14 DAY TRIAL // The Roman Empire was, at least in its heydays, quite gifted at squashing its enemies on the battlefield. According to Joseph Atwill, an American self-described Biblical scholar, there was one other form of war that the Romans excelled at: psychological warfare.
This coming October 19, the scholar is to speak at a conference in London and argue that, according to evidence at hand, the story of Jesus was fabricated by aristocrats in an attempt to control the Roman Empire's population and keep them from rebelling.
Otherwise put, Christianity was, in its early days, more of a propaganda project than it was a religion.
His theory has already generated heated debates online and it is not difficult to understand why: he is challenging the very grounds of Christianity by denying it as a religion.
“Jewish sects in Palestine at the time, who were waiting for a prophesied warrior Messiah, were a constant source of violent insurrection during the first century,” Joseph Atwill explains, as cited by PR Web.
“When the Romans had exhausted conventional means of quashing rebellion, they switched to psychological warfare. They surmised that the way to stop the spread of zealous Jewish missionary activity was to create a competing belief system.”
“That's when the 'peaceful' Messiah story was invented. Instead of inspiring warfare, this Messiah urged turn-the-other-cheek pacifism and encouraged Jews to 'give onto Caesar' and pay their taxes to Rome,” the scholar further details.
According to Joseph Atwill, the aristocrats who invented the story of Jesus weren't even courteous enough to base this character on a real person, just to add some truth to their fabrication.
On the contrary, the Biblical scholar argues that Jesus' figure and his life story are merely a collage of bits and pieces of information taken from different sources.
As he puts it, “He may be the only fictional character in literature whose entire life story can be traced to other sources. Once those sources are all laid bare, there's simply nothing left.”
By the looks of it, Joseph Atwill first started thinking something was seriously off with the story of Jesus while comparing and contrasting “War of the Jews,” i.e. a first-person description of first century Judea, by Flavius Josephus, with the New Testament.
“I started to notice a sequence of parallels between the two texts. Although it's been recognized by Christian scholars for centuries that the prophesies of Jesus appear to be fulfilled by what Josephus wrote about in the First Jewish-Roman war, I was seeing dozens more.”
“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. The biography of Jesus is actually constructed, tip to stern, on prior stories, but especially on the biography of a Roman Caesar,” the scholar argues.
Joseph Atwill claims that other scholars and historians have remained oblivious to the similarities between these two texts all these years due to the fact that the parallels are either “conceptual” or “poetic,” so there are very little chances for readers to pick up on them all that easily.
The scholar says he does not expect that his theory, that the story of Jesus is merely a product of some people's imagination, will cause Christianity to crash and burn.
However, he stresses that, “this is very important for out culture” and that “Alert citizens need to know the truth about our past so we can understand how and why governments create false histories and false gods.”
“What my work has done is give permission to many of those ready to leave the religion to make a clean break,” he adds.
Undoubtedly, his work will also lead to controversy and angry responses.