Over on Twitter, the “outspoken atheist, anti-theist, [and] freethinker” Imtiaz Mahmood has offered one of the wildest theories about the origins of Christianity. He starts off with a bold assertion:
We know that Jesus Christ was a fictional character created by the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 AD and modelled after Julius Caesar to pacify the poor in the Roman Empire.
The idea that Christianity is simply the Roman government’s attempt at creating an official religion is obviously false: they already had an official religion, in which the emperor was honored as a god. How would the poor be “pacified” by abandoning that religion in favor of one in which citizens are reminded that “we must obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29)?
But this is just the first of many of what we might call Mahmood’s “creative” historical claims. For instance, he writes that “most certainly, Augustine inserted the virgin birth, Jesus as God, the Holy Trinity, Original Sin, forced conversion, and holy wars, all of which were adopted at Nicaea.” All of this is quite impossible, since Augustine was born on November 13, 354, well after Nicaea.
In fact, his whole theory of the origins of Christianity is refuted by a mass of ancient evidence. I’ve written about the beliefs of the Christians living before the year 200, so I can attest that (a) they did exist, (b) they worshipped Jesus, and (c) we have their own testimonies to this fact, from their own writings… long before the legalization of Christianity. But even if you know nothing about early Christian history, I hope Mahmood’s historical claims strike you as strange. The First Council of Nicaea, after all, was an empire-wide gathering of Christian bishops. But how could that be if there was no Christianity (and hence, no bishops)?
Mahmood goes on to explain that the Gospels were “written by the Romans,” which is why “the Romans smell so sweet in the Gospels.” For those of you who have never read the Bible (or even watched The Passion of the Christ, etc.), the story begins with the birth of Jesus, at which point King Herod seeks to have him killed, upon learning that that Jesus is being called “king of the Jews” (Matt. 2:2). The contrast is obvious: Herod is a Roman puppet, and his father was an Edomite, not of the Davidic line, who secured the throne through his political ties to Julius Caesar. Jesus is the true king of the Jews, foretold throughout the Jewish Scriptures.
Similarly, Mark begins his narrative of the life of Jesus by calling it “the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1). As University of North Carolina-Greensboro’s Dr. Christopher Hodgkins explains,
This apparently straightforward statement is more layered than it sounds: it not only announces a beginning, but appropriates and repurposes a formula of Roman emperor-worship. Most Mediterranean peoples at the beginning of the Common Era […] would recognize a Greek phrase like this: euaggeliou tou Augoústu Kaísarou huiou tou theou; “the beginning of good news of Augustus Caesar the son of the god.” Statues and monuments were engraved with words like these honoring Augustus’s “descent” from his adopted father, “the divine Julius.”
The opening of Mark’s Gospel is therefore chock-full of both theological and political importance, since it “puts the Roman world on notice that their Lord Caesar has a rival in the Lord Jesus.”
This dramatic tension is brought to a climax during Holy Week, when Jesus is arrested and turned over to the Roman governor Pontius Pilate (Matt. 27:27-31). It’s true that Pontius Pilate seems to believe Jesus is innocent of any crime, but that’s hardly to his credit. On the contrary, he’s indifferent to truth and justice (famously asking, “what is truth?” in John 18:38), and worried only about what’s politically expedient: in this case, appeasing the bloodthirsty mob assembled before him. And the mob knows this, demanding that “if you release this man, you are not Caesar’s friend; every one who makes himself a king sets himself against Caesar.” (John 19:12).
And so, faced with a tension between fidelity to principle and his political ambitions, what does Pilate do? He has Jesus, a man he believes to be innocent, executed. In the words of Matthew 27:27-31,
Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the praetorium, and they gathered the whole battalion before him. And they stripped him and put a scarlet robe upon him, and plaiting a crown of thorns they put it on his head, and put a reed in his right hand. And kneeling before him they mocked him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they spat upon him, and took the reed and struck him on the head. And when they had mocked him, they stripped him of the robe, and put his own clothes on him, and led him away to crucify him.
Pilate even has a mocking inscription placed above the dying Jesus, declaring him “Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews” (John 19:19). And yet, according to Mahmood, “the Romans smell so sweet in the Gospels” that the only explanation is that the Roman government invented the entire story as pro-government propaganda?