Joseph Atwill

Joseph Atwill’s Caesar Messiah is a typological analysis of the Roman era when Christianity came into being. The writer examined Josephus’ Wars of the Jews, historical documents, and the Old and New Testaments to develop arguments about Christianity’s credibility. He looked at Emperors Vespasian and Titus Flavius’ military campaigns in Judea, the stories in the Gospels, and Old Testament’s prophecies.
Atwill attempted to answer a number of questions including: Who was Jesus Christ? Who were Mary, Eleazar (Lazarus), Simon, and John? Was Christ’s resurrection a credible event? Were the miracles authentic? Answers to these questions and others led him to conclude that the stories of the New Testament were nothing more than parodies, satirical in nature, and dark comedy meant to denigrate Jews, and were anti-Semitic.
The gospel stories were meant to bolster Rome’s supremacy, be intertextual references to their military campaigns of Emperors Vespasian and Titus, and were propaganda in the belief of Vespasian – father, Titus – son, thinking themselves as the Father and Son of God.… (meer)

Tunnel - Vision

What Atwill attempts with his work is commendable and deserves five stars just for his attempt to conquer such a monumental topic. However, the author is so engaged to prove his hypothesis that he not only ignores suggestions to the contrary but also misses that he actually would have been onto discovering something truly exciting. Looking beyond the shortcomings, researchers can thus find in this book valuable insights into a possible composition mechanism of the New Testament, although not the one presented by the author. Perhaps Cesar’s Messiah could be interesting for lovers of conspiracy theories or for anti-religionists. Instead, the rather complex work commands such high attention to detail and the capacity to absorb and distinguish between an onslaught of individual names and historic events that I doubt it reaching beyond popular polemics.

Atwill starts with a historical rundown that costs him a star. If he wants to clear up the history of Jesus Christ, first he should realign the history of the Jews and the history of Roman dominance in Judea. While he notices the royal implications on the Roman side, he seems unable to grasp what is really at stake. At times, Atwill does not seem to distinguish one group from another. He does not seem to recognize that the Romans may have already tried to exert control over Judaism with the construction of Herod’s Temple long before the Flavians came to power. Jesus, as imaginary as he may be, happened to be a Roman who also believed in the religion of Judaism – a Jew who was a Roman.

There is a glimmer of hope in a few pages of one of the last chapters (15) where the author starts to explore an interesting avenue. But then, as throughout the book, Atwill insists on the Flavians having created Jesus. This is an assumption that I am unable to logically duplicate, even with the best of wills, and even if I had desperately wanted to. I accept that Jesus did not exist in the first century and that his path may at times be shaped after Titus, and I suspect (a different) Flavian-Jewish conspiracy being pulled from behind the scene. But his case is all circumstantial and is in need of at least one solid anchor that is beyond doubt. Atwill probably misses the most important hints at his flawed theory: the destruction of the Temple was an accident, and the Maccabees had already been in bed with the Flavians before the war.

Atwill does not seem to be interested in the internal and external enemies of Jerusalem or of Rome and does thus not see who allied with whom and what their motives might have been. It sometimes appears as if the author did not even study his own sources in full. Otherwise, he could not have missed that the New Testament, without ever spelling it out loud, preaches against everything that was dear to the Roman culture. It even commands its disciples to send the taxes to Jerusalem, not to Rome, if one were to apply Atwill’s frame of thought. That the Flavians would have signed off on this is unlikely (unless the power game is in a sphere of the unimaginable, but the author is not bothered with an alternative scenario that would obviously change the odds of his case dramatically). Furthermore, Atwill has probably not studied the progression of Judaic beliefs into Eastern Christianity and Islam, even though he hints at some street-smarts. Many of his arguments are rendered futile by the persistence of such opposing religious creeds. For example, while Islam accepts John the Baptist, Mary, and Jesus, it refutes the crucifixion and the divinity of Jesus as understood in the West and offers a different avenue for the Holy Spirit through his mother. Thus, parallelisms with the crucifixion to prove that Titus invented Jesus must be so problematic that another star needs to be taken off.

The author also ignores document histories. Forgers were smart enough to use the writing styles and fonts of the target time and to put their works on old parchments. Atwill himself brags with Titus’s ability to forge any signature. Hence, the opinions of classical paleographical experts over the existence of the Gospels are worthless in an environment of total silence about Christianity deep into the second century (other than some dubious works that refer to Christ but not to Jesus). The books that were created after the four Gospels are even more problematic, and their origin might lie centuries out, making his upcoming work about a connection between Paul, Revelation, and Domitian so questionable that I will not bother. Even Nero’s ‘persecutions’ lead through ‘Chrestos,’ a term that perhaps indicates a Mithrianic movement rather than a Christian. Of course, Nero could not have been angry at Christians if Titus came to invent this sect. If then Atwill argues with the supposed works of Paul (who also find parallels in Josephus), he creates a house of cards. Better yet, the author debunks himself when stating that Christianity flourished while Josephus wrote Wars of the Jews. It would then follow that Josephus must have copied from the Gospels to bring them in alignment. Where are the traces of Christianity in Rome from the first century (or in Pompey)?

