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Other
recent biblical historians
argue that the Jesus story
is actually the story of a Roman Emperor
to pacify the poor
The last few years have seen the publication of three books arguing that the
Jesus story is really the story of a Roman Emperor.
1.
"Jesus was Caesar: On the Julian origin of Christianity"
by Francesco Carotta; and
2.
Et tu, Judas? Then Fall Jesus!.
by Gary Courtney.
Both
argue that that the Jesus story is based on the story of Julius Caesar
Caesar's Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy To Invent Jesus - Joseph
Atwill
makes the case that the Jesus story is the story of Titus.
Of these, Caesar's Messiah is by far the best. While Carotta's work virtually
ignores modern New Testament scholarship, Atwill is cognizant of it, though he
does not locate his narrative within the scholarly paradigms. Caesar's Messiah
reads the texts closely, has a fresh perspective, and many original insights.
The result is a book that is informative and challenging, and will likely repay even
those readers who reject his main thesis.
Story of Jesus Christ was 'fabricated to pacify the poor', claims controversial
Biblical scholar - UK Independent - 10 Oct 2013
Atwill's main thesis is actually a combination of several ideas. First, he
argues that the stories of Jesus in the New Testament are actually stories of
Titus' campaign through Galilee and the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple.
In this reading, the Gospels are clever satires created by the Flavian Emperors
and their supporters. They thus function on the surface as religious tales.
But
the underlying story is actually a huge in-joke. Second, he argues that Josephus
and the New Testament are essentially two sides of the same coin, one written in
intimate relationship to the other. For example, discussing the sequence with
the demoniac in Gadara/Gergasa, Atwill writes:
"The reason that the New Testament's demoniac of Gadara can be seen as a satire
on Josephus' "tyrant" John and the battle at Gadara is simply because the two
stories follow the same plot outline. In other words, the characters and events
that can be seen as parallel occur in the same sequence. And it all occurs near
Gadara. The satirical version in the New Testament tells the same story that
Josephus does but, as is often the case with satire, the characters have
different names."(p65)
Atwill's 2nd
edition contains two discoveries not in the first edition.
1st
The confession of the Flavians that they invented Christianity.
2nd
A sequence in the Gospel of Luke is a virtually line by line symbolic
representation of a section of Josephus. Atwill refers to this discovery
as the Flavian Signature in Luke, and believe it puts the question of who wrote
the Gospels to rest.
In addition to the idea of satire and the close relationship between the NT and
Josephus, this passage highlights another important theme of Atwill's: the
importance of name switching among these texts. Discussing the famous passage
about Jesus in Josephus, Atwill writes, citing Josephus himself:
"To solve the puzzle the reader must simply do as Decius Mundus recommends in
the following chapter and 'value not this business of names.'"(p217)
The importance of this work lies in the originality of its reading of Josephus
against the New Testament. Here Atwill's work resembles that of Cliff Carrington
and other exegetes who have come to the conclusion that there is something
highly suspicious about the way the two bodies of work are related. Atwill's
strength is that not only has he pushed this line of insight farther than anyone
else, he has constructed a full-fledged model to explain why this relationship
exists. Hence, a good alternate title for this work might well have been There's
Something Funky about the New Testament and Josephus.
After reviewing the history of the day, and exploring the links between the
Flavians and early Christianity, Atwill lays out his thesis at the end of
Chapter 2:
"The Gospels were designed to become apparent as satire as soon as they were
read in conjunction with War of the Jews. In fact, the four Gospels and War of
the Jews were created as a unified piece of literature whose characters and
stories interact. Their interaction gives many of Jesus' sayings a comical
meaning and also creates a series of puzzles whose solutions reveal the real
identities of the New Testament's characters. Understanding the New Testament's
comic level reveals, for example, that the Apostles Simon and John were cruel
lampoons of Simon and John, the leaders of the Jewish rebellion."(p36)
Atwill concludes this chapter with a discussion of Mark 1 and Mark 5 and
parallels to Titus' first battle on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.
