Conversion of Europe: From Paganism to Christianity 371-1386 AD, Fontana Press, 1998, p. 39.
[11] Peter Heather, Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, Penguin, 2023.
[12] Jean Daniélou, Philon d’Alexandrie, Arthème Fayard, 1958, p. 14.
[13] Ibid., p. 24.
[14] Kaufmnann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918, p. 290.
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