Audio only:
In this episode Trent breaks down a conspiracy about Jesus that even fringe atheists reject.
Transcription:
Trent:
There are weird conspiracy theories and then there are Bonker crazy ones. Today we’re going to 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 at Will’s, Caesar’s Messiah, the Roman conspiracy to invent Jesus according to at will 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-woman, 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 is 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.
CLIP:
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 Flavian wrote the gospels, how could a Roman family know how to write Jewish literature that refers to Jewish prophecy? The answer lies in the flavian collaborations with a number of Jewish intellectuals beginning with their own court historian Josephus,
Trent:
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 St. 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 Mythicist like Richard Carrier agree. Paul existed and other skeptics agree with the historical consensus about St. Paul.
CLIP:
In almost 2000 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 first and second Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians one, Thessalonians and Philemon.
Trent:
So while scholars disagree about some of St 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.
CLIP:
So the Roman plot to invent Christianity is just so clever when you think about it through the Pope who is 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.
Trent:
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 one 12, 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 maybe 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 nine 11 conspiracy theory was that the government created all the nine 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 is 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-woman 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 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.
CLIP:
Further, there had never been any archeologic evidence of Jesus Christ that had ever been discovered.
Trent:
So what? There isn’t archeological evidence for 99.9% of people who have ever lived and yet they lived. The lack of archeological 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 were not famous rulers. There wasn’t even archeological evidence for Pontius Pilate until the Pilot Stone, which bears his name was discovered in Caesar Maritima in 1961. Next, the document claims Jesus was simply copied from earlier Jewish and Pagan themes.
CLIP:
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. Jesus didn’t make that up.
Trent:
That’s true. Leviticus 1918 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’s 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 hypercritical 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’ mouth, and if he doesn’t sound like the Old Testament or the early church, then he must be a pagan ripoff. This is yet another example of heads I win tales you lose.
CLIP:
If you look at 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, it brings a new religion of love, is accused of heresy or 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.
Trent:
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 Frecker 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 BCUs, one of the pseudonyms of Osirus dionisis. The chance discovery of this amulet made us feel as though the universe itself was encouraging us to make our findings public. However, James Hanna, 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 will disease your mind with rampant unsourced, falsehoods and completely miseducate you about the ancient world and ancient religion.
CLIP:
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.
Trent:
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 three 13, Christianity did not become the religion of the empire until Emperor Theodosius edict of Thessalonica in the year three 80. Next Atwell claims that one of the early Popes Clement of Rome actually belonged to the Roman Flavian family.
CLIP:
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. These include Flavia do Mattila, who is either Titus’s sister or his niece, and there is an inscription honoring Flavia for donating the land that became the first Christian catacomb and Flavia do. Mattila was the first Christian saint. Her son Clement is recorded as having been the first Roman Catholic pope after the Apostle Simon.
Trent:
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. Dooma 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 Palestina and Maceda. The Catholic encyclopedia gives an explanation that probably explains at Will’s slipup and confusing to Clements in the middle of the 19th century, it was the custom to identify the Pope Clement of Rome with the console of 95 T Flavius Clemens, who I’ll add was Dooma till’s husband, not her son who was martyred by his first cousin, the Emperor Domitian at the end of his console ship. But the ancients never suggests this, and the Pope is said to have lived on until 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. First 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 at Will’s book, what seems to have alluded many scholars is that the sequence of events and locations of Jesus’s 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 did modern scholars miss all of this? At Will 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. Atwell offers many alleged parallels or secret codes, but here is a typical absolutely absurd one.
CLIP:
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 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.
Trent:
You heard him right at Will 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 history of the Jewish war against Rome, which took place shortly before the destruction of the temple between 80 66 and 80 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. At Will says Jesus has called to become a fisher of men, is a reference to when Romans caught Jews like fish in the battle of Lake Tiberius. Now, this is a case of what the biblical scholar Samuel Sandel called parallel mania 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 atwell’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 Atwell 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 euphemized. The reading given here is just ludicrous, ludicrous indeed because of Atwell’s thesis is right. Then not only did Jesus never exist, neither did Peter James or Paul. In fact, there would’ve been no Christians at all before the destruction of the temple in 80 70.
But we know this is not true because the Roman historian TAUs records in his annals that emperor Nero blame the great fire in Rome which took place three years before the Jewish revolt on a group called Christians. Even if TAUs 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, when the first Jews who joined the Christian Church realized something was not quite right about a movement that literally spr up overnight that was supposed to have been around for decades. Finally, the author of First Corinthians admits that the cross a dying Messiah represented a stumbling block for the Jews. Now, Paul, the real author of First Corinthians, just had to accept that fact and preach it because Jesus’s 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 at will never has any defensible examples, rarely knows what he’s talking about, gets a lot wrong, makes stuff up, never admits an error, and is generally in my experience, a frustrating delusional fanatic. So an even fringe scholarship rejects your view. To whom can you go? By the way, if you want to learn more about how to defend Jesus against similar conspiracies as well as more substantive objections, check out my book Counterfeit Christ, 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.