Chapter 3 gives us Atwill's discussion of the strange tale of Cannibal Mary. For
readers who have read Josephus many times, Atwill's claim that she represents a
parody of Christianity will come as a shock. Yet it is hard to see a woman named
Mary who kills and eats her son in the manner of a Passover sacrifice as
anything but a satire on the tale of Jesus as told in the Gospels. Atwill
observes that the words in her mouth were placed there by Josephus, and if read
as a satire on Christianity, they take on a new and portentous meaning:
"As to the war with the Romans, if they preserve our lives, we must be slaves.
This famine also will destroy us, even before that slavery comes upon us. Yet
are these seditious rogues more terrible than both the other. Come on; be thou
my food, and be thou a fury to these seditious varlets, and a by-word to the
world, which is all that is now wanting to complete the calamities of us
Jews."(Whiston translation, cited on p46)
Why should anyone roasting and eating their own child expect it to be a "by-word
to the world" and a fury to the "seditious varlets," the Jewish rebels? As
Atwill points out, if this scene were in a piece of modern literature, it would
instantly be seen by everyone as a parody of Christianity. Nor is Atwill the
first scholar to have had this insight into the passage, for Honora H. Chapman
noted parallels between the 'Cannibal Mary passage' in Josephus and the symbolic
Passover Lamb of the Gospels in her SBL seminar paper 'A Myth for the World',
Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus' Bellum
Judaicum' (2000).
Over the next few chapters Atwill then attempts to sort out the problem of who
Jesus really was and solve the problem of the Empty Tomb. His thesis is that the
Gospels were essentially written together, and thus, must be read together.
Hence, he reads the Empty Tomb tale as four versions of the same tale, in parts,
distributed across the various gospels:
"My analysis revealed that these four versions were intended to be read as a
single story. This combined story is divided into two halves. One half consists
of the visits to the tomb described in the Gospel of John. The other consists of
the visits to the tomb described in the other three Gospels. In the combined
story the individuals described in the Gospel of John meet the individuals
described in the other three Gospels and, in their emotional state, the
different groups mistake one another for angels. This comedy of errors causes
the visitors to the empty tomb to mistakenly believe that their Messiah has
risen from the dead."(p129)
The next few chapters cover the authors of the New Testament and how the tale
was constructed. Then comes perhaps the most fascinating chapter in the work,
his discussion of the Testamonium Flavianum (TF). Atwill's reading of this and
its surrounding passages as a complex satire is perhaps the most revolutionary
insight in the work. Unlike his allegorical reading of the New Testament, which
is easy for the reader to swat away, Atwill's analysis of the TF and its
companion passages will be impossible to ignore. Not only does his reading make
sense of this section of the work, it is supported by strong linguistic and
thematic links that will be difficult to refute. This chapter alone makes the
book worth the price of admission.
But if a fresh and compelling look at the TF were not enough, Atwill offers in
Chapter 13 a very interesting argument that Josephus has adjusted the dates of
important events in his works to make them conform to the prophecies in Daniel.
Caesar's Messiah closes with a discussion of the Apostles and the Maccabees, and
other parallels between the New Testament and events in Titus' campaign in
Palestine prior to the destruction of Jerusalem. The coincidence of dates and
names has also been noted by other authors, most recently in Jay Raskin's piece
in the Journal of Higher Criticism on the Maccabees and early Christianity.
Atwill's prose is spare, even grim, and the book is refreshingly free of the
silly attacks on New Testament scholars for being fools and scoundrels that tend
to populate works of authors with out-of-the-mainstream ideas. Atwill usually is
able to strike a sturdy posture that enables him to explain why no one has made
all the connections he has (though a surprising amount of scholars have stumbled
across pieces of the puzzle) without sounding triumphalist. My own view is that
this work, intended for a lay audience, would have been even better had it
presented some of the scholarly support for Atwill's specific claims (a
companion volume aimed at scholars due out soon). There are some regrettable
moments, such as the statistical analysis of the parallels on p224 that reads
like something out of Erich Von Daniken, and the mistaken attribution of a quote
on p296 to Jesus rather than to John the Baptist. Overall, the work is clearly
structured and very accessible. | |
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