As the author reports, one of Jesus’s prophecies was that his followers would be named after him. Jesus’s followers were first known as The Way. Hence, the sectarian designation comes from the point of view of a firmly established Christianity since it also breaks with all naming conventions of Judaic sects from before the war (Sadducees, Hasmonean, Idumeans, Zealots, Sicarii, Rabbinic Judaism, Sabeans/Ebionites, Samaritans, and Essenes), all of which expect the Christ – their messiah – to come and save them. Each could have morphed into Christianity. Moreover, the Sabeans (which translate into baptizers) only adopted Christianity in the third century. Before, John the Baptist was their prophet, and they did not know of Jesus, the Christ and Messiah. On the other hand, Atwill uses writers that are centuries removed from the action to prove his point. Tertullian, for example, is so heavily redacted, and has supposedly changed hats more than once, that we cannot be sure what he believed in, if anything. He even advocated opposing core doctrines about Jesus’s nature in one and the same book. Augustine, too, had supposedly converted from Manicheanism, which is comparable to Archbishop Borgoglio of Buenos Aires declaring himself Imam. Eusebius is even worse. Without him, we have pretty much nothing about early Christianity, and he is generally accepted as a fraudster. Why did only Eusebius understand the methodology when every Rabbi before him should have immediately gotten the message? By throwing just about any similarity at the reader, Atwill’s approach is comparable to how the history of the church has been composed. While modern researchers are trying to untangle these webs, Atwill does not contribute much to this difficult process. The more Atwill adds new sources, the more obvious his tunnel-vision becomes. Researchers need to have the courage to experiment and publish versions that are not watertight. However, this one goes so much too far that another star needs to be removed.

Probably one of his worst flaws and the reason for striking down the fourth star is the insistence on the New Testament and Josephus being the interdependent work of the same hand. He goes as far as taking the passages that refer to Jesus Christ in Josephus as authentic and sets out to prove that they are part of a three pillar temple argument. However, the verbiage of the text is undoubtedly post Constantine (details can be looked up in my work, The Great-Leap Fraud, Vol I. from page 225-226; these pages are available online on books.google). The LEGALITY of Jesus’s divinity, as addressed in the text, came to fruition in the sixth century. None of the author’s sources indicate that there are not other possibilities, in particular when considering that both, the New Testament and Josephus (according to Atwill), knew of Jesus Christ, but Qumran, which he also superficially uses as evidence, does not know of this messiah. Instead of an intermix, there is obviously also a sequence to be taken into consideration. Logical thinkers should be able to recognize that real events lie before the prophesy. Josephus’s passages do not refer to Jesus’s prophetic power and are thus absent of one of Attwill’s central arguments. Even if one were to accept them as authentic, all of Jesus’s details remain in the Gospel and not in Josephus, still indicating a sequence. Moreover, the presence of Epaphroditus as an addressee in both works suggests a deliberate machination that was made to look like the New Testament being dependent on Josephus, rather than being interdependent. The problem with any sequence is that it crushes Atwill’s hypothesis.

The author recognizes that the Flavians were pontiffs. He also identifies that the first pope used the same terminology for his title. However, he neither sees the obvious and intolerable competition between the high-priests of differing religions in Rome nor the paradox that Rome and not Jerusalem would become the seat of the Catholic Pontiff.

The author would have been better off to focus on delivering a foundation of the parallelisms between Josephus and the Gospels without venturing into the jungle of declaring Titus as the Jesus champion of the Roman world. Such a work, together with computer based style analysis, would have brought forth truly inspiring discoveries about the relations between these works. It would not only have been popular and sensational on its own, it would have truly contributed to the understanding of the murky mechanisms of religion. Perhaps, he would have found a mathematical key to the composition of the scripture and could have demonstrated that it was the intention of the Gospels to be put in parallel to Josephus and Titus. Researchers may recognize an opportunity to reverse-engineer, realign, and expand on Atwill’s work without ever having to give him credit. Not a single one of Atwill’s parallels can logically be connected to Titus being Jesus (vs. Titus in Josephus being a model for Jesus), and all of them are merely circular, if not the exact opposite of the author’s claims.

If not before, the plot finally falls apart where Christians did not recognize for two millennia that they had worshipped Titus. What is the purpose of the deception if Titus (or later Domitian) does not end up as the undisputed and universally accepted King of the Jews in his lifetime? I am sorry, I truly wanted to give it five stars for trying; but I cannot.… (meer)